91

How should the question of sublimation be considered in psychosis? For Freud, sublimation is one of the possible destinies for the drive and its satisfaction. However, he seems to confine his reflections to a neurotic type of functioning. What then is the case of psychosis? Creativity, one must admit, is not just the prerogative of neurosis. Can’t the artistic productions of psychotics also be thought of as sublimations? Lacan, in his seminar of 1975-1976, identifies this particular mode of suppléance with James Joyce and his literary work, that he names sinthome. He does not however speak of sublimation. Is it to be rigorously excluded when the artist is of a psychotic structure? On what occasion then can the concept of sublimation be used when the drive dynamic is not specified, that the signifier of the lack in the Other is missing in the set-up of the drive circuit? Beyond the conceptual use of the term sublimation, it is important to locate in the creative force so frequently encountered in psychosis a simultaneous attempt to circumscribe and inscribe the trace of what is originally and implicitly missing for the psychotic subject, and what at the same time poses a threat for him or her. The creation process in this structure reveals the subject’s relation to his or her objects, and their abundance in reality Real. But how to explain this permanent effort, this perhaps constant impulse, that insists on expressing itself, on constructing, sometimes so efficiently for us all? The “ Unglauben” Freud speaks of for psychosis and which Lacan refers to on several occasions, this non-belief in the void from which desire proceeds, would this be at play in creativity? In this perspective we will also consider the work of Perrine Michel who, with her film Lame de fond, in 2014, gives us, in such a subtle way, an opening to the question of the trace, as much as to the subjective necessity to border it.