The analytical work with a person living with psychosis focuses on the symptom, but, so to speak, spells the symptom differently (in Old French, sinthome), thinking of the sinthome as a way that a person’s symptom makes their structure more stable and their ways of jouissance more localised. The idea is that the sinthome’s loop reinforces the imaginary loop, enabling it to separate out from the trefoil, and the other loops, symbolic and real, follow suit and can braid. This is a compensated psychosis.
I call this a metaphor in the real, as this kind of symptom/sinthome is constructed in practice, in the real. It doesn’t last, it has to be re-done as daily and weekly practice, in, for example, prolific artistic practice or in weekly psychotherapy that extends for years. We can understand this as separating out levels; combing and knitting RSI from the tangle that is the person, their sinthome/symptom, and the way they world and are worlded.
The image that I made from the words in Prismatic Heresy 1 is one of scaffolding; it shows the ways that subject constructed a sinthome in their years of therapy and their artistic and spiritual practice. Prismatic Heresy 1 is synchronic, so the scaffolding that the subject constructed over many years of therapy is central to the image, but the diachronic Prismatic Heresies 2, 3, and 4, if transposed into synchronic figures, would also show degrees of scaffolding, varying according to the ways in which the subjects uses, or doesn’t use, artistic practice or other sinthomatic ways of stabilising their structure. We all can and often need to do this.
This separating out and scaffolding can be understood in Bion’s terms as a transition and transformation from beta elements to alpha function. Each person’s words weave a kind of blanket, a text-ile in which they analyse the way they use artistic practise. In Prismatic Heresy 2, the subject discusses the relation between personal change and changes in their artistic practice (green), “Now I have become also the subject of my art … and [I] have a conversation with the world”.
The good thing about practice—whether artistic or psychoanalytic—is that you can’t predict what will happen; it’s non-determinist. After having made my works of art, after having exhibited them, and after having worked through some of my imaginary, egoic resentments about the separation of fringe and conference in my analysis, what I wanted to write about changed, nachträglich.
Of course this is nonsense; my sinthome. Typing up the transcript of the four sessions involved a deliberate non-listening to meaning; absorption in the sounds of the words and the rhythm of my fingers on the keys. Sorting phrases into seven sets, depending on meaning and affect, was an activity that, as well as being meditative, resonated with a theory of mine about differentiation. Drawing on Bernard Burgoyne’s work on set theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that what distinguishes the different psychic structures—autism, the psychoses, and the neuroses—is the extent to which someone can stably sort into sets (Chernaik unpublished; Burgoyne 2000). Binaries—self/other, inner/outer—mark an achievement of Trennung levels past T2. Making art with words sorted into seven sets was a way of playing with this theory. It becomes a question of movement between T levels (‘regression’ and ‘progression’) rather than differential diagnosis.