NLS Minute – 17

During
an afternoon of discussion and debate with the CPCTs[1]
and related institutions in March 2015 (reported by Patricia Bosquin-Caroz and
published by FIPA), Jacques-Alain Miller underlined that diagnosis is no longer
applicable in a clinic that has taken note of the Lacanian notion that ‘all the
world is mad’. In this context, he added, diagnosis is no longer spoken, but is
understood. Elsewhere, what is brought to the fore is clinical questioning in
so far as it allows us to see the phenomenon, to specify it, and to describe it
succinctly. This concise description is of the order of a nomination.

For
those clinicians unable to give up their knowledge of the catalogue of true
psychiatry, as opposed to the DSM, their competence to describe the clinical
tableau will depend upon their talent to speak well; clinicians who are able to
name the phenomenon without effacing either the subject (the patient) or the
clinical relation between them. The genius of Clérambault is here a source of
inspiration. Speaking of the reports which Clérambault compiled each day by the
dozen, Paul Guiraud, (in his preface to Clerambault’s Œuvre Psychiatrique),
qualifies these as “certificates, works of art as much as science”. In one or
two pages, Clérambault knew “how to flawlessly, seamlessly trace the
personality of the patient, without recoiling from the neologism that was
always the genuine foundation. We can say that he almost created a literary
school, one that should be the school of all administrations.”[2]

In
using the DSM5, you can content yourself with noting the code 297.1 (F22) in
order to indicate that the patient suffers from Delusional Disorder. All that then remains is to specify whether it
is erotomaniac, grandiose, jealous, persecuted, somatic, or ‘mixed’. In opposition
to that, Clérambault’s literary descriptions in his short ‘certificates’ give a
living consistency to the person described. It is not only a clinical picture
but also has a presence, a materiality, which is seasoned by the patient’s
words. Thus, you can believe that you can hear the voice of Amélie, seamstress
in a religious house, describing the strangeness of the parasitic mental
automatism that affects her. To quote her: “When one says ‘one’, one has the
air of speaking of two people… There is something that speaks when it wants to,
and that stops when it no longer speaks.” Much later Clérambault notes that
“her eroticism is manifested in smiles and prolonged blushing” or again that
she “starts and stops from impulsive gestures. She says out loud what she
supposes we think.” The reader feels as if they participate in the interview
when they read Clérambault: “A part of her is getting tired at the end of the
examination and this inclines her not to reply, and another part of her, which
is favourable to us, is irritated by this, and she rebuffs the former part out
loud: “we want to answer; you leave; we can wait a little” (ibid, p. 457-8). We
think of L’amante anglaise by
Marguerite Duras[3], which
allows us to put our finger on the psychotic reticence that forms the basis of
the staging of the link established between the author of the crime and the person
investigating it, who tries to identify the inexpressible hole of her motivation.
And then, when Clérambault writes, in his laconic fashion: “In conclusion: Automatism.
Erotism. Mysticism. Megalomania”, these words, which belong to a universal
classification, are transformed, in the case of Amélie, into nominations of phenomena
wholly particular to her.

The présentations de malades given by
Jacques Lacan testify to the teaching of Clérambault, who he regarded as his sole
master in psychiatry. Jacques-Alain Miller portrays how these presentations remind
us of Greek tragedy, except that the participants at the presentation, simultaneously
the chorus and the public, are waiting not for a catharsis, but for a diagnosis
that will be the last word on the patient.

Lacan
dodges this expectation, he makes a sidestep. He ends up affirming the diagnosis,
but at the same time suspends it and problematises it in order to lengthen the
study. His reference to classification is there in order to speak of the
normality of the psychotic subject who does not fail to recognise the Other in
the mental automatism that traverses him. For the rest, Lacan follows the
Freudian thread of naming the singular jouissance that is carried along by the
psychiatric nomenclature. So, Ernst Lanzer has entered into the history of
psychoanalysis under the name of the Rat Man rather than as a case of obsessional neurosis. And again, we think
of Sergei Konstantinovich Pankejeff as being the Wolf Man, before considering
him as a case of infantile neurosis
(a diagnosis that has since been contested).

Thus,
psychoanalysis agrees with the psychiatric nosography but tries to follow more
closely not only the personality but also the jouissance of the subject. The
nomination of phenomena requires a literary competence more than a scientific
one, and there is nothing better to shape and form this effort of nomination
than the analytic experience itself. To know how to name your own jouissance is
a precondition to being able to speak about that of another. To diagnose is to
make an effort of poetry.