Why Topology Matters in Psychoanalysis - Part II

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Lets start with an obvious question that followed from the rst
article in this series: how is the use of topology in
psychoanalysis not just metaphorical? How is it not, even,
mystication?
Remember that Lacan is making a bold assertion, as stated in
Ltourdit from 1972:
Topology is not designed to guide us in structure. It is this
structure.
This is a position he maintains right until the end of his life,
including at his last ever public speaking appearance in Caracas
for Seminar XXVII.
This second article will answer this question with examples of
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how we can think about the problems in a persons life the

problems that psychoanalysis is concerned with as having
topological properties.
Topology is about a delimitation of space. This could be
signifying space, physical space, relational space its
topological properties persist regardless of the nature of the
components of that space, or the deformations that space
undergoes, as we saw in part one.
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Delimitation means separation. The German term for

separation is trennung, and topologists talk about
Trennungsaxiom, or separation axiom, to describe the ways that
topological space can be delimited, with varying degrees of
strength. We will come back to this idea later on.
For now, we can say that the delimitation of space, and the
strength with which its separation is inscribed, is a crucial
problem in understanding all kinds of phenomena of interest to
psychoanalysis. Lets start with a few simple examples from the
clinic of the everyday:
Phobia very often involves a delimitation of space. We can
think of the way that an agoraphobia, or a relatively common
phobia about crossing bridges, marks out the thresholds of a
space. To take an old Freudian example, in the case of Little
Hans, we can think about the way in which the horse phobia
dictates when he can and cant go outdoors (SE X, 22-24).
Obsession the problem of passing from one space to another
haunts obsessional rituals and acts with an uncanny recurrence.
They are very often concentrated at the point where one space
transitions to another. Opening and closing doors, turning on
and o lights, or catching trains or planes from points A to B are
common focal points for obsession. Similarly, we can think of
the articial delimitation of space in cases where someone feels
unable to step on the cracks between paving stones, for
example. So why this recurrence?
Pornography why do so many porn movies involve opening
the door to someone? We nd this in both typically male and
female scenarios, both romantic novels and hardcore porn. We
may not view it as pathological like obsession or phobia, but it is
interesting that in pornographic scenarios some kind of scene is
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LacanOnline.com Is A
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Psychoanalysis Through
The Work Of Jacques
Lacan
Jacques Lacan was a French
psychoanalyst, 1901 - 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he
abandoned the profession in
favour of psychoanalysis in
the early thirties. After
publishing his paper on the
Mirror Stage in 1949, for
which he is probably best
known to the general public,
in the early fties Lacan
embarked on a project he
called the 'Return to Freud'.
Lacan began holding yearly
seminars, starting in 1952,
re-examining Freud's work.
At the time, the theory and
technique of psychoanalysis
was facing a complete
overhaul at the hands of
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staged involving a crossing of a threshold.

.
We are not yet making any claims about topology, but simply
stating some problems it might help us to explain, problems
which are about this same trennung or separation.
And what kind of space are we really talking about here?
Physical or metric space doesnt seem quite to cut it. Although
components of physical space like a door or a bridge may
appear in phobia, obsession and porn, it would be facile to
believe that the real problem in phobia is the bridge that cant
be crossed; or that in obsession a ritual about doors is really
only about doors. This is why therapeutic approaches like CBT,
which target only the site of the complaint, eventually lead to
symptom substitution.
As we saw in the rst article, if we think only in terms of physical
space we cant solve a problem like the seven bridges of
Knigsberg. We are instead talking about a space that can be
conceived regardless of the elements that compose it. This is
the justication for looking to topological space to address
phenomena as disparate as the three above, but which are all
of psychoanalytic interest.
How This Works in Practice
Example 1 The Rat Man
Lets take one of the most famous cases from the history of
psychoanalysis, one we have looked at in depth before: that of
the Rat Man.
In their paper Psycho-topologies: closing the circuit between
psychic and material space, Virginia Blum and Anna Secor point
out that the little maps the Rat Man draws Freud to illustrate his
mission to repay the money for his glasses the feature of the
case which Lacan focuses on bears a topological resemblance
to the bridges of Knigsberg problem we discussed last time.
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post-Freudian
psychoanalysts, many of
whom had emigrated to the
United States after the war.
Lacan railed against their
teaching of Freud, seeing it
as an oversimplication of
his work and a corruption of
psychoanalytic technique
reducing it to the status of
life management. Through
his seminars he oered
another interpretation of
Freud's work and
psychoanalytic theory.
Inventive, radical and
adventurous, many still
believe Lacan's to be a
creative mis-reading of
Freud.
However Lacan's seminars
grew in popularity and as his
teaching developed from a
reading of Freud's text to an
elaboration of his own
concepts his teaching
became more inuential.
Lacan continued to give
yearly seminars until the
year before his death in
1981. By that time, he had
become a major intellectual
gure in public life and had
both created and disbanded
his own school, separating
his members both from the
established psychoanalytic
institutions and from each
other.
Today, Lacanian theory is
advanced by a number of
disparate groupings of his
followers and the technique
of psychoanalysis he
developed is practiced
clinically by Lacanian
analysts around the world.
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The patient develops a tortuous scheme necessitating a train trip

that could not possibly occur in real time and space, whereby he
attempts simultaneously to repay and avoid repaying the crucial
debt. His compulsive journey shows him seeking to solve or to
overcome a psycho-spatial problem.The coordinates of his
map/graph his nodes and lines, vertices and edges are, like the
bridges of Knigsberg, capable of endless distortion without any
shift in their basic relations. (Blum and Secor, Psycho-topologies:
closing the circuit between psychic and material space, p.17).
When he looks at the Rat Man case history in The Neurotics
Individual Myth in 1954 we see Lacan trying to nd a new
model to conceptualise the entanglement of relations in the life
of Freuds patient. With structural anthropology and in
particular with Levi-Strausss conception of myth he thinks he
has found it.
Summarising his idea in a 1957 interview with LExpress, Lacan
says of the Rat Man:
He is descended from a legendary past. This prehistory reappears
via the symptoms that represent that pre-history in an
unrecognizable form, that weave it into myth, represented by the
subject without awareness. Since it is transposed like a language or
a writing, maybe transposed into another language, with other
signs; it is rewritten without the modication of the liaisons;
like a gure in geometry is transformed from a sphere to a
plane. (reproduced here, my italics).
Note this last point. Just like thinking of the physical links of the
bridges of Knigsberg as instead being nodes and vertices, so
we can do the same with the relationships in a persons life.
Instead of describing bridges we are describing inter-human
relations of love, hate, and debt. The relations may be
deformed by (chronological) time or (physical) space, and one
person may be replaced by another, but the liaisons themselves
the relationships remain the same. As Lacan writes,
Everything happens as if the impasses inherent in the original
situation moved to another point in the mythic network, as if what
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was not resolved here always turned up over there (The

Neurotics Individual Myth).
Lacan has an intuition that there is a network of relations which
have very peculiar characteristics. Looking just at the Rat Mans
personal biography his love for his Lady, the ambivalence
towards his father, the hatred of the Cruel Captain isnt
enough to explain it.
What we see in the maps above that the Rat Man drew for
Freud is like a nucleus of the neurosis. Just as the elements of
the map and the story that goes with it are jumbled and
nonsensical in spatial or chronological terms, so the relations in
his life make no sense when looked at in terms of a continuity
of emotion (the aective ambivalence which has been the focus
of almost all commentaries on the case), or even the continuity
of time (not only the fathers debt being trans-generational, but
the fact that Freud even tells us how the Rat Man forgot his
father had died (SE X, 174). What we see in the map looks more
like a condensation: time and locality dont matter; the map tells
us more about the nature of his relationships insofar as it
indicates these elements can be recongured, in the same way
a topological space like a torus can be recongured.
Over the next 20 years this intuition led Lacan to explore
topological models that exhibited these same properties the
torus, the Mobius band, and the Klein bottle were all, as we saw
in the rst article, examples of these.
But pursuing these ideas right up to his death in 1981 Lacan
became obsessed with one particular topological model: the
Borromean knot. After his death, what might call the clinic of
the Borromean knot was interpreted by many of his followers
as representing his legacy. It was deemed to be the new
frontier, the cutting edge, of Lacanian clinical treatment.
We will go on later to look at the history of this project since
Lacans death; how the generations of Lacanian psychoanalysts
after him have taken it forward; and some of the radical
implications it suggests.
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Example 2 A Calculus of Convergence

There are some Lacanian analysts who think about the
problems they face in the clinic topologically. Here is one such
example.
In her paper A Calculus of Convergence, Nathalie Charraud
presents a case which turns on an intervention she makes with
one of her patients. This constitutes what she calls a point of
convergence (Drawing the Soul, p.219). The analysand tells her
three things:
Firstly, that she needs to end the analysis because the man who
is paying for it is living with another woman, making her
eectively his mistress.
Second, she has a nightmare where she is walking down a long
corridor which opens out into a desert. She is stiingly hot, and
wakes up with a strong urge to vomit.
Third, she needs a work permit to stay in France but, terried of
applying for it herself and being rejected in person by the
prefecture, she hires a lawyer to apply in her place.
.
Charraud responds with the following: theres rejection.
This intervention has a profound eect on the direction of the
analysis it is the catalyst for an improvement in the
analysands well-being. How?
Charraud shows how the details the woman tells her can be put
into a signifying constellation conceived of as a topological
space. Lets look at its elements.
The French rejeter in theres rejection has all kinds of
connotations that are pertinent to how the analysand describes
her dream and the circumstances of her life at the time. These
include to reject, to expel, to dismiss, to throw up, and
Charrauds intervention plays on the ambiguity generated by
these connotations. Charraud explains it like this:
The signier rejection, in the case of my analysand, is clearly a
master signier, which represents her in the vicinity of a certain
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number of other signiers S2 (her family, the Prefecture,

various consulates and embassies (ibid, p.220, my italics).
In simple terms, we can represent these relations like this:
To see how we get from this to a topological conception we will

lean on the work of those analysts most deeply immersed in
this theory. Eric Laurents Lecture Critique II in LAutisme at la
Psychanalyse and Bernard Burgoynes collection Drawing the Soul
from which Charrauds case is drawn are key texts here.
The branch of topology that Lacan was interested in and from
which all other branches of topology stem is known as
point-set (or general) topology. A set is a collection of objects,
and the elements within it are points. A set of points, and the
interrelations between them, may constitute a topological
space. And with her intervention, Charraud will establish a
topology through the interrelation of the three associative
elements provided by her analysand.
Here are some examples of topologies that can be generated
from three-element sets, like the one in Charrauds case:
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Image credit: https://www.gipom.com/search/Pointset+topology/images?lang=en

Lets take each point in a set as a signifying term. Associated
with these signifying-points are what topologists call a
neighbourhood. A neighbourhood is essentially a subset an
arbitrary collection of points that give structure to a topological
space. We can see some examples in the image above.
Notice that although the topologies the way these
neighbourhoods are constituted vary, the elements in the
structure, the points, do not. As we saw in the rst article, this is
the fundamental character of a topological space the ability to
retain its properties in spite of deformation. This is how the
bridges of Konigsberg problem was solved. This is also a
property shared by the Klein bottle, the torus, and the
Borromean knot, which was why Lacan was so fascinated by
playing about with them in his later life.
As the neighbourhoods of any point have to sit entirely within a
set, we can think of the network of all possible neighbourhoods
as constituting a language (in the Lacanian sense of a network
of signifying elements unhinged from any referent).
Within this language we have other associative elements to the
patients story which constitute points in their neighbourhoods.
Charraud draws these out:
1. To go, to leave, etc (partir, quitter)
2. To vomit, disgust, etc (vomir, degout)
3. Prefecture, papers, passport, etc (prefecture, papiers,
passeport). (ibid, p.224).
The analysis goes on, and these associations are further
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connected to the theme of paternal rejection (rejet paternel):

To go, to leave my consulting rooms (partir, sortir de mon
bureau);
To be stied (elle etoue);
How she chose her profession (comment elle a choisi sa
profession). (ibid, p.224-225).
Charraud labels these a family of sets (ibid, p.223), and notes
that as they draw closer together there is a kind of
condensation or, to use the term in her title, a convergence
of the associative material, such that successive intersections
within the family give something smaller and smaller,
something more and more precise (ibid, p.223). She calls this
eect a lter but as Burgoyne notes in the footnote to his
translation of her paper (ibid, p.226) this lter or family of
sets is equivalent to a neighbourhood. Charrauds rejection is
a signier which hinges these associative elements. It has the
eect of marking out these neighbourhoods from the signifying
space of the analysands life, and thus generates a topological
space.
But is this the end of the story? After all, if things were as simple
as this a psychoanalysis would be easy. The application of
topology to psychoanalysis would amount to forming
neighbourhoods between sets of signifying points.
To return to the quote at the top of this article, Lacan says
topology doesnt guide us in the structure it is the structure.
We have talked about the properties of a structure and
specically, its capability to retain these properties regardless of
the deformations that structure might be subject to. But we
havent yet looked at what Lacan identies as the cause, and
all the way throughout his later work Lacan is anxious to nd a
place for a cause in this structure. This begins with the
discussion of Aristotles tuch in Seminar XI from 1964 and runs
right through to the work on topology in the 1970s. All the while
Lacan is trying to specify something which is inherent to the
structure even at its innermost point but not part of the
structure as such. A remnant, perhaps, of the construction of
the structure itself.
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Lacan calls this the object a.

In his most famous topological structure the Borromean knot
he places it at the heart of the structure:
(Seminar XXII, 10th December 1974).

Lacans idea even in the midst of his adventures in topology
is that a psychoanalytic intervention, in order to be eective,
has to have an eect on the object a as cause. Otherwise, to
paraphrase Freuds amusing comparison from Wild Analysis in
1910, its just like handing out menus to cure a famine (SE XII,
225).
Therapeutically, treating a problem like addiction demonstrates
this most starkly. Producing a convergence of signifying terms
into a neighbourhood may deform or remould the structure,
but the structure itself is contingent. As Charrauds example
shows, it can be rebuilt around a new signier like rejection
but this leaves the cause object a, at the heart of the structure
untouched.
One way to think about object a is as the nucleus of an
unbearable enjoyment experienced as suering. It is at the root
of what is like an overdose of enjoyment, a backhanded
enjoyment as Lacan calls it in Seminar X (23rd January 1963),
which begins as a tickle and ends in an inferno (Seminar XVII,
11th Feb 1970).
In Lacanian terms, we call this excess of excitation jouissance.
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It is the real enemy of any psychoanalytic intervention. The aim

of analysis is to loosen the bond to object a, where proximity to
it produces a jouissance that cannot be mastered. The task is
then to evacuate this jouissance to discrete margins in the
persons life, or in their body, a process that mimics the
symbolic castration which Lacan views as the price of
becoming a socialised being. If topology is about the
delimitation of space as we began this article by arguing the
practical relevance of being able to do this in order to master
jouissance is therefore extremely pertinent.
In the case she presents, Charraud shows how this works. She
describes the eect of her interpretation as a spiral of meaning
which itself turns about a hole occupied by the object [a]
(p.221). The object a, Charraud writes, is a point of
convergence, if you regard it as a topology of signiers. (ibid,
p.223).
Charrauds idea is that a tightening of neighbourhoods around
this object a, neighbourhoods which are hinged by the signier
rejeter - replete with all its connotations in French of throwing
up, expelling, or throwing out isolates it. We see the mark of
the object a in the urge to vomit that the patient experiences
when waking from the dream, a violent intrusion of something
of a dierent order to, but bound together with, the signifying
network. As we often see in psychoanalysis, what cannot be
represented in one register (here, the symbolic) reappears in
another (the real of bodily suering).
The eect of the analysis is to loosen this tightening of the
signier to the object a. Charraud explains this in the following
terms:
What is interesting is the dierence between the initial situation
and that at the end. The initial structure displays a convergence
towards one signier, that is, a signifying stasis or, again, a
symptom, in the sense of a condensation where the signier
rejection nds itself stuck to the object. It seems that the eect of
the interpretation would have been, on one hand, the unsticking of
the signier in relation to the object which can be seen in the fact
that her problems with her papers will sort themselves out, and
that she will not obey her compulsions to leave. On the other hand,
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theres an eect of subjectivity in so far as she remembers

something primordial in her existence the choice of her
profession: primordial in the sense that she had left everything
behind, and crossed the ocean in order to bring it into being. A
short time after this session, she found herself in the position of
being able to pay for her sessions herself (p.225).
The eect of this unsticking is a dispersal of jouissance away
from the object, a kind of draining or evacuation of malevolent
excitation through an intervention which links a number of
signifying sets into a neighbourhood. Charrauds case shows
that the application of topology to psychoanalysis is not simply
a matter of describing the relations between signifying
elements in a persons life. It is more fundamentally to have an
eect on the jouissance that animates their life. The real enemy
of a psychoanalytic process the thing that keeps a symptom in
place, is the malevolent enjoyment attached to it: jouissance.
Example 3 Autism and the work of Le Courtil
Today, the problem to which topological theory is most readily
applied in Lacanian practice is in the clinic of autism. Le Courtil
in Belgium is the most famous clinic in this respect, having been
featured in Mariana Oteros beautifully light-touch 2014
documentary, Like an Open Sky ( ciel ouvert). But there are also
similar insitutitions such as Antenne 110 and Le Centre
Thrapeutique et de Recherche de Nonette, as well as a
network of other institutions which work with autistic youngstes
from a similar perspective, known as the R13 (for a full list see
here).
Topologically, what practitioners in the Lacanian orientation are
trying to do in the treatment of autism is to introduce a
delimitation of space. This can be done even in the most
modest, minimal way. In Like an Open Sky we see the way that
the clinicians of Le Courtil go about this with the autistic
children and adolescents they host. As one of the supervisors
summarises the approach in the lm, We have to handle things
via a break, writing or counting, and thats what the art of the
work will be.
Why is this delimitation of space necessary? The Lacanian
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theory is that autistic subjects face being overwhelmed by a

jouissance against which they especially are defenceless. This
jouissance could be experienced as coming from the Other (for
example, the institution) or from the body itself, but it is always
Other in the sense of being felt as invasive or excessive.
Le Courtil helps its young intake construct their own techniques
to deal with this through various ways of creating a delimitation
of space. In Like An Open Sky and the published interviews
with analysts of the centre which accompany the documentary
we see many examples of the solutions they nd:
Writing Speaking about one of the children at Le Courtil,
Bernard Seynhaeve tells how, Writing, even if its
gobbledygook, in its very materiality, in its applied gesture,
allows him to construct a rim, to give an edge to jouissance.
(p.66). For this child, By writing, there is something of
jouissance that nds an edge. (p.84).
Gardening Similarly, Vronique Mariage talks about using
gardening with the children as a way of helping them to
establish the boundaries of a space: There arent just the
plantations. For Jerome, for instance, what was important was
to have a patch of ground bordered by a kind of wide ditch, as
though his garden were a castle. He is always constructing
castles, in card, and so on. For the autistic child, this is his
protection. (p.68).
Jigsaw puzzles Alysson, a third child in the documentary,
nds solace in jigsaw puzzles. Since she was four years old,
puzzles have been the most constant object that calms her, the
analyst says. Alysson is both horried and fascinated by her
own body, and we see her battling constant anxiety about what
is going on inside her body or underneath her skin. Through
working on jigsaw puzzles she nds an antidote to this anxiety.
Jigsaw puzzles perform the role of a supplement for a body that
doesnt hold together. In Lacanian terms, this lack of corporeal
integrity denotes a disturbance in the imaginary register, and as
we saw above a problem or impasse in one register reappears
in another. As Alexandre Stevens, Director of Le Courtil
comments, I think we perceive how this young girl, deep
down, is in pieces. As for a diagnosis, I immediately think of
schizophrenia, with this intense corporeal break-up, this
concern, this dismemberment even, as she sees her body in
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pieces. Solving jigsaw puzzles, for Alysson, provide a highly

idiosyncratic but eective solution insofar as they oer a way of
framing a series of fractured images into a unit.
Open sets and the Freudian defence mechanisms

Psychoanalyst Bernard Burgoyne has written and lectured
extensively about autism and topology. In his paper Autism and
Topology he puts forward the idea that the autistic childs
inability to defend against a jouissance from the outside results
from a diculty in dealing with dierent kinds of spatial
realities. These spatial realities can be thought about in
topological terms.
Lets explain how this works with some topological theory.
In any set, a signifying point will have associated with it a
collection of other signiers or phrases, which taken together
can form a neighbourhood within the set. As we saw earlier,
each point can be thought of as a signifying term and their
neighbourhoods a language.
In topological terms, to dene a set out of a space you have to
identify its frontiers. These are known as limit points, so a limit
point of a set is a point that is used to dene the boundaries of
a set.
A closed set is a set which contains all its limit points.
By contrast, an open set doesnt contain any of its limit points:
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So for a set to be open all of its points must have some space
around them which remains entirely within the set. This is also
the special characteristic of neighbourhoods:
For example, this is a neighbourhood:
But this is not:
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As Burgoyne writes,
A neighbourhood of a point has the property that there always
exists within it an open set surrounding that point. That is, a
neighbourhood of a point always gives the ability to retreat to a
collection within it that protects from intrusion from outside. In a
space of phrases, a neighbourhood of a particular phrase would
allow a retreat into a collection of phrases within, any point of
which is protected from intrusion by sequences of phrases in the
exterior. (p.202-203).
Burgoynes idea is that an open set is the equivalent to the
Freudian defence mechanisms. The childs response to what in
Lacanian theory we refer to as symbolic castration is to build
out a series of open sets. The signifying possibilities open to the
subject are therefore the chain of open sets it has been able to
construct. Open sets allow defences against intrusions from
points or signiers from outside the set in Lacanese, from the
demands of, or jouissance of, the Other. So how strong a
persons defence against jouissance is depends on how many
open sets are available to them.
Open sets have to be capable of separating any two points from
each other. For a distinction between signiers to exist a
separation of points through open sets must occur, such that
no open set has the same point in common.
As we saw at the start of this article, spatial realities can be
distinguished by the strength of separation between their open
sets. Topologists refer to these dierent separation axiom as
T-n levels, from the German term for separation, trennung. In
Autism and Topology, Burgoyne looks at four of these
Trennungsaxiom (or separation axioms), going from the weakest
form of separation (an indiscrete topology) to the strongest (a
discrete topology). In the terminology, this progression is known
as the lattice of topologies.
T0 has some separation properties, but they are very weak; T1 has
somewhat stronger separation properties [referred to by
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topologists as Hausdor space]; T2 has build into its structure

considerably stronger separations; and M is just a name for the
familiar metric spaces separation properties in M are very strong
indeed (p.208).
Burgoyne believes that we can use these trennungaxiom or
separation model as an alternative to the classical
developmental models that both psychoanalysis and cognitivebehavioural theories have traditionally relied on. His wager
seems to be that the classical psychiatric/psychoanalytic
diagnostic model can be mapped onto these trennung levels,
from extreme autism at the lower levels to normal neurosis as
metric space. They are about degrees of separation best
conceived in terms of in topological space:
The separation principles at play in T0 and T1 spaces seem to
provide the terrain where dierentiations between schizophrenia,
autism, and paranoia can be established (p.210).
In short, the problem for the autistic child, as Burgoyne argues,
is that the strong degree of separation required to parcel o
signifying points as simple as You and I into distinguishable
open sets has not been instituted. The autistic child is stuck in
the indiscrete space between the Hausdor and T0 regions of
the lattice of topologies (p.210). This is why their relations with
others are so problematic, or why they appear to be caught in
an impenetrable world completely isolated from the outside.
The strength of separation between signifying points in a
Hausdor space allows for a degree of distinguishability or
distance they have not been able to accede to.
Semblance, Pretence, Invention
So how does Le Courtil deal with this problem? How does it help
its young autistic residents to institute this richer separation in
order to get distance from the demands of the Other, or the
invasive jouissance they are plagued by?
In Like An Open Sky one of the ways we see this happening is
through a pretence or make-believe. By taking on the role of the
Other through a semblance, by staging little role plays with the
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children, a separation can be made from the Other but without

the diculties of having to encounter it head on. The main
thing, for me, one of the analysts says, is to see the pretend
become possible. The children can say things in these scenes
they cant say otherwise. One child is encouraged to play the
role of the mother or the teacher, while the analyst plays the
role of the child. Importantly, the content of the scene is not
prescribed, in contrast to the usual methodology at an
institutional level of introducing rules to regulate behaviour
towards an educational goal. Rather, the child chooses the
theme he or she wants to stage. In other words, the analyst
explains, she plays what she has to deal with.
Le Courtils role here is to organise a frame in which this
semblance can be staged and then maintained. The frame is
not the institution but the scene itself, and it is only if the scene
becomes too real that the analyst intervenes to stop it.
Otherwise this role playing is enough to establish the distinction
between self and Other that autistic children struggle with.
The same semblance technique can be employed where the
child has to confront the problem of bodily jouissance. Here is a
particularly charming story of a solution one of the children
developed for himself when his hand started trembling
uncontrollably as he tried to eat breakfast:
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Why does this work? If we think of the sum of all signifying

possibilities as the number of open sets available to the child,
speaking in English oers a shorthand way to expand the series
of open sets to develop a richer lattice of topologies. As
Burgoynes theorises, open sets allow for a protection against
intrusion from the outside, and so establish some distance from
the jouissance of the Other that invades the body in this childs
case and is felt in the symptom. Burgoynes comparison to the
Freudian defence mechanisms is apt. It might remind us of
Anna Os solution to rouse herself from the series of
hallucinations in which a black snake is coming towards her sick
father while she is paralysed at his bedside:
When the snake vanished, in her terror she tried to pray. But
language failed her: she could nd no tongue in which to speak, till
at last she thought of some childrens verses in English and then
found herself able to think and pray in that language. (SE II,
38-39).
This approach, of allowing the child to invent its own way
method of coping through play or pretence, has a signicant
therapeutic advantage: it requires no allegiance to Lacanian
theory or knowledge of topology whatsoever. It can be adopted
equally easily by behaviouralists or those with a cognitivist
approach because it allows the child to invent a system from its
own interests, its own domain of subjectivity. It requires no
hypothesis about aetiology, psychodynamics, or outcomes. It
simply allows the child to develop its own solution to lead
where it will.
Invention, Symptom, Sinthome
The subtitle of the compendium of interviews accompanying
Like An Open Sky is Invention from day to day. Another word to
describe an invention is a symptom. In Lacanian terms
particularly in the way Lacan uses this term in his later work a
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symptom is not necessarily a malevolent or pathogenic thing. In

fact, it can be quite the opposite a big symptom can oer a
way to organise the life of the subject.
Invention is a therapeutic application of what Eric Laurent has
called the knots programme. In his later work, Lacan believed
that each subject can invent a solution for him- or herself which
functions as a supplement to bind together the three registers
of the real, imaginary, and symbolic that he had envisaged with
the topological model of the Borromean knot. He calls this
supplement the sinthome.
Image credit: http://www.lituraterre.org/Illiteracypsychoanalysis_and_topology-The_Sinthome_by_Lacan.htm

Lacan claims that sinthome is an archaic way of writing
symptom (Seminar XXIII, 18th November 1975), and it is true
that in French symptme and sinthome are pronounced
identically. We can think of Alyssons jigsaw puzzles as precisely
the kind of supplement that Lacan is talking about here: an
element that has a special place is a subjects life by virtue of its
function to stabilise the Borromean apparatus of their reality.
The Knots Programme and the Clinic of Supplementation
We can see how Lacans introduction of the sinthome in the
mid-1970s is a revision of his original idea from the 1950s
whereby any subjectivity structure, neurosis or psychosis, goes
through what Laurent has called the logical operator of the
Name-of-the-Father. What changed Lacans mind?
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Lacan lost faith in the Name-of-the-Father to hold together the

symbolic order. Lacanians now recognise this loss of ecacy
and debate this, as the title of the 2012 Congress of the World
Association of Psychoanalysis attests: The Symbolic Order in
the XXIst Century Its Not What It Used To Be. With the theory
of the sinthome and the knots programme at the end of his life
we have a radically dierent idea, and if we work through its
implications we can see just how radical it is.
If everyone builds their own solution which might be a
phantasy, a ritual act, a delusion the
psychiatric/psychoanalytic categories no longer seem quite so
important. Instead, all that matters is the way the knot is
formed for each person, in however idiosyncratic a way.
We can detect a tacit acknowledgment of this from the
burgeoning of clinical categories in the latest editions of the
DSM. Every form of possible solution every sinthome is
taken as a sign of a disorder, but what isnt looked at is the
function that symptom performs in an individuals life. This has
resulted in a DSM-V so fractured and vast that it has become
useless. The fact that the National Institute of Mental Health in
the US recently issued a statement asserting the need to move
away from the DSM classication model as a result attests to
this.
If the question of neurosis or psychosis has always turned on
the institution or foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, faced
with the ineciency of this quilting point, and the fact that the
subject can nd another supplement to do its job in the form of
a sinthome, do we not have to ask what the dierence between
neurosis and psychosis is actually founded on any longer?
Again, a tacit acknowledgement of this might be found in the
revived interest in so-called ordinary psychosis in the Lacanian
community (and beyond) over recent years.
At the end of his paper The Clinic of the Borromean Knot Pierre
Skriabine, one of the leading French Lacanians working in the
eld of topology, hints at something similar a new clinic of the
Borromean knot:
[Lacans topology of knots] brings neurosis and psychosis closer
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to each other at least with respect to the function of

supplementation as correlative to the generalisation of foreclosure
as structural while maintaining the radicality of what separates
them. It thus announces an entirely new dierential clinic, and one
which remains to be constructed: a clinic of supplementation
indexed on the Borromean knot (Lacan: Topologically-Speaking,
p.267).
This is perhaps what Lacans legacy means in psychoanalysis
today. At the end of his life, and at the end of his adventures in
topology, we are left the knots programme as the new
therapeutic paradigm.
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PsychPractice - March 16th, 2015 at 10:24 pm

I dont know if this is a useful way to think about it,
but T0, the indiscrete topology, really doesnt have
any separation properties. The way my topology
professor described it is, If you wear glasses, and
you wake up in the morning and youre not wearing
your glasses, and everything is blurred together,
thats what the indiscrete topology is like.
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Why Topology Matters in Psychoanalysis - Part II

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