[Clinical question for psychosis.]

The analysis treatment of a psychotic individual presupposes a global problem focus on the causes of psychosis, its structure, its outbreak, and the stages in its development. Here, psychosis is viewed in its specifically psychic dimension, where Lacanian theory, to which the author adheres, places the cause of the sickness: (the "forclusion" of the names of the father). This formula indicates the absence of the paternal function. This lack originates in the fact that a dysfunction of the symbolic order in the family structure presides over the birth of a subject. The locating of the elements (the signifiers) of such symbolic dysfunction is essential because the delusion attempts to repair this defect in the representational order. Against this defect the subject first constructed imaginary assemblings which allow him a provisional articulation, satisfying for him, to others and to social reality. The outbreak of the psychosis results in the collapse of such imaginary scaffoldings. Then after a period of bewilderment and psychic retreat, all the effort of the psychotic is directed at the reconstitution of a new representational order. The work of the analysis consistants of attempting, on the basis of the signifiers put forward by the delusion, to assist the psychotic in his reconstitution of symbolic order. The delusion is the access road to this work in psychosis just as the dream is the royal road to the unconscious in the neurosis. The effort of this article is directed at situating these stages in the treatment of psychosis in their theorical and clinical foundations.