The Highway and the Heretical Road
We know what determines the possibility of understanding within a community: it is the meaning determined by the Name of the Father. This also establishes a canon, a kind of orthodoxy. Today we notice a disorientation relative to jouissance, a precariousness that, according to Lacan, is situated only from surplus jouissance. This, if we think of the surplus value from which Lacan takes the conceptual cast, is the effect of dispossession (spoliation). That precariousness is situated only through surplus jouissance means that it is not realised through the ideal. That is, it is not realised from a strong projection coming from the Name-of-the-Father.
In this, we can see in a certain sense the widespread heresy, we can say, of modernity, the “normal” delusion, the deviation from the canon, from the sense given by the father. For what is orientation if not making sense? In Lacan’s last teaching, however, as Miller points out, making sense is always a delusion. Is heresy a delusion? Every symbolic construction that produces meaning generates, in fact, a delusion. This is why in the clinic we should not care to understand. In the seminar on psychosis, as we know, Lacan turns against the term understanding. To understand meaning is to participate in the delusion of the one who is speaking to us, whereas the clinical task is to grasp the patient’s particular way of making sense of things and always coming back to it in the mode of repetition. It is, in a way, to give space to the patient’s heresy.
If from the hypothesis of a strong Name-of-the-Father descends the determination of a common sense that makes everyone march at the same pace, in the clinic we are more interested in the nuances, the differences, what breaks away from the common sense, what particularises the patient’s saying. Let’s consider the dazzling example Lacan presents in the last lectures of the seminar on psychosis, that of the highway (strada maestra).
The highway is the one around whose nodes agglomerations and habits are created, in which cities gradually arise. With this example we are at a stage where Lacan has produced the concept of foreclosure, but he does not yet know how to recognise what is foreclosed, and the example of the highway opens up the horizon for him because precisely, just as in the stages of the highway urban agglomerations are created, so there is a signifier around which aggregations of meaning are produced, and this signifier is the Name-of-the-Father.
The highway is the Name-of-the-Father, and when it is not there, one seeks secondary ways, one walks along the paths, one takes side roads, heretical we might say. This is precisely what happens in psychosis, where the elementary phenomena, the hallucinatory phenomena, the voices, are the side roads that the psychotic is forced to embark on precisely in the absence of the highway, that is, of the Name-of-the-Father.
In a sense, the landscape of modernity, marked by the decline of the Name-of-the-Father, presents a landscape made up of paths, alleys, lanes where everyone must find his or her own way. This is why ordinary psychosis particularly stands out as a phenomenon of modernity, and in our clinic, we have seen it grow strikingly.