The psychotic child and the social bond at the Lacan clinic

Abstract

I depart from a central thesis of Lacan, updated in 2015 by Soler in the following terms: “the most radical, generic foreclosure caused by language is that of sex ratio [rapport]”. I proposed to make this thesis a clinical tool, a guide for our work as analysts who do not retreat in the face of children. This is a new use of the term “foreclosure” that we usually find in Lacanian teaching always linked to the logic of psychosis, whether in the operation of “foreclosure of the signifier Name-of-the-Father” — described by Lacan in the years 1950 — or, later, in the 1970s, in his seminar on Joyce, in the form of “de facto foreclosure”. But, in this case, Soler proposes foreclosure as a radical and generic operation, that is, a fundamental operation, that affects the human race. And what is the cause of this radical and generic foreclosure? The language. This language, which Lacan considered a condition of the unconscious, excludes the sex ratio.