Abstract
This article analyzed the transcriptions of three patient presentations conducted by Jacques Lacan at the Hospital of Sainte-Anne in 1976. The analysis of these interviews aimed to apprehend how Lacan proceeded as an analyst with respect to the use of diagnostic categories and the management of the tension between the universality of the clinical type and the singularity of the single case. The analysis revealed that although Lacan did not refuse to use terms derived from classical psychiatry or to make the structural diagnosis of the interviewed patients, these aspects were not the focus of his interest. Lacan dispensed the rigidity of diagnostic categories, performing disarmament, inversion, annulment or disassembling operations of the standard diagnosis, inventing names - and not diagnoses - that did not establish new classes to characterize patients.
Keywords:
presentation of patients; diagnosis; classification; universal; singular