What Is The “Quilting Point”?

Introduction

In this post I will begin by exploring Lacan’s term the “quilting point” as he introduces it the chapter of that title in Seminar III and its subsequent development in later texts. Alongside this exploration I will consider the place of the term in Lacan’s discussion of Judge Schreber’s psychotic breakdown and suggest why it occupies such a central place in his conception of what happened.

The Quilting Point

Lacan introduces the idea of the “quilting point” in Chapter XXI of Seminar III. He leaves no doubt as to how significant this term is for him when he writes “the schema of the quilting point is essential in human experience”.

I will follow Lacan by being interested in the phenomena of psychosis, the symptoms, but most especially in the auditory delusions, which Schreber reports with such fastidiousness. Lacan believes that proper analysis of these delusions will allow us to better understand the relationship between signifier and signified, which he situates at the core of a psychoanalytic understanding of human discourse and the unconscious.

Lacan believes that we can ascertain something “really deep-seated in psychotic structure” by investigating what Schreber is describing when he keeps referring to two planes of discourse: An “anterior plane” and a “plane beyond”. For Schreber each of these are in their turn “indefinitely subdivided within themselves”. Lacan brings to mind Saussure’s famous schema of the two curves, where Saussure suggests we envisage language “as a series of adjoining subdivisions simultaneously imprinted both on the plane of vague amorphous thought … and on the equally featureless plane of sound.” However Lacan is on the way to developing his own understanding of “the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as distinct orders initially separated by a barrier resisting signification.”

Lacan tells us “it is in the chain of signifiers that meaning insists, but none of the chain’s elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment.” Meaning accrues to words through their accumulation, so that “no signifier is isolable” and sense comes to a sentence “retroactively”. He illustrates how we cannot know what is being said until we reach the end of what is said, which may be a phrase, a sentence, or a whole accumulation of signifiers.

Lacan uses the opening lines of Racine’s lyrical poem “Athaliah” to illustrate the way meaning arises from an assemblage of signifiers. Asking the question: “What is the role of the signifier here?”, he focuses on the word ‘fear’ and demonstrates the way this ambivalent signifier ‘fear’ is radically changed when it occurs in the construction “the fear of God” although it still sounds exactly the same.

Lacan elaborates on how this ‘fear of God’ came into existence: ‘The fear of God’ is not a given, something pre-existing, it had to be invented and proposed, and it is quite specific as an “essential expression of a certain line of religious thought”, “rather rigid”, and quite different from the “fear of the gods”. It arose as

… the remedy for a world made up of manifold terrors … To have replaced these innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being who has no other means of manifesting his power than through what is feared behind these innumerable fears, is quite an accomplishment.

Once this signifier ‘the fear of God’ does exist it changes everything, because it dominates the meanings of this particular structuration of human discourse. It has become the “major and primordial signifier” that transforms all fears into “perfect courage”. Indeed Lacan invites us into the paradox that, “however constraining it may be”, what is called “fear of God” is the opposite of a fear.

Lacan suggests Racine’s artful introduction of the word “fear” and connected key words, such as “tremble” and “extermination”, which partly coincide in the discourse of the two protagonists, transforms “zeal” at the beginning, with its connotations of “everything that is ambiguous, doubtful, always liable to be reversed”, into the “faithfulness” of the end. This, Lacan says, is an example of “the transmutation of the situation through the intervention of the signifier”.

Lacan considers the effect of introducing “fear” into the narrative an example of a “quilting point”. The metaphor of a “quilting point” refers to the way upholsterers use buttons to secure the fabric of their work to the backing, in order to maintain a defined shape. There is a certain tensioning of the fabric involved as it resists this stitching down, and this tension can be seen in the way the fabric bunches up around the button and radiates out from it. In a similar way a major and primordial signifier (fear) can enter a discourse at a particular point and in a particular way as to ‘knot together’ signified and signifier, “between the still floating mass of meanings” that circulate between “the two characters and the text”. There is a tension involved as language resists such ‘buttoning down’, and the lines of force radiate out in language around these ‘quilting points’ situating the discourse both “retroactively and prospectively”.

Although Lacan does not clarify in detail the manner Racine does this, he suggests there is something about “this admirable text” and the fact that by the “grace of Racine” Jehoiada is to “some extent … a poet or a prophet” that produces this “quilting” effect which allows everything to radiate out from the signifier fear, and for this convergence to situate everything. Lacan seems to be saying that in the way upholstery can be shabby and poorly ‘buttoned’ or beautifully and carefully crafted, so the manner in which language is “quilted” marks the difference between literature and “a piece of boulevard theatre”.

Equipped with this metaphor of “the quilting point” Lacan considers what might be done with it. He wonders if it might be possible to work out the minimum number of “fundamental points of insertion between the signifier and the signified necessary for a human being to be called normal” and in the absence of which the result might be psychosis. However he is quick to turn his attention to Freud’s own buttoning of his thinking to the Oedipus complex and the place of the father, suggesting it represents an essential “knot” to Freud because “the notion of father … gives him the most palpable element in experience of … the quilting point between the signifier and the signified.” For Lacan the radical ‘unbuttoning’ of the signifier and the signified is the essential characteristic of psychosis.

These quilting points are essential to the structure of the symbolic register, and when they fail we are abandoned to the imaginary. This ‘unbuttoning’ is owing to the lack of a signifier that establishes a “thou” in the sense of the big Other, as “the locus in which is constituted the I who is speaking with him who hears.” When the symbolic is unbuttoned the “thou” is heard, but “nothing in the subject is able to respond to it” and “the function of the sentence is then reduced solely to the significance of the thou, a free signifier that is nowhere pinned down.”

Lacan asks us where in the case of Schreber has the symbolic become unbuttoned:

Which meaning is it that, in the case of Schreber, has … been interpellated, the lack of which has produced such an upheaval in a man who till then had come to terms with the apparatus of language perfectly well … Which is the signifier whose absence can explain how this constant repetition of speech becomes for him the elective mode of relating to another, how otherness is reduced to the unique register of absolute otherness, breaking, dissipating the otherness of all the other beings in his surroundings?

By way of answering his question, we need to take a detour via Lacan’s elaboration of the Oedipus complex. According to this the Oedipus complex may be understood as establishing “a relation, a function and a distance”, super-imposing a symbolic order on imaginary relations through the intervention of a third party, “a law, a chain, a symbolic order, the intervention of the order of speech”. The incestuous imperative of imaginary relations are transformed by the intervention of the “name of the father.” The father’s only function in the triangle of the Oedipal situation is to “represent the vehicle, the holder, of the phallus.” In other words “The father, as father, has the phallus – full stop.” The father is “that which in the imaginary dialectic must exist for the phallus to be something” other than like a rainbow where there is no substance, existing entirely in its appearance as ‘phallus’. A father is a father and “invoking the father, whether it be Zeuss or someone else, is entirely different from purely and simply referring to the generative function”.

In “Lacan, Language and Philosophy”, Russell Grigg writes that the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ is the symbolic father, a pure signifier in the sense there is “no representation correlative to it” and yet it is “a condition for the possibility of any representation.” It has a close relation with the phallic signifier, but the latter is never entirely free of “imaginary connections”:

The imaginary object that the subject in the Oedipal situation wants to be, namely, the phallus that will satisfy the mother’s desire, is transformed into a signifier by the operation of the paternal metaphor when the paternal signifier is substituted for the signifier of the mother, thereby producing a new signification or meaning … which is the meaning of the phallus.

Lacan develops this idea of the ‘paternal metaphor’ in Seminar V “The Formations of the Unconscious”, where he introduces the “Graph of Desire”.

He also writes in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”:

Of course there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than there is to be dead, but without a signifier, no one will ever know anything about these states of being.

The Name-of-the-Father is a ‘quilting point’, which steadies the slide of signifiers. The indications are this was missing in Schreber, and as a result his psyche contained a psychotic structure nascent since he transitioned the Oedipus complex “like an invisible flaw in the glass”. This lack in the symbolic register will have been compensated for in the imaginary. Lacan makes reference to a paper by Helene Deutsch, “Some Forms of Emotional Experience and their Relationship to Schizophrenia”, where she notes there is often an “as if” phase to a psychotic breakdown before it builds up into the delusional form. Deutsch surmises that the “as if” personality may be of the nature of a pre-existing condition for psychosis: (p. 318-319)

Outwardly the person seems normal. There is nothing to suggest any kind of disorder, behavior is not unusual, intellectual abilities appear unimpaired, emotional expressions are well ordered and appropriate. But despite all this, something intangible and indefinable obtrudes between the person and his fellows and invariably gives rise to the question, ‘What is wrong? … The apparently normal relationship to the world corresponds to a child’s imitativeness and is the expression of identification with the environment, a mimicry which results in an ostensibly good adaptation to the world of reality … Attaching themselves with great ease to social, ethical, and religious groups, they seek, by adhering to a group, to give content and reality to their inner emptiness and establish the validity of their existence by identification.

Deutsch understands this in terms of a weakness of the ‘ego’, which surprisingly Lacan does not comment on directly!

Winnicott also discusses something similar in his paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self (1960) published in ‘The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment’: Despite the title he seems to be closer to Lacan’s thinking here.

Returning to Schreber, Lacan suggests the signifier that was problematic from the beginning was “procreation in its most problematic form … the form of being a father”. For ‘procreation’ to have its full sense there needs to be an “apprehension, a relation with the experience of death” which creates the “highway in sexual relations” otherwise all there is are a “number of elementary minor paths”.

It is appropriate to raise the question here of the privileged status of Lacan’s “master signifier” or ‘quilting point’ in a system of difference. From a Derridean perspective all signifiers would be considered equal acquiring meaning only through their differences. Janet Lucas in her paper “The Semiotics of Schreber’s Memoirs: Sign, Sinthome and Play” suggests a way to understand the quilting points work in Lacan’s schema is that it creates a hierarchical framework within which a master signifier “‘pins relations of difference as signifying clusters”. According to Lucas, up until Schreber’s collapse, the clusters have been held in place (in the manner of a sinthome) for Schreber by science: “Schreber uses science as a substitute – a barrier or a rim that maintains Schreber at a distance from the term he foreclosed”. Thus through a series of imaginary identifications, as suggested by Deutsch and Winnicott, Schreber managed to hold together his pre-psychotic structure.

When Schreber was elected as President of the Court of Appeal it triggered an encounter with the signifier as such where:

… the Name-of-the-Father-verwoifen, foreclosed, that is, never having come to the place of the Other-must be summoned to that place in symbolic opposition to the subject … It is the lack of the Name-of-the-Father in that place which, by the hole that it opens up in the signified, sets off a cascade of reworkings of the signifier from which the growing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in a delusional metaphor.

The ‘upholstery’ of Schreber’s world came unbuttoned and what had been refused (Verwerfung) in the symbolic order returned in the real.

The concept of the ‘quilting point’ allows Lacan to understand Judge Schreber’s psychosis through his ‘Return to Freud’ such that the structuring of the unconscious like a language, which he finds implicit in Freud, can be elaborated through restoring a revised and elaborated Oedipus complex to the centre of psychoanalysis. At the same time this allows further elaboration of the registers of the symbolic and the imaginary.

Conclusion

In this post I have explored Lacan’s understanding of the “quilting point” and its centrality in Lacan’s thought, as a metaphor for the way the field of human discourse is constituted. I have indicated the way Lacan understands Judge Schreber’s psychotic breakdown as the emergence of a pre-existing psychotic structure resulting from the absence of the essential ‘quilting point’ the Name-of-the-Father, which up until the breakdown had been compensated for through identifications in the imaginary.

Bibliography

Deutsch, H, ‘Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and their Relationship to Schizophrenia’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol.11, 1942, pp. 301-321.

Grigg, R, ‘From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition of the Symptom: On Foreclosure’, in D Nobus (ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Rebus Press, London, 1998, pp.48-74.

Grigg, R, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, SUNY Press, New York, 2008.
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Lacan, J, ‘On A Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, in J. Lacan, Ecrits, translated B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg, W.W. Norton, New York, 2006, pp. 445-488.

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