Structures in Psychoanalysis: Neurosis, Psychosis, and Perversion
Lacan’s retour à Freud is a project which raises Freud from the subject to the social, the linguistic, through the structuralisation of this very subject. This is necessary, for Lacan, as the dimension of truth emerges within the appearance of language. For Lacan, and Freud first recognised the presence of these structures yet was unable to give a systematic account of which, there are fundamental types of structures which correspond to clinical or social behaviours — namely, neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, and their corresponding functions of repression, foreclosure, and disavowal.
Freud’s clinical cases represent the first attempts at producing a theory of neurosis; however, Freud is not consistent in his application of the term, and is ultimately unable to provide a structural account of the subject in order to properly identify the neurotic, and the non-neurotic subject. This is the point from which Lacan offers his account of the subject through returning to Hegel, and reinvigorating Saussure, and the basis of which is a certain prohibition, or castration.
This essay will ultimately serve as a summarisation of notes on the ideas of Freud and Lacan on these psychic structures, and how they relate to, and differ from one another.
