foreclosure

foreclosure (Verwerfung/forclusion) The psychoanalytic term for the repudiation of a specific desire. It differs from repression in that the incompatible desire is not merely prevented from entering the consciousness, all trace of its existence is denied, as if the thought had never arisen. In his reading of Freud, Anna, Lacan, Jacques treats foreclosure as the specific mechanism of psychosis (in contrast to neurosis); he argues that the psychotic subject forecloses on the Name-of-the-Father (that which organizes the subject’s symbolic field and gives them their identity and meaning to their reality). In effect, then, foreclosure is the repudiation of the organizational structure of reality, hence Lacan’s treatment of it as a flight into psychosis. da Freud, Sigmund’s name for a game played by his 18-month-old grandson involving a cotton reel which the boy would repeatedly throw out of his cot, exclaiming ‘Oo’ as he did so, forcing his mother to retrieve it for him, at which he would utter an appreciative ‘Ah’. Freud interpreted these noises as babyish approximations of ‘fort’, meaning ‘gone’, and ‘da’, meaning ‘there’. The significance of the game, which Freud discusses in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), is that it shows the child transforming an unhappy situation, one in which they have no control over the presence of their parents, into a happy one in which the parents are at the beck and call of the child. Freud also interpreted it as a kind of revenge on the parents, a way of saying to them that they aren’t so important. See also compulsion to repeat.