Citation: 24 Cardozo L. Rev.

2229 2002-2003
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KILLING THE OBJECT:
PSYCHOSIS AND THE CRIMINAL ACT
Linda Belau*
In French clinical psychiatry, the phrase passage 6 l'acte
designates those types of impulsive acts of a violent or criminal nature
indicating the onset of an acute dissociative episode. These acts
supposedly mark the point at which the subject proceeds from an idea or
intention to an act.' In Lacanian psychoanalysis, one's alliance with the
most radical and ethical position is demonstrated through what is
referred to as the passage 6 l'acte. In this sense, one's actions are not
symbolically mediated; rather, they are aligned with the real beyond the
symbolic. In Seminar X, L 'angoisse (Anxiety), Lacan introduces the
idea of the passage a /'acte, likening its structure to what he calls a
"letting drop" (niederkommen lassen).
2
In the passage 6 l'acte, Lacan
says, one "topples off the stage" of social relations, falling out of the
realm of symbolic concerns; this is what engenders the ethical (or at
least the non-pathological) dimension of the act. Grounded in his
clinical work in psychoanalysis, Lacan's notion of the ethical is not the
same as the traditional ethics of moral philosophy insofar as it does not
revolve around the Good, nor is it linked to pleasure, or the service of
goods. Thus, passage 6 l'acte is fundamentally different from "acting-
out," which is more like an unconscious message that the subject
addresses to the Other or in the symbolic network; the symbolic being
nothing other than the field of the Other.
3
Unlike acting-out, which
makes a call to the Other, the passage a l'acte functions at the level of
jouissance, of an unmediated enjoyment that is addressed to no one.
4
* Linda Belau is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas-Pan American in the
Department of English. She is the author of several articles on psychoanalysis and literary theory
and is also editor of Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Experience.
She is currently completing a book entitled Encountering Joussance: Trauma, Psychosis,
Psychoanalysis.
I See DYLAN EVANS, AN INTRODUCTORY DICTIONARY OF LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS
136 (1996).
2 Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire X, L'angoisse (Jan. 23, 1963) (unpublished seminar paper).
3 Id.
4 This, incidentally, is exactly how Lacan refers to the symptom in Seminar X, where he
2229
CARDOZO
LA W REVIEW
Passage 6 /'acte, therefore, is entirely devoid of pathological content;
one passes to the act not for symbolic recognition or return, but for
some other reason that takes one beyond such concerns. In Seminar
VII, where he takes up the question of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
Lacan maintains that Antigone makes precisely this passage as she
aligns herself with the family Ate.
5
Antigone does not ally herself with
the exiled brother because she is responding to a higher law or because
she is attempting to secure her place in the divine order. She commits
her crime as an act of filiality with the empty signifier (SI), with the
impossibility of the symbolic order to guarantee the law it purports to
inaugurate.
Now, my particular interest in psychosis ultimately lies here in the
question of this ethics-the horizon of the real-and its relation to an
unmediated act, especially since the psychotic suffers the real as an
unrelenting, unbounded attack ofjouissance as if from outside the body.
I will continue this point momentarily, but, before I get ahead of myself
and start making the claim that a psychotic's criminal act-serial
murder, to take the example that I will turn to in this Article-is an
ethical act, it is of utmost importance that we recognize that the analytic
ethic which Lacan formulates necessarily relates action to desire, in the
sense that desire is a question. This ethic concerns itself with a relation
to the Other, the barred Other, that is, which always presents itself in
and as a question: Che vuoi? This means that we must consider both the
question of desire and the function of any possible Other in relation to
the psychotic act. Technically speaking-and this will most certainly
be elaborated below-a psychotic is not subject to the dialectic of
desire. Since he has essentially no meaningful relation to or in the
symbolic register and since his relations are suspended in a kind of
imaginary alienation (there is no lack in the Other), the psychotic is
subject to demand rather than desire.
6
Does this then mean that the
psychotic is incapable of an act?
In Seminar XI, Lacan relates the logic of the act to the form of
repetition, maintaining that an act is not mere behavior; thus, it would
seem, an act is something other than a response to a demand. "An act,"
maintains that the symptom does not call for interpretation and, therefore, is not like acting-out.
In its essence, the symptom is not a call to the Other, but rather has gone beyond the barrier of the
good and has moved toward the "Thing." Id. According to Dylan Evans, this is an early
configuration of Lacan's notion of the sinthome. See Dylan Evans, From Kantian Ethics to
Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance, in KEY CONCEPTS OF LACANIAN
PSYCHOANALYSIS 12 (Danny Nobus ed., 1998).
5 See JACQUES LACAN, THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN, BOOK VII, THE ETHICS OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS 1959-1960, at 247 (Jacques-Alain Miller ed., Dennis Porter trans., 1992).
6 1 have decided to use the traditional masculine pronoun form to apply to both sexes in
order to avoid clumsy locutions like his or her and she or he throughout this essay. By choosing
thus, I do not intend to suggest that only males are psychotic or to cast any aspersions whatsoever
on the masculine gender.
2230
[Vol. 24:6
2003] PSYCHOSIS AND THE CRIMINAL ACT
he writes, "a true act, always has an element of structure, by the fact of
concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it."
' 7
The
structure that Lacan mentions is the very movement of repetition, and it
introduces the ethical question because it compels the subject to realize
the essential relation between his actions and his desire. So, passing to
the act opens one to the ethical domain only insofar as one acts in
conformity with his desire and only insofar as he assumes full
responsibility for this desire. This brings us to the question of the
antinomy between desire and enjoyment, since the law of the Oedipal
father binds desire, and enjoyment is tied to the anal father who is freed
up from the constraints and prohibitions of the law. It is precisely this
question of enjoyment orjouissance that organizes my inquiry into the
motivations of the psychotic serial murderer, especially since his brand
of murder is typically less an impulsive, spontaneous act than one that is
excessively premeditated, or at least over-determined. If nothing else,
the serial pattern indicates this premeditation, and so it would seem that
the serial killer is not simply indulging a fleeting impulse, surrendering
his rational faculties to some uncivilized libidinal urge, but rather, is
somehow engaged in an activity that is more about gaining control of
his libido than it is about "letting go" and giving way to his drives.
A serial murderer has made a radical passage from an intention to
an act; this is not debatable. The question remains, however, whether
he has also acted in accordance with his desire or whether he engages in
a kind of defensive acting-out. This brings us to the question of the
meaning of the act itself: Is the serial killer's act a psychotic's
compensation for the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father and, therefore, a
desperate attempt to delimit jouissance, or is it a perverse attempt to
make present the disavowed paternal function? That is, is the
murderous act an imaginary support, intended as the only viable
substitute for a missing symbolic, or is it a means to bring the symbolic
mandate, the Name-of-the-Father, into existence? Is the psychotic
attempting to become a law unto himself (like the pervert who, in
transgressing the law, invents a new one), or does the serial killer rather
suffer a fundamental crisis of and indifference toward the law, an
indifference that concerns him most intimately?
According to the psychoanalytic account, the psychotic is not
subject to the dialectic of desire because he forecloses the Name-of-the-
Father. Unlike the neurotic, the psychotic has not undergone symbolic
castration, also known in psychoanalysis as the process of alienation in,
and then separation from, the incestuous pre-symbolic maternal relation.
Instead, he is subject to an unlimited jouissance, an enjoyment that is
7 JACQUES LACAN, THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN, BOOK X1, THE FOUR
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 1964, at 50 (Jacques-Alain Miller ed., Alan
Sheridan trans., 1981 ).
2231
CARDOZO LA W REVIEW
unbounded by the Law of the Father. In this sense, we could also say
that the psychotic is subject to the drives without the libidinal
reorganization that is the result of castration (alienation/separation)
through the paternal function. In neurosis, the castrated body is
essentially dead since, according to Bruce Fink, "[i]t is written with
signifiers... codified by the symbolic."
8
For the "normal" neurotic, the
force ofjouissance is contained through the father's intervention, and
any residual libidinal energy is relegated to what are known as the
erogenous zones: those areas of the body still infused with jouissance.
This is the natural consequence of our socialization and civilization.
Such is not the case for the psychotic, however, whose body is alive; it
is real. In psychosis, the libidinal reorganization that is the consequence
of castration and the social development of the subject does not take
place. This does not necessarily mean that the psychotic comports
himself as some sort of uncouth, uncivilized barbarian, though. As Fink
also points out, "the drives are never hierarchized in the body except by
imitation. In other words, the hierarchy that may be apparent is not
irrevocable."
9
Thus, the psychotic may appear the same as the neurotic.
He is able to mimic certain social customs, but he is never able to
internalize the authority that grounds these very practices. Having
foreclosed paternal authority, he is, thus, radically amoral and
completely freed up from any sort of symbolic constraint. This, it
seems, gives a certain "edge" when it comes to taking action:
The absence of the paternal function affects all symbolic functions,
and thus it should be no surprise that it affects everything we
commonly associate with morality and conscience. This does not
mean that a psychotic always acts "immorally"; rather, it means that
even slight provocation can lead the psychotic to engage in seriously
punishing behavior. The reigning in of the drives that occurs in the
course of the neurotic's "education," socialization, Oedipalization,
and de-Oedipalization-often manifested in the laborious weighing
of alternatives by the neurotic before any kind of lust or aggression
can be displayed to others-does not occur in a durable way in
psychosis. Thus, the psychotic is more prone to immediate action,
and plagued by little if any guilt after putting someone in the
hospital, killing someone, raping someone, or carrying out some
other criminal
act.1
0
While the psychotic is indeed free of symbolic constraints and
seems to endure none of the inconveniences or annoyances of social
custom, this should not give us the idea that the psychotic suffers no
misery in his life, for what is foreclosed in the symbolic returns in the
8 BRUCE FINK, A CLINICAL INTRODUCTION TO LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS: THEORY AND
TECHNIQUE 97 (1997).
9 Id. at 96.
10 Id. at 97-98.
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[Vol. 24:6
2003] PSYCHOSIS AND THE CRIMINAL ACT
real. The paternal agency, therefore, does not necessarily disappear
altogether; it returns in a different form from outside the subject as the
threatening and unbridled primal father. Thus, while the father may not
function, he still persists. This is essentially what is behind the
psychotic's hallucinations and paranoia, which, because of their
invasive character, have a most devastating effect on him and on his
relations with the world.
In his essay entitled Foreclosure, Russell Grigg tells us that
"[a]lthough the real is excluded from the symbolic field within which
the question of the existence of objects in reality can be raised, it may
nevertheless appear in reality, but it will do so in the form of a
hallucination."
''
The hallucination is the hallmark of the paranoid
psychotic's experience since he has no strong tie to symbolic reality.
But why is it that hallucination is a consequence of foreclosure?
Because certain things are not within the realm of possibility for the
psychotic, everything that exists for him is attributed to a threatening
external agency. The alien character of everything around him is
nothing other than the way the psychotic internalizes the return in the
real of the foreclosed paternal function and the failure of the signifier to
make its castrating cut.
12
For the neurotic, who is subject to the
signifier (SI) that is founded through the Name-of-the-Father, the
structure of language means that he uses substitution, displacement, and
metaphor. He is subject to a signifier that is lacking, that does not
always work. But he must engage the Other, the world around him, by
means of the signifier since it is the signifier that creates the field of
meaning. This is not the case for the psychotic, for whom metaphor
II Russell Grigg, From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition of the
Symptom: On Foreclosure, in KEY CONCEPTS OF LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS 53 (Danny
Nobus ed., 1998).
12 This also goes a long way toward explaining why the psychotic is not "curable." Once the
structure of language is foreclosed, it cannot be recovered since any attempt to introduce a
paternal mandate will be taken as yet another instance of the threatening activity of external
forces. To introduce a lack or a question into the psychotic's carefully sealed imaginary order is
to introduce chaos and ruin. Jean-Claude Schaetzel's case of a young psychotic man he calls
Bronzehelmet is illuminating in this regard. See Jean-Claude Schaetzel, Bronzehelmet, or the
Itinerary of the Psychotherapy of a Psychotic, in RETURNING TO FREUD: CLINICAL
PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE SCHOOL OF LACAN 184-94 (Stuart Schneiderman ed. & trans., 1980).
According to Schaetzel's account, there seems to be no way to approach the psychotic in a
clinical manner except to always carefully prop up the imaginary substitute that stands in for a
missing symbolic order. Id. As far as pharmaceuticals are concerned, the future of a cure for
psychosis is unclear. I do know of one case in which the paranoid psychotic patient, who has
been "successfully" treated with anti-hallucinogenic medicine, believes in his own cure, though
he still seems intolerant of any possible future triangulation in his relations to the world. "I know
I'm cured," he says. "The aliens cured me." This shows how he still clings to the imaginary
dyadic relation and how the paternal function remains foreclosed. Perhaps the benefit of anti-
hallucinogens is that they create a much more friendly, even helpful, external agency for the
psychotic. In this sense, we could say that pharmaceuticals impact the force of the symptom, but
they do nothing to change the underlying structure of a psychosis.
2233
CARDOZO LAW REVIEW
does not make sense. This is why, as Lacan says, the psychotic is no
poet.
13
He has only a limited use of language, gleaned from his
mimicking of others. When it comes to making new meanings, he is not
able to deploy metaphor to make up for the lack in his language.
According to Lacan, when listening to the psychotic's speech, "one
never encounters anything that resembles a metaphor."
4
Instead, the
psychotic will employ neologisms, often creating new words that have
no relation to the signifying chain, which he otherwise appears to be
using without problem. While his body may not have been
domesticated by being overwritten with signifiers, the psychotic will,
however, still have to contend with the signifier since it, too, returns in
the real as real. Such a return is the basis for a psychical intrusion.
This is what Lacan calls the "invasion of the signifier, called psychosis"
that is at the bottom of the psychotic's use of language.
1 5
Thus, Lacan
says, "where the signifier isn't functioning, it starts speaking on its
own."'
16
For the psychotic, words are things, and this is what conditions
his all too material relation to language.
The absence or failure of what psychoanalysis calls castration
accounts for the significant distinction between the psychotic and the
neurotic, since castration makes all the difference in how the materiality
of language is inscribed. For the neurotic, who is subject to the signifier
and castration, the materiality of language is encountered negatively, as
repetition and through the inadequacy of the signifier. For the
psychotic, on the other hand, the materiality of language is encountered
positively. Consequently, his experiences are entirely imaginary. This
is because the father function never gets instantiated in the psychotic.
For the neurotic, however, castration takes hold and the paternal
authority functions as the basis for law and prohibition. The father is
able to name the mother's desire, thus effectively symbolizing this
desire. This act frustrates the child's imaginary relation to the mother
and her desire, allowing for the completion of castration: The child
becomes a subject in the symbolic once the authority of the paternal
function breaks the presymbolic bond, delimiting the maternal
jouissance that would otherwise be unbearable for the subject. Here we
see how separation, structured as it is in the Name-of-the-Father,
guarantees the symbolic social link. Through the father's prohibition,
the subject is free to create new unions, to choose other relations.
While the Name-of-the-Father prohibits, it does not do so
13 See JACQUES LACAN, THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN, BOOK IlI: THE PSYCHOSES
1955-1956, at 78 (Jacques-Alain Miller ed. & Russell Grigg trans., 1993) [hereinafter LACAN,
BOOK Ill].
14 Id. at 218.
15 Id. at 221.
16 Id. at 293.
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absolutely. This is the basis of paternal authority, and it is also what
frees the subject to make his own symbolic choices. The authority of
the father, then, is not so much an oppressive agency as it is a liberating
one for the subject. This is not the case for the psychotic since-insofar
as he is not subject to the prohibiting agency of the paternal function-
everything, in a sense, is impossible.
17
For the neurotic, the paternal
figure is the symbolic father. His authority has limits. He is as
impotent as he is strong. For the psychotic, on the other hand, the
symbolic father function has been foreclosed. He is not subject to the
rule of the symbolic father. While some feminists might applaud this
accomplishment, due to a desire to disband paternal authority and turn
the supposedly oppressive phallocentric power of masculine paternity
on its head, one does not get away from the paternal mandate so easily.
One always has a choice, of course, but this choice is, for the most part,
a forced one. This is the meaning of Lacan's warning "le pare ou pire."
One must choose the symbolic authority of the father or something
worse. Because he has foreclosed the Name-of-the-Father, he has
chosen "the worse," as it were, the psychotic's notion of paternity is tied
to the primal father-the obscene father of enjoyment-who functions
at the level of the super-ego and incites the subject to a boundless and,
therefore, unbearable enjoyment. This father has no limits; his authority
is unbounded and, as such, it is experienced as raw power.
Consequently, a psychotic's relations to his particular father are
typically characterized by a strong aggressivity. This father is more
concerned with his own enjoyment than he is with his role as the
disruptor of the imaginary mother-child relation. Thus, the child is
caught in a rivalrous imaginary relation with the primal father (who
also, it would seem, is unwilling to share the mother). Because the
primal father fails to delimit the mother's desire, the child is trapped in
her alienating presence.
Here we see a curious reversal of sorts. While it is initially the
17 In an early (1950) essay entitled "A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of
Psychoanalysis in Criminology," where he discusses the origin of humankind with law and
crime, Lacan inverts Nietzsche's claim that if God is dead, all is permitted, underscoring the
significance of paternal prohibition for subjective freedom. See JACQUES LACAN, A Theoretical
Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology, in ECRITS 125-49 (Paris:
Editions du Seuil 1966) (English translation published in THE JOURNAL FOR THE
PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY Vol. 1, No.2, at 13-25 (Fall 1996)). Lacan writes:
A modern human figure was thus revealed, which contrasted strangely with the
prophecies of late nineteenth-century thinkers, a figure that mocks both the illusions
nourished by the libertarians and the uneasiness inspired in the moralists by the
emancipation from religious beliefs and the weakening of traditional ties. To the lust
gleaming in the eye of the old Karmazov, when he questions his son-"God is dead,
thus all is permitted"--this "modem man," who dreams of the nihilistic suicide of
Dostoyevsky's hero or who attempts to blow into the Nietzschean windbag, replies
through all of his ills and all of his deeds: "God is dead; now nothing is permitted."
Id. at 15.
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CARDOZO LAW REVIEW
primal father who is the unbearable and unlimited agency that provokes
a kind of unbearable enjoyment, it is, ultimately, the mother who is the
source of alienation. Her presence is alienating, or in her unmediated
presence, the child becomes the object of her unlimited enjoyment. In
the Lacanian phrase, le d~sir de la mre-the desire of the mother-one
should not hesitate to read the genitive both ways. On the one hand, the
phrase refers to the child's relation, to his desire to be everything for his
mother. He has a primal desire for his mother-a desire of the
mother-since, in the symbiotic and, therefore, incestuous mother-child
relation, all is supposedly good. If this were the end of things, there
would be no egregious difficulty, and perhaps no psychosis. All we
would see is a lot of very content narcissists. This view of things, of
course, is only possible from the vantage point of being beyond the
mother, from the point of the symbolic and the distance of paternal
authority. In actuality, the narcissistic psychotic is not so content. He
suffers the alienating presence of the mother, le dsir de la more, the
excessive desire that is hers and that makes him her little object. The
consequences of foreclosure expose that very desire-the one that is on
the side of the mother. For if in psychosis and through the process of
foreclosure one chooses "the worse," whatever this is, the worse, it
turns around and makes a choice of its own, never allowing the child to
become a separate entity.
To be engulfed in the mother's unlimited jouissance essentially
means annihilation for the child. He has, in a manner of speaking, no
life of his own. If the father did not limit the maternal jouissance, if
castration were never imposed, there would be no subject to speak of.
Without the father's prohibition-without, that is, the authority of the
Name-of-the-Father (Nom du pkre)-there is no naming of the mother's
desire and the subsequent symbolization of desire. This is precisely
why the psychotic cannot, properly speaking, be considered a subject.
He is stranded in the imaginary field of alienation. The Name-of-the-
Father has been foreclosed, and, therefore, the mother's desire is neither
named nor limited. Separation has not taken place. Consequently, the
psychotic has no symbolic defense against the maternal flux of
jouissance which, in psychosis, is experienced as an unbearable
irruption of the real over his entire body.
Unlike the psychotic, the castrated subject develops his neurosis
according to the various misfires of separation. Separation, that is, goes
somewhat awry, but the subject, nonetheless, does go through it. This is
how castration is completed and the symbolic order is mandated. This
is significant for the difference between the neurotic subject and
psychotics simply because it is castration and the symbolic order which
serve to put a limit on the incestuous maternal jouissance-the order of
the real. When a child is never able to separate from the mother, when
2236
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the incestuous union, as it were, is never-ending, when transgression is
not even a possibility, the child will become psychotic. This is because
the symbolic does not function for him as a protection from the
unmediated real, from that impossible time before time of the maternal
jouissance. Thus, the psychotic must turn to the imaginary in order to
maintain any sense of separation from the real.
Attacking from the outside, the psychotic's experience of the real
is unbounded and unrelenting. Because he experiences the force of the
drives without the symbolic rewriting that is characteristic of the
neurotic (the anal, oral, and genital phase of fibidinal reorganization that
renders the drive more localized, contained, and bearable), he must erect
an imaginary support for his existence in the world. As far as psychosis
is concerned, this imaginary prop functions as a substitute for the
symbolic, offering some means of defense against the Other's unlimited
jouissance and the force of the drives. And, according to Lacan, the
symptoms-or, more correctly, the delusional behaviors-that the
psychotic displays are always a sign of the psychotic's attempt at
restitution-what Lacan calls the imaginary supplement-once his
imaginary support collapses. This collapse, of course, is precisely what
triggers the psychotic incident. For some reason, the imaginary support
that the psychotic has used to supplement the missing symbolic is
compromised and, thus, can no longer stand as a solid defense against
jouissance. Most often, and in his haste to create something out of
nothing, the psychotic will erect the delusional metaphor, which gives
him the means for restoring his imaginary scene. Typically, the
delusion takes the form of a highly idiosyncratic but very organized
account of the universe, allowing for some stable meaning of and reason
for the psychotic's existence.
No one can say for sure why the imaginary structure that the
psychotic has employed in his imitative relation to the world around
him fails. A psychotic always has the structure of psychosis, but it may
not be until the age of twenty or even thirty that he suffers a collapse of
the imaginary supplement that had served him and his "social relations"
for so long. Without the paternal function, the symbolic cannot be
restored for the psychotic. Thus, the imaginary is all he has to stand in
for the missing symbolic. Strangely enough, it is often some sort of
crisis of authority, of paternity, that triggers the collapse of the
imaginary for the psychotic, evoking the need for the delusional
compensation. In the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, the object of
Freud's most extensive case study on psychosis, the delusional Schreber
seems to have cracked under a particular crisis of paternal authority: He
suffers his psychotic break and erects his elaborate delusion (that he is
involved in a sexual relationship with God who has chosen him as his
feminine object with which to couple and repopulate the earth) just as
2137
CARDOZO LA W REVIEW
he is appointed to be presiding judge for the Dresden Superior Court.
18
Schreber's "break" also seems to revolve around the question of his
sexuality. According to Grigg, "his entire literary output [which
chronicles his delusional restoration] revolves around two connected,
fundamental issues which he is unable to resolve: the question of the
father and the question of his own sexual identity."'
9
Regardless of the
reason for its appearance, once the psychotic break shatters the
psychotic's imaginary world, he must instantiate a new imaginary
support to ward off the unbearable jouissance. Thus, while Schreber's
account of his relations with God are entirely delusional, they do allow
him to quilt some meaning onto his otherwise terrifying experiences.
While it may not do much for his social relations with his fellow beings,
the psychotic's imaginary delusion essentially functions to help delimit
the flux of jouissance that has invaded him from without. If nothing
else, this gives him some sort of basis for being in the world.
Immersed in the real, then, the psychotic must deploy an imaginary
rather than a symbolic support in his attempt to contain jouissance.
While this is clearly the situation for Schreber, whose delusional
cosmology shows us his "condition," this may be more difficult to
detect in the case of psychotics who are functioning normally in the
world, or at least who appear, from all casual observance, to be
unencumbered by any sort of delusional worldview. This is often the
case with the psychotic criminal, who often appears to be the most
normal of friendly neighbors up until the point that the police come
knocking at his door. No one, for example, could believe that the
intelligent and well-mannered Theodore Bundy could be the same
sadistic murderer who killed dozens of women. In fact, Ann Rule, who
knew Bundy from work and who heard on the television news that a
man matching his description and driving a tan Volkswagen Beetle (just
like the one Bundy drove) was wanted for questioning in a series of
murders and disappearances in the area, thought to herself, "Gee, that
guy looks just like Ted. What a strange coincidence.
'20
It never
entered her head that the psychotic Bundy was the guy on the news
because he seemed like such a nice young man. That he was a sadistic
serial murderer was not within the range of possible explanations. Now,
18 See DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER, MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS (Ida Macalpine &
Richard A. Hunter eds. & trans., 1955); see also 12 SIGMUND FREUD, Psycho-Analytic Notes on
an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia, in THE STANDARD EDITION OF THE
COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD 9 (James Strachey & Anna Freud
trans., 1958) (1911).
19 Grigg, supra note I1, at 56.
20 Ann Rule worked with Ted Bundy in the Seattle area at a crisis hotline. After the story
broke about Bundy and he was convicted for his crimes, Rule wrote her first "True Crime" book,
The Stranger Beside Me (1980). She is now a well-known author and has written several
subsequent "True Crime" books.
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if Bundy had been the delusional raving madman that many psychotics
often become, this woman would have had no trouble making the
connection between the man on the television news and her colleague,
Ted Bundy. As far as Bundy is concerned, it seems that he was
suffering from some sort of psychotic break but had not yet elaborated
the kind of delusional support that Schreber invented. The radical
incongruity of his murderous activity with his other social activities
suggests some underlying turmoil. Bundy himself claimed that a
"malignant entity" had taken over his mind, which is reminiscent of the
threatening external agency (the return of the father in the real) that the
psychotic suffers. While it is not always entirely clear that Bundy's
imaginary support failed and that he was indeed subject to an invasion
of something otherworldly, his Janus-faced existence leads us to wonder
how it is that a psychotic can continue to appear to function normally in
the world but have suffered the devastating psychotic break that
demands some sort of emergency-and, therefore, often highly
idiosyncratic-imaginary restoration.
Perhaps it would help us somewhat at this point to shift gears and
turn our attention to another psychotic serial killer who has something
more in common with Schreber: An autobiography that outlines the
delusional imaginary restoration. Thus, I would like now to turn to the
case of the psychotic Russian serial murderer, Andrei Chikatilo,
otherwise known as The Butcher of Rostov. Although he was clearly
absorbed in delusional psychotic activity for some time-between 1978
and 1990, Chikatilo raped and murdered fifty-three people as part of a
"partisan ritual" he performed-he
seemed like a normal guy to his
neighbors and family. In fact, up until the time he was arrested and
tried for the murders, Chikatilo showed no overt psychological distress.
He was dismissed from a teaching post for exposing himself to young
children, but pedophiles are a dime a dozen in boarding schools where
young children are easily accessible. No one saw this activity as setting
him apart; no one considered that his actions indicated that he was
living in a world of his own. In fact, his behavior was perceived as so
benign (just a confused man, but not a monster) that it never caused him
to lose his Communist Party membership. And so when he was brought
in for questioning in 1978 after his first murder (his house was
connected to the slaying), the investigators did not find anything
alarming about him. He was, in fact, perceived as a rather boring,
diminutive man who probably could not commit such a crime. But,
while he did not appear out of touch, something must have been going
on, for his murders all took on the character of a delusion as he danced
like a Partisan around the body, engaging in strange rituals and
meaningless violence. During his eventual arrest and interrogation, in
fact, Chikatilo betrayed the delusional character of his psychosis that
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CARDOZO LA W REVIEW
must have been plaguing him all along. When asked if he kept track of
his victims, Chikatilo replied "I considered them to be enemy aircraft I
had shot down.
'21
When it comes to propping up the symbolic in the wake of the
shattered imaginary support, it seems that there is more to the equation
than just a delusion. We see that Schreber had to go all the way with his
imaginary restitution and developed an elaborate hallucination that
would make it quite clear to those around him that he was delusional.
But what about Chikatilo? He was obviously suffering from some
delusional fantasies, but they never seemed to impede his relations with
others. Thus, we might simply assert that a psychotic's delusions are
simply a matter of degree or intensity. This does not, however, help us
with the question of the difference. Why are some delusions more
severe and isolating than others? Why is it that some "full blown"
psychotics (such as Schreber) appear crazier to the world around them
than others? The answer, it seems, lies not in the strength of the
particular personality or the level of tolerance toward the invading
jouissance each psychotic has, but rather in the form of suppletion that
stands in for what is missing at the level of the symbolic. The most well
known, which Lacan addresses at length both in Seminar III, The
Psychoses and in his Ecrit On a Question Preliminary to Any possible
Treatment of Psychosis, is the delusional metaphor.
22
This is the
metaphor that stands in for the missing paternal metaphor and is also
what conditions the psychotic's delusional system. According to
Russell Grigg, Lacan's later work with psychosis, in which he considers
the literary productions of James Joyce, provides for another form, a
kind of symbolic suppletion (despite the air of paradox, Grigg tells
us).
23
In Seminar XXIII, Le Sinthome, Lacan considers how Joyce was a
sort of prepsychotic who used his literary work to prevent the onset of a
psychotic break.
24
This is also the case for John Nash, a diagnosed
psychotic who managed to keep his demons at bay through his work in
mathematics. Nash was so successful at averting the psychotic break, in
fact, that he was able to make a number of significant social
contributions and even won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics. Grigg
also mentions a third form of suppletion which Lacan borrowed from
Helen Deutsch's work on prepsychosis, or what she calls the "as if'
phenomena. "The case of Deutsch's is a good example of imaginary
21 MIKHAIL KRIVICH & OL'GERT OL'GIN, COMRADE CHIKATILO: THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
OF RUSSIA'S NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER 213 (Sandi Gelles-Cole ed. & Todd P. Bludeau trans.,
1993).
22 See LACAN, BOOK I1, supra note 13; JACQUES LACAN, On a Question Preliminary to Any
Possible Treatment of Psychosis, in ECRITS: A SELECTION (Alan Sheridan trans., 1977).
23 See Grigg, supra note I1, at 63.
24 See Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire XXIII, Le sinthome (1975-76), text established by
Jacques-Alain Miller, Ornicar? 6, 3-20 (1976).
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suppletion," Grigg writes, "where the support derived from an
identification with the other is sufficient to compensate for the absence
of the signifier.
'25
It is through relations with others that the psychotic is able to
appear normal, to avert the psychotic break. In fact, these
identifications can be so strong, and the ego can be so entrenched in
such identification, that we see a kind of confusion between self and
other. This is superbly represented in Patrica Highsmith's novel, The
Talented Mr. Ripley, in which a young psychotic man first identifies
with and then murders his best friend in'order to completely usurp the
place his demented identification has created.
26
Given such a strong
identification with and even dependence on others, is it any surprise that
the psychotic turns toward an other once violence becomes a strategy
for propping up the missing symbolic? Since the psychotic is not
subject to the dialectic of desire or symbolic relations, it would seem, on
the one hand, that he would never attack an other, simply because the
Other does not exist for him. But this is clearly not the case for the
psychotic. We should keep in mind that it is, in fact, the neurotic for
whom the Other does not exist. It functions. This is the meaning of
Lacan's famous dictum: "There is no Other of the Other." The neurotic
is barred access to the Other, the Other is lacking, and there is no
agency beyond it which will guarantee its status. This is precisely how
the symbolic-the field of the Other-functions for the neurotic. For
the psychotic, on the other hand, the Other-that threatening external
agency-is not lacking. In psychosis, then, but especially with
paranoia, the point is not that there is no Other of the Other, but that
there is, indeed, an Other of the Other.
27
If nothing else, this is one way
to account for the psychotic's certainty. Here we see the very issue that
is at the source of his misery: The Other is not barred and can, therefore,
use the psychotic as the object of its enjoyment. With paranoia, for
example, the psychotic locates jouissance in the Other rather than in his
own body. (This is not the case in schizophrenia, where enjoyment is
located in the body and accompanied by somatic hallucinations.)
28
The
Other's jouissance is the threatening external agency that invades the
psychotic from outside. Aliens probe the psychotic's mind because they
25 Grigg, supra note 11, at 63.
26 See PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1992).
27 1 assert here that there is an Other of the Other rather than insist that the Other is lacking in
psychosis because I believe this is one way to accommodate Jacques-Alain Miller's claim that, in
psychosis, the Other is not necessarily lacking. See JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER, The Symptom and
the Body Event, 19 LACANIAN INK 4-47 (Barbara P. Fulks trans., 2001). According to Miller,
Schreber sees plenty that is lacking in the Other that inhabits him; this is shown by his continual
complaining about the God who is clearly less than everything for Schreber.
28 See Lacan, supra note 24 (elaborating on the difference between paranoia and
schizophrenia).
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want to use him for technological advances. And the CIA follows the
psychotic because he knows something that they want to know. The
paranoid psychotic thinks the Other is using him for its own enjoyment,
as a kind of complement, which is behind the kind of persecutory
suspicion that accompanies paranoia. This is the case with Schreber
(who saw himself as God's sexual partner) and it also appears to be the
case with Chikatilo, though he never betrayed his feeling of paranoia
and persecution until after his arrest.
Focusing on the violent and criminal nature of the act, I would like
now to consider Chikatilo's criminal actions in relation to the particular
way he incorporates the objet a, that impossible remainder of the lost
enjoyment orjouissance that the subject has given up as his price for
entry into the symbolic. When we speak of the objet a, we often think
of that missing piece of the Other, since, as Lacan says, the a is
correlate to that in you which is more than you.
29
But for the psychotic,
as we have said, the Other is not barred. There is no missing dimension
or lack and so, properly speaking, there would be no objet a. Another
way to point this out would be to say that there is no remainder of a lost
enjoyment for the psychotic; instead, there is the unbearable presence of
the Other's boundless jouissance. How is it, then, that Chikatilo came
to be the object of such a force?
Through the autobiography that he wrote after his arrest, Chikatilo
tells us how he found himself unable to separate from the noxious and
cannibalistic maternal Thing:
According to the stories my mother told I was born October 16,
1936, in the village of Yablochnoye. My parents were hungry and I,
too, went hungry until I was twelve, when I ate bread for the first
time in my life. My father and mother almost died from hunger in
1933-34. In 1933, they lost their older son, my brother Stepan, who
was kidnapped by desperately starving people and eaten.
30
Because of the supposed cannibalism that took away his brother,
Chikatilo also believed that he had been violated even before he was
born. Since Chikatilo sees the disappearance of his brother from the
family scene-a disappearance that meant the loss of a final protector-
as a violation against himself, we can surmise that the true violation lies
in his mother's imposition of an unlimited desire, in the fact that he was
never adequately protected from this desire. Chikatilo's father
disappeared when he was young, thus offering no protection against the
maternal jouissance, and the brother who should otherwise have
29 See LACAN, supra note 7, at 263-76.
30 KRIVICH & OL'GIN, supra note 21, at 141 (quoting ANDREI CHIKATILO, A BIOGRAPHY OF
THE DEFENDANT A.R. CHIKATILO, CITIZEN OF THE USSR, VICTIM OF FAMINE AND
CANNIBALISM IN 1933 AND 1947, STALINIST REPRESSIONS, STAGNATION, AND THE CRISIS OF
PERESTROIKA (unpublished autobiography)).
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"protected" him from the incestuous relation with the cannibalistic and
devouring mother was, oddly enough, cannibalized. While the brother
never existed in actuality, he does exist in Chikatilo's narrative and, in
fact, seems to occupy a rather important place in his personal
genealogy. This sort of delusional genealogy signals the dominance of
the foreclosed paternal function.
3
' It is interesting to note that,
according to Chikatilo, this is his mother's story; it is, therefore, her
delusion, or, rather, is a delusion that originates with her. In order to
keep the young Andrei at her side, the helpless object of her annihilating
desire, his mother tells him this story so that he will be afraid to leave
her. Thus, the young Chikatilo will be spared the signifier's castrating
cut, he will be free of the authority of the Name-of-the-Father, but he
will, therefore, be subject to something far worse: an unrelenting,
unlimited maternal presence.
Now, rather than embarking on a wild psychoanalysis and making
all manner of claims about Chikatilo's dysfunctional family and its
place of prominence in his psychotic structure, it is important to note
that a single-parent family does not necessarily lead to a psychosis.
Additionally, it is not necessarily the case that a weak or an absent
father will lead to the foreclosure of the paternal function, or that a
suffocating mother will engender a psychotic child. What matters is the
way that paternal authority functions in the family circle. While an
actual flesh and blood father may be absent (as in Chikatilo's case), a
mother can still carve out a symbolic space by referring to an agency of
authority beyond herself as the locus of law and prohibition. Lacan
refers to this as A-father: "It is enough that this A-father should be
situated in a third position in some relation based on the imaginary dyad
... that interests the subject in the field of the eroticized aggression that
it induces." We must, as Lacan says, "concern ourselves not only with
the way in which the mother accommodates herself to the person of the
father, but also with the way she takes his speech, the word (mot), let us
say, of his authority, in other words, of the palace that she reserves for
the Name-of-the-Father in the promulgation of the law."
' 32
It is,
31 Because of a fundamental gap in their notion of paternity, many psychotics create father
figures who are somehow idealized or exceptional. An acquaintance of mine, who works as a
residential supervisor for a schizophrenic man, reports precisely the same kind of imaginary
genealogy. While this client of hers is quite delusional and full of all kinds of unbelievable
stories, one day his narrative seemed to change. It appeared that, finally, there was some sort of
paternal metaphor threading through his delusions and anchoring his language, leading others to
believe that either the craziness was just a ruse or his medication was finally meeting its
expectations. When asked to elaborate on the status of this newly fomented paternal figure, he
came up with a whole family tree, complete with a strong patrilineal family structure. What was
significant about this intricate system of kinship relations (and what ultimately betrayed his
psychotic structure) was the fact that the father of all the other fathers-the ultimate Urvater-
was, according to his account, manufactured in a laboratory by some sort of alien life form.
32 LACAN, supra note 22, at 217-18.
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therefore, in the discourse of the mother that the paternal function is
instantiated. This is why it is significant to consider what Chikatilo says
his mother said concerning paternity and protection. If, according to the
stories she told and the figure of paternal authority she established, the
father was unable to protect young Stepan (and then, presumably, also
young Andrei), then how convincing is his authority? Furthermore, if
young Stepan, who was to stand in the role of "father" in the absence of
the real thing, was so easily annihilated and cannibalized, then how
adequate is a father when it comes to keeping a mother from devouring
her child? These are the kinds of childhood impressions that cause the
foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and make separation from
maternaljouissance an impossibility.
Because he was never really able to separate from the maternal
desire, because no "protector"-symbolic or actual-was functioning as
the prohibitive, castrating element in the family triangle, Chikatilo was
alienated in the imaginary dyadic relation with the first Other-the
mother. Such alienation, according to Lacan, is always cause for great
anxiety:
What provokes anxiety? Contrary to what people say, it is neither
the rhythm nor the alternation of the mother's presence-absence.
What proves this is that the child indulges in repeating presence-
absence games: security of presence is found in the possibility of
absence. What is most anxiety-producing for the child is when the
relationship through which he comes to be-on the basis of lack
which makes him desire-is most perturbed: when there is no
possibility of lack, when his mother is constantly on his back.
33
Chikatilo suffers an anxiety-provoking, too-proximate relation to the
mother. He cannot get her off his back. Consequently, Chikatilo would
suffer unremitting attacks of the maternal jouissance. And when it got
to be too much to bear, he would need to turn to an imaginary defensive
restitution. In his case this defense would take the form of a radically
violent and obscene string of murders.
After every one of his murders, the psychotic Chikatilo mutilated
the corpses, either by removing their genitals or cutting off parts of their
bodies, most commonly the breasts, nipples, tongue, and lips. He
almost always pierced the eyes of his corpse victims with a knife or
blindfolded them. Chikatilo was also suspected of cannibalizing his
corpses. He frequently bit off body parts (nipples, tongues), and
genitalia were often missing from the crime scenes. While Chikatilo
admitted to putting body parts into his mouth, he always denied actually
consuming them. He was known, however, to occasionally carry a
frying pan with him on his murderous rampages, and the remains of
33 See Jacques Lacan, Le Sdminaire X, L'angoisse (Dec. 5, 1962) (unpublished seminar
paper).
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small fires were sometimes found next to his victims' bodies.
Following Lacan's theory of psychosis, let us maintain that this
behavior is not an example of a "psychotic break," but, rather, that it is
an attempt at an imaginary suppletion. We see this in the very crimes
themselves: Chikatilo's transgressions far exceed the regular economy
of murder. The post-mortem mutilations tell us at least this much.
Although most of the biographical accounts maintain that Chikatilo
killed his victims as a means to revenge himself on others for his sexual
impotence,
34
this clearly does not explain why he did so much violence
to their dead bodies or why he attempted to devour something of his
victim once the murder was accomplished.
35
Given the specificity of
the attacks on the body as well as the cannibalistic incorporation, there
was much more to these crimes than the eradication of a human being.
Chikatilo was clearly after something else: With his vicious attacks on
the corpse, he was trying to eradicate the objet a, that part of the body
that is still eroticized, "alive." When the body is overwritten with
signifiers and becomes a dead entity, the objet a remains as those zones
or places on the body where libido maintains its vitality.
In the imaginary space of the delusional metaphor, Chikatilo sees
the corpse as still alive, for the objet a persists even after death,
becoming a locus of libido that must be annihilated. Thus, the a
exposes the paternal failure and evokes an unbearable reminder of the
outlaw libido that is embodied in the primal father. According to
Lacan, "a father only has a right to respect, if not love, if the said love,
the said respect is-you won't believe your ears-perversely orientated,
that is to say, come of a woman, an objet a who causes his desire.
' 36
The objet a, then, is at the foundation of a father's symbolic status and
is also the cause of the symbolic subject of the signifier:
If it knows anything, it is only by being itself a subject caused by an
object-which is not what it knows, that is what it imagines it
knows. The object which causes it is not the other of knowledge.
The object crosses this other through. The other is thus the Other,
which I write with a capital 0.
37
The objet a crosses the imaginary other through, bars the Other. While
34 According to his own account, Chikatilo suffered a systematic feminization and, as result,
was sexually impotent. As far as the significance of his impotence is concerned, Bruce Fink
writes that "[a]n interesting facet of psychosis in men is the feminization that often occurs." See
FINK, supra note 8, at 98.
35 Richard Lourie argues that Chikatilo murdered his victims after they mocked him for being
unable to perform sexually. See RICHARD LOURIE, HUNTING THE DEVIL (1993). Mikhail
Krivich and Ol'gert Ol'gin also claim that Chikatilo's impotence was what provoked the attacks.
See KRIVICH & OL'GIN, supra note 21, at 178.
36 See JACQUES LACAN, Seminar of 21 January 1975, in FEMININE SEXUALITY: JACQUES
LACAN AND THE tCOLE FREUDIENNE 162, 167 (Juliet Mitchell & Jacqueline Rose eds. &
Jacqueline Rose trans., 1982).
37 Id. at 164.
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it is this object-the object-cause of desire-that precipitates castration
and the subsequent ordering of the drives, this reorganization, of course,
does not take place for a psychotic such as Chikatilo. So, while the
object-cause may not function for the psychotic who is not subject to
the dialectic of desire, it does persist as a particular provocation; it
persists as that which does not function, which does not introduce any
lack in the Other.
Such provocation is precisely what Chikatilo finds intolerable and
is also why he attempts to kill the corpse even after the human being is
dead. As the living dead, the corpse embodies something of the primal
life substance, the maternal jouissance. Though his sexually motivated
murder is seemingly intended to bring some relief from the relentless
attack of jouissance he suffers, the excremental remainder of his
crime-the corpse-actually becomes another object that is, as Lacan
says, elevated "to the dignity of the Thing."
38
Rather than offering a
means of defense, the corpse is transubstantiated into the material
embodiment of this asphyxiating maternal presence; the unbearable
presence of the corpse materializes the objet a, that impossible
remainder of the lost enjoyment or jouissance. Like the objet a, the
corpse materializes the real. And this is what Chikatilo is after in his
act: he is attempting to eradicate the attack of the real, to direct the force
of the drives. As he attacks the corpse, then, Chikatilo essentially
endeavors to launch an assault on the maternal jouissance and,
consequently, to impose a limit on it. Paradoxically enough, Chikatilo's
psychotic attempt to delimit this jouissance is his own twisted way of
attempting to instantiate the law. It is, therefore, precisely in his
passage to the act that the psychotic appears similar to the pervert: he
seems to be attempting to bring the paternal function into existence, or
become a law unto himself. With his violent attack, Chikatilo appears
to be throwing himself into the process of separation. Unfortunately,
however, he is stuck in the imaginary relation, and his act will never
overcome the fact that it is necessarily conditioned by-and therefore
limited to-his delusional metaphor. Only the paternal metaphor can
name and delimit the mother's desire. But because he has foreclosed
the "Name-of-the-Father, Chikatilo will never be able to move beyond
the alienation of the dyadic maternal relation.
Chikatilo will choose the corpse as the privileged site of his
imaginary restoration. And it is, in particular, through his attack on the
body of the corpse that he will attempt to delimit the maternal
jouissance, to impose a kind of paternal function, a law of his own.
Incidentally, Chikatilo was very interested in the law. In fact, he
38 In SEMINAR VII, Lacan writes that "the most general formula that I can give you of
sublimation is the following: it raises an object-and I don't mind the suggestion of a play on
words in the term I use-to the dignity of the Thing." See LACAN, supra note 5, at 112.
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applied to the Department of Law at Moscow State University, claiming
that he passed all the pre-admission examinations but was ultimately
turned down because of his repressed, political dissident father. For
Chikatilo, it seems, the father can only get in the way of the law. And
since Chikatilo is unable to erect the law of the symbolic father, he will
have to be content with the primal father. This is why he used the most
unlawful of means in his attempt to construct an imaginary barrier
against the real. The primal father, however, has no limits and his
authority is unbounded. In this sense, the primal father is correlate to
the obscene and asphyxiating mother, whose enjoyment is also without
bounds. In order to highlight his obscene nature, Slavoj Zi~ek calls him
the anal father:
psychoanalysis subverts the usual opposition between paternal and
the maternal and brings out what has to be repressed, excluded, in
order to establish this opposition. It brings out the reverse of the
father, the "anal father" who lurks behind the Name-of-the-Father
qua bearer of the symbolic Law. This "anal father" is the third
element that disturbs the familiar narrative of the gradual prevalence
of the paternal over the maternal in history as well as in the subject's
ontogenesis, the narrative that even Freud seems to follow in his
Moses and Monotheism, as least upon a superficial reading of it. The
mad "anal father" is the nauseating debauchee, threatening yet
ridiculously impotent, who does not fit into the system of the
"complementary
relationship between yin and yang" insofar as he
short-circuits it, for he is the father who still carries the mark of the
mother's
desire.
39
Both the maternal Thing and the anal/primal father are characterized by
the lack of any lack. Thus, they both evoke the real dimension of the
presymbolic partial object. Nothing is missing in them, and so they
impose on the psychotic their asphyxiating presence, which is what is at
the heart of Chikatilo's impotence.
According to Richard Lourie, Chikatilo believed that nature had
castrated him at birth, and that this is the reason for his sexual
ineptitude. Naturally, this is not exactly a properly psychoanalytic
characterization of castration, which is more metaphorical than literal.
But, as far as the economy of his murders is concerned, it would make
more sense to say that Chikatilo was, in fact, never castrated, or that
Chikatilo never completed alienation/separation in the normal way.
Nothing is permitted without paternal prohibition, and this is precisely
why Chikatilo was impotent. According to Lourie:
fate had violated him even before birth. During the great Ukrainian
39 Slavoj Zi ek, Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears, 58 OCTOBER 56
(1991). Here 7i~ek tells us that, "[w]hile what we are calling the 'anal father' is customarily
referred to as the 'primal father', our term is meant to highlight the obscene nature of the father
qua presymbolic 'partial object'." Id. at 54.
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famine of the early thirties, his older brother, Stepan, was abducted
and cannibalized. It was not a unique event for those times, but that
didn't take the pain and horror out of it for Chikatilo's mother, who
wept bitterly, copiously, every time she told him the story, which
was often. And Stepan was the older brother who would have
defended him against the world and people. But he had no one to
defend him now, least of all himself, for Chikatilo always felt
himself the most defenseless of men. He could not rise to an insult
any more than he could to a woman.
40
Here we see, once again, how the mother's discourse does not
adequately quilt the father's authority and the consequent feminization
of the male child. In his early work on psychosis in Seminar 1II,
Lacan's notion of feminization in psychosis is related to a rivalrous
father who never allows his son to become a man (replete with all the
symbolic authority that this connotes). Thus, it seems that an actual
father is the cause of the psychosis. This "less of a man" theory takes
the gender divide as complementary for granted, however, (less of a
man = more of a woman) and forges a theory of psychosis that is not all
that different from Freud's argument that psychosis betrays a latent
homosexuality, where one, presumably, is also less than a man. Here
we see the significance of Schreber's systematic feminization at the
hands of God, who, according to the delusion, turned Schreber into a
woman in order to copulate with him. Freud sees this as a thinly veiled
homosexual fantasy: Schreber wants to make love to a man but cannot
admit this to himself, so he invents the bizarre cosmology in which he
becomes God's concubine. According to Grigg:
[I]n contrast to Freud, and also, in part, to his own earlier views,
Lacan sees the foreclosure of castration and the homosexual
identification as effects and not causes of psychosis. In fact, he
claims that Schreber's symptoms are not really homosexual at all and
that it would be more accurate to call them transsexual. These
transsexual and other phenomena, for which Lacan will later coin the
phrase "push towards woman" (pousse 6 la femme), are a result of
the initial foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the
corresponding lack in the imaginary of phallic meaning.
41
Lacan would develop the structural reasons for foreclosure beyond
Freud, but it would not be until Seminars XVIII-XXI that he would
seriously revise his notion of femininity. It is this very revision, I
believe, that allows him to come to a more linguistically nuanced notion
of psychosis in his Seminar XXIII, Le sinthome. Suffice it to say, for
our purposes here, that if Chikatilo's impotence-the supposed reason
for his attacks-is structurally and functionally related to foreclosure,
40 LOURIE, supra note 35, at 6-7.
41 Grigg, supra note II, at 55.
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then the argument that he is attempting to revenge himself on others for
his sexual inadequacy would also mean that his attacks are directed
toward the crisis that foreclosure presents in his life: That is, the
noxious enjoyment of the anal father and the maternal Thing.
According to Zi~ek, it is the surplus enjoyment of the anal/primal
father that gets in the way of the sexual act:
This surplus represents what the subject must renounce, sacrifice
even-the part in himself that the subject must murder in order to
start to live as a "normal" member of the community. The crucial
point here is therefore that this "anal father" hinders the sexual
relation-its stumbling block is not the "repressive" agency of the
symbolic Law, but on the contrary, the excessive "sprout of
enjoyment" materialized in the obscene figure of the "anal father."
42
In the particular case of Chikatilo, it would seem that, in the failure of
the sexual relation, something of this excessive and obscene enjoyment,
of the unlimited maternal jouissance, appears and persists. Perhaps his
impotence, then, is a means to avoid the sexual relation since his
sexuality (like Schreber's) leaves him "confronted by an obscure
enigma at the level of the jouissance of the Other.
43
According to Renata Salecl, Chikatilo targets this enigma at the
level of the objet a. Since this object is all too present in reality for the
psychotic, it embodies an ever present, inescapable gaze. This, Salecl
argues, is the unrelenting gaze of socialism.
44
And it is this gaze,
insofar as it is lacking nothing, that "produced a psychotic state which
in a specific way "forced" him to commit his crimes.
' 45
It is this same
gaze that, according to Salecl, also interrupted Chikatilo's libidinal
economy:
Chikatilo's impotence can be seen as a reaction to this total visibility.
If the Other "sees everything," enjoyment is out of reach for the
subject insofar as enjoyment is only possible in the holes and gaps of
the Other; i.e. where the Other (the gaze of social control) cannot
reach the subject. When Chikatilo committed his murders he was
not afraid of being caught, because it was precisely through these
acts of killing that he intended to escape the big Other.
46
Chikatilo's assault on the eyes of his victims, then, was an attempt to
escape what Salecl calls the gaze of the big Other.
Chikatilo cannot escape this gaze as he is unable to maintain
42 Zi~ek, supra note 39, at 54.
43 Grigg, supra note 11, at 55. This enigma manifests an assault of its own. According to
Grigg, "Schreber's virility itself is attacked by the return in the real of the castration that is
foreclosed from the symbolic." Id. at 68. This may well be the case with Chikatilo as well.
44 In this sense, Josef Stalin, the father of modern socialism, would be correlate to the
obscene primal father, the exception who enjoys without limit.
45 RENATA SALECL, THE SPOILS OF FREEDOM: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM AFTER THE
FALL OF SOCIALISM 107 (1994).
46 Id. at 108.
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normal sexual relations with women. According to his own wife, he
was essentially impotent during their entire twenty-seven years of
marriage: He could not consummate the marriage on their wedding
night and he showed absolutely no sexual interest in her.
47
Chikatilo
tells us that it is only through an imitation of the sexual act, played out
as he murdered his victims, that he is able to achieve an orgasm. While
Chikatilo is said to have raped his victims, he actually was only able to
penetrate them with his knife. The police investigators had already
"profiled" the murderer as an impotent male long before the Chikatilo's
arrest. Mikhail Krivich and Ol'gert Ol'gin write, "Experts found marks
on the bodies of victims that showed that the murderer, without
removing his knife, would rain down dozens of blows in one place as if
imitating the movements of intercourse. Sexual pathologists view this
as a kind of ritual masturbation.
'48
Thus, we can see that Chikatilo's
murders were never about sex, at least not about performing the sexual
act in any kind of functional way. He admits this himself as he
confesses to the murder of a seventeen-year-old victim:
It was clear that she would agree to anything. I should have loved
this young girl and thanked her for bringing pleasure to an old man.
But I obviously didn't require sexual pleasure from the caresses of a
young girl. Someone else, some kind of beast, was living within me.
I began to choke her. I stuffed earth into her mouth and hit her with
my fists. After I ejaculated, I pushed my sperm into her vagina, and
I bit off a nipple.
49
Chikatilo only bothers to impose the sexual dimension of his crime after
the murder is already over because the object persists, provoking him to
further action against it. Thus, the sexual attacks are always on the
corpse because it is in this particular object that he finds some
unbearable jouissance. According to Lacan, "the petit a could be said
to take a number of forms, with the qualification that in itself it has no
form. The common factor of a is that of being bound to the orifices of
the body.
' 50
Breast, eyes, mouth, these are the partial objects that
psychoanalysis calls the objet a. And this is what Chikatilo is after in
his post-mortem attacks.
It would seem, then, that his attack on the partial object is an attack
on the obscene anal father; not the dead symbolic father, but the father
who is still alive, whose murder only makes him all the more vital since
47 According to Krivich and Ol'gin, who had access to all the court and police documents, the
following passage was taken from the testimony of Chikatilo's wife, Feodosya Semyovna: "We
never had any intimate relations before we were married. From our very first night together, I
sensed that he was sexually impotent. He could not consummate the sexual act without my help."
KRIVICH & OL'GIN, supra note 2 1, at 159.
48 Id. at 194.
49 Id. at 185 (citing unpublished autobiography).
50 See LACAN, supra note 36, at 164.
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he escapes any symbolic function and enjoys the status of the exception
or the exceptional one. Here we see how the corpse, more alive than
life itself, is correlate to the primal father and the obscene, unlimited
enjoyment that he materializes. In his attacks on the eyes, tongues, and
genitals of his victims, Chikatilo attempts to perform that necessary
murder Freud cites as the constituting act of man: The murder of the
primal father as obscene sprout of enjoyment.
5
'
In the excessive economy of his serial murders, Chikatilo targets
the object that should have been precluded in reality-the objet a. As
he attempts to exclude the unbearable object, however, Chikatilo will
only have an imaginary strategy at his disposal. One might say
Chikatilo is attempting an act-he is attempting to infuse jouissance
with meaning-not through a delusional metaphor but by confronting
the void of the object and attempting to somehow sublimate the drive.
He cannot, however, elide his psychotic structure or the alienating hold
of the imaginary. This explains why his attempts to kill the object
ultimately disintegrate into an imaginary, delusional paranoia once he
no longer has the strategy of the post-mortem attacks at his disposal.
The emptiness of the object reemerges to haunt Chikatilo in prison
when he no longer has the defense of his murderous suppletion. Thus,
we might suggest that, in the same way that Thomas De Quincy argues
that murder is one of the fine arts,
52
Chikatilo's murderous activity-his
criminal acting out-functions as a kind of sublimation. According to
Lacan's well-known definition of sublimation, the object is elevated to
the dignity of the Thing. For Chikatilo, then, the sublimatory dimension
of his criminal behavior functions as a means of both producing and
organizing enjoyment. It is a means for diverting the drive. This might
explain how Chikatilo was able to avoid lapsing into a state of overt
delusion for twelve years, committing murders and mutilating corpses,
but not betraying any outward appearance of his inner turmoil until his
imprisonment when the full dramatic manifestation of his psychosis
exposed itself. However, according to the usual understanding,
sublimation functions in service to the symbolic order, for it offers a
socially recognizable means of libidinal expression as it diverts the
drive. While Chikatilo's murders may not be socially acceptable, they
are most certainly socially recognizable (at least after Perestroika).
They are a kind of demented call, cautioning us to heed the threat of the
Other, and it is perhaps this very dimension of his crimes that give them
51 See 12 SIGMUND FREUD, Totem and Taboo, in THE STANDARD EDITION OF THE
COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD, supra note 18, at 1-161 (discussing
the murder of the primal father as the constituting moment of culture and civilization). Here we
see, on the phylogenetic level, the advent of the symbolic which, on the ontogenetic level,
inaugurates the subject of the signifier.
52 See 13 THOMAS DE QUINCEY, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, in THE
COLLECTED WRITINGS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY 9-124 (David Masson ed., 1890).
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their social significance.
After his arrest, Chikatilo degenerates from what appeared to all
observers to be a normal man with a normal existence to a raging
lunatic. While some suggest that he was simply feigning insanity to
avoid a death sentence, it seems one could just as readily suggest that,
without the outlet of his murderous rampages, without a kind of a-
symbolic (or solipsistic) sublimation that helped him to direct the drive
and contain jouissance, Chikatilo was forced to invent a new imaginary
restoration. This, I would argue, is precisely what is behind his
autobiography, which was written while he was in prison and during his
trial. While he begins with an account of his childhood and family
background, Chikatilo's narrative ultimately disintegrates into a long,
paranoid tirade: "My head is killing me all the time .... Dizzy spells,
nightmares .... Rats are following me . . . In the cell .... I'm being
poisoned by radiation.
' 53
In the end, Chikatilo exhibits a strong
paranoia, accusing his jailers of attacking him with rays and claiming
that he is a woman about to give birth.. In the throes of his psychotic
misery and along with his paranoid delusions, Chikatilo's structural
feminization has taken him from impotence to a full identification with
a feminine object. As a platform for expressing his delusions, his
autobiography reads much like Schreber's paranoid rant in that it offers
him the means for establishing a delusional metaphor in place of the
paternal metaphor. But the paranoid delusion also offers a warning: the
noxious Other is out there. Despite its insensibility, this is the message
we can incur from the paranoid psychotic.
Both Chikatilo's and Schreber's paranoia, reflected in and as the
writing of their respective autobiographies, is merely a response to the
impossible object; it is an attempt to acquire some sort of consistency,
to delimit the real. Chikatilo turns to the writing of his autobiographical
narrative in order to, once again, lend some stability to the imaginary
restoration of the missing symbolic. According to Fink, writing has the
potential to fix or freeze meaning for the psychotic, whereas speech "is
dangerous because meanings become slippery."
54
This is how the
Lacanian sinthome functions, as well, Luke Thurston argues, where a
new or revised notion of the symptom in the topological formation of
the Borromean Knot (sinthome) stands in for the Name-of-the-Father.
55
In Seminar XXIII, Le sinthome, Lacan turns to the question of writing
and psychosis through an analysis of the literary productions of James
Joyce. In his analysis, he comes to see Joyce's writing as a suppletion
of the missing symbolic by "reconstituting the knot as well as the place
53 KRIVICH & OL'GIN, supra note 21, at 39
54 See FINK, supra note 8, at 107.
55 Luke Thurston, Inehlctable Nodalitiev: On the Borromean Knot, in KEY CONCEPTS OF
LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS, supra note 4, at 156.
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it allows the subject.
' 56
According to Lacan, Joyce used his writing as a
means to prevent the onset of psychosis, establishing the paradoxical
symbolic suppletion. It would seem, however, that while Joyce is able
to identify with the sinthome in his writing, and, thus, able to ward off
the psychotic rupture and its delusional wake, Chikatilo is not.
Through his writing, Joyce also seems able to sublimate the object,
to elevate it to the dignity of the Thing. This allows for the necessary
identification with the object, an identification which Chikatilo attempts
but cannot realize through his literary productions. This is because,
according to Grigg's gloss of Lacan, "letter is not just a signifier but
also an object."
' 57
While Chikatilo's autobiography employs another
strategy to delimit the noxious enjoyment of the threatening external
agency, the primal father, it fails to do so adequately and merely
becomes another stage on which the force of the drive is exhibited. The
"the falling off the stage" which Lacan attributes in Seminar X to the
passage i l'acte is not part of Chikatilo's destiny since he has never
been on the stage in the first place. Additionally, the "unmediated
jouissance addressed to no one," which Lacan also refers to in
L 'angoisse in relation to the passage i l'acte, does not determine
Chikatilo's attempt to kill the object since his intention is toward some
sort of return: he wants to instantiate the law. And while his criminal
activity seems to have offered some sublimatory relief that his writing
never created (at the very least, his murderous deeds seemed to keep the
full-blown delusional metaphor at bay), Chikatilo is not able to identify
with the sinthome the way Joyce is because his crime annihilates the
very social his act would supposedly make possible. Murder, that is, is
a means for him to find a place in the world, but he destroys that very
place through the means he employs. This is precisely why his is not an
ethical act, though his case does open us to questions concerning the
psychotic and his ability to sublimate hisjouissance, to order his drives
and to find a place other than the world of delusion. Ultimately,
Chikatilo is not able to use his writing or his criminal activity as a
means of relating to or connecting with the world around him. While
Chikatilo's writing is only able to forge a delusional imaginary
restoration, in doing so, it attempts to warn us of the danger that the
Other poses, even if this danger ultimately is just Chikatilo himself.
Through a kind of literary attack on the unlimited jouissance of the
mother and the obscene enjoyment that is materialized in the primal
father, Chikatilo's writing counters the attack of the real, but only
insofar as words are things.
56 Id. at 157.
57 Grigg, supra note I1, at 69; see also JACQUES LACAN, The Agency of the Letter in the
Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, in ECRITS: A SELECTION 146-78 (Alan Sheridan trans.,
1977).
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