AI 1: FROM THE PSYCHOTIC REAL TO ORDINARY PSYCHOSIS

Dear Readers,

The text published on September 30 brings together my different elaborations of the notion of the Real over the previous decades. This new two-part text on artificial intelligence tries to explain how the explosion of digital media has cast new light on the notion of the Real.

Many critics complain that the Lacanian Real is an elusive notion which oscillates between opposite meanings: it is the void around which a symbolic network is structured; it is a contingent remainder, a stain, a little piece of the real that resists symbolisation (what Schelling called der nie aufgehende Rest); it is a purely formal language that sustains no meaning (like mathematical formulas); it is a terrifying Thing that we are unable to integrate into our everyday notion of reality (a gigantic monster eating people alive, a mega-storm that wipes out houses and the people in them, brutal torture that tears people apart—cases in which an observer tells himself: “This cannot be true!”); it is a barrier that prohibits us from moving beyond it (although there is nothing there); it is the basic fantasy on the repression of which a subject’s existence is grounded, a fantasy in which a subject can never recognise itself…

What we have to do here is not introduce a classification of the Real, dividing it into four or five subcategories; we have to capture the immanent movement of the notion of the Real. One aspect of the Real, brought to an extreme, mutates into a totally different one: the image of a terrifying Thing mutates into a fantasy that covers up—or, rather, fills in—the primordial Void; this Void mutates into an obstacle/prohibition covering up the fact that there is nothing hidden behind it… The same matrix repeats itself here: the Real as what is out there prior to symbolisation and what comes after, the remainder of symbolisation. The Real is not lost; it is what we cannot get rid of, what always sticks on as the remainder of the symbolic operation.

The Real is what is beyond symbolisation and the obstacle that prevents us from reaching this beyond. The Real is an empty form without content and a content for which there is no place in the form (recall Lacan’s formula of subject-object: \$-a). Therein also resides the paradox of the prohibition of incest: it prohibits something that is in itself impossible. Incest with one’s mother is prohibited, but the true aim of this prohibition is to create the illusion that, if we transgress this prohibition, we would attain full, non-castrated jouissance. In short, the prohibition masks the fact that there is nothing to prohibit… So why lose time with these details here? Because, again, there is no place for such a convoluted coincidence of opposites in AI.

However, this position of mine offers itself to an obvious critique: did I not neglect the fact that AI is a bric-a-brac full of inconsistencies, heterogeneities, and hallucinations? Does, then, our immersion in AI not bring us closer to a psychotic subjective stance? When we are fully immersed in AI, symbolic castration is suspended: the gap that separates the symbolic and the real disappears; the Name-of-the-Father that sustains this gap is foreclosed. While this gap is still operative in hysteria, it is not present in psychosis: a hysteric reacts to the Name-of-the-Father, which is still there. So we can easily imagine a subjectivity floating in the space of AI, a larval subject whose fluid identity is constructed by temporarily unstable sinthoms. The overlapping of the symbolic and the real opens up the space of extreme experiences: the space of destruction, but also of creativity outside the established frame of symbolic normativity; and also the space that can develop its own forms of temporary stability. (Incidentally, such a reading contradicts Lacan, who located creativity in hysteria.) Stijn Vanheule systematically developed such a positive notion of psychosis: not as a disease, but as an alternative mode of human existence:

“I don’t think of psychosis in terms of a disease. For me, it’s a kind of human experience. If people are confronted with difficult challenges in our lives, in our contexts, our families, our jobs, then we tend to respond in a certain way. Some of these responses are more standard responses, more attuned to what the collective way of reacting to events is, but all of us have reactions that are a bit off standard.On one hand, these experiences have something disruptive, and we have to acknowledge that sometimes it’s very difficult to have delusional experiences that there is a conspiracy, or to hear voices that are communicating confusing things. We have to help people soften that disruptive experience. The biomedical tools might help at that level. But we have to use them wisely, not to sedate people so they cannot think anymore, but to soften something in the experience.But on the other hand, the topics that people are concerned about, or the things communicated through a hallucination, are not purely random. It is a mind that is reacting to something. It’s not a narrative response to an event; there is an associative link between what is being experienced and the threat. If we say that it is random, or that it doesn’t matter what you hallucinate, then you potentially lose something. We erase something of the human experience. It’s wiser to try to listen.Human beings make use of the narratives around them, like religion and science, to make sense of these questions. We read books, watch TV series, and talk with friends. These are all ways of trying to make sense of the things we are struggling with. We try to deal with challenges with words. In psychosis, something in the story that has been told is not working anymore. For me, psychosis means that someone is being confronted with a typical human dilemma, but the stories around them are no longer functioning to deal with it. At that point, an effort of out-of-the-box thinking takes place. Whilst most people think in the box, within the narrative constraints through which we are educated, psychotic experiences are out-of-the-box thinking.It’s a way of being creative, but in such a way that maybe you lose yourself; you’re too creative, in a certain sense. There is a strength in that, because it starts from something when there is no answer, when there is a lack, and then you start doing something in response to that. That’s already a very creative act. You could say that hallucinations and delusions are creative actions, but maybe too wild, in the sense that they overwhelm everything. This creative potential manifested in a psychotic experience could be cultivated in different ways, in ways that are not so devastating for a person.”

As expected, in talking about sinthoms as the way psychotics construct a minimal stability in their lives, Vanheule has to mention James Joyce—he elaborated the notion of the sinthom apropos Joyce:

“The James Joyce example really comes straight from the work of Jacques Lacan. His point was that therapy is not always needed, and he used Joyce as an example. He said Joyce did all the work that you can do in psychoanalysis by himself. It was writing for him. It was his artistic practice. It was his way of dealing with language; from a clinical view, you could say what Joyce is doing with language is a bit strange. It reminds us of what is called schizophrenic language, like jumbling, decomposing words, and seemingly nonsensical sentences. You could pathologise it, but that’s not what Lacan would do. He would say that Joyce had a peculiar relation to language because he used language in a very non-conventional way. That’s similar to psychosis. In psychosis, conventions don’t guide you in how you interact. Convention was not guiding Joyce in how he interacted with language, and that made him creative. But Joyce didn’t need clinical help because he cultivated it in the context of being a writer. That was the identity that he cultivated: that of an artist.”

While I find this description correct and very helpful, two things should be added. First, we should bear in mind that, from the clinical standpoint, Joyce is not a big exception: he is just one example among many ordinary psychotics of how one stabilises one’s subjectivity through sinthoms. Second, Vanheule still perceives psychosis as triggered by a traumatic event, and here enters Jacques-Alain Miller, who introduced the notion of “ordinary psychosis”—we could even say “normal psychosis”. This term describes a latent or non-manifest psychotic structure that remains hidden, without classical symptoms like severe delusions or hallucinations, until a major life event triggers it. Individuals function normally in daily life and do not display obvious or “mad” psychotic symptoms. It lacks the striking clinical markers traditionally required for a formal psychosis diagnosis in Lacanian theory. The underlying structural fragility becomes visible only when a specific stressor—such as losing a job or a significant relationship breakdown—overwhelms the person’s symbolic anchors. In July 2008, Miller gave a presentation, “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited”, in which he claimed:

“Ordinary psychosis does not have a strict definition. Everyone is encouraged to give their opinion and their definition of ordinary psychosis. I have not invented a concept with ordinary psychosis. I have invented a word, I have invented an expression, I have invented a signifier, by giving a definition mark to attract the different senses. I have bet that this signifier could provoke an echo in the clinician, the professional.”

In a detailed reading of Miller, Manuel Fernández Blanco introduced a temporal dimension into psychosis. It is not enough to say that, if a traumatic experience is too strong to be contained through neurotic symptoms, it triggers psychosis. For a full psychosis to be triggered by a traumatic event, a patient must already be in a state of untriggered psychosis, which characterises ordinary psychosis:

“From a structural (Lacanian) perspective we could only consider that such subjects have had the good fortune not to have encountered any vital contingency that would have confronted them with the particular form that the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father had taken for them.”

With respect to social externality, ordinary psychosis concerns the function of social identification that gives us a place, a support—for example, a professional identification. According to Miller, “the clearest clue is when you have a negative relation of the subject to social identification, when you have to admit that the subject is unable to conquer a place in the sun, is unable to assume a social function.” However, Blanco correctly points out the ambiguity of this negative relation, which can assume two opposite forms:

“The difficulty with social identification may be a sign of ordinary psychosis, as can an overly intense identification with a social position, for example a profession. In such cases, its loss can trigger a psychosis, because that social position was serving for the missing Name-of-the-Father. Social norms come in the place of the father’s disappearance. Norms, common sense, the ordinary, proliferate in response to the decline of the Law.”

This brings us to the distinction between ordinary-psychotic social identification and normal social identification: when we normally assume a social identity, ironic distance is included—there is no patriotism without making fun of your country, no love for your parents without ironically noticing their failures… Or, as Lacan put it, a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king. In the case of ordinary psychosis, there is no ironic distance because of the subject’s direct identification with his symbolic title. Incidentally, that is why we can say that Political Correctness in all its versions is definitely a form of ordinary psychosis: it lacks ironic distance; it is overidentified with rules and norms. Right-wing new populism is, on the contrary, much closer to the destabilised, excessive version of ordinary psychosis—just think about Trump’s confused and incoherent statements…

To demonstrate the difference between normal irony and ordinary-psychotic play with words, let us take a rather tasteless example from my own language. Since June 2026, Slovenia has had a right-wing nationalist government which, among other things, insists that in everyday conversation, whenever possible, people should use Slovene words instead of common foreign terms. Once in a restaurant, I caused a small scandal when I simply translated “cocktail” into Slovene: cock (penis) and tail, so I asked if they had a “kurčev rep” (cock’s tail). This was, of course, delivered in the tone of a rather vulgar irony. But then, when I was alone at home, I began to think about how to repeat the same procedure in other languages, and I quickly discovered that in German the same word (Schwanz) has two main meanings, precisely “tail” and “penis” in vulgar everyday use—so how would one render “cocktail” in German? The idea came to me to coin a new word, “Doppelschwanz” (a double prick/tail). Here I was much closer to ordinary psychosis. There was no irony intended; I simply took this nonsensical game as a serious task…

Is normal psychosis not how we function when we are immersed in AI? Our subjective relationship to the symbolic universe of AI is exactly the paradoxical combination of immersion and externality described by Miller: we are fully immersed in AI, deprived of the gap of impossibility in finding our place in language, in adequately expressing ourselves within it; but, at the same time, words and speech acts do not performatively grab us. We move within it with a weird indifference, as if speech were part of a universalised hallucination, a game we play in which the difference between hallucination and reality tends to disappear. Today, the majority of us continue to occupy the hysterical position described by Johnston: we are disturbed by a mysterious big Other of AI, not sure what it wants from us. However, what is on the horizon is ordinary psychosis.

The greatest challenge of a Freudian reading of Patricia Highsmith’s work is to show how writing was for her literally what Lacan would have called her sinthome: the “knot” that held her universe together, the artificial symbolic formation through which she maintained a minimum of sanity by conferring narrative consistency on her tumultuous experience. In her masterpiece Those Who Walk Away, the hero’s wife justifies her suicide by quoting what later became the James Bond phrase: “The world is not enough.” Her writing was for Highsmith that which enabled her to avoid suicide, to endure in a world which, in itself, is not enough. The task is not so much to explain her work through references to her “real” life, but rather to explain, through reference to her work, how she was able to survive in her “real” life.

More precisely, Highsmith’s sinthome is the figure of Tom Ripley, the hero of her five novels. Ripley is difficult to swallow, and the best indicator of this difficulty is the failure of his four cinema versions. First there were Alain Delon in René Clément’s Plein soleil (1960, based on The Talented Mr Ripley—but in the film, the police arrest Ripley at the end, to Highsmith’s dismay), and Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977, based on Ripley’s Game); then, in strangely symmetrical remakes, there were Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and John Malkovich in Liliana Cavani’s new Ripley’s Game (2002). Although all four are, in themselves, outstanding films, their Ripley is simply not the Highsmith Ripley: they somehow humanise Ripley’s inhuman core. Delon is a cold-blooded, demoniac European; Hopper is a Sam Shepard-type existentialist cowboy; Damon is a hystericised, emotionally unstable American brat; and Malkovich displays his standard decadent, ironic coldness.

Who, then, is the “real” Ripley? Although the novel was written in the mid-1950s, Highsmith foreshadows today’s therapeutic rewriting of ethical Commandments into “Recommendations” which one should not follow too blindly. Ripley simply stands for the last step in this rewriting: thou shalt not kill—except when there is really no other way to pursue your happiness. Or, as Highsmith herself put it in an interview: “He could be called psychotic, but I would not call him insane because his actions are rational. /.../ I consider him a rather civilised person who kills when he absolutely has to.” Ripley is thus not a kind of “American psycho”: his criminal acts are not frenetic passages à l’acte, outbursts of violence in which he releases the energy hindered by the frustrations of yuppie daily life. His crimes are calculated with simple pragmatic reasoning: he does what is necessary to attain his goal, the wealthy, quiet life in the exclusive Paris suburbs. What is so disturbing about him, of course, is that he somehow seems to lack an elementary moral sense: in daily life, he is mostly friendly and considerate, although with a touch of coldness; and when he commits a murder, he does it with regret, quickly and as painlessly as possible, in the same way one performs an unpleasant but necessary task. Ripley is the best exemplification of what Lacan had in mind when he claimed that normality is the special form of psychosis—of not being traumatically caught in the symbolic cobweb, of retaining “freedom” from the symbolic order. In short, Ripley is the figure of what Miller conceptualised as ordinary psychosis.

The mystery of Highsmith’s Ripley transcends the standard American ideological motif of the individual’s capacity to radically “reinvent” himself or herself, to erase the traces of the past and assume a thoroughly new identity; it transcends the postmodern “Protean Self”. Therein resides the ultimate shift of Minghella’s film with regard to the novel: the film “Gatsbyises” Ripley into a new version of the American hero who recreates his identity in a murky way. What gets lost here is best exemplified by the crucial difference between the novel and the film: in the film, Ripley has the stirrings of a conscience, while in the novel, the qualms of conscience are simply beyond his grasp. This is why the making explicit of Ripley’s gay desires in the film also misses the point. Minghella implies that, back in the 1950s, Highsmith had to be more circumspect in order to make the hero palatable to the wider public, while today we can say things more overtly. However, Ripley’s coldness is not the surface effect of his gay stance, but rather the other way round. In one of the later Ripley novels, we learn that he makes love once a week to his wife, Heloise, as a regular ritual: there is nothing passionate about it. Tom is like Adam in paradise, prior to the Fall, when, according to St Augustine, he and Eve did have sex, but it was performed as a simple instrumental task, like sowing seeds in a field. One way to read Ripley is thus to claim that he is angelic, living in a universe which precedes the Law and its transgression—sin—that is, the vicious superego cycle of guilt generated by our very obedience to the law, described by Paul. This is the reason why Ripley feels no guilt or even remorse after his murders: he is not yet fully integrated into the symbolic law.

The paradox of this non-integration is that the price Ripley pays for it is his inability to experience intense sexual passion—a clear proof that there is no sexual passion outside the confines of the symbolic law. In one of the later Ripley novels, the hero sees two flies on his kitchen table and, on looking closely and observing that they are copulating, squashes them with disgust. This small detail is crucial—Minghella’s Ripley would never have done something like this. Highsmith’s Ripley is, in a way, disconnected from the reality of flesh, disgusted by the real of life, by its cycle of generation and corruption. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, provides an adequate characterisation of Ripley: “All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.” Insofar as such coldness characterises a certain radical lesbian stance, one is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay man, the paradox of Ripley is that he is a male lesbian. No wonder that Highsmith, as a lesbian, felt such proximity to the figure of Ripley. Tom Ripley was not just a mask for Highsmith; he was quite literally her externalised ego: as we learn in Wilson’s book, she even changed her name to Patricia Highsmith-Ripley and signed her mail “Tom (Pat)”.

Minghella’s Ripley makes clear what is wrong with the procedure which appears to be “more radical than the original”, bringing out its implicit, repressed content: what mattered in Highsmith’s original was not only the “repression” of the allegedly prohibited sexual, etc., content, but the void of this repression as such. What is lost in the gesture of filling in the gaps is Ripley’s non-psychological cold monstrosity, uncannily close to a weird “normality”. By way of “filling in the void” and “telling it all”, Minghella retreats from the void as such, which, of course, is ultimately none other than the void of subjectivity. Instead of a polite person who is at the same time a monstrous automaton with no inner turmoil, we get the “wealth of a personality”, a person full of psychic traumas—in short, someone whom we can, in the fullest sense of the term, understand.

There is another no less outstanding case of OP in Episodes 5 and 6 of Season 27 of the BBC TV series Silent Witness: Kevin, an overweight, bearded young man always seen in a green dress, who is revealed at the end to be the murderer. Although Kevin is designated in the series as autistic, I think he is much more an ordinary psychotic, although his mode of OP is opposed to Ripley’s. While Ripley justifies his crimes, including murder, with cold, egotistical calculation, Kevin cares about people close to him: the people he killed were effectively very evil and, in some naïve sense, deserved to die. At the end of the second episode, the police detectives have to admit that, by killing the main criminal, Kevin saved the life of Paula, whom the criminal would certainly have killed. So when—ridiculously, given his ugly, fat body—he refers to himself as a “superman”, one of the detectives ironically remarks that he really was a superman. His externality to language is indicated by his constant repetition of the same phrases (“I can fix things!”, etc.) and by his strangely automatic gestures. All Highsmith’s readers know that her last Ripley novels—from Ripley’s Game onwards—are focused on the topic of friendship, of finding a true friend, and my naïve dream is that, if Ripley were to encounter Kevin, they would become friends in spite of the abyss that separates their personalities.

My critical point apropos ordinary psychosis is that it is not just one among the possible modes of existence—we can be hysterics, obsessional neurotics, perverts, ordinary psychotics, and so on. Such a stance brings us all too close to Jason Arday’s rather ridiculous vulgar-materialist notion of “neurodiversity”: a coexistence of different modes of subjectivity—autism, etc.—which are supposed to be directly grounded in neural structure and are thus also to be treated as socially equivalent. Incidentally, where did the notion that psychic structures are not directly grounded in biology, but are socially constructed, go? What we get with advocates of the psychotic option as another mode of existence that should be treated as equal to others in an emancipated society is merely a cultured version which grounds plurality in social processes.

We should reject the idea of a primordial plurality of modes of subjective existence and stick to Vanheule’s point that psychosis, in all its forms, is a reaction to some traumatic disturbance, however we define it. So I think that there is a primordial cut, failure, or tension which makes us human subjects, and this cut concerns what Lacan calls “symbolic castration”: the fact that, while we exist as subjects only through and in language, we never fit into language; we are always out of place in it. The zero-point of this awareness is hysteria, the hysterical question: “Why am I what the big Other is telling me that I am?” The subject is thus, at its basic level, a hysterical subject, and all other modes of subjectivity are variations of, reactions to, or solutions to the deadlock of the hysterical subject.

I think the psychotic solution is best illustrated by an old vulgar medical joke. The narrator’s wife has a big malignant tumour in her brain and needs urgent surgery to remove it. The narrator discovers that the best surgeon in town is a good friend of his, and his friend agrees to do it. While the surgery is taking place, the narrator nervously walks in a corridor close to the operating theatre. When the surgeon steps out, the narrator immediately asks him: “How did it go? Is everything OK?” The surgeon benevolently smiles: “It went well, don’t worry, she will live longer than you! There were just a couple of minor complications with her nerves, which regulate her bodily movements. She now cannot move her lips, so saliva will be dripping from them all the time, and she will not be able to swallow food without help. Plus, the muscles around her anus and vagina are also out of her control, so her urine and shit will just be coming out of her. Plus, her vaginal opening will be constantly twitching, so sexual penetration is out…” The narrator’s face gets paler and paler, when the doctor interrupts his long narration with loud laughter: “Don’t worry, I was just joking. Everything went well: she is dead now!” The bodily movements out of control are like neurotic symptoms, while her death is the psychotic solution: everything ends well because the subject is thrown out of normal symbolic life.

So let us conclude with a case of ordinary-psychotic thinking, involving two words that sound similar for contingent reasons. Apophenia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, connections, or intentionality in random or unrelated data; epiphany is a sudden, striking moment of clear understanding or profound realisation. The lesson of ordinary psychosis is that the effect of epiphany is, as a rule, an unexpected outcome of apophenia: to perceive apophenia as an event delivering a profound message is, of course, a case of psychotic hallucination, but it is simultaneously a case that can deliver a genuine creative insight—a case of what Lacan called lalangue, as opposed to standard language.

https://madinireland.com/2025/07/why-psychosis-is-not-so-crazy-a-conversation-with-stijn-vanheule/.

Miller, J.-A., “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 26 (2013), p. 34-35.

https://congresoa

mp2018.com/en/textos-del-tema/tiempo-la-psicosis-ordinaria/.

Miller, op.cit., p. 43.

All quotes from Wilson’s book are designated simply by the page number in brackets.

The term was coined in 1958 by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad during his research on the early stages of schizophrenia.

I owe this case to Tim Salecl-Žižek.