Abstract
In 1963, Charles Melman was the first to describe a clinical feature specific to certain hallucinatory persecutory delusions which he called the party wall phenomenon. In this phenomenon, the intimate contact between the persecuted and the persecutor is established on either side of a party wall. This feature, which Melman so brilliantly isolated, seems to us to have the potential to shed light on entire sections of the psychosis clinic, which we revisit with the help of Lacan’s ingenious commentary of De Clérambault’s mental automatism concept.
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Notes
We thank Nathanaël Majster for giving us access to these notes. The French notes have been transcribed by Jean-Paul Beaumont. Nathanaël Majster is Melman’s legatee and holder of the moral rights of his work. All correspondence concerning Charles Melman’s work may be addressed to the ALI secretariat.
This word does not appear clearly in the manuscript.
See Masselon, quoted by Henry Ey (1973/2012, p. 719), on the inconsistent and superficial aspect of hallucinations in mania: “There are no confirmed Hallucinations. They are sketches, embryos of Hallucinations.”
From one of Melman’s undated and untitled manuscripts. We thank Nathanaël Majster for giving us access to these notes. They have been transcribed by Jean-Paul Beaumont.
According to de Clérambault the phenomena of small mental automatism have no ideal content, in other words they are “anideic” and neutral from an emotional point of view. For de Clérambault, this aspect confirmed their mechanical origin and enabled him to establish the kinship of “automatism-based psychoses” with psychoses of toxic and organic origin. Whereas these elementary phenomena appear abruptly at the onset of some psychosis, the delusion is a construction around these phenomena, which manifest themselves in consciousness and “demand” an interpretation on the part of the subject. As a result, when the delusion enters the clinical picture, the psychosis is already well established. According to de Clérambault, the feeling of passivity that the psychotic subject may feel towards these phenomena is because they are foreign to him: a kind of “xenopathy”, from the Greek xénos meaning foreign or stranger. See also Dimitriadis (2016).
See Lacan’s comments (2017, p. 289, lesson of 10 June 1964) on the paranoiac’s Unglauben.
According to a finding by Nicolas Dissez (personal communication).
In this respect, one could refer to the despecification of impulses in psychotic patients (see Czermak, 2002).
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Acknowledgement
Translated by Clémence Sebag. The extracts from Lacan’s seminars have been translated from the Association Lacanienne International’s editions of the unpublished manuscripts that have been produced for use by its members.
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Dimitriadis, Y., Thibierge, S. Psychopathological ramifications of Charles Melman’s “party wall phenomenon”. Psychoanal Cult Soc 29, 90–101 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00424-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00424-2