Documented madness
By Ana Castaño. Member of ELP

Last July 5, we had the opportunity to conclude the meetings of the group for psychoanalysis applied to mental health by attending a private showing of the documentary " La Osa Mayor menos dos".

We had been working on invention and creation throughout the course and this encounter made us think what it does to psychosis, to madness, as regards a possible invention on existing materials and which supposes the act of creating "ex-nihilo", on a void.

This is a documentary shot over the course of a year in the different rehabilitation units for seriously mentally ill patients, the so-called chronic patients, in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city. The director, David Reznak, manages to transmit something that goes beyond the eye that is looking and the spectator gradually becomes involved in the different stories. His intention is not solely artistic, as he says in his introductory text. "Just as the train that takes you from Madrid to Leganés shows you the back room of factories and cities, that road that only the railway line follows, the stay in the psychiatric hospital becomes a look at society from behind the scenes. Madness has a primitive force of revelation: revelation that the oneiric is real, that the tenuous surface of illusion is limitless. All of reality is reabsorbed by the fantastic image." The format, very beautiful and excellently edited, gradually moves through the different seasons of the year and through different moments of the characters, some young and others older, on their road out of or back to madness. As Miguel Marías says in his review, it is "one of the (very) few real documentaries made recently in Spain" as it has narrative and registers what happens in such a way that it could well be a dramatic fiction in which it doesn't really matter if the characters are themselves or magnificent unknown actors playing a role, "it is credible, dramatic, terrible, occasionally funny. That is why what we see and hear matters to us."

Beyond the esthetic question of a job well done, it is of interest to us as psychoanalysts, insofar as it documents madness for us. We can see in different scenes what Lacan teaches us about psychosis in his seminar no. three and, above all, that the fundamental thing in psychosis is the phenomena of language and how "That talks". On an excursion to an exceptional spot, the Tablas de Daimiel, a woman talks to the sun in an invented language in which the play between signifier and signified to produce an effect of signification is disrupted, in a good example of how in the psychotic experience the subject is inhabited by language contrary to neurosis which leads him to "love his delirium as himself". We can also observe in the conversations held with some of the younger patients how the relationship with the world, with others, is not sustained on a question but rather the psychotic has the certain answer of what he is for the Other and the affront, the damage, at times irreparable, that this supposes. There were moments during the projection when I remembered what Lacan tells us in his seminar: ".the psychotic is a martyr to the unconscious, giving the term martyr its meaning: to be a witness. It is an open testimony." which as the signifier is alienated, fixed, in a directionless metonymy, he can't give an account of "that to which he testifies, and share it in the discourse of others":

" La Osa Mayor menos dos" testifies to the double exile of these subjects, that which is caused by the lack-in-being as a result of being inscribed in language, of being talking creatures, and that caused by their psychosis which places them outside discourse, with no social link, as in the moving story of the ballerina.

There is a setting which, like a papier-mâché set, remains immutable: the place where they live, also alienated, excluded and with slightly hygienist interventions in order to lead the subjects to psycho-social well-being, which is a neurotic aspiration, and question of public order which invites us to reflect on how to deal with chronicity from psychoanalysis and if creation is possible in unleashed psychosis.

Finally, after the screening there was a conversation with the director David Reznak about his creation and about various incidents and details of the shooting. We realized the enigma that madness is for him, summarized in the title of the documentary. Soon it will be on commercial release, after participating in various festivals and receiving the award for best documentary in Barcelona 's XII Festival of Independent Cinema: L'Alternativa.

Ana Castaño, Member ELP

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