Foreclusion
Encyclopedia
Foreclosure is the English translation of a term that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
introduced into psychoanalysis
to represent a defence mechanism
which he considered central to the development of psychosis
.
The term has become something of a critical crux for the interrelationship of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis.
'in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet
's review, his famous article on "The Psychological Significance of Negation in French"'...[and] borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate...facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality'. The publication took part against the background of the Twenties dispute between Freud and René Laforgue
over scotomization. 'If I am not mistaken', Freud wrote in 1927, 'Laforgue would say in this case that the boy "scotomizes" his perception of the woman's lack of a penis. A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not the case here'. Freud went on to suggest that if one wanted to 'reserve the word "Verdrängung
" ["repression"] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be "Verleugnung
" ["disavowal"]'.
Ignoring over Pinchon's role in foreclosure's introduction, as part of his 'victory over Laforgue he attributed to Freud the discovery of a process (foreclosure) and the invention of a concept (Verwerfung) that Freud had not originated at all'; and he tied foreclosure firmly into 'our theory of the signifier' which he also attributed to Freud (though admitting at least that 'Freud says this all the more in that he does not know that he is saying it fifty years before the linguists'). Here as elsewhere, his critics would suggest, 'Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him' - so that "foreclosure" in Lacan's sense is one of the 'many times...he used to attribute to Freud innovations that were really his own'.
had pointed to 'a number of changes in speech...in schizophrenics...words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream'. Lacan used foreclosure to explain why.
For Lacan, 'Foreclosure is a primordial defense because it does not act on a signifier that is already inscribed within the chain of signifiers, but rather, it rejects the inscription itself....This operation of repudiation especially affects highly meaningful signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father, the guarantor of castration. Lacan viewed the foreclosure of this signifier as the characteristic mechanism of psychosis'.
Lacan considered the father - later Lacanians might use the terms "fatherer", "motherer" - to play a vital role in breaking the initial mother/child duality and introducing the child to the wider world of culture, language, institutions and social reality - the Symbolic world - the fatherer being 'the human being who stands for the law and order that the mother plants in the life of the child...widens the child's view of the world'. The result in normal development is 'proper separation from the motherer, as marked out by the Names-of-the-father' - by, one might say, the internalised father. Thus Lacan postulates the existence of a paternal function (the "Name of the Father
" or "primordial signifier") which allows the realm of the Symbolic
to be bound to the realms of the Imaginary and the Real
. This function prevents the developing child from being engulfed by its mother and allows him/her to emerge as a separate entity in his/her own right. It is a symbol of parental authority (a general symbol that represents the power of father of the Oedipus complex
) that brings the child into the realm of the Symbolic by forcing him/her to act and to verbalise as an adult. As a result, the three realms are integrated in a way that is conducive to the creation of meaning and successful communication by means of what Lacan calls a Borromean knot.
In some cases, the paternal function is foreclosed from the Symbolic order. When this happens, the realm of the Symbolic is insufficiently bound to the realm of the Imaginary and failures in meaning may occur (the Borromean knot becomes undone and the three realms completely disconnected), with 'a disorder caused at the most personal juncture between the subject and his sense of being alive'. Psychosis is experienced after some environmental trigger in the form of a signifier
which the individual cannot assimilate means that 'the Name-of-the-Father, verworfen, foreclosed...[is] called into symbolic opposition to the subject'. The fabric of the individual's reality is ripped apart and no meaningful Symbolic sense can be made of experience. 'Absence of transcendence of the Oedipus places the subject under the regime of foreclosure or non-distinction between the symbolic and the real'; and psychotic delusions or hallucinations are the consequent result of the individual's striving to account for what he/she experiences.
. With a general obligation to uphold both fidelity to Lacan, and Lacan's fidelity to Freud, they struggled with the fact that 'whatever the (considerable) value of "foreclosure" as clinical and epistomological concept...the term, before being a translation of Freud's German, was a borrowing from Pinchon's French'.
'At best the commentators perceive that foreclosure does not exist as a concept in Freud's work...sometimes they make no mention of the borrowing from Pinchon and...at worst, the commentators "hallucinate" the presence of a concept of foreclosure in Freud', driven by the need to preserve Lacan as Freud's true successor.
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
introduced into psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
to represent a defence mechanism
Defence mechanism
In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, defence mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies brought into play by various entities to cope with reality and to maintain self-image. Healthy persons normally use different defences throughout life...
which he considered central to the development of psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
.
The term has become something of a critical crux for the interrelationship of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis.
Prehistory
The term was originally introduced into psychologyPsychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
'in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet
Pierre Janet
Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory....
's review, his famous article on "The Psychological Significance of Negation in French"'...[and] borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate...facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality'. The publication took part against the background of the Twenties dispute between Freud and René Laforgue
René Laforgue
Rene Laforgue was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Laforgue was born in Thann and died in Paris. He studied medicine in Berlin. He maintained a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis.-External links:*...
over scotomization. 'If I am not mistaken', Freud wrote in 1927, 'Laforgue would say in this case that the boy "scotomizes" his perception of the woman's lack of a penis. A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not the case here'. Freud went on to suggest that if one wanted to 'reserve the word "Verdrängung
Psychological repression
Psychological repression, also psychic repression or simply repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one's own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious...
" ["repression"] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be "Verleugnung
Denial
Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.The subject may use:* simple denial: deny the reality of the...
" ["disavowal"]'.
Lacan's introduction of foreclosure
It was however a third Freudian term, "Verwerfung", that came to the fore when Lacan took up the cudgels against Laforgue again three decades later, in his third seminar on the psychoses, and 'used the French word forclusion (fore-closure) to translated the German term Verwerfung, previously rendered in French as rejet (repudiation)'. When he first made public his use of the term (in 1959), he announced it very cautiously: 'Let us extract from several of Freud's texts a term that is sufficiently articulated in them to...designate in them a function of the unconscious that is distinct from the repressed. Let us take as demonstrated the essence of my seminar on the psychoses, namely, that this term refers to...psychosis: this term is Verwerfung (foreclosure)'.Ignoring over Pinchon's role in foreclosure's introduction, as part of his 'victory over Laforgue he attributed to Freud the discovery of a process (foreclosure) and the invention of a concept (Verwerfung) that Freud had not originated at all'; and he tied foreclosure firmly into 'our theory of the signifier' which he also attributed to Freud (though admitting at least that 'Freud says this all the more in that he does not know that he is saying it fifty years before the linguists'). Here as elsewhere, his critics would suggest, 'Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him' - so that "foreclosure" in Lacan's sense is one of the 'many times...he used to attribute to Freud innovations that were really his own'.
Lacan's interpretations of psychosis
The problematic Lacan sought to address with the twin tools of foreclosure and the signifier was that of the difference between psychosis and neurosis, as manifested in and indicated by language usage. It was common analytic ground that 'when psychotics speak they always have some meanings that are too fixed, and some that are far too loose...they have a different relation to language, and a different way of speaking from neurotics'. Freud, following Bleuler and JungJung
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology.Jung may also refer to:* Jung * JUNG, Java Universal Network/Graph Framework-See also:...
had pointed to 'a number of changes in speech...in schizophrenics...words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream'. Lacan used foreclosure to explain why.
For Lacan, 'Foreclosure is a primordial defense because it does not act on a signifier that is already inscribed within the chain of signifiers, but rather, it rejects the inscription itself....This operation of repudiation especially affects highly meaningful signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father, the guarantor of castration. Lacan viewed the foreclosure of this signifier as the characteristic mechanism of psychosis'.
Lacan considered the father - later Lacanians might use the terms "fatherer", "motherer" - to play a vital role in breaking the initial mother/child duality and introducing the child to the wider world of culture, language, institutions and social reality - the Symbolic world - the fatherer being 'the human being who stands for the law and order that the mother plants in the life of the child...widens the child's view of the world'. The result in normal development is 'proper separation from the motherer, as marked out by the Names-of-the-father' - by, one might say, the internalised father. Thus Lacan postulates the existence of a paternal function (the "Name of the Father
Name of the Father
The Name-of-the-Father is a concept that Jacques Lacan developed over time, beginning in his Seminar The Psychoses...
" or "primordial signifier") which allows the realm of the Symbolic
The Symbolic
The Symbolic is a part of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, part of his attempt 'to distinguish between those elementary registers whose grounding I later put forward in these terms: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real - a distinction never previously made in psychoanalysis'.-The...
to be bound to the realms of the Imaginary and the Real
The Real
The Real refers to that which is authentic, the unchangeable truth in reference both to being/the Self and the external dimension of experience, also referred to as the infinite and absolute - as opposed to a reality based on sense perception and the material order.-In psychoanalysis:The Real is a...
. This function prevents the developing child from being engulfed by its mother and allows him/her to emerge as a separate entity in his/her own right. It is a symbol of parental authority (a general symbol that represents the power of father of the Oedipus complex
Oedipus complex
In psychoanalytic theory, the term Oedipus complex denotes the emotions and ideas that the mind keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic repression, that concentrate upon a boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother, and kill his father...
) that brings the child into the realm of the Symbolic by forcing him/her to act and to verbalise as an adult. As a result, the three realms are integrated in a way that is conducive to the creation of meaning and successful communication by means of what Lacan calls a Borromean knot.
In some cases, the paternal function is foreclosed from the Symbolic order. When this happens, the realm of the Symbolic is insufficiently bound to the realm of the Imaginary and failures in meaning may occur (the Borromean knot becomes undone and the three realms completely disconnected), with 'a disorder caused at the most personal juncture between the subject and his sense of being alive'. Psychosis is experienced after some environmental trigger in the form of a signifier
Sign (semiotics)
A sign is understood as a discrete unit of meaning in semiotics. It is defined as "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be...
which the individual cannot assimilate means that 'the Name-of-the-Father, verworfen, foreclosed...[is] called into symbolic opposition to the subject'. The fabric of the individual's reality is ripped apart and no meaningful Symbolic sense can be made of experience. 'Absence of transcendence of the Oedipus places the subject under the regime of foreclosure or non-distinction between the symbolic and the real'; and psychotic delusions or hallucinations are the consequent result of the individual's striving to account for what he/she experiences.
Late Lacan
It has been suggested that in his last decade there was 'a significant shift in Lacan's own writing from a description of psychosis as rooted in "foreclosure" of - refusal to acknowledge, let alone recognise as legitimate - the "Name-of-the-Father" to anaccount of a particular form of knotting together of the symbloic, imaginary, and real'.Clinical applications
'Many have asked whether psychoanalytic treatment can repair a foreclosure. Case histories do not provide any clear answers'.Post Lacan: the continuing problematic
The question of the status of foreclosure continued to plague Lacan's successors in the decades after his death, as 'a mood of dissidence...[bore] witness to the transformation linked to the end of the Lacanian saga' and 'more than twenty associations emerged from the 1980 dissolution of the Ecole Freudienne de ParisÉcole Freudienne de Paris
The École Freudienne de Paris was a French psychoanalytic professional body formed in 1964, of which Jacques Lacan was a founding member....
. With a general obligation to uphold both fidelity to Lacan, and Lacan's fidelity to Freud, they struggled with the fact that 'whatever the (considerable) value of "foreclosure" as clinical and epistomological concept...the term, before being a translation of Freud's German, was a borrowing from Pinchon's French'.
'At best the commentators perceive that foreclosure does not exist as a concept in Freud's work...sometimes they make no mention of the borrowing from Pinchon and...at worst, the commentators "hallucinate" the presence of a concept of foreclosure in Freud', driven by the need to preserve Lacan as Freud's true successor.
Further reading
- Fink. B (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Theory and Technique. HUP. London
- Sanchez. B (2004) "Understanding the Psychotic Mental Structure from a Lacanian Point of View and Dialogical Treatment in a Therapeutic Community." Therapeutic Communities 25.4: 253-260.