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This article discusses the success as well as the shortcomings of Lacan's concept of forclosion (Verwerfung, or repudiation), which is one of only three Lacanian concepts that Laplanche and Pontalis retained in The Language of Psychoanalysis (along with symbolique, or symbolic, and imaginaire, or imaginary). Repudiation, or foreclosure, was proposed by Lacan as the specific defense mechanism of psychosis, and was held to present a “preliminary question for all possible treatment” of psychosis.
The first difficulty here is that foreclosure cannot be taken in isolation, but instead forms a system with other Lacanian concepts of the same period, such as the law, the symbolic, the signifiant, and the other. At the time that Lacan was promoting the concept of foreclosure, he also identified the oedipal complex as a system of alliances and relationships that are subject to the law of the prohibition of incest, into which the subject is born. For Lacan, the Oedipus complex does not come about because the child has sexual desires for the parents, but