Foreclosure (psychoanalysis)

Foreclosure (also known as "foreclusion"; French: forclusion) is the English translation of a term that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan introduced into psychoanalysis to identify a specific psychical cause for psychosis.

According to Élisabeth Roudinesco, the term was originally introduced into psychology 'in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet's review, his article on "The Psychological Significance of Negation in French": "...[and] borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality'.

According to Christophe Laudou, the term was introduced by Damourette and Pichon.

The publication took part against the background of the Twenties dispute between Freud and René Laforgue over scotomization. 'If I am not mistaken', Freud wrote in 1927, 'Laforgue would say in this case that the boy "scotomizes" his perception of the woman's lack of a penis. A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or emphasizes it. This is not the case here'. Freud went on to suggest that if one wanted to 'reserve the word "Verdrängung" ["repression"] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be "Verleugnung" ["disavowal"]'.

In 1938 Lacan relates the origin of psychosis to an exclusion of the father from the family structure thereby reducing this structure to a mother-child relationship. Later on, when working on the distinctions between the real, imaginary and symbolic father, he specifies that it is the absence of the symbolic father which is linked to psychosis.

Lacan uses the Freudian term, "Verwerfung", which the Standard Edition translates as "repudiation", as a specific defence mechanism different from repression, "Verdrangung", in which "the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea has never occurred to the ego at all." In 1954 basing himself on a reading of the "Wolf Man" Lacan identifies Verwerfung as the specific mechanism of psychosis where an element is rejected outside the symbolic order as if it has never existed. In 1956 in his Seminar on Psychoses he translates Verwerfung as forclusion, that is foreclosure. "Let us extract from several of Freud's texts a term that is sufficiently articulated in them to designate in them a function of the unconscious that is distinct from the repressed. Let us take as demonstrated the essence of my Seminar on the Psychoses, namely, that this term refers to psychosis: this term is Verwerfung (foreclosure)".

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