This paper reports on the analysis of a psychotic subject. Transference enabled the analyst to witness a painful subjective debacle process which, however, ran in parallel with a heroic attempt at cure and reconstruction. As the subject perceived that the institution was letting him down, a whole series of monsters began to be constructed as related to his psychiatric hospital experience. The demons have a symbolic dimension and are in fact ways of naming jouissance. They also permit a reconstruction of the imaginary, inasmuch as they effect a separation of the subject from the other. Demon construction constitutes a way of working with the real, an effort to deter the Other's jouissance which threatens to break up the subject's structure. Thus, at least for some time, the subject was capable of establishing and maintaining some distance between himself and the other and of reconstructing, though briefly, the knot on which his existence was sustained.
Psychoanalysis; subject; psychosis