Notes: “Everyone is Mad”
The orientation for the congresses of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, during the year 2024, came under the title “Everyone is Mad.” This is a phrase that Jacques-Alain Miller extracted from Lacan, but one which, through Miller’s work, achieved, within some circles, the status of an aphorism. Miller wrote:
Everyone is Mad, Lacan formulated it once and only once, in a text published in the then confidential journal Ornicar? Because I pointed it out, commented on it, repeated it, this aphorism entered our common language, that of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, and into what we could call our doxa. It has even become a kind of slogan.
For this reason, no doubt, Miller opted to return to the expression, in order to develop it beyond its aphoristic reduction.
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Miller began with Lacan’s claim, which seems to echo Freud, that psychoanalysis cannot be taught. Like any statement within the Lacanian orientation, it would have to be qualified and set in the context of the paradigm of the time. What Miller says is that analytic discourse supposes a knowledge about the practice of psychoanalysis, while the university discourse exposes a knowledge. It is a distinction, then, of supposition and exposition. On the one hand, exposition highlights a voyeuristic or exhibitionist quality to knowledge, one that is transmitted according to a system of delusion: the master signifier and the secondary signifiers form a couple, not based on fantasy, necessarily, but based on their proximity, S1 →S2. On the other hand, supposition highlights a knowledge that is in the place of truth, one that can only be supposed from the get-go.
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Next, Miller describes the completed seminars of Lacan, from “Freud’s papers on technique” to the “moment to conclude,” as a teaching. In fact, Lacan said this of his own efforts: he offered a teaching, one that was based on the experience of psychoanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious. Yet, Miller adds that Lacan used this word, teaching, only “before he pushed it away.” Hence, we have, after the teaching was concluded, a movement away from describing his approach as a teaching. It is a hyper-critique of teaching.
Within which overarching context did it enter the doxa of the psychoanalytic milieu? Miller claims that it “catered to contemporary prejudices,” that is, what Peggy Papada describes as the “culture of complaint.” I quote Peggy:
Those of us who work in public institutions know something of the culture of complaint. Patients are above all customers who are entitled by law to have access to their clinical records and every right to complain about what they perceive to be mistreatment or shortchange. […] [This is] based on ideas of universal equality, fairness, and care. […] [It] leaves no room for metaphor or misunderstanding. Sensitivity leaders have gained momentum, a future profession according to Miller. […] A universal sensitivity to language is now prevalent in Western societies.
In other words, the idea that everyone is mad introduced a sort of “democratic” principle into the clinical discourse surrounding pathologies. In a way, it was an effort toward the depathologization of delusion which overturned the presupposition that the practitioner is the yardstick of normality while the patient is the one suffering from possible pathologies or delusions. At the same time, what we know is that the contemporary period is one of depathologization, particularly within Western societies, where the patient is whatever he or she says about him or herself. In such a context, the psychoanalyst, by merely repeating and invoking the aphorism “everyone is mad” contributes to the dominant discourse: ‘yes, we are all mad,’ by which I mean, ‘we are all normal.’
This is one of the principles of the new social bond, the one that Lacan described in his seminar “…Or Worse,” that of the fraternity. The fraternity is a social bond organized not around the name of the father but around the segregative principle from the world and the “wow” of the comrades, siblings, or peers. Miller wrote: “I say this without nostalgia, insofar as Lacan had anticipated the contemporary ideology of the universal equality among speaking beings by emphasizing the fraternity which, according to him, should exist between the therapist and his patient.” He quoted Lacan: “[t]he ‘emancipated’ man of modern society […] we will take him and clear anew the path to his meaning in a discreet fraternity […] to which we never measure up.”
I take this to imply that the fraternity is governed by a particular principle of meaning, one which is grounded on a knowledge that is perhaps akin to the university: S1 →S2, a sort of madness of meaning that we can call delusion.
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The problem therefore has to do with the discourse of equality. In the last few decades this discourse has even been dignified by philosophy, which has called for flat or horizontalist ontologies, and so on. Yet, the threat is, precisely, to the clinic. Hence, Miller wrote: “it should not come as a surprise that this demand for equality results in the programmed disappearance of the clinic.” It is the era of depathologization since it is not that ‘everyone is mad,’ and hence everyone gets their own singular entry within the manuals of clinical diagnosis, but rather that the entries are being removed, one at a time.
How does this logic operate? I will provide an anecdote. When my son was a few years old he began to show signs of stereotypies. I began researching the condition and discovered that one of the pioneering research centres for this condition was at the Johns Hopkins University. They named it Complex Primary Motor Stereotypies, or CPMS. I began to research further and discovered that the internet was filled with spokespersons for the condition, and large groups of families, mostly mothers, who study it and advocate to have it depathologized. I once asked why the group was almost exclusive composed of mothers, and why there did not seem to be many fathers in the group. This query provoked a sensitivity. Those within the groups defended CPMS as a ‘superpower,’ and reacted very strongly to new members who asked: ‘how can it be cured?’ The idea of curing the condition seemed to strike a chord. If a father would enter the group and, after asking how it might be cured, respond: “yes, but people are making fun of my child!” The group would call for more advocacy against bullying, and so on.
The point is the following one: depathologization occurs alongside the formation of groups according to principles of fraternity. I quote Miller:
All clinical types are being progressively removed from the great clinical catalogue, already debunked, and deconstructed by successive editions of the DSM. And this, at a time when all individuals affected by a mental disorder, a handicap, or something that was once deemed to be an abnormality, are coming together to form groups. These legally established and registered groups are often constituted as pressure groups — right down to autistic people, voice-hearers, etc.
This is the challenge to the clinic and to psychoanalytic experience by the fraternity. The difficulty is that the psychoanalytic clinic has contributed to this mess and has even found itself quite empathetic to it. The experience of pathologies, which is not often considered a trademark of the menacing psy- professions, has given way to the depathologization and upsurge of lifestyle communities, that is, communities of enjoyment whose legal right is to not have their satisfactions taken away from them. Enjoyment has become affirmed rather than denied, even, as it were, the enjoyment of suffering.
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Miller advances a case for “how the clinic could be saved” in spite of depathologization. He points toward a dialectic from Monsignor Dupanloup, from the Catholic church, who rose up against the church’s advancement of liberalism and modern civilization under Pope Pius IX. Two levels are offered:
- The principle is affirmed, in the absolute;
- The hypothesis, where the relative triumphs.
These two levels would seem contradictory. On the one hand, there is an absolute affirmation of a principle of liberal progress and modern civilization. On the other hand, there is a hypothesis, submerged beneath it, where the relative position triumphs, as in, that is just your truth, but not mine. Yet, one must affirm this hierarchy for the contradiction to be resolved. Miller says: “the absolute and the relative, far from contradicting each other, can co-exist as good neighbours, provided that a hierarchy is established between the two terms.”
Miller advances the following:
- Absolute level: depathologization and post-clinical egalitarianism;
- Relative level: clinic is subordinate to this level, and relatives it (e.g., ‘yes, I agree, at the absolute level, but at the clinical level this is madness’).
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Lacan, after stating “everyone is mad, that is, delusional,” offers another sentence: “this is indeed what is demonstrated in the first step towards teaching.” Hence, we can say that the first statement is a universal or absolute one: everyone is mad. Yet, the second one relativizes it, since it indicates that this is what is being learned in the clinic. For Lacan, teaching is a type of madness, a delusional practice, at least in its university variety. Miller decides to phrase it another way: “you have to be mad to teach, whoever teaches is delusional.”
Yet, Miller reminds us that all of this was put forward within the context of a defense of a Department of Psychoanalysis, and not long after the advancement of his School after its prior dissolution. He goes further: “the analytic discourse cannot be taught.” At this point, one wonders what the point was, then, of reestablishing his School on the basis of a teaching arrived at through the cartel and the clinic. It is a question, at this point, not simply of re-establishing the foundations of teaching within the cutting edge of psychoanalytic experience, but of going even further and claiming that teaching, as such, is not possible for psychoanalysis.
The analytic discourse, Lacan maintained, “teaches nothing” for no other reason than because of its exclusion of domination. By excluding domination, it avoids, therefore, the agent of the master’s discourse, and the truth of the university: S1. S1, which pushes toward S2, is the coupling required for delusion. The analyst discourse places S1 in the place of product, but not as an agent, other, or truth. Hence, through the analyst’s interventions, the analysand ‘coughs up’ an S1. Miller says: “the university discourse is, par excellence, the discourse of teaching.”
There is no teaching from the analyst discourse, there is only the support of a supposition within which one finds desire: “this place is occupied by an element that is not intended to dominate, command or subdue, but rather to cause desire. […] knowledge […] is in the position of being only ever supposed — and not explicit — unlike in academic discourse.” Finally, it does not allow itself to be a discourse ‘for all,’ as in the other discourses. Lacan said “there is nothing universal about it.” As such, it is aimed at the One rather than the All, a place of jouissance that is singular beyond the not-all of the world. It is a knowledge that “vanishes as soon as you claim to universalize it, claiming that it is valid for all.” Miller makes a point here that I find easily confirmed from my own experience: “try to explain the sensational effect of an interpretation to a large audience and it will only serve to highlight its banal or debatable character.”
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Lacan raised the question: “how does one go about teaching what cannot be taught?” It seems to be a question of how to make possible something that is impossible, but, actually, it is a question of the impossible and the necessary. Miller says: “though impossible to teach, it is nevertheless necessary.” There is teaching which can occur on the side of the impossible, as singular, as what cannot be generalized or made “for all,” a teaching on the side of the One, which is singular and subject to jouissance. There is also teaching which can occur as necessary on the side of the all, a teaching which must be brought into discourse. Miller highlighs the passage of the one to the other, which is “far from straightforward.”
Except that it is not a passage to the All. It is about “paying with one’s person,” which means that one brings something of oneself into the teaching. For example, Freud had recourse to his own dreams, his own experience, and so on. This is true also of Lacan. And we can say, I think, that it is true also for Miller who never shies away from what might appear to some as juicy gossip.
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Lacan began pointing toward the “homogeneity of the imaginary and the real.” For example, in seminar 23, he states that the imaginary continues the real. This imaginary-real is no doubt apparent also in delusion, and, moreover, discourse. Hence, discourse, which demonstrates a real that is also imaginary, is no doubt a defense against the real but also its very continuation. That makes discourse into sinthome. It is on this basis that Lacan could say “everything is but a dream,” which makes dream and delusion roughly equivalent. This makes sense since, while dreaming, we believe the dream to the utmost and we seldom ask to be released from the dreamworld.
It is the supremacy of the imaginary as a real. Yet, things become a bit tricky here, because if the imaginary-real is a real that continues, then it also implies that the real, as such, may very well be missing. This is perhaps what led Lacan to claim that Freud’s entire psychical device can do without the real. Even the navel of the dream, we might say, is a product of the dream designed to push the dreamer into a still purer dream. As Khalil Gibran once put it: ‘you come to be in my dream, and now you come to me in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.’ One wakes up, therefore, only to continue dreaming. Hence, one never really wakes up from the dream.
In any case, Miller summarizes this idea in the following way: “Freud’s theoretical conception does not presuppose the real.” I add a wonderful line from Miller: “What it is a question of obtaining via the pleasure principle, then via the reality principle, is always the Lustgewinn […] which we will translate with Lacan’s term: surplus enjoyment. And this proves to be, to use Lacan’s words this time, impossible to be negativized by the reality principle.” In it for this reason that we discover what I’ve been calling, for many years now, the prevalence of faux-negs, false negatives, which do not at all wake the dreamer up from the illusions that animate his perspectives on the world: “the dreamer is indestructible, [and] waking up is but an illusion. To wake up is to continue to dream with one’s eyes open.”
