Phallic Convection and the Psychotic as Unsexed
For Lacan, the psychotic suffers as he does because, although the signifier performs all of its absolute operations (metaphor, metonymy, message, code, deferred action, etc.), it does not perform its major contingent operation. As a result the psychotic has not arrived at true intersubjectivity. The psychotic doesn’t know that the other’s desire is caused by a lack. The contingent operation that the signifier fails to perform, producing psychosis, can be considered under three aspects: the paternal metaphor, the repression of the maternal phallus, and the choice between being and having (the ratio between demand and desire) in relation to the veiled phallus. The result of this threefold operation, if it is successful, is the production of a sexed being. Only this sexed being can then offer his desire to be alienated in and by the community as energy for social and economic production. Because the failure of this operation is the fundamental feature that defines the psychotic, we can see that psychosis is, precisely, and nothing beyond, being unsexed. It follows that sex, for its part, is what protects the neurotic from the thing-in-itself, enmeshing him, most of the time, in the safety of the veil of maya.
For the neurotic, the sliding of the signifying chain takes place as the unconscious across the field of social and economic exchange. For the psychotic, the same sliding takes place, but in the field of phenomenal awareness–it is a sliding-in-itself–hallucinatory sliding from one perceptual object to another along laws of association, persecutory thrills and horror, delusory astonishment, mystery and truth, the ineffable, the inane. He is confronted with the real of the signifier itself, and it is in this sense that we can say the psychotic has no unconscious. The neurotic endures a split between his reality and the unconscious metonymy of his desire; for the psychotic there is no such division. For the psychotic the phenomenon is the noumenon. Somehow for the neurotic the phenomenal sliding is blocked. Can we say more–beyond invoking the paternal metaphor–to explain how this blockage happens?
We can begin by describing the social grid. The neurotic subject is problematically situated, along with the terms shaping his hopes, dreams, and fears, in a social grid. The signifiers that appear for him refer to other signifiers that are communally recognized. He feels the need to represent himself as something he is not in order to dupe the Other–though he can never be sure he has succeeded–so as to desire and cause desire. He commits himself and those around him by means of speech. The signifiers in their interconnection block one another like a system of checks and balances, by referring to one another in a system of reference. The limit of any isolated signifier is an abstract, wrenching, all-meaningful inanity. Any signifying wave will crash onto the rock of the real unless it is can pass its signifying baton on to another signifier–which is what the communal signifiers do. They contain and check one another; they refer to one another. In this way the ultimate meaning can be deferred indefinitely. Only now and then does any signifying wave manage to break. The limits of meaning–the ineffable and the refrain–are marked off, quarantined for exceptional crises, revelations about death and so on.
But how does a subject of language enter into this symbolic grid and become neurotic? The crucial term–the eye of the social storm–is the phallus. The name-of-the-father pushes the phallus under the bar. There are three moments of this passage, each of which relies absolutely on the success of the other two. Lacan especially emphasizes the paternal metaphor–by accepting paternal attribution, the subject constitutes himself as desiring in or against the name-of-the father–but there are complementary operations too. He also says that the paternal metaphor necessarily implies the renunciation of the maternal phallus.
What Lacan does not emphasize as much in his writings on psychosis–but which is no less important–is that in accepting the paternal metaphor and renouncing the maternal phallus, the subject must, and now can, adopt one of two positions in relation to the veiled phallus, which has gone under the bar. He must either predominately wish to be the phallus (the demand for love) or to have the phallus (desire). The ratio of demand to desire determines whether the subject is male or female. For the female, demand is stronger than desire and for the male desire is stronger than demand. Lacan articulates the nonrelation between the sexes in many different ways over the course of his teaching, but he never abandons this fundamental opposition which is articulated in “The Signification of the Phallus.”
If the paternal metaphor fails for the psychotic, the maternal phallus is not renounced. There is therefore no veiled phallus to act as the eye of the socio-neurotic storm, as the term to which all other significations ultimately and indefinitely refer.
It follows that a neurotic must be sexed, and a psychotic cannot be–the psychotic has no sex. Only sexed beings can participate in the social bond. At the metapsychological level Lacan is thinking in terms of structural anthropology: the women are the gifts that the men circulate so as to establish and renew kinship ties. The woman wants to be the perfect gift; the man wants to have the most and the best gifts. All neurotic symptoms and all hopes and dreams are in one way or another metaphorical substitutions or metonymical displacements, compromises, etc., for the impossible status of either being or having the perfect gift. Thus arises the flurry of exchange, ambition, communication, romance, war, and economic crisis that make up the cul-de-sac of neurotic desire.
We can thus imagine a phallic convection, a tornado of signification whirling around the phallus which, by means of its momentum across the intersubjective field, blocks those delusory and persecutory slidings that would be possible on still waters whose smooth surface could reflect the noumenal moon.