| This dissertation asks the question of the nature of testimony and of psychosis as its limit, through the conceptual framework of psychoanalytic theory. I argue that as a modality of discourse, in testimony one testifies primarily to one's confrontation with one's own division vis-a-vis the trauma of the real, a division which in psychosis cannot be subjectivized. My work is asking firstly, what happens to our understanding of testimony if we extend its scope to psychosis (paranoia in particular) and secondly, if and how can the notion of testimony elucidate the nature of the relationship between neurosis and psychosis in both Freud's and Lacan's work.;After following the evolution of Freud's concept of paranoia and Lacan's first theory of psychosis in Seminar III, I show, through a reading of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Primo Levi's If This Is A Man and The Drowned And the Saved, that Freud's notion of the historical truth enables us to examine the affinities between, on the one hand, a testimony such as Levi's, which in its elaboration necessarily invokes the dimension of infantile trauma and, on the other hand, the paranoiac's delusion. In its own way, the latter too functions as a testimony to the psychotic's encounter with the real, as well as an effort to sustain the truth of this encounter in a discourse recognizable by the other. |
