The enigmatic experience in psychosis: the elementary phenomena in the light of theory of significant

Abstract

The knowledge of the elementary phenomena is a valuable tool for diagnosis and treatment of psychosis. Lacan reexamines this psychiatric notion based on Benveniste`s and Jakobson`s studies on the shifters. As will be shown, the result of this dialogue was the formulation of the enigmatic experience on psychosis, where appears the unique possibility of an enunciation without enunciator. Despite exceeding the limits of what is acceptable as valid by linguistics, the consequence of Lacan’s research is situate in a definitive way the causality of psychosis in the field of language, and not in the biological register. In addition, understanding the two logical times of the enigmatic experience allows to isolate a principle from which is deduced a reorganization of the elementary phenomena into 2 types: xenopathic and self-reference.