“Ordinary psychosis doesn’t have a rigid definition. Everyone is welcome to give his feeling and definition on ordinary psychosis. I didn’t invent a concept with ordinary psychosis. I invented a word, I invented an expression, I invented a signifier and I gave a very sketchy definition, just to attract the various meanings, the various shades of meaning, around the signifier. I didn’t give any know-how as to how to use this signifier. I bet that this signifier could elicit various echoes in the clinician, in the professional, and I wanted it to grow, and see how far this evasive expression would go.

I was inspired by what Lacan said with ‘The Pass’. Lacan gave only a sketchy definition of The Pass and opened it up to experiment so as to see, once this moment had been defined so sketchily, what would appear, what people would contribute. I wanted to do something like that with ordinary psychosis. And I believe it has been a powerful attractor of meaning.”

Jacques-Alain Miller – “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, No. 26, Psychosis Today, 2013.

This is no ordinary volume. This is not a dictionary on ordinary or extraordinary psychoses. This is not a manual on transference. This is a collection of formulations by 110 psychoanalysts of the World Association of Psychoanalysis on 105 diverse terms carefully chosen to show us something new:

21st century psychoses and their Lacanian psychoanalytic treatments.

March 2018