According to Élisabeth Roudinesco, the term was originally introduced into psychology 'in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet's review, his article on "The Psychological Significance of Negation in French": "...[and] borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality'.
"[8] In 1954 basing himself on a reading of the "Wolf Man"[9] Lacan identifies Verwerfung as the specific mechanism of psychosis where an element is rejected outside the symbolic order as if it has never existed.
[12] The problem Lacan sought to address with the twin tools of foreclosure and the signifier was that of the difference between psychosis and neurosis, as manifested in and indicated by language usage.
"[13] Freud, following Bleuler and Jung had pointed to 'a number of changes in speech...in schizophrenics...words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream'.
In 1957 in his article "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis"[15] that he advances the notion that it is the Name-of-the-Father (a fundamental signifier) that is the object of foreclosure.
"[19] Psychosis is experienced after some environmental sign in the form of a signifier which the individual cannot assimilate is triggered, and this entails that "the Name-of-the-Father, is foreclosed, verworfen, is called into symbolic opposition to the subject.
"Absence of transcendence of the Oedipus places the subject under the regime of foreclosure or non-distinction between the symbolic and the real';[20] and psychotic delusions or hallucinations are the consequent result of the individual's striving to account for what he/she experiences.