Meeting With The Real: Neurosis, Psychosis, Perversion

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The modern world is a world where it is more and more difficult for people to touch their feelings, to understand their essence, to recognize their meanings. Vanity, haste and some kind of vague need to accomplish a multitude of supposedly necessary things for him builds a person into a system that invariably leads him to a place from which he has already left, but he does not notice this and continues his life in a circle.

The door to the psychoanalyst's office is opened by people whose usual running in a circle is interrupted. They cannot continue to run, that is, continue to live the way they used to, and they want to understand what is happening to them and how to live on. "My world has collapsed, how can I be?" Does this mean that such people are sick?

Psychiatry divides people into mentally healthy and mentally ill. However, if you take a closer look at each specific person, you will notice those individual psychological characteristics of a person that distinguish him from others. Moreover, this singularity is noticeable in stressful, conflict situations for a person, situations of the impossibility of further habitual existence. Medicine in such cases diagnoses and prescribes drug treatment to return a person to a normal lifestyle.

Psychoanalytic theory and modern psychoanalysis do not divide people into healthy and sick. Psychoanalysis does not define mentally healthy people, "normal" people as such, for the reason that a person or a subject is always split, has a shortage. A harmonious, integral being is an illusion, which in modern society is zealously imposed by many psychological and esoteric currents, but which has no foundation.

The question arises, do different actors cope with emerging shortages in the same way? “The structure of the psyche is formed in the face of the real, or otherwise, on the impossibility of sexual relations,” and it is precisely the overcoming of this impossibility that determines the logic and strategy of the functioning of the mental apparatus, which determines the structure of the psyche.

Psychoanalysis does not solve = does not close the problem with medicines or recommendations on how to become happy or normal, but reveals to a person his ability to exist through his own singularity, uniqueness and individuality based on his own experiences, desires and sufferings without a medical diagnosis, but with the help of understanding his work mental apparatus. This happens through speech interaction with a psychoanalyst, since the founder of modern psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, says that: “Psychoanalysis should be the science of the language in which the subject lives. Man, from the point of view of Freud, is a subject, captivated and tormented by language."

It is through speech, in interaction with the analyst, that the subject reveals himself and his own understanding.

So, psychoanalysis understands a person as a speaking subject, whose mental apparatus manifests itself, functions through a certain structure of the psyche, which is formed in childhood and does not change throughout later life. “It arises as the effect of the birth on the light of the subject, as always already the subject of the Other, language, culture. It arises as a result of the birth of a speaking being in the course of his constitutive alienation into language as a house of being”V. Mazin.

So, the subject enters the culture, the language, and Lacan says that the structure of the psyche is set by how exactly subjectivation is performed when entering the culture. How exactly the subject becomes the subject, that is, the mental structure indicates the position of the subject in relation to the Other.

Lacan identifies three mechanisms of subjectivation: repression, rejection and perversion. Through these three mechanisms, the subject can experience a meeting with the real and meet with the Law, that is, the requirement of this real. How the subject accepts this Law, what mechanism of acceptance he uses - the structure of the psyche depends on this.

The law can be accepted - recognized through repression, and then it constitutes a neurosis. It can be dropped, and then psychosis is constituted. And the Law can be rejected - as if to admit, simultaneously saying and (or) yes and (or) no, that is, to evade the answer - and get a perverse structure.

Based on this, Jacques Lacan distinguishes three structures: neurosis, psychosis and perversion.

Neurosis: A neurotic is an inquiring subject. A doubting subject who faces a choice and asks, and in the impossibility of making a choice, neurosis unfolds. For a hysterical subject, this is a question: "Who am I - a man or a woman?", For a subject with obsessions, the question: "Am I alive or dead?" The neurotic subject, through psychoanalysis, has the opportunity to undergo symbolic castration. The image of the I and the image of the world in the neurotic is created through phantasm.

Psychosis: With a psychotic structure, questioning and doubt are impossible. The image of the I and the image of the world in psychotics is realized through a logical operator. The Law, the Name of the Father has been discarded for them, its function does not work. The psychotic cannot refuse pleasure, and symbolic castration is impossible for them.

A person with a psychotic structure can live and not suspect about it, that is, it can remain latent until the moment when the Name-Father is called. After this, the unfolding of psychosis is possible.

In perversion “I am faced with a choice - to accept or reject the threat of castration, it answers this question with two opposite reactions, effective and sanctioned. Splitting the self allows you to evade the decision - to reject or accept castration. To Mazin.

Lacan presents the theory of mental structures as something that clarifies "the meaning of analysis - to find out what function the subject takes on in the structure of symbolic relations." However, Lacan never says that defining structure is the very meaning of analysis. You can go through the analysis and not guess about the structure. You can understand the structure after analysis.

This is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from psychiatry, where it is important from the very beginning to establish a diagnosis and cure the patient with medication, making him "normal".

Psychoanalysis gives the subject the opportunity to understand that everything that happens to him in his life is his handiwork and what to do next with it is also his handiwork. “Nobody will change your destiny except you” (V. Mazin).

The structure of the psyche - whether it be neurosis, psychosis or perversion - does not change either over time or due to the passage of analysis, but it is never final, conserved, and this is what enables the subject to understand the causality of his thinking and his own mental life. “Where was It must become I” S. Freud.

The essence of psychoanalysis and understanding the structure of the psyche as the main element of understanding the mental apparatus is that, as Lacan says: “We can escape our fate,” and accepting the diagnosis, the subject will always be a slave to fate and medicines.