Il dibattito intorno alla schizofrenia. Una lettura a partire da Freud e da Lacan

Freud was one of the key figures in the debate that led to the emergence of the concept of schizophrenia, a term introduced by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911. After his break with Jung and Bleuler’s distancing from the psychoanalytic movement, Freud continued to develop his ideas—most notably documented in the Schreber Case—and a few years later, he began to approach schizophrenia through its articulations between body and language.

In his “return to Freud,” Lacan focused more on paranoia than on schizophrenia; however, at a later stage, he took the opposite path, reconsidering psychosis from its schizophrenic side.

In relation to the subjective positions defined as various modes of defense against what Freud called a “primary experience of satisfaction”—and which Lacan would later name the real of jouissance—schizophrenia can be seen as a paradigmatic form of psychosis, as it lays bare, without veils or defenses, the impact of that jouissance: a prerogative and drama of the body caught in the element of language.