Diagnosis in Lacan (4 of 6): Diagnosis through the Other

We discuss Lacan’s idea that the big Other is excluded in psychosis. One implication of this is that, borrowing again from Dany Nobus, psychotic speech has lost the dimension of the unknown. So, whereas neurotic subjects exhibit ambiguities in their speech and say more than they mean, these features are largely absent in a psychotic orientation to the world which is characterized, typically, by certainty. We discuss the idea of the Other as the ’subject supposed to know’, and consider how this idea lends itself to clinical work. How though should the psychoanalyst locate themselves in the clinical psychoanalytic interactions with psychotic people? Link to board: