The distinction between nothing and the void: Nothing is localized, like when we say “there is nothing here;’ while the void is a dimension without limits.” In psychoanalytic clinics, this couple is clearly operative in the distinction between psychosis and hysteria: in psychosis, we encounter so-called “depersonalization’ or the feeling of the loss of reality, which refers to a void; while in hysteria, this void is localized as a nothing, a specific dissatisfaction.
What this means is that nothing is always a nothing within some specific framework: there is nothing within a frame where we expected something. The first task in the analysis of a psychotic is thus arguably the most difficult, but also the most crucial: that of “hystericizing” the psychotic subject, that is, transforming the void of his “depersonalization’ into a hysterical dissatisfaction. The opposite of this transformation is the case of psychotic forclusion, where the excluded element throws the subject back into the void. But why? Because the excluded element — the Name-of-the-Father —is not just one among the signifiers, but a signifier-frame, a signifier which sustains the texture of an entire symbolic framework. 68
It is only this nothing, and not the void, which can then be counted as 1. One should apply this lesson to the key problem of Neoplatonist mystics: how to pass from the primordial abyss of the limitless Void to the One? By way of framing it and thus turning it into a nothing which can be counted as One. [footnote 67]