Search

Résumé Objectifs Les criminels considérés irresponsables pénalement témoignent d’actes violents commis sous l’influence d’hallucinations. Le texte vise à mettre en évidence la fonction de l’acte dans cette clinique extrême. Méthode Le récit de la rencontre avec deux patients dans une unité pour malades difficiles vient s’articuler avec des apports théoriques, afin de dégager les processus psychiques en jeu quand l’agir émerge dans un mouvement hallucinatoire. Résultats Le sujet semble confronté par l’hallucination à la réactualisation d’un pan non symbolisé de son histoire dont il s’échappe par sa transposition dans un acte effectif. Une fois les enjeux du clivage identifiés dans la rencontre avec ces patients, la scène du crime peut alors se regarder comme le lieu de figuration de terreurs vécues de façon sensori-motrice et perceptive. Discussion L’article met en évidence que le meurtre de l’autre protègerait le criminel de son propre vécu d’anéantissement, notamment en lui permettant de se dégager d’une position mélancolique. Le sujet/non-sujet du crime vise à advenir comme sujet différencié, par le meurtre d’un objet avec lequel il essaierait de se défusionner. Conclusion Le crime aurait donc une fonction de survie pour le sujet halluciné confronté à la réactualisation d’un pan non symbolisé de son histoire qu’il tente de traiter par l’acte. Afin d’endiguer un vécu de fusion catastrophique avec l’objet primaire, le meurtre apparaît comme une tentative de mettre des limites entre le sujet et l’objet, et correspondrait, en l’absence d’introjection d’un double empathique, à une ultime tentative de constituer l’autre comme un double non menaçant. Objectives Criminals that are considered as criminally irresponsible may have committed violent acts under the influence of hallucination. In this article, the author aims to cast light on the function of the act in this extreme clinical situation. Method The account of the encounter with two patients in a unit for difficult patients is completed by theoretical contributions aiming to identify the mental processes involved when action emerges while a person is under the influence of hallucination. Results It appears that, when undergoing hallucination, the subject is faced with reappearance in the present of a part of his story that had never been symbolized, and he breaks free from the hallucination by turning it into an act that is committed in real life. Once splitting phenomena have been identified in the encounter with these patients, the crime scene can then be regarded as a representation of terrors experienced in sensorimotor and perceptual manner. Discussion The article shows how, by killing another person, criminals protect themselves from their own feeling of annihilation, among other things by freeing themselves from a melancholic state. The subject/non subject of the crime is aiming to become a separate individual through the murder of an object from which he is attempting to “un-merge”. Conclusion The crime therefore functions as means of survival for the hallucinating subject who is faced with the reappearance of a part of his history never before symbolized, with which he is trying to deal through enactment. To contain the experience of catastrophic fusion with the primary object, murder appears as an attempt to separate the subject and the object; in the absence of introjection of an empathetic double, murder seems to be an ultimate attempt to instate the other person as a non-threatening double. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contiguous with social spaces, the prison is invested with a degree of secrecy. However, those who are incarcerated tolerate the space, which imprisons them with difficulty, insofar as this place, which punishes them, does not allow them to approach an act where the significance escapes. The act, which led them to this place, identifies them, more than it interrogates the “acting out of the act”, which is profoundly enigmatic and rarely questioned. The legal procedures fix behaviors by a ruling, which is hardly suitable for clarifying acts, which inhibit the significance. Based on clinical situations, we have attempted to conduct investigations concerning the act, defining the role, which the psychologist, orientated by psychoanalysis, must have in the individual work that he maintains with the prisoners. Far from numbing the significance, the aim is to articulate the statements with the contradictions, which compose them, to let an aborted word appear under appropriate discourse; the one which touches on the unspeakable. Taken literally, the significant point of the act is revealed to be less expressible than it had seemed and allows a glimpse of unsuspected areas. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Acting takes place at a time when the subject''s act literally puts down in reality the logical necessity of a loss. The loss is equal to attesting a signification which has been achieved – the subject being altered to a “fallen object” and imposing on the Other a loss of his enjoyment. This can only be established while reaching an anticipated certainty answering the question : ‘What am I for the Other?’. It goes along with the downfall of the subject, contrary to the principle of altering afterward which is at play in Fantasy. Committing suicide illustrates this decision and so, after Lacan, entails the alteration of the subject through the act. An examplary clinical case (the “case of Marie” by D. Lagache) which is revisited here allows us to ascertain clinically the coordinates of the subject''s resorting to act. Studying teenagers'' suicides (in increasing numbers and a current illustration of the general feeling of discomfort) on the one hand and on the other the martyrs of idealized political causes will throw a new light on psychopathological cases whose reasons are not made the clearer for a sociological approach which is too often the only point of reference used. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]