A Contribution of the Schizophrenic
to the Psychoanalytic Clinic

(Original title, "La clinique d'ironie")

Jacques-Alain Miller

translated and edited by
Ellie Ragland and Anne Pulis

 

I have taken up the problem of a differential clinic of psychosis in all its generality. I believe it will clarify the problem if I begin by opposing it to a universal clinic of delirium.1 To give a foundation to a differential clinic of the psychoses, I propose a universal clinic of delirium. Nothing less.

By universal clinic of delirium, I mean one that takes its point of departure from this: that all our discourses are only defenses against the real.

In order to clearly construct this clinical perspective, it would be necessary to attain the infernal irony of the schizophrenic, that irony out of which he or she makes a weapon which, Lacan says, goes to the heart of any social relation. That is to say, the universal clinic of delirium cannot find a way to make itself heard, to cease not writing itself, except from the point of view of the schizophrenic.

How are we going to define the schizophrenic here? For the moment, I propose to define him or her, following Lacan, as the subject who specifies himself or herself by not being caught up in any discourse, in any social link.2 I would add that this is the only subject who does not defend himself or herself from the real by means of the symbolic, which we all do when we are not schizophrenic. The schizophrenic does not defend himself or herself from the real by language, because for him or her, the symbolic is real.

It is a question of the schizophrenic's irony, and not of his humor. Although irony and humor both make us laugh, they are distinguished from one another by structure.

Humor is the comic slope of the superego. Freud says it.3 The neurotic does not lack humor, the pervert is completely capable of having it, equally so the philosopher of universal maxims,4 and the surrealist as well.5 Humor inscribes itself within the perspective of the Other. The humoristic saying makes itself heard, above all, in the place of the Other. It overtakes the subject in the misery of his impotence. Think about the well-known Jewish humor which is cultivated in the ghetto, this supremely social place since it is created by segregation, where the terrible God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob encloses his children.

Irony, on the contrary, does not come from the Other. It is from the subject, and it goes against the Other. What does irony say? It says that the Other does not exist, that the social link in its very foundation is a fraud, that there is no discourse which is not a false pretense, a semblant - the title of one of Lacan's Seminars.6 The true masochist sometimes manages to attain irony when he demonstrates that the Other whose slave he shows himself to be, is only the puppet of his will, his, the masochist's. It is on this path, doubtless, that irony is suitable for the psychoanalyst, no less than for the revolutionary. Lenin, like Socrates, displays irony, even if he disguises it by means of the invective, and even if this irony grows pale when it is a question of its cause.7 Irony is the comic form that takes the knowledge that the Other does not know - that is to say, the Other as the Other of knowledge - for nothing. While humor is practiced from the point of view of the subject supposed-to-know, irony is only practiced at the point where the fall of the subject supposed-to-know has already been accomplished, has already happened.

It is in this, according to Lacan, that psychoanalysis, following the path prescribed by Freud, restores irony in neurosis. It would be wonderful, in fact, to cure neurosis by irony. If we succeeded in curing neurosis by irony, we would not need to support it by psychoanalysis. Be we are not yet cured of psychoanalysis, despite Lacan's irony, and, doubtless, despite what his wish was regarding the future of psychoanalysis.

While waiting to be cured of psychoanalysis, the wish I shall formulate is that our clinic be ironic.

The choice is a forced choice: either our clinic will be ironic, that is to say, based on the inexistence of the Other as a defense against the real - or our clinic will be a resucitée of the psychiatric clinic. The psychiatric clinic is voluntarily humoristic. This clinic often makes fun of the crazy person, of this poor madman who is outside discourse. But to make fun of the crazy person only means that one constructs his or her own clinic, based on established discourses. What I am saying does not spare the psychoanalytic clinic of the psychoses when that clinic restricts itself to the measure of the established discourse of the psychoanalyst; by that I mean when the analytic discourse refers itself to the Oedipal norm. I would not point my finger in this direction if Lacan had not gone into the psychoanalytic clinic of the psychoses, beyond the Oedipal norm. He waits for us to follow him there. This comment is on the side of humor, of course.

In what I call the universal clinic of delirium, the schizophrenic occupies a place one could call that of an internal exclusion. In fact, if the schizophrenic is the subject for whom all the symbolic is real, it is on the basis of his or her subjective position that the symbolic can appear, for other subjects, as only a semblant. The circle of the four discourses as distinguished and formalized by Lacan, is, indeed, made to show that there is no discourse which is not of the semblant.8 And this circle itself can only be conceived on the basis of the subject outside discourse.

I call this schizophrenic subject the one who would not avoid the real. He or she is a speaking being9 for whom the symbolic does not serve to avoid the real, because the symbolic is itself real. If there is no discourse which is not of the semblant, there is, then, a delirium which is of the real. It is that of the schizophrenic. It is from there that one can construct a universal of the delirium.

Let us note that the thesis of a universal of the delirium is a Freudian thesis. For Freud, everything is only a dream. That is what Lacan says Freud says. If nothing is but a dream, everybody is crazy; that is to say, everybody is delirious.10 That is the thesis I propose to put on the facade of a differential clinic of the psychoses: Everyone is crazy. It is only then that it becomes interesting to make distinctions.

Everyone is crazy, that is to say delirious. It is a truth which appears in the differential clinic of humanity and of animals as well. But animals are not crazy, except the donkey, because he is the one who carries the Holy Sacrament. And this responsibility, whose merit he does not attribute to anyone, makes a delirium of presumption. Animals can, however, commit suicide, insofar as domestication has made the cause of desire exist for them a little in the Other.

Let us simplify. Delirium is universal based on the fact that people speak, and that there is language for them. That is, we start from scratch, the "abc": language, as such, has the effect of annihilation.

In dialectical terms, we would say: the word is the murder of the thing. It is a proposition from the first period of Lacan's teaching.11 Already everything has been said, because that requires that the symbolic separate itself from the real. In the schizophrenic perspective, the word is not the murder of the thing: it is the thing.

It is in this sense that, if the psychotic does not believe in the Other, he is, however, sure of the Thing. If you know how to understand in this la chose, the Freudian das Ding as it is punctuated by Lacan in his The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,12 "the word is the murder of the thing" means: Jouissance is forbidden to the one who speaks as such, or again, that the Other, as place of the signifier, is the terrace swept clean of its jouissance. For the paranoiac, the word has not adequately murdered the Thing, the kakon,13 in the Other, in an act of aggression which can serve him or her, throughout his or her whole life as a metaphor, as a supplement. One sees this in the Aimée case.14 The melancholic subject turns the mortifying effect of language against himself or herself in the act of suicide where this subject accomplishes his or her destiny of kakon.

"The word is the murder of the Thing" means that the word is death. The "death drive," thus designated by Freud, is inherent in the speaking being. Without a doubt this melancholic short-circuit stretches itself out again with the neurotic, whose desire is perhaps less decided. Let us note that the letter distinguishes itself from the word. Does the instance of the letter kill the Thing? Rather, is the letter the thing?15

What I have said in dialectical terms can be said in diacritical terms, in passing from Hegel to Saussure.16 There is no biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing: the word does not represent the thing, the word articulates itself to the word. This structuralist axiom is no less pathetic than the dialectical maxim. It implies a passion. The single fact, concerning language, of putting the function of the articulation or linking of words in place of the function of representation - as structuralism does17 - has some perfectly pathetic effects of delirium. To say that the signifier has no relation to the thing, but to an other signifier - we repeat it like an Antiphon - implies that the signifier has a function of unrealization. The signifier unrealizes the world.18

It is only when the relation of the signifier to the signifier is interrupted, when there is a broken chain, an interrupted sentence, that the symbol rejoins the real. But it does not rejoin it under the form of representation. The signifier rejoins the real in a fashion which leaves no room for doubt. Just look at President Schreber's interrupted sentences.19 In the interrupted sentence, the signifier does not represent the least part of the real world. It makes an irruption there; that is to say that a part of the symbolic becomes real. It is in this that "schizophrenia," such as it is redefined, can be said to be the measure of psychosis.

*

This ironic perspective on language, if I recommend it, requires us to take things from the underside of this perspective. One sees how that leads to the so-called theory of descriptions, for example, which owes its name to Bertrand Russell.20

Russell began this theory of descriptions in 1905, at the same time that Freud wrote his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." It is not excessive to say that all contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy comes out of this. That philosophy has developed in our time under the name, a bit ridiculous, of formal ontology. At the same time, it is a question of an inheritance of the medieval theory of suppositions,21 a theory of which Lacan himself made himself the echo with his subject supposed-to-know.22

Russell's theory of descriptions is concerned with the supposed reference of discourse; or, to call it by the name Frege gave it, Bedeutung (meaning).23 And what is his worry? What bothers Bertrand Russell, and the others, is that one can speak about what does not exist, as if it existed. It is the same question as Plato's in his Sophist: that speaking about non-being makes it exist in some fashion.24 The theory of descriptions would like to reduce the truth to exactitude, would like one to say only what is, would like a given discourse to describe the real. The theory of descriptions would like to track down the discourse which says what is not. Bertrand Russell's principle example is "the king of France is bald."25 In 1905, and for an Englishman - who is not a French royalist - there was no king of France: "The king of France" is a delirium. Evidently there are many connotations around this "king of France is bald." It is an echo of the Franco-English quarrel. And it does not go without evoking "the king is naked."

What escapes Bertrand Russell is not that one can speak of what is not, but that what is, from the single fact that one speaks, becomes a fiction. Were the king of France to exist under the species of a personage who would wear the crown, he would not be any the less of a fiction. What is significantized or given meaning is at the same time "semblantified," that is, given appearance or falseness. Something does not exist because one speaks about it, then. One must be quiet, as Wittgenstein says,26 if one wants something to exist. One has to silence that wish. And that is what constitutes psychoanalysis in its practice. The theory of descriptions is vain, not because the word makes what is not exist, but because language actually makes what one is talking about un-exist.

Lacan's axiom - that truth has the structure of fiction - allows the word to have the effect of fiction.27 The secret of the universal clinic of delirium is that the reference is always empty. If there is truth, it is not in the adequation of the word and the thing. It is internal to saying (dire), that is to say, to articulation. In this sense the signifier, insofar as it links or hooks itself to another signifier, requires that the reference be empty. And that is what constitutes the symbolic as an order - the symbolic order as Lacan named it. It is the same movement one observes in Freud when he passes from factual seduction to fantasmatic seduction, from the fact to the fantasy,28 from the search for exactitude to the scansion of truth, from the unconscious as a referential knowledge to the unconscious as a textual knowledge.

How does one incarnate the empty reference? Nothing is more simple, if one remembers that the Freudian clinic turns completely around an object which does not exist; that is, the penis of the mother. The king of France who is bald is the penis of the mother. It is a fact that Freud began with the dream, that he offered the interpretation of dreams as the royal road to psychoanalysis, and that he took the dream as a signifying articulation with reference. It is in this that Freud considered the dream as a form of delirium. And it is also why Lacan arranges his whole clinic in terms of a "there is not" whether that be by writing it as (- φ), or by stating that "there is no sexual relation."

"Let us begin by separating all the facts," Jean-Jacques Rousseau says superbly.29 An analysis begins thus. As long as one is not there, these are only preliminary conversations. "Associate freely, tell the truth, go ahead, speak frankly, don't omit anything" means: "Join signifier to signifier without preoccupying yourself with the reference, with formal ontology." Lacan reintroduced terms which ought to have been proscribed or banned terms of representation and of reference. But with Lacan they change meaning. There is representation, but only insofar as the signifier represents a null reference. This reference as empty is written as castration (- φ) or as what is made of castration, the subject, barred subject gif. Lacan's subject is an effect of a non-existent entity, the one which motivates and haunts the theory of descriptions.

Up until then, we were still in Freudian space. The idea of a negative reference realizes - starting with the structure of language - the pivotal importance of Freudian castration. But properly speaking, what comes from Lacan is the introduction of a reference of a new type which is born of the articulation itself, that is, of the linking of signifiers to one another. This is not a reference that would already be there and that one could represent, or about which one could say "there is not." This reference of a new type, born of the articulation of signifier to signifier, is what Lacan called the objet petit a.

How, by what condition, does the signifying articulation produce a reference? From the articulation, or linkage, one day a reference is born. There is, in some sense, a double reference. The first is negative. It is absence, it is (- φ), it is barred subject gif. There is an other which is positive, and it is a. This is what explains that, in the economy of Freud's discourse, the fantasy can come to the place of the fact. This allows that the objet a, if it is a being, is a being of fiction which depends on the articulation of the signifier. The objet a is a semblant.30 If it is a being, it is a being that depends on the signifying chain, and precisely, on the consistence of that. That is why Lacan calls the objet a, a logical consistency. The objet a is what takes on consistency when one speaks in proportion to what one reduces to nothing along the way. Thus it is also a remainder, in the sense of what remains to be said. But it is not the same as when a signifying chain is developed, only at its inception.

If the objet petit a depends on the signifying articulation, the only formal ontology is that of the objet a. Why "ontology"? It is because the objet a in its analytic pinpointing appears very much like a being. It is there, especially, that it is of capital importance not to confuse it with the real. The objet a, as such, is a semblant of being, and it is the only term of consistency which speaks very well of its affinities with the imaginary.

Without a doubt, when the objet a finds its place in the fantasy, the fantasy holds the place of the real for the subject. That does not mean, as far as I know, the real. The very term of axiom31 that Lacan uses concerning the fantasy indicates quite clearly that he places it in a logical system and confirms that the object is dependent on the signifying articulation.

That is why the objet a as a semblant has its place between the symbolic and the real. It is a logical consistency which constitutes the semblance of being, and it is only that that one meets in going from the symbolic toward the real. The objet a is a symbolic elaboration of the real which, in the fantasy, holds the place of the real. But it is only a veil of it. Its proper function is to compliment the negative reference of the subject. The objet a, as logical consistency, is apt for the purposes of incarnating what is lacking in the subject. What the subjective lack-in-being names is the semblance of being. That is why the objet a, taken as a logical consistency, is suitable for giving its place to forbidden jouissance, to the lost object.

This is what permits us to give a new meaning to what we call psychosis. Lacan leads us there. Psychosis is the clinical structure in which the object is not lost, in which the subject has it at his or her disposition. It is in this sense that Lacan could say that the crazy person is a free person.32

At the same time, in psychosis, the Other is not separated from jouissance. The paranoid fantasy involves the identification of jouissance in the place of the Other. In short-circuit, we can set forth the difference between paranoia and schizophrenia - inasmuch as the schizophrenic has no other Other than language and at the same time set forth the difference between the Other in paranoia and in neurosis. There is the Other in paranoia, and this Other is real; that is to say that, effectively, the Other of paranoia exists, and that it is even fond of the objet a.

We have repeatedly spoken of the paternal metaphor a lot and spoken about its failure in psychosis. To take it up on another bias, would it not be necessary to conclude from the failure of the paternal metaphor, that the desire of the Other, of the mother, is not symbolized in psychosis? And, is it not for that reason that it is in the real? I am saying: there is desire of the Other in the real, both the Other with it, and the signifying chain where the desire of the Other manifests itself as the will to a jouissance without limit. This is the path for understanding the connection of psychosis and for understanding the erotomania aroused in the Other as well.

There is also the Other in neurosis, except that there, the best proof that it is not real is that one must make it exist, for example, in loving it. This is what is verified in the first steps of the analytic experience: the transference means that it is a question of making the Other exist in order to be able to restore to it, to the Other, the burden of making a logical consistency for the objet a. That is what Lacan called the subject-supposed-to-know: make the Other exist in order to restore to it the objet a, made of this object that is the cause of desire. The restoration of the object to the Other, at the same time, renders this object lost, and installs the demand at the heart of neurosis - whether this be to demand of the Other the object it conceals, or to make oneself ask via the Other for a settlement of the debt one is owed. The Other of neurosis asks, at least, that the subject justify itself. That also touches the pervert when he brings the unjustifiable character of his jouissance to analysis. It is there that one situates what, in other categories than ours, one calls a borderline.

To ask the Other for the object it conceals, to make oneself ask for the payment of a debt - that is to say, to situate the logical consistency in the field of the Other - is in every case the foundation of any discourse, the very principle of the social link.

*

The Other does not exist as real. To say that the Other is the place of truth is to say that the Other is a place of fiction. To say that the Other is a place of knowledge is to say that it has the status of supposition. Neurosis wants to make it exist at the price, for the subject, of consenting to erase him or herself before the object. There, the notion that desire is a defense, takes on its meaning, a defense against the real of jouissance. Let us go further to say that neurosis is a clinical structure where the defense is called desire, while perversion is the clinical structure where the defense is called repudiation.

Lacan proposed, as a definition of the psychoanalytic clinic, "the real as the impossible to bear."33

One has distinguished, for psychosis, the mechanism of foreclosure. Why not give the same pathogenic status to the Freudian Bejahung, the affirmation or the assent? Then one could grasp that in neurosis, the defense takes the form of giving meaning to jouissance. That is radical in phobia, where the signifier serves as a rampart against the empty reference, the lack of the mother's penis. One could then perceive that in perversion, the defense takes the form of a fetishization of jouissance. The Other separates the pervert too, not less than the neurotic, from jouissance. The neurotic admits it, while the pervert denies it.

The term of "démenti" takes its weight from its opposition to the recognition characteristic of the neurotic. Doubtless, the pervert, like the neurotic, makes the Other exist. He pretends to be the objet a of the Other in order to produce anxiety there; in that he succeeds at the point where the neurotic fails. The hysteric would like to make her or his lack-in-being the cause of the desire of the Other; that is to say, to give the value of the truth of desire to her lack-in-being. But the lack remains on her side, while the pervert makes it see-saw in the Other. And, for the pervert, suddenly the demand no longer has the function of an object in his fantasy, but, indeed, of an imperative, an order, a command...

Let us note, again, that what one calls mania in the psychiatric clinic is the case in which the objet a does not function; that is to say, a case of inconsistent logic, which goes together with the perceived inexistence of the Other. That is, it is a question of a maxim which does not set itself up as truth. And why not put in opposition to mania, as a formula of depression, the a-logical consistency of the object, of an object which is no longer the cause of the desire of the Other. The lack-in-being of the subject is no longer there except as a being-in-excess of being wanted. As for the melancholic subject, his or her sudden suicide, if it does not constitute a call to the Other, not even to his or her lack, translates the brusk conversion of the subjective lack-in-being into a. But such a death is the dying of a physical death which is only a support of the second death.34

Why did Lacan evoke mania and depression in regard to the pass, at the point where the Other discovers itself as non-existent? Perhaps to indicate to the one who goes up to that point that the Freudian cause is necessary as a protection against madness.35

The last clinic of Lacan36 indicates that in no case is the symbolic father a satisfactory solution to the impossible to bear. The symbolic father is the father of the crazy person. With Lacan there is no question of the ideal symbolic father, the one who would want our good. Lacan did nothing in order to remain among us as an ideal father.

It occurred to me, while inaugurating the first psychiatric service baptized by Jacques Lacan, to give a small, elementary vade-mecum to the practitioners.37 Here I shall add an additional opinion: "Before the psychotic, before the delirious one, do not forget that you too, that you were delirious as an analysand, that you too spoke of what does not exist."

A first version has been established by Juan Carolos Indard, whom we thank. This version, as well as the commentary of the bibliographical notes, have been established by Agnès Aflalo.

notes

1. Opening lecture of the 5th International Rencontre of the Freudian Field, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1988.

2. Jacques Lacan, "L'Etourdit," Scilicet 4, Paris, Seuil, 1972, p. 3 1.

3. Sigmund Freud, "Humor," (1927), S.E. XXI, London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.

4. Kant develops the universal maxim in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, (first two sections.) Then, based on this postulate, he founds existence on the moral law in his Critique of Practical Reason. Lacan often returns to this universal maxim in his teaching and he proposes a new reading of it, based on Freud, in his écrit: Kant with Sade.

5. André Breton, Anthologie de l'humour noir. Paris, Pauvert, 1966.

6. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVIII, D'un discours que ne serait pas du semblant (1970-1971). Unpublished.

7. Concerning Lenin, one may best consult One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Complete Works. Editions sociales. As for the irony of Socrates, it is always present, particularly in the first dialogues of Plato.

8. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVII, L'envers de la psychanalyse (1969-1970), Paris, Seuil, 1991.

9. Ser hablante in Spanish does not completely have the same usage as parlêtre in French (translator's note).

10. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Abrégé de psychanalyse, Paris, P.U.F., 1949, chapter IX).

11. Jacques Lacan, "Function and the field of the word and language in psychoanalysis," (1953), Écrits: A Selection, trans. By Alan Sheridan, New York, Norton, 1977; The Seminar, Book 1, Freud's Papers on Technique (1953-1954), ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester, New York, W.W. Norton & co., 1988.

12. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter, New York, Norton, 1992.

13. Lacan takes up this idea of P. Guiraud in his thesis, then again in the "Propos sur la causalité psychique," Écrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 175.

14. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (193 2), Paris, Seuil, 1975.

15. Jacques Lacan, "The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud" (1975), Écrits, op. cit., pp. 493-528.

16. The dialectic of Hegel or the Hegelian logic is first developed in the Science and Logic - his so-called, big logic. It is taken up again in the first part of the Precise Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences - his so-called little logic.

17. One can cite here among others: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structure élémentaires de la parenté (1947), (Paris, Mouton, 1967); Roman Jakobson, Élements de linguïstique générale, (Paris, Minuit, 1963).

18. Lacan retains irréalisation from the "Introduction théorique aux fonctions de la psychanalyse en criminologie," in regards to crime. He will take up this function of the irréalisation of the signifier in regard to the phallus in his écrit, "The signification of the phallus," (p. 694). One will be able to follow the construction of it with "The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud" and Bruce Fink, "The Subject as Metaphor," NFF (Spring/Fall 1991), vol. 5, nos. 1 and 2, p. 19.

19. D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of a Neuropath, (Paris, Seuil, 1975), notably, chapter XV. The interrupted sentences are taken up by Lacan again in two of his écrits: "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis" and "Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious."

20. B. Russell, "On denoting," 1905, collected in Logic and Knowledge, London,1956.

21. See, for example, Duns Scottus and the medieval theory of suppositions.

22. The subject supposed to know appears for the first time in Le Séminaire, Le transfert, livre VIII (1960-1961). It becomes a concept in "La proposition sur le psychanalyste de l'École" in 1967, Scilicet 1.

23. G. Frege, "Sense and Meaning" (1892), trans. by Seuil. [In English , C. Malake, Talking Cure].

24. Plato, The Sophist, (Oeuvres complètes, La Pléiade, Gallimard, volume II).

25. Op. cit.

26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Paris, Gallimard, Proposition 7.

27. One can consult Le Séminaire XVIII, "D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant" (1970-1971), unedited; and the écrit which is the contemporary of that, "Radiophonie." And in 1973, Television.

28. Sigmund Freud, Letter to Fliess of September, 21, 1897, La naissance de la psychanalyse, Paris, P.U.F., 1956: "I no longer believe in my neurotica."

29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Inequality Between Men (Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard).

30. Cf. In the course of the year 1991-1992 that the author consecrated to the course "De la nature des semblants" (1991-1992, unpublished).

31. Jacques Lacan, Review of the Séminaire, La logique du fantasme, Ornicar?, no. 29, Paris, Navarin, 1984, p. 16.

32. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Sur la leçon des psychoses." In Actes de L'École de ]a Cause freudienne, XIII, Paris, 1987; Cf. Also Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan; trans. and ed. Stuart. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1980.

33. Jacques Lacan, "Ouverture de la Section Clinique," Ornicar? 9, April 1977.

34. The second death is the object of a long development in Séminaire VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, op. cit.

35. Jacques Lacan, "Proposition de 9 octobre sur le psychanalyste de I'École," op. cit., p. 14.

36. The schizophrenic does not have the signifier for lack, but nothing prohibits us from trying to help him obtain it in the real. That is the lesson that I draw from the Robert case of Robert and Rosine Lefort.

37. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Allocution," De près Montré, Revue de clinique psychanalytique, Paris, June 1988, Editions Borromée.

published prior in PSYCHOANALYTIC NOTEBOOKS 7 as Ironic Clinic, translated by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf