#63: Symbols, Psychosis, and Common Ground: A Lacan-Jung Dialogue with Stijn Vanheule

Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor at Ghent University, Belgium. Our conversation was inspired by his most recent book, Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy.Stijn overviews the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He explains Lacan’s three registers: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real; psychosis as a confrontation with the Real; the security and limitations of symbolic convention; how words and stories structure reality; logic versus artistic coherence; and the existential value of paranoia.We compare Lacanian and Jungian approaches on subjects such as the paradox of archetypal and individual, personal myth, and self-knowledge as a never-ending process. Underlying our conversation is the common ground of viewing psychosis not as an illness, but in Stijn’s words: “the subjective manifestation of a struggle that touches upon the fundamental aspects of human existence."