Forgetting and Reinventing Analysis: Mutual Analysis in Ferenczi

The author and Qtmir, Liverpool

I have given up attempting to form a study cartel devoted to the various  revisions  Ferenczi and Lacan made to their psychoanalytic projects.

Groups and Cartels

A cartel is a lacanian invention. It was a small study group with a facilitator that lasted a limited period of time and then stopped. Afterwards members were encouraged to join another study group devoted to a different or similar topic. Lacan had learned from Bion that groups regularly become dysfunctional, cease working for a while at least, and even pursue totally different objectives from those adopted at the outset. Lacan cut out these diversions by giving his groups a limited time frame that was non-negotiable. In reality however, Lacan's cartels often had a limited membership drawn from his followers. Although topics changed and cartels ended, membership could never be completely fresh but only ever recycled. Eventually Lacan avoided dysfunctional group dynamics, ideologies, rivalries, and analytical prima-donnas by closing the organisations he founded. From the short-session, to the brief cartel, and series of abandoned Schools, Lacan's social and psychoanalytic formations would never produce rival masters.... or indeed any magister whatsoever. In this Ferenczi anticipated him:

I know the excrescences that grow from organized groups, and I am aware that in most political, social, and scientific organizations childish megalomania, vanity, admiration of empty formalities, blind obedience, or personal egoism, prevail instead of quiet, honest work in the general interests

But even the venerable founders of psychoanalysis failed to establish any working group that catered to the "general interests" of psychoanalysis alone. Instead there arose complicated factions, splits, secessions, excommunications to name but a few group phenomena arising within psychoanalysis. In short the notion of "a working group" remained part ideal, part fantasy.

So now I begin my idiosyncratic cartel for one devoted to Sandor Ferenczi's experiments with mutual analysis. These started in the 1930's when he was already a very well established figure in international psychoanalysis and leader of an influential group of analysts and doctors in Hungry. The three most important texts documenting this experiment arehis Clinical Diary, the voluminous Correspondence with Sigmund Freud, and finally a text by the other party to the experiment, Elizabeth Severn, called The Discovery of the Self: A Study in Psychological Cure.

Was The Cure failing?

The immediate background to Ferenzci's experiments comprises of three weighty factors. First of all there is what Freud called Ferenzci's "mania" for curing to which he gave a Latin epithet, furor sanandi. There was international recognition for Ferenczi being analyst of last resort. He would invariably accept analysands that had been failed, dismissed, or deemed "incurable" by other contemporaries. Not without a certain amount of self-irony the analyst himself once referred to his own "super-performances" ! His reputation matched that of his physician friend Georg Groddeck, who was also noted for accepting patients deemed incurable by physicians and alienists alike.

Though Ferenczi might occasionally conduct analyses by correspondence, he preferred to see patients face to face. Moving to Budapest was an option available to the rich and desperate only, so this in itself was effectively a criterion for selection or exclusion. A notable exception was Melanie Klein who was already living in Budapest from 1910. She herself reported

My interests in psycho-analysis and in the analysis of children arose

during the time when I lived in Budapest. By that time I already had

three children. I had come across [‘some’ deleted and replaced in pen

by ‘one’] of Freud’s books and was deeply impressed by [‘them’ deleted

and replaced in pen by ‘it’]. I was analysed by Sandor Ferenczi,  and it

soon became clear that I was very much drawn to understand more of the

inner life first of all of my own children, and then of children in general.

Ferenczi told me that I was gifted for this particular, and at that time

still very little developed, branch of psycho-analysis (See the Autobiography of Melanie Klein in  https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2013_Klein_autobiography___Janet_Sayers_transcription.pdf)

Klein here judiciously glossed over her own therapeutic needs of the time. Since 1908 she sought contemporary fashionable "cures" for her nerves, depressions, bladder problems, and post-natal conditions.  Klein needed regular periods away from her children in order to rest and recover. It was following the birth of her third child that she turned to Ferenczi for analysis in 1914. Klein didn't have to travel. She happened to be at the right place at the right time to benefit from five years of therapy with him. Even then five years of psychoanalysis was a long-term treatment, compared with the much briefer treatments of the first generation hysterics or Freuds impromptu, ad hoc, training analyses.

Alongside his passion for healing analytic incurables, two further factors pushed the Hungarian analyst's experiments in mutual analysis and other techniques. Suspicions began to circulate amongst psychoanalytic communities after 1918 that eventually shook the foundations of Freud's psychoanalytic cure  One was an anxiety that freudian sublimation had become less effective or even completely useless. Freud witnessed many of his earliest clients surrender or forget their neurotic tangles when they found some demanding social role. Anna O. for instance, who invented psychoanalysis along with Breuer and Freud, eventually became a pioneer in women's social work.  After 1918 this form of sublimation seemed less attractive, particularly to women.

Another worry had an equally dramatic impact on psychoanalysts. This was the rumour that psychoanalytic "interpretation" had become less effective in clinics. Analysts of course continued interpreting the dreams, words, behaviours, and even the transferences of their patients; yet sadly these interpretations often led to no corresponding "mutative response" from clients. In other words patients remained stubbornly neurotic, however hard or frequently analysts might attempt to interpret their dreams, behaviours, or transferences.

Many post-Freudian developments occurring during the inter-war years originated to address the apparent failures of both sublimation and interpretation. Correspondingly, what was originally designed to be a quick cure, analogous to a few modern counselling sessions, became progressively longer; lasting years instead of weeks or months. The costs of analytic listening inflated in tandem. This is the sitz-im-leben for all Ferenczi's work: his restless experiments with technique and frequent theoretical revisionism, though he was certainly not the only one to harbour doubts about the effectiveness cure. Whereas debates about the effectiveness of psychoanalytic treatment and techniques were largely undercover, confined to internal debates, Ferenzci  boldly went public with his doubts, struggles, and continuing efforts to revise and reinvent psychoanalytic treatment for new generations. 

Ferenzci himself acknowledged mutual analysis to be exhausting and demanding. He did not recommend it as a "technique" available to all clinicians. Rather it was an exceptional adaptation forced upon him by a set of particular circumstances. He openly admitted learning from this adaptation, but it was a costly process that ultimately failed. During the final years of his life Ferenczi was battling with pernicious anaemia that eventually forced him to abandon his clinic. When the eight year enterprise with RN (Elizabeth Severn) finally ceased, she moved to Paris in a distressed state to receive alternative support from her daughter Margaret, a dancer. Eventually Elizabeth moved to London and practised as a therapist there, whilst remaining  determinedly aloof from all psychoanalytic groups and organisations there. Had she wished to practice as what was then called "a lay analyst" there were more opportunities available for that in London than in her native USA where the psychoanalytic profession had become closed to all but medics. As her daughter once acknowledged, Elizabeth was always a one woman band who had very limited tolerance for colleagues.

For Debate

1. Psyche/Soma: Pernicious Aenemia

What is the influence of serious illness on psychoanalytic practice? The Clinical Diary is testament to the final struggles of an increasingly sick man. Various contemporaries, like Abraham, had died, and leadership was already passing on to a new generation. Freud himself had been forced to reduce work because of cancer. Ferenzci, though taking more rests and holidays than usual, continued to engage fully in what he called "the problems" of psychoanalysis until he succumbed to pernicious anaemia, which some analysts unscrupulously misrepresented as psychotic depression.

How then does the presence of a terminal illness, in either analysts or analsyands, impact psychoanalytic treatment? A question of weighty significance in view of Freud's conviction that the unconscious offers neither space nor time to the concept of its own extinction

2. What was "schizophrenia progressiva"

RN the person for whom mutual analysis was designed, received a weighty diagnosis in a diary entry for January 2nd 1932. She was believed to be suffering from an illness which resulted in a permanent psychotic state; so why risk psychoanalysis with an already fragmented and fragile person?

3. What were the limitations of mutual analysis?

4. Unsuccessful and Messy Endings with Ferenzci

Notes

1. I began this writing in the July of 2025 aged 73. For decades I struggled with generalised arthritis and during the July of 2024 I received a second knee replacement. Simultaneously I was undergoing a divorce which involved court appearances online and regular threats of imprisonment whilst recovering from surgery and relinquishing my treasured retirement home on the banks of the River Dee. If this was not enough, toward the end of July 2024 I was told tests had found secondary cancer despite successful treatment by radiation and hormone therapy a decade ago.  I therefore acknowledge that July 2024-July 2025 was a time of sickness, social dislocation, and more threats by aggressive lawyers more interested in escalating fees than any form of justice or equity.

2. Although "self analysis" has an honourable tradition since Freud, it inevitably suffered from the stigma of being idiosyncratic and delusional. In the theocratical  language of Freud, self-analysis invariably teetered on the borders of "wild analysis' -despite the fact that Freud himself was the original wild analyst who found it extremely difficult to remain friendly with a whole series of colleagues including Ferenczi himself and Georg Groddeck, the famous physician and the inventor of the unconscious Id (das Es). See The Ferenczi-Groddeck Letters, 1921-1933 Open Gate Press 2002.

3. Psychoanlytic sublimation, like every other technical term in psychoanalysis, is a multifaceted concept. In Freud's earliest practice, his middle and upper-class patients exchanged neurotic, sexualised preoccupations for activities with a practical social role. Of course intellectual achievements, particularly literature and art, involved sublimation in Freud's theories, but for individuals eager for the cure before 1914 social sublimation remained the most privileged avenue to escape neurosis available to both men and women.

4. Lacan offered one of the most important revisions of Freud's concept. Already a qualified doctor and psychiatrist, he began a training analysis lasting from1932 until 1938. These were precisely the years when psychoanalysts became increasingly  worried about the effectiveness of interpretation and sublimation. His own theoretical proposal involved crafting an ethics for psychoanalysis whilst simultaneously offering analysands and followers with powerful avenues for intellectual sublimation in his constantly evolving theory along with a battery of changeable concepts invented and sanctioned by himself. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 exists in a variety of French texts and English translations.

5. An excellent summary of the mural analysis between Severn and Ferenczi is offered by Berlin Psychoanalytic on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ_ytqz_qAM.

6 . The website of the Pernicious Aneamia Society says People who have been diagnosed as having Pernicious Anaemia will be unable to absorb Vitamin B12 from food.4 Until the 1920’s when it was discovered that feeding patients raw, or very lightly cooked liver could keep them alive patients died from the disease. Injectable ‘artificial’ B12 became available after the Second World War and now, as long as the diagnosis is made, people seldom die of the disease. Once the Vitamin B12 Deficiency is corrected patients can live a more or less normal life. However, a great many people still have problems with symptoms after the deficiency has been corrected though doctors don’t know why this is so. 

7. This quotation is from the first volume of the translated Correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi p xxiv

8. A modern woman writes about living with pernicious anaemia. In modern times, Linda born in 1961, tells her own story about pernicious anaemia.

I’ve always been active – cycling, swimming, and a physically demanding job kept me fit. Then, the subtle changes began. In 2015 I was diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency and was prescribed vitamin D. Around 2016, I noticed a decline in my health. Fatigue crept in, headaches became frequent, and I felt increasingly clumsy. I visited my GP, attributing it to stress and the menopause, which was definitely the trigger for me. But the symptoms worsened: Visual disturbances: lots of problems with my prescription glasses and eyesight. Unexplained falls: Upstairs, downstairs, even on flat pavements. Cognitive fog: Forgetting everyday things, like where I kept my plates.Intense fatigue: Like I’d worked a gruelling night shift, even after minimal activity. Despite my concerns, I was dismissed by my GP with suggestions of stress management and yoga. I tried to do more as exercise as I felt unfit but my life was grim with lots of symptoms.

The turning point was a severe fall in 2018. I hit my head hard, and the fatigue became unbearable. I then had a second neurological event in October when, reaching up in the garden, I had a dizzy spell. I went to go indoors but staggered, felt as if I was being pulled down to the right and had to fall into a bush; I was then unable to get up and was worried that I had had a stroke. Following this I experienced dizziness, a first serious attack of vertigo, and even migraines – something I’d never had before...........The initial shock was immense. How could this have happened to me? I ate a balanced diet, including plenty of meat and dairy. With hindsight the way the symptoms crept up on me felt like a rope pulling me backwards. I had tried hard to explain to friends and health care professionals, but I just wasn’t listened to. I became irritable, scatty and felt detached from the world, personality traits I had never experienced before. I was offered anti-depressants which I refused even though my mood was low, I knew it wasn’t depression....

Ferenczi went through a similar period of illness and uncertainty. 

WORDS & FLESH: OBSESSIONS & DEATH

ENDING SEMINAR FIVE

Salvador Dali Metamorphosis of Narcissus1937 

This title is deliberately odd. First of all I refer to a text which was a seminar. It was never written as a book, but delivered orally and transcribed. The afterlife of these transcripts, is better left to some future archivist, who might be able to gather the various documents, fragments oral testimonies, and notes

Second it is impossible to cite any definitive Urtexte because Lacan’s seminars have been subject to interpretation and reinterpretation from their first transcripts and hearers. My

own preferences for this seminar is a French edition and two English renderings.

Third, it must be underscored that these texts remain raw. Though the seminars craved editorial input, it never happened for decades. The transcripts circulated anonymously amongst the Others, who in this case were devoted colleagues and pupils. Not surprisingly the continued circulation of raw transcripts led to suspicion, legal debates about ownership, and -the very big question- as to whether Lacanian teachings as well as the psychoanalysis he constantly reconstructed could ever be transmitted in an authoritative, unitary, and smooth fashion.

For the purposes of this brief note, towards the end of this seminar Lacan comments on the concept of obsession. He believed the root obsession was a persistent rumination as to whether the Subject itself was alive or dead. Death is therefore a necessary association (or signifier) for any Lacanian account of obsessiveness.

Freud’s death drive is perplexing. Is it singular, plural, or both? A similar question can be asked of the love or life drives. The answer of course, is both. Whatever Freud meant by drives, their trajectories are not immutable. A drive can trigger and change into  its opposite. Drives have circuits indeed, but their timings, trajectories, comings, goings and spheres of operation can be inscrutable….. in other words “unconscious”

What I find strange about Lacan’s interpretation of Freudian death drives is that he studiously avoids any reference to anything physical or organic. Freud’ death drive was primarily interpreted by himself as organic. As in Dali’s representation of Narcissus, subjects undergo -and sometimes desire to undergo- metamorphic changes -especially from organic to inorganic. Of course there was a psychological dimension to such a drive or drives. But death was not solely restricted the associations of signifiers -however unconscious.

The history of psychoanalysis can be perplexing. Even when Freud was still working and writing, there were many analysts who completely rejected Freud’s death drive. Max Schur, was such a one. Schur (1897-1969) became Freud’s GP in  Austria after he lost confidence with his previous doctors. He accompanied Freud to London. Schur also wrote a book about Freud which remains first class but sadly ignored.To be forthright -it was Schur who looked after Freud’s cancer and assisted him to die. Doctor and patient had a pact. When the old man experienced his pain as unbearable, Schur agreed to inform Anna of her father’s decision and administer a lethal dose.

But then there were those contemporaries that welcomed the theoretical and practical presence of death drives. Kurt Eissler (1908-1999) was a veteran Austrian analyst who later worked in America. It was Eissler who for many years was responsible for the Freud Archives and collecting interviews from contemporaries- like the family of Little Hans. Finally an abiding inspiration for Lacan was Melanie Klein for whom death drives were psychological, imaginary, symbolic and real processes operating within and without subjects

During the final sections of the Seminar Lacan speculates about the word in the beginning. Obviously a reference to the opening of the fourth gospel, whose author is named John. The biblical text about the word (ο λογοσ) in the beginning continues, but the following is not quoted by Lacan:

 Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο,

καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν — καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρός — πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. John 1:14 King James’ Version

Does Lacan’s word ever become flesh? The opposite seems more apposite to me. Rilke tried to make the world invisible with his poetry; similarly Lacan’s signifiers dissolve things fleshly into an infinite succession of associations (or signifiers). It should be said therefore, that Lacan's signifier kills flesh.

It is the genius of Lacan’s signifiers, as well as Freud’s literalism, that helps one to appreciate the words of Thomas Beckett in T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The play dates from 1937, the very year Freud published Analysis Terminable and Interminable

I have smelt

    Death in the rose, death in the hollyhock, sweet pea, hyacinth,

      primrose and cowslip. I have seen

    Trunk and horn, tusk and hoof, in odd places;

    I have lain on the floor of the sea and breathed with the breathing of

      the sea-anemone, swallowed with ingurgitation of the sponge. I have

      lain in the soil and criticised the worm…………………

 Corruption in the dish, incense in the latrine, the sewer in the

      incense, the smell of sweet soap in the woodpath, a hellish sweet

      scent in the woodpath, while the ground heaved. I have seen

    Rings of light coiling downwards, leading

    To the horror of the ape. Have I not known, not known

    What was coming to be? It was here, in the kitchen, in the passage,

    In the mews in the barn in the byre in the market-place

    In our veins our bowels our skulls as well

    As well as in the plottings of potentates

    As well as in the consultations of powers.

Notes

K Eissler: Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child XXVI (1971)
Melanie Klein : On The Sense of Loneliness 1963. Available at https://www.scribd.com/document/377411574/Klein-1963-on-the-Sense-of-Loneliness

Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying 1972 International Universities Press

Versions of Lacan’s Seminar V

French: http://staferla.free.fr/S5/S5 FORMATIONS .pdf

English by Cormac Gallagher http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-05-the-formations-of-the-unconscious.pdf?utm_source=newsletter_654&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=reading-group-reminder
English by Russell Grigg Formations of the Unconscious: Book 5: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V  Polity 2017


In 1925 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this to his Polish translator Witold Von Hulewicz
Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable, but they are. For as long as we are here, our possession and our friendship, sharers in our trouble and our happiness, just as they were once the confidants of our ancestors. Therefore it is crucial not only that we not corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but precisely because of this provisionality it shares with us, that these appearances and objects be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us…
we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible

From the notes contained in the Duino Elegies,  translated by Edward Snow  North Point Press, p.70

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Le Visible et l'invisible, suivi de notes de travail Gallimard 1964

Sigmund Freud Analysis Terminable and Interminable 1937 from the Standard Edition 23 translated by Strachey & others. Available online in German and English

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Analysis_Terminable_Interminable.pdf 

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/freud/endlich/endlich.html

The Tyranny of an All

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:

general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer,

for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organised Particulars.

William Blake         

in memorium: Glenda Jackson

1936-2023

                                   The Tyranny of an All

This brief paper arises from encounters with the “All” in my clinical work. It is also inspired by an ongoing philosophical perplexity about “the All”. This series of aporiae began in my youth, when monks at my seminary laboured hard to teach me symbolic logic. Sadly -or fortunately- their logic managed to make me even more confused!

Although I see analysands much less than earlier in my career,  I have become aware recently of how an analysand’s “All” might try to dominate -and even subvert- both an analysis as well as its subject.

Lacan’s triple registration of Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary might seem to dissolve any All for both analysands and analysts. Instead everything that can be thought and experienced must, in principle, belong to one of these registers or some combination of them. But this is not necessarily the case for everyone. Not everyone lives in a world dominated by three registers.

Commitment to an All might involve individuals operating with other registers, that of the Ideal for instance. Of course the notion of an Ideal was ruthlessly criticised by early psychoanalysis. The Ideal in this instance would be some remnant of enforced religious orthodoxy,  a weird science, authoritarian regimes, or simply the prevailing norms of a civil community -whether that community be some rural stekl or fashionable suburb of imperial Vienna.

Nevertheless psychoanalytic theory and practice did eventually establish a lofty Ideal of its own. I instance here notions of “genital maturity”. Once upon a time this represented the goal (or end) of analysis for both patients and practitioners. Whatever genital maturity was supposed to have represented then, it was thankfully deflated by Lacan when thematising sexual relationships. Here there is no ideal, real, or imaginary: instead there are perplexing lacunae of various sorts. (see footnote)

Ideality is also associated with political theory, action, or cause. An analysand might well be committed to a programme of political action inspired by ideals of social equality for the distribution of goods and services, for instance.  This noble ideal can easily become a sort of drive. It becomes an All in short. It dominates the living, thinking, and actions of the individual.

A massive challenge to this commitment very often arises from others -namely ones closest political associates and comrades. Even the analyst becomes one of these. I remember well one analysand who had been expelled from every socialist group in his locality. Often he would engineer actively his own expulsion. In short he refused all compromise with any of his social and political ideals. Though he needed comrades to achieve his ideal political objectives, he invariably chose to remain faithful to his ideal, which functioned as the All of his life. This was his great desire and remained so. He preferred to be a solitary revolutionary  than to dilute his ideals with any social bond

Analysing one’s own construction of the All could well threaten to betray your own very being, striving, and doing to date. An analysis may seem to push you to you towards evil opponents of your progressive programme -like intellectual nihilism or profound apathy. Apatheia in the true sense of the word involved ataraxia too: inactive passivity, an empty longing, and inability to achieve.

 Is there any hope for a politically active analysand?

After years of analysis one politically active person told me that his life was governed by a dilemma. Apparently the only alternative to his All was complete unhappiness, the death of hope.  This crucial formulation marked a tremendous change in the direction of his analysis. Unlike the other socialist I mentioned above, this individual began to question the dominance and tyranny of his ALL with surprising consequences.

Briefly I have considered two alternatives to a dearly held social and political All. One took the way of sticking to the All of his desire. The other began to reformulate a central dilemma resulting from the tyranny of his All. 

In both instances the All abhorred castration.

footnote: lacunae

I use this word to designate several gaps, hollows, emptinesses or surds. Regrettably a lacanian gap (hole or whatever) is in danger of becoming a massive singularity.....a sort of "empty" All. It is quite easy to slip from believing there is one All, albeit empty, to believing there is One answer to plug that gap

 Maybe an individual has a plurality of splits, lacks, and inaccessibles. Why should a he, she, it, or they have just one?? 

Castellamare di Stabia November 6 2024

Are we are all delusional now?

Laughing Fool circa 1500, possibly by Jacob Cornelis van Oostsanen Wikipedia & Public Domain

A psychoanalytic movement recently offered an intriguing seminar interrogating whether "we are all delusional here?"

The colloquium was indebted to Lacan's musings about James Joyce, who may, or may not have avoided some devastating psychosis by novel-writing  and word playing. Nevertheless asking whether "we" are all mad "here" predated both James Joyce and Jacques Lacan.

But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Occupants of Wonderland are by definition "mad"; but each in their own way. The Hatter is mad, though in a different way from the Red Queen.

Whereas the English language attempts some differentiation between illusion and delusion; continental French prefers the word Illusion which embraces both concepts and all degrees of the same. So one can reform Lacan's question to read whether all human subjects are immersed in some illusionary version of reality. If one wanted to talk about the delusions encountered in psychiatry, the choice words would derive from a variety of word. One of the greatest French diagnoses of the early twentieth century was "la folie des grandeurs"  or in English "delusion of grandeur"

Interrogating psychosis is a cultural undertaking of venerable age. How and why do  people with seemingly psychotic symptoms abruptly cease they display? One possibility highlighted by some, is that a more stable existence might be acquired by pursuing a hobby -like writing or art. Such a hobby is not simply a conduit for excessive thoughts, feelings, or energies. Nor is it simply a new dawn of creativity. Rather deep commitment to a creative hobby helps individuals to stabilise themselves socially, psychologically, and culturally. 

Unfortunately there have been people living within the structures or styles called psychosis who had hobbies, professions, meditations, and pursue keenly cultural endeavours; but nevertheless fail to stabilise. On might recall Lucinda Joyce. The promising avant garde artiste who was a promising, creative dancer, failed to make a career even with help from C G Jung and a succession of psychiatric experts. The Irish choreographer and historian of dance, Deirdre Mulrooney, wrote

Lucia Joyce dancing at Bullier Bal, Paris. May 1928. Photograph by Bernice Abbot (public domain)

 Not unlike Mary Wigman, founder of German Ausdruckstanz/Dance of Expression, after a few broken engagements, Lucia suffered a nervous breakdown. While Wigman survived her breakdown to become one of the most important modern dance practitioners of the 20th century, Lucia was incarcerated by her brother, and ended up trapped in mental asylums for most of her life, with many equivocal diagnoses, variously put in straitjackets, and once even injected with bovine serum. (Giorgio Joyce, quite a tragic figure himself, would also commit his ‘marvellously wealthy’ older wife Helen Fleischmann to a mental institution). Alas, Lucia’s father, her greatest champion and supporter, died when she was just 34. After his death, Nora never visited Lucia again. Giorgio only visited her once, in 1967. Go figure! Lucia outlived them both, until 1982, in Saint Andrew’s Mental Asylum in Northampton.

See: Reclaiming Lucia Joyce's legacy - The Lyric Feature 

https://www.rte.ie/culture/2019/0711/1061493-reclaiming-lucia-joyce-the-lyric-feature/

The distinction -whether structural or no- between florid psychosis and ordinary living enjoys an extensive practical history.

 In the history of European medicine, the greatest theorist of "melancholy" was the scholarly academic Richard Burton. He offered several typologies for melancholia: love depression is one, whilst religious mania was another. Russia, for instance, enjoys a proud history of holy fools One called Basil was

Naked, dirty & forever mumbling their prayers, they could proffer raw meat to a tsar, call him a bloodsucker and yet still be invited to a royal feast afterwards. Their “supernatural” powers inspired awe in nobles and peasants alike.https://www.rbth.com/history/331573-why-did-russian-tsars-love

holy icons of st basil: fool of christ

Another question begging answers is the location and identity of the "we" in this quote. Most concepts relating to identity or location are slippy.  A valued colleague suggested to me how an innocuous everyday "we" can easily become a big or royal WE. Any therapeutic practitioner talking about a "we" - is referring to a bigger Other. This "we" thus resembles claims made by religious, political, and other social groupings when isolating a sanctioned authority along with an excluded minority.  resembling somewhat  the "cart and carriage" or "love and marriage. The we lends me an identity which nobody can tarnish, because the "we" of the Others is inviolable, absolute, and indubitable. Theories of religion refer to this epistemic style as "fideism". It is a near absolute  claim, encapsulating the All and the Others in a god, political belief, praxis, or imaginary group structure. 

Testifying about one's psychoanalytic experience obviously concerns chiefly my own experience, social being, history, including even my amazing professionality. But how can others be expected to ratify it?There is a circularity here when traversing from I to the We, thence to the Others and back again to myself. It resembles a solipsist wondering why there aren't more people that agree with her. Maybe it is easier to shut the discussion down because some allegedly foundational concept is being attacked. Fideism is a conundrum that creates and destroys its own truth and testimonies.

Everything I claim to be the case is- eo ipso- related to everything else. Hence my subjectivity is valid for all.... just as all Lacan's concepts are related internally as well as chronologically

Criticising Lacan or Freud is supposed to be both futile and contradictory. One is better to subjectivise their teachings. Interrogating writings from some futile "external" viewpoint means one is metamorphosed into an academic, philosopher, master, or super therapist. This position is reified. I cease being a Subject Viator -always in transit. Now I have arrived at my destination and destiny. Nevertheless it is sometimes imperative to interrogate. For example many speakers at the conference mentioned above thematised the concept of delusion. They teased out differences between psychosis or the "psychotic" by exploring regional ontologies for delusion.  Hence one might be exceedingly delusional, without necessarily adopting a full-blown psychotic style.

During the first fifty years of the twentieth century it seems to me that most behaviours, specialisms, and institutions  devoted to "the psychotic" were obscured, if not downright hidden from public interrogation in western civilisations. As the century proceeded psychological, analytic, and psychiatric words became more widely known and used, whilst pseudo-illnesses (such moral insanity, homosexuality, along with  supposed perversion, degeneration or stigmatised minorities).   

Eventually concepts of mental illness became banal during the following century. From the nineteen sixties onwards "mental health"  came to refer to an increasing public awareness of a previously hidden sector of society. I remember well when I began to work in the domestic department of one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in Europe as a stores labourer. The director of the hospital said to me at interview "I have some massive wards here that will terrify you". He predicted correctly; because he was referring to vast "psycho-geriatric wards" that shocked a boy of seventeen. They reminded me of the black and white
holocaust documentaries produced after the defeat of Germany and her allies that accompanied most of my childhood. 

A young boy walking along a roadside strewn with corpses in Dachau. Copyright Getty & also public domain

As novelist Beryl Bainbridge testified, the war was indeed over but the nightmares were just beginning.

WE WERE never taught about the war at school. Because my father's business friends in Liverpool were mostly Jewish, I actually believed that the war was being fought to save the Jews. I couldn't have been more wrong.

When the war was over we went to the Philharmonic in Liverpool. We got out of the train at Exchange station, then walked in a crocodile to the Philharmonic Hall in Hope Street and saw the films the troops had taken when they entered Belsen.

It was the most extraordinary, numbing experience - those little mummified skeletons which were just being pushed up by a machine, to be carted into pits ... I had nightmares for a long time afterwards. Independent  Monday 08 June 1998

Whilst many of my colleagues rightly explore the meaning and structures of delusions, my purposes here are more modest. I am interrogating the "we" and the "here" associated with the quotation about delusion.

The "here and now" of delusions that followed public images after the "Shoah" which incinerated innumerable Jews, communists, gypsies, and gays, has poignant currency still. Were Europeans delusional or even mad to inflict such destructiveness on themselves and their Others -even after the previous destructions of 1918!! The "now" can contract and expand its magnitude as required by its users. But I doubt it is a definable temporal concept because of its slippage and diverse composition of ideal, real, and fantasy formations.

Hence the "We" contracts and expands. During Bainbridge's paragraphs the "we" is a family, one's school pals, an educational establishment, a religious/ethnic minority,  and business associates. But it expands in time, in space.

 icon of basil