Nobus, Dany. Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis. 2000. pp. 15 – 16
foreclosure as the best translation of Freud’s term Verwerfung. (Lacan 1955-56 Sem III)
Indeed, whereas foreclosure is a juridical term expressing the expiration of a person’s assigned rights (for instance, the legal access to one’s children after a divorce) when he does not exercise them, Lacan took it and developed it in 1957-58 text on psychosis.
Lacan introduced the concept of the Name-of-the-Father in a 1953 lecture on the neurotic’s individual myth, in order to separate the real fathe, a flesh and blood man, from the symbolic ‘function of the father’, which he interpreted a sthe culturally determined regulation fo the natureal order of things. In the “Rome Discourse” bears a striking resemblance to how the Jerish God Yahweh was understood by Freud in his Moses and Monotheism. 16
On occasion, people commenting on Lacan’s theory have argued that the mother’s refusal to accept the paternal authority is sufficient for psychosis to occur in the child, by which they have reduced Lacan’s complex Oedipal schema to its simple triangular roots, and by which they have also realigned it with the post-Freudian view that a child’s psychic normality is predicated upon its separation from the pre-Oedipal dyadic relation with the mother, through the intervention of the father and the concurrent ‘triangulation’. Nowhere does Lacan’s work allow us to make these kinds of inferences, yet neither does it suggest a good alternative answer to the problem. 18
The foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father does not only affect the individual’s speech, but also influences his sexual identity and relationships with others.