The Subject, the Madman and the Psychiatrist. —Commentary on Lacan's "Petit discours aux psychiatres": 1967-11-10

Psychiatry weaves the field of its practice around the madman and with its instruments (cold showers, the rotary chair...). We pretend to ignore this violence—primary in relation to said centering—that by wanting to "place him at the center," the psychiatrist adjusts, levels, flattens this field that madness destabilizes, at the very moment it fails to conjure its appearance: we never speak of the "madman" without making him a noun, without producing him in his place and, crowning it all, as a subject, which is not the same thing as reducing him to the status of an object—we are seasoned enough in all kinds of sciences, but not so naive as to weep in the name of some humanism over the objectification of the one we call the madman. Yet, attempting the double blow of cornering him, making him one's object, and supposing him to be a subject identical to the psychiatrist's ego, makes a petition for "comprehension" in this context laughable, and we can easily follow Lacan all the way; compression would be more accurate: no recentering without pushing from all sides (madness has the quality of a circle as medicine has that of a frame, and everyone knows that the square is geometry at its lowest degree, the figure most likely to explode).

If we never speak without losing control over what we say, due to the double reason of accidents that can interfere—on the side of slips of the tongue, stutters, in the gaps of this roll of letters and secretions that is the signifying chain—and as long as our speech is addressed to another in whom all intention will break (no one knows what they are saying), Lacan rightly scoffs at demands for understanding and worse still at the anxiety of health professionals who place their little "hopes" in the psychoanalyst. Now, that there is a psychiatrist does not mean that there is a madman! What a melodrama: "Save us! Say that there really is an art to making madness intelligible! Repatriate it into the categories of our ancient nosology, the emblem and coat of arms of a discipline that in the golden age of Esquirol freed the mad!"