Preliminary Note on Lacan’s Style
I think that Lacan had many brilliant ideas. Unfortunately, I think that it is also indisputable that he would often write or speak in a purposefully obscure way.
One of his close friends records this in a book of her recollections of their time together (“Life with Lacan”)—that he would begin with a clear draft which he would work over to make more obscure (or which, at any rate, became more obscure in the act of his working it over, which runs contrary to the normal process of composition):
He wrote a first version, and once it was finished he binned it and began again, and so on. For ‘L’étourdit’, for example, there were three drafts. The first was the most understandable, each of the following two added a degree of ‘complication’, in the Leibnizian sense. He proceeded by condensations, overdeterminations and equivocations. The text then had to be literally unfolded by the reader.
Lacan himself says this or alludes to this unusual practice (in a characteristically obscure passage) somewhere in his Écrits as well:
With […] this style [i.e: the style of these writings], which the audience to whom they were addressed required, I want to lead the reader to a consequence in which he must pay the price with elbow grease.
In other words: “One must earn the right to the truths contained in these writings through the hard work of interpretation!”
Zizek complains about this feature of Lacan's writing.
While I would like to lazily hide behind Zizek’s authority, inwardly I am conscious of an objection to the idea that any truth can be extracted from the confused, knotty tangle of Lacan’s words and writing.
Here is an imagined objection:
Perhaps Lacan’s style is inextricable from the substance of his ideas.
After all, form and content cannot be divided so easily. Isn’t this one of the main insights of psychoanalysis? Freud famously taught that the latent and manifest content of a dream was not as meaningful as the formal traces (i.e.: the traces pertaining to form) which were generated in the act of transcription itself. In simple terms: it is not what one says, nor even what one really means, but why and how the underlying, “latent” meaning is distorted—it is this third term which is of central interest to a psychoanalyst. So, if we take this to be true, or if we are taking psychoanalysis at all at its word, then surely Lacan’s knotty theorizing is inextricably bound up with his knotty modes of expression, such that separating one from the other, like untying a knot, will cause the system to lose its entire substance, its being, which in an intellectual system is is truth.
All these would be valid concerns if I held that Lacan’s theories were entirely correct.
But in fact, I think he was wrong about certain important things—and I think that these errors influence both his theory and his practice. To hold, as Lacan held, that language cannot but be unfaithful to truth—I think that this position necessarily leads to a practice of treating language like a tool, a meaningless object, rather than as a medium for truth. And while there is much to be gained from this approach, there is also much to be lost—clarity and, in extremis, coherence.
The Aim of this Essay
I want to try to summarize a Lacanian account which purports to explain something of human psychic development and then apply it to our current political situation.
So here is a brief (and hopefully intelligible) summary of what I take as one of Lacan’s phenomenological accounts of psychic development:
For some time after birth, an infant lives at an animalistic level. They only have needs, which the mother fulfills. But at some point in development, language, and thus meaning enters the child’s experience.
With language, there can be a real difference between need and demand. In other words, we can begin to exercise a certain degree of cupidity, asking for more or less than what we truly need. In fact, we can’t do otherwise: outside a state of ecstatic beatitude (which has scarcely ever been observed, and is far from psychologically normal), there is always a difference between a rational creature’s symbols and those symbols’ referents. In simpler terms: from the beginning of symbolic, meaningful thought, there is a difference between our words and what they mean. Such a difference, in fact, is the birth of truly human desire. This is the only thing that we are really missing—harmony between our words and their meaning.
Notice that this observation remains true whether or not one has faith in an absolute being, a logos in which language and meaning are united in one being (or rather, a being who precedes both of these beings ontologically, from whose refraction language and meaning descend). In other words, this account can be reconciled with traditional religion, even though it originated in a worldview which was opposed to it.
Anyway: in old religious terms, we might say that, at a certain time, the child begins to grow into a rational creature, capable of cognizing immaterial truth. Or perhaps we always have this power, but we don’t “awaken” to it (we don’t become aware of it) until a certain point of development.
One is differentiated from the mother's desires (and thereby from the mother) by the father, who (psychologically speaking) comes to stand for that which the mother desires beyond and apart from the child.
Emotionally, the infant should get a sense that the mother cares for someone beyond the child him or herself. Otherwise, the wall between self and other won’t be built—or if it is built, it will be “leaky.”1
Note that in this account the father is more of an idea, an abstraction (we might even say: the idea of abstraction) than a reality of perceived experience. This is why Lacan uses the term “the name-of-the-father” (nom-du-père2) The psychological entity he describes is not a directly perceived thing, but the prototype3 of the reality of experience turning aside into an idea which is separate from one’s own desires and emotions. Hence that it takes the form of a “no,” which Freud argued was expressed in the lowest layers of the psyche through gross carnal metaphors.4
The sense in the infant that the mother directs some emotional energy towards the father—that he has some place in her speech—is the minimal, i.e. the essential part of the paternal “function.”
The word “function” means that the idea of the father does something in the psyche.5 What does it do? Again: it builds the wall between self and other.
By breaking into an otherwise undifferentiated field, the mother’s desire or care for the father shows the child that there is something other than the child’s own desires.
The state won’t do it (the state cannot fully take on the role of a father), because young children cannot conceive of impersonal abstractions.6 We anthropomorphize beings before we see things as they really are.7 What is true in the individual is true of the species: This is why ancient and primitive peoples tell myths long before they contrive abstract philosophy. All the Greek myths are about anthropomorphized concepts; the names of the gods of Greek mythology are generally nouns: for example, Cupid and Psyche, lit. “desire and the soul”—whence our “cupidity” and “psychology,” even to this day.
Psychologically speaking, reality is only "that which resists."
Desire and fantasy are—again, psychologically speaking—as coextensive with the real world as reality allows them to be.
Thus, if the mother does not desire the father in some sensible way (if she does not care about him), the child themselves will never break apart fantasy from reality.
Rather, psychological reality (which, again, is defined as that which does not go away when you stop thinking about it) will float around freely in the amorphous subjective space of fantasy, and vice versa: fantasy will float around within (psychological) reality—which of course it already does, to a certain extent, but more than usual, more than is socially sanctioned. This causes problems.
What is psychosis? I think everyone would agree that it is a state within the mind of a pronounced difference between ideas and reality.
But none of us really live in reality entirely, at least not by the above definition of reality. Almost everyone has wishes (which must pertain to what is not),8 and often they are satisfied. Even waking life is partially a dream, and “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.” In other words: our substance is most purely expressed in dreams.
But is reality only that which resists? That is, is psychological reality nothing other than pain?
I would say that the resistance of the world to our mind’s concepts does not need to take the form of pain alone. It can also take the form of a joy or existence beyond our knowledge or expectation. The world goes on beyond our expectations, it resists our expectations in both “directions,” up and down: from the depths of hell to the highest reaches of heaven. The latter experience is much less common, but it is important enough to orient life (because its psychological being is substance, rather than the horror of non-being).
This is perhaps signified quite directly in the literal construction of our term “under(-)standing.”9 How intimate, then, is the link between truth and intellectual humility!
So this, I think, is the cause of the preponderance of madness in our times. A failure of love in the mother (for the father) and a complementary (or even primary) failure to be lovable in the father (for what is lovable naturally attracts love).
Someone might reply to this that such an analysis is naïve, because it imagines that the sexual relationship (a system which ensures happy coexistence between two people) is even possible, when in fact such a thing is impossible (as Lacan never tires of repeating).
But I would turn this around: when Lacan says that “the sexual relationship does not exist,” what he means is that a sexual rapport is impossible. But for Lacan, “rapport” has a definite meaning: it refers to an intelligible systematic relation between two things. Thus “the impossibility of the sexual relationship” is not the impossibility of human connection as such; rather, the claim is that the relationship between two people in a relationship is so substantive that it cannot be mapped out, structured in advance, any more than life itself can be entirely planned and lived out according to a finite set of definite rules, according to a fixed system.10
That is, what is true of life as a whole is only more evident in romantic relationships (at least in our current historical situation; it seems clear to me that other modes of consciousness do not place such a premium on romantic love as “we” do. This does not make our valuation vain, however).
And we can return again to truth itself, that it pre-exists us and forms a whole of which we are merely a minor part.
But on from the brief description of an interpretation of one facet of Lacanian theory to its application to our present situation:
Application to Everyday Life:
Conspiracy theories are becoming more popular, to the point that they are beginning to lead to real political instability. Some people attribute this growing madness to technology, but I think that the effect is too intense to be accounted for by technology alone.
Social media only catalyzes a growing lack of common sense (a collective idea among a group of the verities or really the realities of life). And such separation is driven by this failure towards the other.
People without a strong enough wall between self and other begin to translate their pain (which generally de facto ensues as the result of impersonal forces—or at most, indifference) into malice directed at them from some external agent. They personalize it, because to a great extent they are unable to truly think from the perspective of another person—which intellectual empathy requires a high degree of psychological “reality.” One cannot truly think other persons into the field of impersonal abstract reality until one has a solid idea of such a reality. The wall must be built—or rather, a solid stage must be established in the psyche before one can introduce actors onto it. Or again, one must have a clear background against which independent persons can be thought. The oppressive agent posited by the psychotic mind is only an inverted image of the other who exists wholly for their sake. Their absolute malice is a trace of their reality. They are a primitive means of processing pain.
People tending towards psychosis generally fail to realize the actual improbability of a Iago-like character, an individual who is almost totally devoted to bringing harm to someone else. One of the reasons self-consciousness is banished at the end of adolescence is that one grows to realize that most people are preoccupied with their own concerns.
That said (to pause for a moment to ward off pride) if any of us were so firmly grounded in reality to that point that no emotion or false idea could ever uproot us, we would be godly.
Clearly it is not given to us to enjoy that state always in this life. I think that we can taste it in certain moments, but usually things hold us back or obscure our vision, though seldom to the point that we become wholly blind.
Indeed, perfect blindness would relieve us of all guilt.
And a sense of guilt, along with the love which produces it, could be called the affective wellspring of all religion.
But to return to my point: that failure of connection is what generates psychosis; it is the cause of people becoming more disconnected from reality. Indeed, with the ascendancy of empirical science in our times, one might have expected “empirically verifiable” truth (or at least vast swathes of it) to become something inert and banal. “We have accepted it, so let’s move on to other things.” But today, sadly, people seem to be losing touch with it.
What do I mean? Here are some epistemic battlegrounds which are abundantly familiar to us all: flat earth theory, the Q conspiracy, the COVID vaccine and pandemic, global warming, and the phenomenon of transgenderism.
Let me remain agnostic on all these issues for a moment: whichever “side” you are on in each instance, the predominant thing we should notice is that a significant portion of society is apart from another portion on what in each case should be a simple matter of facts. In the liberal utopia before our times, differences of opinion within groups or individuals were properly speaking ideological, i.e: they were preferences which traced their origin to something comparatively inscrutable in a person.11 Idealism vs. cynicism, for example, is a disagreement about a fundamentally unanswerable thing. One may believe in democracy or authoritarianism for certain reasons, but as all arguments about ideals trace themselves to what are finally inscrutable apprehensions within an intellectual being, there is a place for them within a liberal order (we should say: within a humane order, because such tolerance of ambiguity is the more realistic approach to human nature).
But again, all the above issues (the issues which divide society in our time) are matters of empirical fact. Such disagreement, therefore, is less excusable because more pathological—indeed, more psychotic.
Maybe what we will learn from this epoch is that one’s disposition towards truth (and the underlying psychological configuration which produces that disposition) is more important than one’s mere access to the actual truth.
After all, many medieval and even ancient thinkers were more capable than we are of thinking clearly,12 even though from the perspective of natural science, they were hopelessly in the dark. One might say that one’s manner of reasoning is more important than the field of facts one intends to reason with or on, but in fact I am claiming something else, that a kind of madness can cloud the mind even when it knows many things and is capable of applying reason. Chesterton, in fact, viewed madness as a kind of excess of reason. At the least we can agree with him in saying that “common sense” is something ultimately inexplicable.
I end this with an appeal that all of us reflect upon where in ourselves we have failed to give credit to the fullness (or rather, the emptiness as pertains to ourselves) of others.
Such an understanding of the minds of those who have departed from reality should also help us feel less anxiety when confronted with the madness of other people.
A Possible Solution: Humanitas
The term above refers to a concept the ambit of which once encompassed humaneness, civility, etiquette, or custom, among other things. Another closely related term is the medieval “courtesy.”
Every community is sustained, in part, by a body of unwritten rules. Both autism (or the states tending towards autism) and schizophrenia (or the states tending towards schizophrenia) are marked by a certain insensitivity to or disregard of these unwritten rules.
Where one cannot love, then, one ought to sustain the social fabric or even create it anew through obedience to or even fabrication of these unwritten rules, with the rule governing this fabrication that the rules devised ought to maximize or at least secure the deterioration of what is “ownmost” in the being of other rational creatures.
Our time is tired of moralism and all its empty appeals, and for good reason. But I think that the preceding material gives enough intelligible ground for the injunction towards humanitas that it will no longer appear as a chimera which moments of evil impulse degrade into nothingness, but as a fortress the reality of which is unrealized in spite of the ideal being of its design, its form.
And yet, maybe the barrier is always somewhat porous. I think that the view we have of the world will never be totally “pure,” in the sense that it will never be perfectly purified from any trace of the emotional bond we shared with our first caregiver. Maybe autism an attempt at such an impossible neutrality. But such neutrality is in fact tendentious, because the love of our first caregiver itself expresses a truth about being. This is lapsing from psychology into something like metaphysics or ontology, but I think that it’s worth saying. The world exists for our sake.
Why? Isn’t it more sensible to follow Feuerbach in saying that such a religious belief is a projection of our own experience into the world? In more modern parlance: creatures wish for the security they experience from their first caregiver, so they project such security into nature and anthropomorphize it. But this is untrue…
A contrary “Platonic” thesis in support of the above point (that the world exists for our sake): everything lesser exists to serve what is greater.
What makes you think that human beings are greater? Isn’t this just “speciesist” chauvinism?
Unlike animals, human beings can grasp intelligible truth. What is changeless is higher than that which suffers change. Truth does not change. Therefore, the faculty which participates in truth puts human beings above the world they live in.
Death, entropy does not change. Thus it must be greater than human beings. And surely you would find such an idea repugnant.
But death is not any “thing” at all, but the end of things, the absence of things, the disappearance of things.
Does all such immaterial truth, then, stand above us? If by your logic what is changeless is higher than what suffers change, then we are subject to trivial, elementary mathematical theses. Should human beings perish because 2 + 2 = 4?
We are not subject to theses (propositions), but to what they represent and express: truth. I am not afraid to affirm that human beings are subject to truth.
To all truth, or to a single truth alone? In other words, is the worth of a human life outweighed by even the smallest truth?
We must distinguish between truth as we conceive it and truth as it truly is. Human beings reason in a finite, limited mode—gradually traveling, step by step, from axioms through inferences to new premises. But truth, which is timeless, always exists as an eternal, perfect whole. So it makes no sense to consider a particle of truth as if, in itself, it did not both imply and depend on all other truths—indeed, as if it were not truly one in being.
In the original French, this term is a pun: the “no” of the father as well as the name of the father. This wordplay signifies that the mother’s desire moving beyond the child is inextricable from psychological reality, intelligible being which conflicts with the psyche’s desires.
In the sense of “first model.” I would be so bold as to say that the image which the mother presents to the child is gradually adapted to form the image of everyday life (in its emotional valence). Children who are doted on end up with a sense of unshakable optimism about life, and vice versa.
The feminist reaction to theories such as these has been that they are cruel because they place too much pressure on the mother to be perfect. But as Donald Winnicott wrote, mothering only needs to be sufficient (“good-enough”), not perfect. And in fact this conception follows from Freud’s idea that the goal of psychoanalysis is to reduce neurotic misery to ordinary unhappiness. I.e: it goes beyond the proper purview of psychoanalysis to prescribe the ideal way of behaving. Even this essay is not intended to posit a perfect ideal so much as to delineate the actions which may help society less swiftly incohere.
In simpler terms: one need only be a “good enough” mother, not a perfect Madonna (which goal is de facto unattainable for normal human beings anyway).
The idea is that the child seeks some kind of union with the mother (or to maintain the union given before the presence in consciousness of abstract truth), but the bodily instrument of physical desire is nullified by the father. All this is an expression, using the body as a metaphor (which is understandable, because an animal becoming human would use what is closest at hand and most salient), for the faltering ascent from a seemingly whole animal existence to non-beatific abstract thought.
An animal’s highest good is biological reproduction, the continuation of its physical being. So the instrument of that continuation would loom large in their influence in that sphere of our consciousness which is purely mechanical, or at least determined (unspiritual).
I say “instrument,” singular, because animals to the best of my knowledge perpetuate their being one-sidedly, acting without communion.
The justification for such an idealistic or metaphysical reading of Freud’s theory (i.e: such a Lacanian reading) is that as a theory of human psychological development it is a theory about the development of essentially spiritual yet accidentally fallen beings. As such, metaphysical truth will become bound up with what is most salient from the perspective of our animal nature, which is “unfallen.”
A function is a mathematical abstraction which maps certain inputs to certain outputs. One can think of it like a machine which operates in a predictable way (hence our verb for a machine’s act: “functioning”). A function where a single input returns multiple differing outputs is no function at all. The reason for this, I think (?), is that such a mapping between inputs and outputs would not be sufficiently informative. Abstraction, thought itself, consists in observing true distinctions within the whole of experientially undifferentiated being.
As Chesterton said: “art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere…”
And anyway, no one can desire a state in the same way that human beings can desire other persons. Because the name of the father is the birth of abstraction as such, it has to be mediated through a person. One can’t jump from the world of persons to the world of abstractions without a vanishing mediator who personifies abstraction as such.
Note also that any other person can play the role of the father. It is not inflexibly welded to biological sex or cultural kinship structure.
And perhaps, ultimately, being itself really is personal. Perhaps it is one of the highest truths that “experience loves me” (which, note well, is to be sharply distinguished from the proposition that “the world loves me.”) But again, this is verging into metaphysics and ontology (or even theology). Suffice it to say that mature people in civilized societies are or should be capable of conceiving of things as impersonal objects, rather than seeing everything as a subject.
Indeed, the Lacanian view of psychotic catatonia, psychotic depression (a wish-less state), is that it obtains where there is no room for desire to operate. The name-of-the-father, which on Lacan’s view is what triggers signification as such, has not become operative in the soul.
Thus psychosis is connected to an excessive proximity between the child and the mother.
One might object that the original etymology is something closer to “inter-standing.” But the essential point (expressed in both spatial metaphors) is that Truth is a whole of which we are a part (and not the other way around), such that we can stand in its midst.
Conversely, “superstition” denotes the opposite; its etymology seems to indicate that the superstitious attitude is finally reducible to a delusory “standing-over” the world and its operations.
One might argue that this is one way of explaining why so much of our modern popular art is fixated on what some people have called “the construction of the sexual relationship.” In other words, there is a love story in almost every movie because romantic love can never be conclusively settled and set aside; like life, it can never be solved, but only endlessly incorporated into an eternally-imperfect knowledge.
I am not saying that all ideological differences are reducible to aesthetic preferences, however.
Anyone who doubts this ought to read anything by St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Anselm.