JA MILLER - The lesson of psychosis introduce him with a question: whether Lacan offers us mad as a free man, it's just a hell of humor, cruel and inhumane? Who is in fact less free of unsound mind? Who, when not parked at the side of social life, is allowed to circulate only equipped with a vest of chemical force. Defined as free does not mean mock? Is this a joke offensive, which can occur only to someone who has broken all bonds of human brotherhood?
I think not. And if you listen to this saying that the mad man is free, for what it is, namely, the axiom that the experience of psychoanalytic psychosis, the latter will be closed forever. We not to think that our structuralism has deteriorated into a backwash of mechanisms, not least the mechanism of the unconscious, to make us deaf to the essentials of today say that the madman is the man free? We might have said everything about the causality of psychosis when put into operation, as so many mechanisms, formulas that Lacan has given us? I refer to formulas such as the failure of the paternal metaphor, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, and others that we have taken from the texts. Lacan himself did not think so, since even in 1967, ie ten years after the "preliminary issue" (S), says: "The madman is the man free."
If we quote so often Lacan's sentences, is not to mask or commemorate the surprise that they arouse in us? It is a surprise when you are not yet gone under our pavement, that perhaps there is a chance to learn something. (Published in "The Psychoanalysis No. 4, Astrolabe, Rome, 1988)
