On Extraordinary Neurosis: An Introduction

Varia
By Renaud Evrard
English

The notion of “extraordinary neurosis” was at the center of the mid-nineteenth century debates in the Société Médico-Psychologique. They put a name to a set of clinical cases that lay at the boundary of the psychiatric knowledge of the time, mixing, among other phenomena, somnambulism, double personality, hysterical fits, and lucidity phenomena. Nowadays this concept might fit into our nomenclature as an alternative to the diagnosis of psychosis for another clinical practice: non-psychotic hallucinations and delusions. More specifically, recent Lacanian theories of ordinary and extraordinary forms of the psychotic structure call, out of a concern for symmetry, upon a reflection on what the ordinary and extraordinary forms of neurotic structure would be.

Keywords

  • extraordinary neurosis
  • psychopathological structures
  • ordinary psychosis
  • exceptional experiences
  • Société Médico-Psychologique
  • dissociation
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