The Ironic Clinic
By: Duane Rousselle
Tags: Irony, Jacques Alain Miller, New York City, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Jacques-Alain Miller’s lecture on the ironic clinic predates Alenka Zupancic’s work on Irony and Comedy and its political dimension by over three decades. This seems important, and by stating that I do not intend, in any way, to diminish the profound importance of Zupancic’s work. In fact, I believe that her lecture is a very important one, to be listened to alongside the work of Mladen Dolar on gossip.

Miller opens his lecture by presenting us with his solitary challenge: “I have set myself the problem […] of establishing a differential clinic of psychosis.” Indeed, we can now witness how this important project has unfolded over the decades into a renewed discussion of the ‘lawless real,’ and of the clinical category of ‘ordinary psychosis.’ In any case, the differential clinic of psychosis seems to be situated within, though somehow distinguished from, “a universal clinic of delirium.” I gather from this that the term “delirium” is meant as a corrective to clinical positions which posit a ‘normal subject’ against the backdrop of madness. Rather, the position seems to be that we are all mad and that it is from within this generalized perspective on madness, that is, on delirium, that we might discuss schizophrenia.

So, there is a very clear bifurcation, but not in the simple sense of dichotomy of binary structure. First, all positions are positions of delirium, and yet within that position there is a second exception: schizophrenia. Within the universal clinic of delirium, then, we can state that “all discourses are […] defenses against the real,” and it is on the basis of this defense against the real that we can speak of delirium or maladaptation, or madness. This is a clinic in which the real “cannot cease not writing itself.” Except that there is, nonetheless, within this universal clinic of delirium, an exception found in the schizophrenic for whom discourse itself is lacking and there is a cessation of ‘not writing itself.’ In other words, the schizophrenic does not defend against the real but is rather caught up in it. This is why I always claim that the schizophrenic is not divorced from reality but rather has too much of it (a claim that got me in some hot water recently in my discussion with a fashionable New York City relational psychoanalyst). Finally, since discourse is what constitutes a social link, the schizophrenic is without being implicated in a social link.

The symbolic is real for the schizophrenic. I take this from Lacan’s essay on “A Question Prior to Any Preliminary Treatment of Psychosis” wherein, if I remember correctly, Lacan writes, and I paraphrase, that when the symbolic is foreclosed — as it is by the psychotic, whereby the schizophrenic would be a type of psychotic — it returns within the real. Thus, the symbolic emerges within the real.

Although the schizophrenic might make us laugh, he is ultimately without humor. Miller makes a further distinction — and I’m not sure how long we can sustain this one — between irony and humor. Humor seems to be on the side of neurosis and the universal clinic of delirium, while irony seems to be on the side of the schizophrenic. In other words, the neurotic has humor — can make jokes, and so on. Why? Because the neurotic, perhaps through humor, finds himself inscribed within the field of the Other, of language, of the name-of-the-father. Humor resonates because it has touched this field of the Other. But irony does not come from the Other. It is on the side of a subject out of touch, completely, with the Other. The psychotic is therefore not the one for whom there is a disconnection from reality but rather a disconnection from the symbolic and the name of the father, that is, the Other. The subject, through the real, makes a “weapon against the Other” and the social link by saying “that the Other does not exist, that the social link in its very foundation is a fraud, that there is no discourse which is not a false pretense, a semblance.”

This raises a clinical question concerning the function of irony within the clinic. In the same way irony is suitable, according to Miller, for the psychoanalyst as well as the revolutionary (and what about the lover?) because it maintains that the social link, at its most radical, is a fraud. It is for this reason that we can claim that psychoanalysis is radical. Irony exists there within an analysis when there is no longer any subject supposed to know, when the Other does not know. Humor, on the other hand, begins with a subject supposed to know. Irony begins when that subject supposed to know has fallen. This implies that there is irony in the psychoanalytic fall of the Other, in the revolutionary fall of the Other, but also in the psychotics — schizophrenic’s — foreclosure of the Other.

Miller presents us with a choice: either the psychoanalytic clinic will be ironic, and, therefore, based upon the non-existence of the Other, or else it will be psychiatry and seek only the ‘common relationship to language’ (as my New York colleague did in the statement above) by therefore making “fun of the crazy person, this poor madman who is outside the common relationship to language.” Miller continued, “but the one who makes fun of the psychotic’s means merely remains stuck within a construction of his [or her] own clinic, based on already established discourses.” This is why, in my estimation, it is important to discover as one of the goals of analysis not simply therapeutic effects, not simply ‘understanding,’ but, as Bruce Fink once put it in his books Against Understanding, something of a ‘change.’ And this change of priority — from one of interpretation (and seeking an intersubjective relational communal space) is essential.

How has Lacanian psychoanalysis responded? The psychotic, or schizophrenic, by being internally excluded from the universal clinic of delirium, helps us understand that the symbolic is only a semblance for other subjects. The Lacanian accepts this position from the psychotic: “the rotation of the four discourses that Lacan distinguished and formalized [master, hysteric, university, and analyst] is, indeed, made to show that there is no discourse which is not a semblance.” In this way, we generalize madness, we construct a universal clinic of delirium, because everyone is crazy.