I'm with you on this one. Also, it always seems odd to me that sexual desire is elevated in this tradition when it seems more logical (and maybe that's my problem) to attribute to a child newly in the world more obviously immediate desires like to be free of hunger, free of pain, and free of cold -- all three of those experiences are lined up in abundance from the moment we're born.
You have some odd food preferences, as do I, but we're still carrying out the basic function of eating. We put some kind of food in our mouths, chew it, and swallow. Sexual desires can get much weirder.
I think maybe it's because hunger shows up years earlier than sexual desire. Or maybe because, while sex is necessary for the survival of the species, food is necessary for the immediate survival of the individual. If you're putting food in the wrong hole, you're not going to last long.
I was convinced by this, but then also convinced by Bullseye's reply that food doesn't get anywhere near as weird as sex.
But then thinking about this analogy, I find it really interesting that there is a growing acceptance of people's unusual identities on both in recent years. Even out in red suburban Texas, where they don't have much respect for vegetarians, there's all sorts of overt welcoming of gluten sensitivity and other allergens (to the extent that a moderately nice restaurant in town advertises a "gluten free brownie" on their menu, when it's actually just a regular flourless chocolate cake) and a lot of this coincides with the years when people across the political spectrum have mostly come to just accept that different people have different sexual orientations and identities.
Interesting. That last line about Freud seems spot on to me. And I know we all hate this, but in this context "man" and "girl" seemed really irritating, although I strive not to react or get all p.c. Its just an extremely jarring image to this woman, in this case. Take it as you will, a correction or a ridiculous objection. It stood out though, big time.
I never really know how to take these objections. Some feminists - women and men - are triggered by this sort of language. Others think they have much bigger fish to fry and may raise an eyebrow and point out the imbalance and wait for a more pressing problem to really throw down the gauntlet.
I wouldn't identify as a feminist, but I did find it odd that all this discussion of children assumed the child was a male with an Oedipal desire for its mother. What happens with female infants? Hysterics must come from somewhere! :)
Yeah there is a ‘guy-nerd’ vibe here a lot of times. As a guy nerd myself, this doesn’t always jump out at me.
I don’t know what the m\f ratio of the readership actually is but I’d guess it skews male.
I hear your point and the one made by AIG though.
FWIW I identify as a feminist myself but lean in on what I think of as bigger issues. Equity in pay, opportunity and respect. You could make a valid case that the man/girl word choices indicate inequality in respect of course.
But there are a lot of things in the world that are unfair and I worry that making noise for every injustice I see will just make me annoying. It’s a matter of choosing my battles
So now I'm thinking about what a baby's experience would be like. There certainly wouldn't be named colors. Probably their experience of their hands would have feeling and seeing mixed together, and I don't know whether they'd realize that their hands when visible and hands when not visible were the same thing.
They start off not realizing the widgets they're seeing are connected to the feelings they have in their hands -- that is, their experience begins as *unmixed*. But pretty early on they "discover" their hands, in the sense that they realize these things floating around in their field of view are their hands, so they play around with them -- look! I can move it this way and that, hit myself in the face by accident damn it, put them in my mouth which kind of feels good 'cause I have a tooth coming in.
It's very likely an important early milestone in the development of the visual cortex's ability to do what machine vision people call "segment" the visual field -- identify certain areas of the visual field as containing distinct objects, which have an existence largely independent from the rest of the visual field (they can be moved around against the background, and retain their identity). The retina does some significant preprocessing to speed this process along -- motion and edge detection -- but we think most of it still goes on in the visual cortex. Oliver Sacks's famous story shows what happens when this ability is degraded in a certain way, and the visual cortex can segment the visual field but loses the ability to categorize and associate an abstract mental symbol with the object ("This is a distinct object, and also my hand.")
I assumed this was an accurate reflection of either Lacan or the explainer of Lacan, who presupposes a male subject, except when forced to imagine who might be hysterical.
The classical parallel is the Electra complex, which was developed by Jung later; Freud disagreed with this, but the whole idea (both Freudian and Jungian) doesn't much hang together. There is this obsession with the phallus (penis envy for girls, castration anxiety for boys) which on the one hand yes, if you're a young child, this is the most easily visible difference between boys and girls, but on the other hand there's a ton of instinctual work around sexual development in the psyche that needs to be going on to make the theories work, and I'm not convinced that they do happen that way.
The theory of hysteria is one that bounced around from physiological to psychological and back to physiological; it's complicated, based on work Freud did with/researched about Charcot, and had a rise and fall in popularity. It's been years since I read some of Freud's work, so I'm going on vague memory, but I think some of his patients were male hysterics. However, it became associated mainly or even solely with women, and the psychosexual theories started tumbling out.
I think a lot of Freudian and Lacanian analysis is based on the mores of their particular times, so that the changes in social and cultural attitudes makes that stand out very much (e.g. the emphasis on the male as the child in the triad of father, mother, child) so that whatever about the principles underlying the theories and the interpretation of them, the result sounds odd to modern ears.
I liked the cover illustration chosen; while it does have the triad of mother-baby-father, it's also The Tempest by Giorgione which has had various and variant interpretations over the years, from "Giorgione was just painting a landscape and that's all there is to it" to "There are deep secret hidden meanings here" - very Lacanian!
> There is this obsession with the phallus (penis envy for girls, castration anxiety for boys) which on the one hand yes, if you're a young child, this is the most easily visible difference between boys and girls
Here in America, we wear pants when kids are around. I remember having no idea what the difference between boys and girls was. I could see the difference in faces as well as anyone else, but I had no idea what the difference meant. It was baffling.
Same, though I had some idea after I sneaked into a dictionary at 9. The thing I was missing for many years after that, though, was a correction of my misconception that babby was formed by magic when the key went in the hole (without any rubbing/motion... I also was under the impression that the only reason people really wanted to do it was emotional and romantic rather than neurophysical).
I am not always "triggered," and tried to say that. Am not in favor of a lot of the reactions to language, but sometimes, and in general to some. Sometimes its not really "trigger," which suggests just a personal response, perhaps to our own traumas. Rather, sometimes it really matters what we model and how we frame things. You "never really know how to take these objections." Just listen and ponder. There is room for thought and reasonable discussion around this, though yes it can get ridiculous. I am always on the side of not generalizing, which yes is a generalization. But let's try to think together.
I could have used a less loaded word than trigger. I think you would find I’m on your side if you knew me a bit better. My main point, if I were to phrase it more carefully Is that effecting change is very difficult and you can’t be heard if no one is listening. It has become too easy for the forces of illiberalism to dismiss things like this as dumb SWJ nonsense. So as I say below or above depending on your sort, it’s become a matter of choosing battles.
Sorry about any personal trauma that had made these things to stand out for you
I didn't say it well, I meant that "trigger" suggests personal trauma when that may not be it at all. And, I do believe you are "on my side." That wasn't really in question. Although we all might think about if it makes sense to frame some battles as more worthy than other. I will say this again: I am not a huge advocate of the constant language-watching that is so prevalent. Just: sometimes it really sticks out (pun?) -- and sometimes, the little things are connected to the big things (pun?) That is why I say just listen. One doesn't always have to come up with an answer. Sometimes just questions will do. Thanks though.
Language is weird. I think equivalent word pairs are boy/girl (for children), guy/girl (any age, less formal) and man/woman (adult, more formal). My grandmother calls her 90+ year old female friends girls (eg, "I met with the girls this afternoon").
Certain phrases are more common and sound more natural with one or the other. A "hot girl" and a "beautiful woman" are more natural sounding than if you swap the adjectives. (And similarly, "hot guy" sounds more natural to me than "hot man".)
I think what happened here was a switch from more formal, clinical language ("a heterosexual man") to informal language ("hot girl").
Sometimes I think the problem is that there's no female equivalent of "guy." There's no informal neutral substitute for "woman" "Gal," which started sounding dated by the 60's or maybe before, seems like a pretty decent equivalent, a fairly neutral term without a bunch of other attributes attached. But if you say "gal" now a linguistic wormhole opens up and Eisenhower comes strolling through it.
In the 1980s, my wife sang in a wedding band headed by an elderly horn player who'd composed some hits in the Big Band era for his wife, who introduced herself to us as an old "gal singer," which struck my wife as a worthy aspiration.
The the word "guy" in this context actually derives from the name: the effigies of Guy Fawkes traditionally burned on November 5th in Britain are called "guys" in his honor, and the term was also used figuratively for a person wearing disheveled or eccentric clothing reminiscent of the worn-out and often mismatched clothes used to construct the Guy Fawkes effigies (kinda like modern American usage of comparing someone's appearance to a scarecrow). From there, it came to mean a shabby or disreputable-seeming person, and then just a casual term for a male adult or adolescent.
"Dude" has similarly convoluted origins. It was originally a near-synonym for "dandy" (from "duds", a casual term for fancy clothes). Then it came to mean a wealthy urbanite who was conspicuously out of place in a western frontier town, or else such an urbanite who was playing at dressing up like a cowboy (c.f. "dude ranch", a ranch run specifically for tourists to play at being cowboys). The "cool dude" meaning came next, which evolved into the modern usage.
I should think language lags behind culture. Until recently, a fertile female human who had sexual intercourse with a male would with some probability get pregnant, which changed her whole social role, usually much for the worse, if she wasn't married. So there were words for the social roles of filles and femmes, mädchen and frauen, girls and women. Males just grew beards and were no longer boys. Ok, a lot of ritual and celebration, whatever.
Maybe we shall see if there will be new words. The feminist project to address everyone without a penis, regardless of age and sexual activity, as women, seems not to have succeeded.
Personally I'm more taken aback by the way he presented a scenario where a man gets raped, and then presents it as a big mystery why he objects to being raped.
The idea, I assume, was to get around the 'I'd never enjoy getting head from a man' objection to the notion that getting head from a man and a woman might result in identical physical sensations while generating different mental appreciations of the event.
Although I agree that the scenario presented is not a very good experimental design for evaluating the question.
Yes, because there was a bait-and-switch of what you had consented to. Even if we presume that you would have been willing to consent if informed, the opportunity to decline was not provided.
If you decided to play a sexy game with your lover, and agreed to be blindfolded before intercourse, and the blindfold were then accidentally lifted to reveal it was a stranger -- let us posit a very handsome man -- instead of your boyfriend who'd entered you, would you call it rape? Is consent a thing for everyone, or just one sex?
Fascinating. So if you sat on a rape jury, would you vote to convict on the less serious charge if the assailant is very good looking, and on the more severe charge if he is homely?
It would certainly be a traumatic experience for me, regardless of how beautiful or attractive the woman was. The difference between an attractive woman and an ugly one would honestly be negligible, because the surprise alone would make it deeply traumatizing either way.
Yes. I think it was very clear that he does *not* mean the discomfort caused by a lack of consent.
To make this clear, perhaps imagine instead the difference in discomfort between removing the blindfold to see an ugly man, vs. seeing a different beautiful woman.
I think this may have something to do with the age assumptions typically made about the age of iconic sexually active and attractive people. In this scenario we are probably expected to imagine the "hot girl" as quite young -- say, between 19 and 25 -- while the "man" might be almost any age from 19 to 55, say, althought almost certainly her age or older.
We are not expected to imagine a 18-year-old high-school male getting a beej from a 48-year-old female, even if she were as comely as Raquel Welch at 48, and indeed if that were revealed to be the actual scenario the description would probably be read as somehow off, inaccurate in some overtone. But if it were a 48-year-old man being pleasured by an 18-year-old female, that "fits" the description just fine.
That is, I think it might have less to do with infantilizing women per se, or denying agency or maturity, and more to do with an (maybe half or entirely) unconscious assumption that women are sexually active and attractive and participating in exciting things like blindfold sex games only during a more restricted and considerably younger part of their lives than men.
Maybe, but you sure are not talking about the women I know. And, I doubt all this is the explanation. Any stats for these claims? Seems like more assumptions about women, is all. Though I know you are offering a respectful try. Many women get stronger and more self-confident as they age, thus more willing to try things, in sex or lots of other ways.
Bear in mind I am not saying what women are actually like, or should be like[1], but only theorizing how the language came to be the way it is via the social conventions and pressures surrounding a public discussion of sexual frolics. A version of the Comics Code Authority we carry around in our heads.
As for *why* it is that way, regardless of the actual behavior of actual women, I might go further out on the limb and say it has to do with the fact that men perhaps feel more inhibited imagining[2] or describing sexuality in women of their mother's age than in men of their father's age.
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[1] And I can draw this distinction with ease because I am not one of those curious people who think language affects objective reality. What people actually are and what they say they are, or other say they are, are not of necessity connected.
[2] At least publically. The existence of the pr0n category "MILF" suggests they have no problem doing it privately, although again the attraction of the category also suggests even privately they still find it at least a bit naughty.
It's a simple, and good, question to begin; `what is the nature of desire?' I follow Girard and Otto Rank, for example, in my answer, but that means when I read that babies have a desire to please then I immediately respond, `no, they don't.' The infant lives in a magical world we can no longer imagine where all the desires are sensual with no rhyme or reason for how or why they magically are, or are not, satisfied.
As a parent, I think you're right. I never got the sense of babies as having a desire to please, at all. It's more the reverse, parents have a desire to please the baby. It's kind of weird that people look at babies as in the submissive powerless position, because when you're a parent it feels much more like babies are in the power position. It's true that babies are *helpless*, but it turns out that's different than being powerless!
Sometime they like to please their parents. Sometimes they like to do something else despite the fact that they know full well that their parents will be very displeased.
The idea that humans are fundamentally motivated by a desire to please their parents doesn't seem compatible with the experience of anyone who has actually spent time around children of any age.
There do seem to be contradictory drives. Children like both approval and also autonomy. or some other thing. I certainly didn't mean to imply that children's motivations could be reduced to a single desire.
Right, this sounds a lot like something theorized by a bourgeois gentleman who spend 15 minutes per day with their children after the nanny has gotten them properly prepared to meet Papa. It's like Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music" confidently composing an essay on what babies want.
According to Wikipedia, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940. Perhaps they were unusually complaisant babies, or Marie-Louise did most of the childcare?
It seems he already had a mistress, Sylvia Bataille, the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, and they married in 1953, his second wife. It says: "During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war."
He was also busy with other stuff - "Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice."
Remembering George Bataille`s obscene writings, his friend Lacan seems even more of a weirdo to me. No offence, weirdos sometimes have great insights. Bataille`s stuff seemed like a dead end to me, though.
Very true. In my experience that's one of the first truly tricky (rather than simply arduous) challenges of parenting--weaning oneself off that feeling of being servants to the child, and doing so at the right pace. Many of the children who are spoiled in an infantilized way (passive, expecting everything to be done for them) are the children of parents who didn't manage the transition. It's trickier than it looks, especially for people who don't take easily to change.
Freud and Lacan agree, calls it polymorphous perversity and considers it a developmental stage from age 0-5. (perversion meaning "I can choose to get my pleasure from whatever I want, however I want", not in a negative sense). Remember you're reading a review by someone who admits in the first paragraph to not really understand it :)
Proust probably explores the obscure nature of desire more than any other thinker, although I can appreciate that most people don't want to invest the time required to read him.
I forgot to ask, how does one get started with Proust (I've only read secondary sources - like Monty Python . . . "Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about" . . . ha ha).
Proust wrote one famous multi-volume novel: In Search of Lost Time. You read Proust starting in the beginning with Swan's Way and keep reading from there. It's six or seven books in all. I like it from the beginning but there's a cumulative, compounding value to reading it all. I'd suggest a program of reading 15 pages a day. Read more if you want, of course, but read at least 15 pages each day. Some of it is boring. But many of the boring parts become interesting later.
That said, if you read all of Swanns's Way and hate it, then Proust isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with that. Not every book is for everyone.
I think the prediction market was exactly correct that you would produce a very entertaining piece of writing on having read this book, which made me laugh out loud a couple of times (the sentence about failed schemes including ending up reading this book, and the parting line).
Totally concur: funny and thought-provoking. My favourite sentence, in parenthesis I think, something like, 'I can' t believe I'm writing this sentence.' Yep. More!
I suspect a bit also came from trolls who thought it'd be funny to make Scott dutifully read and review such a mess of a book. Given low-4 figure volume numbers, it wouldn't take an outrageous sum to turn the market and give you the powerful feeling of having made a famous person do something. But agreed that the review itself was great!
The best of Scott's works has always been the #thingsIllregretwriting and other culture war stuff. This is a flame war about a dead guy and a community that doesn't cancel people, so it's all fun.
"Lacan plays with the similar sounds in French of le nom du père (the name of the father), le non du père (the no of the father), and les non-dupes errent (the non-dupes err) to emphasize with the first two phrases the legislative and prohibitive functions of the father and to emphasize with the last phrase that "those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most"."
I d'ont buy it. Physicists are able to explain clearly awfully complex and non intuitive concepts. Pyschoanalyst should be able to do the same with their much easier stuff.
I was going to make a similar reply, then I remembered that when physicists try to explain awfully complex concepts such as quantum field theory, most of the time they end up simplifying so much that it's actually wrong - case in point, virtual particles, no they don't really exist.
Which ties pretty nicely to what scott was saying in the "sadly porn" review about explaining complicate concepts in a simple way and ending up with people believing they have understood it while it's not actually the case
I have no opinion on the existence/usefulness of virtual particles in the description of quantum phenomena but I do think it is possible to have reasonably correct descriptions of complex things, at different levels of approximation.
I will not dwell on physics because I am far too ignorant of it. If I take the classical example of the shape of the Earth, one can describe it reasonably correctly as a sphere if one only wants a rough approximation, at the next level of precision one can introduce flatness at the poles, at the next level one can add smaller features, etc.
I think this is true in all scientific disciplines, i.e. it is possible to have very rough descriptions that are reasonably easy to understand, and to increase the level of precision and complexity (and difficulty of understanding) as needed.
I do not believe that the human psyche is uniquely impossible to describe in a reasonably clear and correct way. Why should it be? Yes, it is terribly complex, in the sense that there are really many factors of different kinds involved (biological, societal, personal, etc.), but I see no indication that this makes the functioning of our mind impossible to describe correctly and clearly.
I'm curious what you mean by the assertion that virtual particles don't "exist." In what sense? Obviously they can't be measured, by definition, but I would have thought that their existence is proved by the fact that consequences of their existence are indeed measureable.
Are you just taking a nonstandard approach to the quantum measurement problem?
I don't know. Unless graduate level QCD textbooks are things that are "simplifying so much that it's actually wrong," virtual particles are invoked in the real explanation just as much as they are in the simplification. There's often the accompanying Copenhagen Interpretation philosophy of "the equations are all that we really believe, so don't take the Feynman diagrams too literally; just treat them as a tool to help you do the math," (although, I think that typically comes more from professors teaching the book than the book itself), but that's mostly because the Copenhagen Interpretation is the agreed upon truce to prevent people from spending all of their time trying to interpret the equations and arguing with each other about their interpretations of their equations rather than just shutting up and doing the math.
Ah...well we usually do it with math, you know. I've written papers that were half and half words and equations, and a lot of the words were along the lines of "...substituting the expansion (16) for the kinetic energy operator in (11) gives..."
Sure, and these are clear explanations for the intended readers of these papers. You don't have people doing the exegesis of each article to try to understand what the meaning could be!
"Fink presents a (supposedly) real case study of psychosis. A man (“Roger”), ... "
I can't help but noticing that Lacanian therapy causes Roger to go insane, while another therapist helps him to be fine afterwards.
The goal of therapy is typically to help people live normal lives, not to cause their ego to collapse in a particular way. Why would Fink want to use this as an example of Lacanian therapy?
The fact that Freud prospered professionally despite the record suggesting he didn't help many of his patients ... well, it seems to provide useful information about the whole field.
The goal of psychoanalysis is not "to help people live normal lives", unlike typical "supportive" therapy. After Freud, most psychoanalysis has been about developing a sort of reflexive self-understanding or self-knowledge, rather than curing symptoms. This might clear it up (or it might make it more confusing): https://nosubject.com/End_of_analysis
“I have not seen my psychoanalyst in 200 years. He was a strict Freudian and if I had seen him all this time, now I would be almost healed” ~ Woody Alan, “Sleepers”
You want your mom and fear your dad and you don't know what to do about it and you moralize about that fact. Although when I put it like that it sounds like I'm only describing the process for boys and maybe there's another version for girls that the author just didn't catch on to.
Straight girls, I suppose you mean. But remember that the "wanting one's mum" thing is only "sexual" insofar as psychoanalysts decide by fiat to consider babies' physical enjoyment of being hugged and fed by their mothers to be "sexual". (Heterosexual) baby girls are just as capable of deriving that sort of not-actually-especially-sexual pleasure from closeness to their mothers, so the theory doesn't actually need to be boy-specific.
(Of course, I think the theory is hogwash besides, but never mind.)
But, following Lacan is it the sort of weird where, if we ever did understand it, we would immediately replace it with a version of sex that we didn't understand?
Is it true that no one's parents ever tell the kid exactly what they want? Mine never did, but i assumed that they were uniquely flawed somehow. I never thought of that as normal.
Keep in mind that in a Lacanian model, your parents *can't* tell you what they want, because they probably don't know, because their parents didn't know, because their parents didn't know, because...
There's even a non-Lacanian sense in which the parents are uncertain due to the complexity of the situation, lack of time and energy, misunderstandings, etc. and fail to properly express their feelings. It's a common trope in shows and movies for an older dad to tell his children that he loves them and should have said that before (or spent more time with them, or whatever).
I cannot imagine a world in which a parent tells their kid exactly what they want. Such a parent would definitely be a bad parent, but even if we disagreed on that, there's a long period where communication with your non-verbal child is a serious challenge.
Sometimes (like in this case), that is very important. That's an explicit want that will also be in line with whatever values you're trying to instill in your child.
But when I read the analysis above, that's not what comes to mind. What comes to mind are the wants you should, under no circumstances share:
"I'm sorry honey, Mommy's having a hard time concentrating because she is very very horny right now. And not for your father, to be clear. For that young man cleaning the neighbor's pool. I'd really like to have him in a ball gag."
"While I know I should desire that you learn to control your emotional responses to things in a way that serves you well into adulthood, most of my reptile brain doesn't give a crap about that, and would like you to shut up, immediately, and stop making a scene in this grocery store."
"I know you're very into dance, and all of the best parts of my personality are in agreement that it's good that you've found your passion, but there actually is some part of me that always wanted to be a chess grandmaster - I sublimated that desire when I chose to instead get a stable career and be a parent, and I'd make that choice again. That said, it's left me with a fantasy that my child would one day study chess, so some part of me is somewhat disappointed you chose dance class over chess lessons."
These "wants" aren't any less real than other wants, and your kid is still going to detect your distraction, frustration, and ambivalence respectively. And while they don't know the details, they will sense that you have needs they cannot meet. I don't know if that forms the basis for every single part of their relationship and personality (and common sense says I should doubt it), as the Freudians and Lacanians apparently do. But I do think they'll notice despite your best efforts, and that it's probably better that you not give them a detailed explanation nonetheless.
No. But the Lacanian claim (according to this review) isn't that you should or shouldn't tell kids about your wants. It's that you have wants the kids can't fulfill, those wants are ambiguous, and that ambiguity is one of the main shapers of how we seek meaning in our lives.
I find that third bit very suspect, but was just saying assumptions one and two are trivially obvious
I also totally agree. That this ambiguity sometimes can play a role in influencing children why not, but that it usually is a big factor seems very unlikely.
My main question with psychoanalysis is always less "is this correct?" because it obviously is just a bunch of nonsense.
My question is always "why do so many people get taken in by it?" I suspect the answer there is the same as horoscopes or Myers-Brigg: "some of it is obvious and some of it is obscure enough that our pattern-seeking brains can project their own meaning onto it.
"We can't share every part of our lives with our children" is the obvious part and "the things our parents kept from us makes us who we are" is the "Mercury is in retrograde" part. With a nice side order of "therefore it's not our fault."
I totally agree: it is total nonsense and the wonder is that a susbstantial minority of people love said nonsense.
I also think that it is a bit similar to horoscope, MB or tarot reading, as it is a way to produce interesting stories and insights, provided you are not too fussy about these insights being correct.
And the obscurity of the langage could perhaps make the nonsense more attractive for some people. A few years ago, I was very striked when one of my friend told me very seriously that she met this great writer (the son in law of Lacan!), that se did not understand a word of what he said but found him a genius anyway.
Mystery is inherently interesting and exciting and science can have a way of disenchanting reality by projecting a huge hard light on the lovely mists hiding reality. So may be Lacan being vague and obscure make him more attractive.
I have one part of the answer, relevant to the horoscope and Myers-Briggs: analyzing yourself in a mostly-positive way feels GREAT. Double if someone else is doing it, because then you're getting actual attention from another human being, but there's something about turning even your own attention deeply on your own personality (again: in a positive way--this is not self-examination for sins or to figure out why you're a violent drunk or whatever) that feels almost like getting high-quality attention from someone else. It makes you feel valued and important. Why all this talk, all this analysis, if you are the mere nobody you fear you are, worthwhile only for your small usefulness to other people? No, you are a subject worth understanding.
There may be personalities for whom this doesn't work, which would explain why these things aren't universally popular. But there are definitely personalities for whom it does.
I think you may be thinking of a much higher and abstract level of "want" than is relevant to 99.5% of parenting. For most of their lives what you want is "stop hitting your brother" and "wash your hands after you pee and flush the damn toilet" and "do not wipe your hands on your pants, that's why there's a napkin next to your plate for God's sake" and yes we tell the kids exactly what we want over and over and over and over again, until it finally starts seeping in after 5-10 years of fierce repetition and you begin to glimpse the possibility of a civilized human emerging from the hooligan chrysalis.
In terms of telling them what we want at a higher abstract level, which is only relevant in the last one to two dozen months of childhood, the latter half of high school, by that point most of us are tired enough that we settle for "don't embarrass us by going into the pot business or pr0n, if possible kthx!"
It's probably valuable to be at least a little aware of your deeper wants for your kid but I agree day-to-day you can communicate most things you need from your kids. (Also I'm brand new to this so I'll let you know if I'm right at this in about 20 years :P ).
But that deeper, abstract level is almost certainly what Lacan is referring to - the assumption seems to be 1) a baby's primary motivation is pleasing its mother, 2) there are some needs mothers have that children cannot fill, and those are ambiguous enough to cause distress, 3) this leads to a lifelong hole in *every person's* life and most human action is an attempt to fill that hole.
Assumptions 1 and 3 are pretty suspect but assumption 2 is just obviously true imo.
Well, as an empiricist I would need to be persuaded in the first place of one of the *assumptions* around which a lot of of this baby psychology is constructed -- which is that we need a social explanation for basic aspects of human nature in the first place. Who says? Maybe we are just born wired up with a lifelong yearning for meaning, stature, positive feedback from our tribe. Why not? We are apparently born with an instinct to learn language, to play in the water, to walk upright, to use tools, to fornicate and form friendships, pair bonds -- and much else besides. Who says we need any complex "programming" step in our tender years? It might just be part of the hardware.
Indeed, for such essential steps in the budding human nature to be left to a delicate web of interaction strikes me, from a strictly engineering viewpoint, as insanely risky. It's hard for me to believe evolution would not have provided a much more robust mechanism, e.g. a bunch of hardwired tendencies.
Doesn't mean psychology doesn't have a role in screwing these things up -- we've plenty of evidence traumatic experience can pervert instinct -- but the proposition that the child's nature is a blank slate on which mommy artfully (if unconsciously) draws strikes me as grandiose and insufficiently supported by measurement.
Completely agreed. As I said elsewhere, the question with these psychoanalysis philosophies is never "is this true?" It's almost always obviously not true (at least not literally true). The question is 1) Do they sometimes produce insightful ideas at a rate greater than random guessing, and if so why? Or 2) If they don't, why are they so compelling to so many people?
Because those are the more interesting questions, I'm trying to meet the philosophy where it lives. There's no reason at all to assume that all human behavior derives from not knowing your parents' unconscious desires for you. But I think we can grant that parents probably have unconscious or unshared desires their children don't know how to fulfill.
Yesss....and I have definitely seen trauma related to that in certain specific cases. Unusually narcissistic parents, and parents who cannot get another adult to fulfill their ordinary narcissistic needs, can do lasting damage to their kids (in adolescence especially, when the child is yearning for adult "status") by allowing the child to stand in for the emotional role that should be filled by an adult friend, spouse, or lover.
I think it's even possible to do that earlier: some parents are so starved of ego strength and reinforcement that they will try too hard to win or keep their young child's friendship, to the point of neglecting their parental duties and perverting the child's development into its own narcissistic pathways.
It *can* be a desperately lonely thing to realize you cannot be their little friends, that sometimes it's your duty to be Mom or Dad, the Right Bastard Who Said No, and (apparently) didn't care one bit that you (the child) said you'd hate them forever for that "no" and totally 100% really truly meant it at the time -- especially when you (the parent) are tired and not even entirely sure you're right and the little tear-stained wretch is wrong.
I think with respect to analysis -- or therapy in general -- I think we need to consider yet another possibility, which is that the *surface* aspect -- all the talk, theorizing, passing of complex verbal symbols back and forth -- may actually be unimportant. The real healing power of analysis, or therapy, when it has any, may come from much more primitive aspects of the interaction.
Id est, having someone pay respectful attention to what you have to say, and not be threatened by it, not attempt to manipulate you for his (the therapist's) own benefit (at least too much) during it, being in the presence of someone genuinely compassionate and attentive who clearly *wants* to understand things from your point of view -- would not these things *alone* have considerable therapeutic power, even if what went back and forth in words were literally nonsense? You could maybe just get together and chant rhythmic soothing nonsense syllables and it might work just as well.
One is communicating specific requests, like Emma B says ("don't hit your siblings"). I'm sure parents do this.
Another is something like "give you their utility function". This is impossible because people don't have utility functions, don't understand them even insofar as they have them, and can't communicate them even insofar as they understand them. CF the rationalist idea of "complexity of value" https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/complexity-of-value
I think the tension where this becomes an actually interesting question is something like "do parents tell their kids what they want from them", eg "I want you to become a doctor, have lots of grandchildren, and make the family proud". I think some do, some don't, and that lots of parents would feel bad doing this because it's putting on too much pressure.
I think most likely Lacan is thinking at the utility function level, and with very young kids who can't understand even the few things their parents do communicate, and at a time when parents' actual demand is probably something like "be cute and impressive and don't cause me too much trouble", which most parents would feel bad saying. But this is just a guess.
In my circle of friends, most parents try to transmit their tastes and values to their children, even if with very variable success!
I don't doubt that it is impossible for someone to express his or her "utility function" in its entirety, given its immense complexity and the fact that a significant part of it is probably unconscious-not to mention that it must be full of contradictions. But at the same time it seems clear to me that most of us have certain values that we are aware of, that we feel are important and that we are perfectly capable of expressing clearly, and that we want to pass on to our children. In my experience, it is also very common for parents to try NOT to pass on certain values/ways of doing things that they have disliked in their own upbringing.
There is also probably a large category of "unexamined" values: those that parents have learned from their own parents, that they have taken for granted and reproduce without ever questioning whether they are really relevant. I had read in Proust's Recherche du temps perdu a tiny example of this kind of thing: the narrator understands at one point that the reason his clever friend sometimes proudly tells not-so-funny jokes is that they had been told to him by his father and that his family considered these stories to be laughable. The friend had admitted to the funniness of these stories without ever examining it.
To continue on this subject, on a personal note, I felt that I understood a lot more psychology from In Search for Lost Time than from the few books by Freud that I read ( they were on the high school curriculum in France). I am always exasperated when I read psychoanalytical texts: I find jarring the combination of a pompous jargon with a content that has always seemed to me to mix platitudes with obviously false absurdities, and in Lacan's case those innumerable stupid puns that think they are profound...
Emma_B, your comments are small treasures. They convey common sense and kindness, and are thus almost out-of-place in a discussion of Lacan and his ideas.
It’s nice to hear this from a French person. I kept wondering if something was getting lost in translation (probably, but not as much as confused me.)
And so many of the anecdotes about patients make me say “Wow, 1920s France or Austria must have been really different.” Most psychoanalysis patient stories feel to me like they were written by an early-model AI.
Thanks for the hint. Proust lecture is overdue for me. I regret now that my French is so insufficient that I`ll need a translated text. Should be working on my Polish before brushing up French, though.
I think a human is always in conflict with themselves, misaligned, generating tension. So to be in the presence of another person is to be in the presence of their enclosed conflict. And so if that person is my parent, I am in the presence of their conflict. It might be a large gap, such as when the alcoholic parent says “I just want you to be happy” and then goes and gets drunk. It might be a small gap - distraction maybe (“how was your day, dear!”/tune out.)
If the parent is intentional and self-merciful about juggling their own conflict, it might be possible for the parent not to pull the child in multiple directions. Should the child believe the “I love you” or the drunk? How can both be true? If the parent is not merciful with themselves, whichever of their parts the child allies with, the child will never be safe, the parent will eventually attack them next time the parent has an internal struggle.
Kids see into the parental subconscious more deeply than other beings. Maybe because the child lives in its mother’s body for a while. Maybe just long term proximity. But the “I never understood what they wanted from me” seems to me to translate better as “I found them to be unable to project coherence toward me and therefore unable to project coherence about me.”
It's possible that, for a lot of people, being clear about what they want feels like lowing their status. "Don't do that" means not having to bother explaining what the "that" is, one's belief that one is clear enough because the other person *should* know what is meant.
That is a really good observation. Recently I was reminded how “the first rule of money is don’t talk about money,” exactly as you describe, negotiation and explanations imply ignorance or imperfect previous understanding. One is supposed to swim in the rules like a fish in water, nonverbally. A certain behavior is necessary, but it cannot be requested by another individual, because it is supposed to be collective. Requesting it would also reveal/imply the potential influence of an individual on others, which is also supposed to be invisible.
I tell my kids what I want them to do all the time. "Go do your homework." "Can you get that box for me?" "Dinnertime!" "Get off the table!" "Go to bed."
I've never tried to understand Lacanian psychoanalysis before, but I've always wondered how do people combine it with Marxism as you often see in the humanities (at least here in South America and in Continental Europe). This review puzzled me even more. How are these things even remotely compatible?
Lacan + Marx = Zizek, so you should look into Zizek's work to see how it's done (answer: through a lot of Hegel and a lot of jargon).
I personally tried reading Zizek's first book (The Sublime Object of Ideology), but I got stuck on a part 15 pages in where he compared the unconscious to the commodity form, probably because I haven't read any Marx.
Seems like one advantage when combining two notoriously recondite academic theories like that is that if you have a basic understanding of each, you can bullshit almost without restraint. Even if your interpretations are thoroughly puerile, very few reviewers will be able to say more than something like, "Well, his [Cosmology] is superficial and full of undergraduate mistakes, but perhaps it does work as a kind of training aid to absorb his intriguing theories in [Basic Fighter Maneuvers]."
This is true but Zizek also gives notoriously no-bullshit talks (there's plenty on Youtube) and writes very accessible articles, occasionally in major news outlets. Fact is, he's a really good philosopher, but he is in the Marxist/Leftist tradition (although I found his talk with Jordan Peterson a really good way of convincing people that this doesn't imply some naive utopianism), so may not appeal to everyone on this site.
I do get where he's coming from. Most of the biggest debates in modern political discourse (at least here in the West) are about cultural issues, rather than economic ones. So I can see how old-school Marxists like Zizek could actually come across as quite "right-wing" by modern standards, in the sense that they're not all that socially/culturally progressive, and some are actually quite socially/culturally conservative.
After all, Marxist-Leninist dictators like Stalin, Mao, and Castro were further to the *cultural* right than the majority of Western conservatives, being patriarchal, nationalistic, and homophobic to a degree that would make even hardline Republicans balk. And while Marx himself didn't go that far, he was still rather socially conservative in some regards: he was a staunch homophobe, adamantly opposed to prostitution, somewhat anti-immigrant (on the grounds that immigrants drove down wages, hurting the working class and benefiting the bourgeoise), and had little but disdain for the "lumpen-proletariat" (the people below the working class, e.g. vagrants, beggars, dole recipients, criminals).
Yeah, it's true. I think this is because "leftism" itself shifted a lot in the last decade or so, and few "active" leftists are willing to touch his ideas outside of academia or small critical theory circles. Freddie deBoer strikes me as having a similar sort of relationship with the left as Zizek does, where he's still a leftist but disagrees really hard with a lot of what passes as contemporary leftism.
I wouldn't explain any of this based on a *shift* in the left, because orthodox Marxism and orthodox 1960s feminism still both read as left, even as Zizek does not.
I consider my task when reading to be to best understand the work from the frame and intent put forward by the author, rather than to judge whether it is "true" or not. Nonsense is a subjective term; it may not make sense to me now, but if I can trace the author's footsteps, then it will eventually make sense. And only then do I feel prepared to cast judgment, about whether it's good or bad.
>Nonsense is a subjective term; it may not make sense to me now, but if I can trace the author's footsteps, then it will eventually make sense. And only then do I feel prepared to cast judgment<
This do it be what if you dumbdumb said, in the way of try smart but no no, I interior speaking. They need to do way instain mother.
In the same way that believers in one fringe conspiracy theory are more likely to believe other fringe conspiracy theories, I think believers in one heterodox academic theory are more likely to believe other heterodox academic theories, even in separate fields. In particular, Marxism and Freudian/Lacanian psychology both tend to attract a similar sort of person - the type of intellectual who's skeptical of mainstream academia for its supposed biases, but still holds a certain reverence towards the concept of academia. (This last bit is what distinguishes them from both the anti-establishment right, e.g. Q-Anon believers, and from the more anarchist and/or naturalist groups of the left, e.g. punks, hippies, New Age types.) So in that regard, it's not surprising that Marxism and Freudian/Lacanian theory would often go hand-in-hand.
There's also a more direct connective tissue between the two in the form of postmodern and post-structuralist theory, which heavily draws from Marxism (despite contradicting much of Orthodox Marxist theory) while also being deeply intertwined with Freudian and Lacanian theories of psychology. Plus Marx himself drew heavily from Hegelian philosophy, and there's a strong Hegelian undercurrent to Freud and Lacan.
Yes, there's a difference between "heterodox academic theory" and "crackpot pseudoscience that you'd never hear within ten miles of any respectable academic institution."
It strikes me as funny that "punks, hippies, New Age types" are subsumed here. The identification is correct, but I remember the punk saying: "Never trust a hippy." . It's Chapman again, and Walter Sobchak, Esq., of course. One love.
> I've never tried to understand Lacanian psychoanalysis before, but I've always wondered how do people combine it with Marxism
I don't know how they are compatible. I can only speculate about the motivation to combine them.
Imagine an academic who wants a reliable way to be critical of society, perhaps because it offers so much to write about. This academic is motivated to come up with a counter-theory to things like naive realism, bourgeois optimism, and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get understanding of human emotion. He or she might like Marxism's promise of standing outside of society. (Literary critic Edmund Wilson said this was the appeal of Marxism for American intellectuals in the 1930s.) But Marxism alone can seem insufficient for addressing some issues, such as our emotional lives. The question would then become, what works with Marxism?
The compatibility is rooted in how ideology shapes subjectivity and replicates itself. On the ground it makes sense of why we tell our kids to go to school (why?) to get a job (why?) to be a functioning member of society (why?) because that’s what we do even though most of us are some level of miserable doing it.
Lacan attempted to address Marx's theories and claimed that in his concept of surplus value, Marx "invented the symptom." As best I understand it, it's an argument that some process in the development of the soul took an external form before it was recreated in personal psychology, as I think often happens.
1. I DID want you to write this exact review; I was excited to see and read it. It sounds more exciting to me than the other ones you put in prediction markets. I don't think I want that only because you might want me to want it, although I'm certainly capable of something like that. I think I want it because (a) I'm obsessed with my own mind and so hearing anything about it, even if it's adjectives associated with my birth year by Chinese astrology on a placemat, is pretty interesting, and (b) you're a psychiatrist and I always want to know what you think about this type of stuff.
2. As an authority-seeking pervert currently converting to Catholicism after a lifetime of atheism (and did I mention my absent father?) I found some of this relevant to my interests in a different sense.
3. That diagram almost looks like abstract algebra, or perhaps category theory, the former of which was my research area in grad school, but it's still not saying anything to me.
I think it's fairly widely accepted that Lacan's occasional forays into mathematics (i, the square root of -1, if the phallus, apparently) are just made-up out of whole cloth - perhaps in an attempt to please the scientific Other.
That makes me pretty dubious about the rest of the Lacanian project, particularly given it's obscurity/obscurantism. Anytime he says anything concrete, it seems to be either wrong or not-even-wrong. How seriously should we entertain the unverifiable stuff, given his approach seems to be just making stuff up and writing it down confusingly?
I’ve seen “what he meant was”-style explanations, but never anything approaching a derivation. Which is how equations get made.
I think borrowing mathematical terminology to dress up your non mathematical theory is maybe a little desperate, but defensible. But “I have derived the following formulae, see, here’s e, it’s all very complex and precise “ when you have not, in fact, derived any formulae is a real charlatan move.
Lacan would've loved the superstring analogy, especially since he got deeply into knot theory during the 70s. It's the perfect pun!
Surprisingly, I don't have a lot to say about or add to this review, other than a few small comments, that:
- My guess is that contemporary transgenderism is more of a neurotic than a psychotic phenomenon, unlike in Fink's day. I almost wrote a post about exactly this but I didn't want to get absolutely destroyed on Twitter.
- You mention psychosis rates haven't risen, but did you know that the original definition of "autism" was as a subtype of schizophrenia, i.e. psychosis (source: Eugene Bleuler's original definition of autism in a tome I found in a rare bookstore: https://listed.to/@simpolism/25737/excerpt-bleuler-on-autism-1911)? And we do indeed see more autists today (although of course there's diagnostic issues etc). There's even a contemporary Lacanian text on autism, called "The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language" by Leon Brenner, which deals with the topic in some detail.
- One other comment on perversion: I read a great quote that said "the neurotic fantasizes about being a pervert" but I can't remember where it's from but it seemed true. My friend getting a PhD in this stuff also recommend thinking about perversion as "sociopathy" essentially. They rarely even end up in analysis because they usually don't want to get better. But they end up in jail instead for imagining themselves as "above the Law".
Anyway, glad you're exploring the topic! And my apologies that the neuropsychoanalysis papers didn't make much sense -- but you're correct at least to have expected that LMAO
I think the most important thing you could add is something like -
If you don't have much to say about this, then it sounds like I got things sort of right and have a basic 101-level understanding of some Lacanian concepts. But I still don't understand - why anyone would be attracted to them? What you can do with them? I'm not even asking whether they're true at this point, more like "what kind of predictions do they make that you couldn't get from common sense" or "how do they simplify message length" or something like that? What made you read this kind of stuff and think "Yeah, something about this calls to me and I should continue pursuing this framework"?
Gallic pride? The French do have a reputation for occasionally choosing to be different from everybody else Just So You Know We Can And Very Well Might. Has the Academy accepted "le weekend" yet?
...I would adduce the possibility of sabotage, but I can't bring to mind any foreign intelligence service with a command of French sufficient to embed puns with the precise level of groanworthiness required for versimilitude.
Aggressively co-signed, albeit with the standard caveat that just because something isn't worth your time doesn't mean zero value can be derived (I do like some of Lacan's discussion of The Real, but that might be me sanewashing him). It's one thing to come up with a framework that creates a "straightforward" narrative explaining some collection of observations†, but if we struggle to translate that into any sort of future insight it starts to look like all we've done is overfit on available data.
>I expect that if I made this point to him, Fink would argue that my puny DSM-trained intuition totally misses that psychosis is a Lacanian personality structure which can’t possibly be measured in something as superficial as symptoms. Or maybe he’d refer back to the claim that transgender is a psychosis in the Lacanian sense and so the rise in that counts as fulfillment of his prophecy.
Maybe uncharitable since this is putting words in Fink's mouth, but where this kind of response pattern is accurate (and IME it certainly isn't unknown) it's damning to the idea the frame should be taken seriously. If the expected response to a prediction is either affirmation or irrelevance, you're building an argument, not a theory!
†Ignoring for a moment that the set of observations we consider is very much *not* independent of how good we are at constructing models off of them.
A couple stories, from closest to furthest from the "intended audience":
- Within the psychoanalytic community: as I wrote on Reddit, Lacan sold himself as a return-to-Freud, contra object relations theorists like Klein, so analysts might choose Lacan if they found his framing made more sense + wanted a fresh, more abstract read on Freudian concepts. Klein was also kind of notorious for, not quite fabricating, but uh, projecting things wrt her case studies that may or may not have been real.
- Within academia, particularly philosophy and art criticism: Lacan's work can be compared with Ricoeur's work on Freud, in terms of providing an interpretive framework for understanding texts. The original feminist theory paper that defined the "male gaze" drew from Lacan extensively, and his star student was Guattari (they eventually became estranged, classically), who co-authored some very influential books with Deleuze, such as "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia". There is a direct lineage from Lacan to contemporary theories of gender, by way of Judith Butler, for example. I believe Lyotard was also a student of Lacan, and he was famous for basically inventing/mainstreaming "postmodernism" as a concept in philosophy. In a certain sense, this makes Lacan one of the original seeds of pomo, alongside Derrida. Lacan also is playful with a lot of classic philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, so academics with such familiarity find him fun to read rather than just frustrating.
- For me personally, a random guy: I had already been in therapy for a long time and something kind of traumatic happened that forced me to re-evaluate my own epistemic frameworks regarding my emotions and desires. The first book I found that actually helped me develop new epistemics was a text by Eric Berne, his precursor to "Games People Play". This led me to Freud (I started with Interpretation of Dreams), and then I started reading some bloggers who referenced Lacan and realized some of his ideas are _insanely_ powerful in my own reflections and also as broad theoretical tools, such as the big Other and his formulas of sexuation (which I have been blogging about obliquely for a few months now). I also felt like he was being neglected as a useful resource in the part of the internet where I hung out, so I decided to dive in and try to figure some shit out. This took a lot longer than I expected...
In terms of why someone would pursue psychoanalytic theory in particular, Lacan himself notwithstanding, I tend to think in terms of a spectrum where on the one side, you have an entirely symptoms & pathology oriented medical psychiatry, and on the other side you have entirely non-pathological frameworks like astrology, tarot, all that woo stuff (they do actually work as tools, but purely as entropy-generating gestalts, i.e. as noise that destabilizes high level priors, akin to psychedelics but without the drugs -- helps you break rigid patterns of thought). Psychoanalysis seems to fall in the middle, where there is some degree of coherent ethics and normativity, but there's a far broader degree of freedom when it comes to what is and isn't considered a pathology.
In practice, what I really wanted to do was figure out how to stop feeling *ashamed* of myself for having desires (read: sexual fantasies) that might not be cool to admit to most people, and that didn't actually impede my life in any way except for the fact that I had them. And psychoanalytic theory was enormously helpful toward that end, to the point where I eventually ended up being able to just *tell* my therapist about those fantasies (spoiler: my therapist didn't react at all, i.e. it went fine), which helped me make a new sort of peace with myself in a way that's a little hard to explain.
The new challenge is that psychoanalytic theory goes against a huge amount of contemporary psychological doctrine, so now I have different thoughts I feel I can't express in public places, but not because I'm ashamed of them. I would say that the prediction-making capacity of psychoanalytic theory is extremely lateral, in that it lets you cut across domains in novel ways, but that first requires a pretty major overhaul in terms of epistemological fundamentals. But hope is not lost: my friend Natural Hazard has been very closely approximating some Lacanian ideas by way of rationalist thought, and hopefully will make some posts about it on LessWrong soon.
I hope this answer was sufficiently thorough and makes sense -- let me know if there's any other elaboration I can do that would be helpful.
Thank you, this was a helpful response. I think more detail about your own experience would be more helpful, but I can understand if you don't want to share all your fantasies and psych issues with the blog-reading public.
Is "Big Other" a stronger/different idea than the sociometer idea of "you're constantly checking your abstract social status because that's important for evo psych reasons"?
Is the sexual stuff useful insofar as it provides a nonjudgmental framework for approaching strange sexual fantasies / does the Tarot card useful entropy thing, or because you think it's literally right and "pays rent in anticipated experience".
> Is "Big Other" a stronger/different idea than the sociometer idea of "you're constantly checking your abstract social status because that's important for evo psych reasons"?
Yeah, the big Other is unfortunately an extremely complicated idea. Part of the difficulty with Lacan in general is that understanding his ideas ties in a lot with the epistemic setting from which they originate. Lacan is big on speech because the analyst in a psychoanalytic setting basically only has speech to go on. So the big Other is ultimately a pattern of utterances, a specific object of speaking, which is typically "society" or "everyone" or "God" as you note, whatever the abstract object is that stands in for a totality, and is also always "external" to the speaking subject.
The difference that this makes vs the evo psych view is that the big Other isn't really a psychological mechanism *per se*, but something people use. So the "point" of the idea is that when someone speaks and makes reference to "society", you can be like "oh, they're talking about the big Other", which as Lacan notes, does not exist. This leads to new potential questions, like "when you say 'society', who exactly are you talking about?" and lets you cut deeply through the ways people hide their feelings through abstractions.
To me, this feels very different than the frame of evo psych, which seems to me like an explanation rather than a purely formal property (this is why Lacan was obsessed with math, btw: he saw it as a language that expresses formal structures in a highly compressed and totally non-lossy fashion).
As an example case, shame relates a lot to the Other, because shame is about feeling like you broke a "rule" (whose rules?). Spinoza's definition does a good job of showing this: "Shame is sorrow with the accompanying idea of some action which we imagine people blame." (which people?)
> Is the sexual stuff useful insofar as it provides a nonjudgmental framework for approaching strange sexual fantasies / does the Tarot card useful entropy thing, or because you think it's literally right and "pays rent in anticipated experience".
I would say that reading a lot of case studies of people with extremely unusual sexualities, and also seeing my own fantasies represented in the literature, made me feel less ashamed ("I am not alone in this thing, and other people are able to say it without being judged, so maybe I can too"), enough to actually speak the fantasy in therapy, as I mentioned. The weird thing about speaking something which you feel is absolutely totally against the rules is that it has a kind of freeing effect, an elation to it, as opposed to merely thinking it. Suddenly the rules appear as a sort of illusion, kind of like how the PUAs/redpillers are always saying shit like "you can just talk to her bro."
I feel like this is one of the appeals of rationalist conversational norms in general (no wonder your patients like your demeanor!), as it's a place that I personally found helpful because I had some thoughts I was ashamed of having, but that I felt able to talk out with people rather than being bludgeoned for (yknow, SJW stuff back in 2016, the usual).
So the value in non-judgment, IMO, is less about a useful entropy and also not even necessarily about a factual correctness, as much as having a place where you can just speak it out loud (i.e. free associate, speaking without prior thought to what you're saying) and see what happens next. And as in the above example with the big Other, the reason that the Lacanian concepts exist is so the analyst can have a sense of what to do or ask next, i.e. they can see how to fit those utterances into place formally, as a piece of the structure of "you", even if they can't provide an immediate interpretation or explanation.
So in a sense the analysis is itself a form of therapy, and it’s truth value or ability to predict is fairly irrelevant, as long as it helps the therapist form a non-destructive coherent plan of action/helps the patient make the realization that they are not alone?
No, I wasn't in analysis, I was in normal therapy. The point of analysis is different, much more about revealing your inner desires to yourself, and then you can do what you want with that knowledge. Zizek puts it as something like "learning to [recognize and] enjoy your symptom", which is entirely different than "curing" your symptom.
Asking about psychoanalytic theory's "truth value" or "ability to predict" is like asking about the "truth value" or "ability to predict" of statistics itself -- it doesn't make sense, because analysis is not a science in the proper sense of the term, but rather is a set of formal tools that guide your empirical efforts to find the truth of the person in front of you (just like statistics, but oriented toward the speech of a single individual rather than data points). So it's closer to a philosophy of science, in level of abstraction.
"all that woo stuff (they do actually work as tools, but purely as entropy-generating gestalts, i.e. as noise that destabilizes high level priors, akin to psychedelics but without the drugs -- helps you break rigid patterns of thought)"
This is a really interesting take on the usefulness of things I previously considered useless. Thank you.
Art, literature and music can have the same effects. If one thinks of Freudian and other psychoanalytic frameworks as literary rather than scientific, their utility is more readily plausible (from a utilitarian standpoint).
Indeed, it’s almost a cliche within certain artistic/academic sets to say one reads Freud more as literature than as actual medico-therapeutic or strictly scientific intervention.
It seems like mental masturbation, but I understand Lacanian concepts even less than you. The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking "yeah, ok, but what is this useful for?".
It's like over-engineering taken to extremes. A bit of over-engineering is fine I guess. But I have a deep problem with purposeful obscurantism. It stinks of ages past.
Many people have an experience of personal epiphany when reading works by Lacan and Freud. There's a moment where it's as if the scales fall from your eyes and you recognize something profound has been described regarding the shape of your own experience and (un)consciousness.
This also happens in therapy. The thing about corny puns is a lot less corny when it actually happens to you and you realize that the motor force of some inexplicable anguish was a verbal formula that was simultaneously on the surface of your psyche/your discourse and paradoxically willfully "nulled" by your own conscious mind.
This possibly sounds like a religious line of argument, or a cop-out, 'you had to be there,' etc.
But I also think that it's true that the primary motivating experience for credulity in psychoanalysis is this uncanny feeling that there is something more in us than our sense of who we are (which follows quite naturally from the "common sense" notion that we don't know ourselves with total transparency), and that this unknown core of our self contains some things we only do not know because we would prefer not to.
To deny this would seem to be naive—no one is morally perfect—and to refuse to investigate it would seem irresponsible.
I suggest you read "Basic Freud" by Michael Kahn. It's a much better introduction to psychoanalytic theory, the best I've read out of a dozen or so attempts to get it.
"Physics is stuck in an annoying equilibrium where the Standard Model works for almost everything, and then occasionally we come across some exotic domain where it totally falls apart and we know that reality must be something deeper and weirder. "
The standard model actually only works well for electromagnetism and weak force interactions. It falls apart mathematically when you try to calculate strong force interactions properly, and no one has even figured out how to add gravity to it at all, let alone actually do calculations with it.
And of course there's the fact that it doesn't have dark matter and what not.
Point being, most people don't think gravity is exotic, but will think that single electrons travelling the void at 0.5c is exotic and the standard model is awful at the former but seemingly perfect at the latter.
??? Using lattices, you can get pretty good predictions. And for most energy scales we care about, we can get an effective field theory out of it and calculate away. Like, it works damn well in the LHC. If it didn't we'd be having a ball of a time. The standard model is just disgutingly hard to do high accuarcy calculations with for the strong force, but even then we've got some pretty decent phenomenlogical models.
Plus, we can combine the standard model with classical curved spacetime (i.e. no gravitons). The problems is that things blow up at certain energy scales or requires extra stuff that we don't have evidence for. But they still work for most energy scales i.e. day to day life.
Not being able to do explicit calculations is a huge handicap. We still don't know answers to basic questions, like if there is an island of stability, and why or why not. Basic phenomena like jets are very hard to understand. A lot of effort has been put into AdS/CFT-like models to get a qualatative handle on these kinds of things, even though those models aren't particularly standard-model like.
And no amount of lattice QCD will tell you about dark matter or susy.
Also, we can do more than classical gravity. Doing quantum gravity to one-loop is fine, too.
Also also, "every day life" energy scales are boring. If they were interesting, I'd have gotten my degree in classical mechanics in the 1800s.
Noting that QCD has problems "in practice" is an important qualifier to HaraldN's statement. Yes, in practice we can't get to jets or what have you with explicit calculations. But I don't see anything suggesting that the standard model couldn't account for that with enough compute. It does not fall apart, so much as require devillishly clever computations to prise out the meanest answers. Yet, the answers are there.
SUSY is a failure. Dark matter is a big problem, but that's got nothing to do with QCD (probably).
And boring stuff is what we want to explain. If it looked like this wasn't just hard but impossible to do well, then that would be a huge black mark against the standard model.
This system seems to assume a strict good-cop-bad-cop approach to parenting, where the mOther is soft and loving but increasingly distant, while the (Name-Of-The-)Father is stern and harsh and punishing.
Setting aside the gendered aspect, it just seems weird to me that Lacanians take it as a given that those are always going to be different figures. You don't have to bring modern single mothers into it to recognize that mothers absolutely do scold their kids, tell them to follow rules, make vague implicit threats that could be construed by psychoanalysts as threats of castration (e.g. "Now, Bobby, I'm going to count to ten… You don't want Mommy to get angry, do you?").
If, according to Lacan, getting your Law from somewhere else than a Father begets an entirely unique kind of mental illness — *surely* getting it from the same person who is also acting as your mOther would have interesting effects? Doesn't Fink talk about this at all?
(I kinda suspect the effect is that it begets healthier people who don't internalize weird gendered essentialism and don't go to see psychoanalysts, who therefore don't hear about them.)
I wonder if the whole mother-father-infant bit is a projection on the part of the father (therapist.) Since little Junior came along, daddy isn’t getting any. Junior is the one “telling” the father that desiring mommy is wrong. Junior does this by keeping her awake all night every night feeding him and calming him down. While daddy is reading his serious books (language! Law!) hmm.
I can think of one person I know of who fits that Psychotic description practically to a T, but the conditions Lacan talks about Psychosis arising from are basically the opposite. There's an interesting observation there, but the predictive power is one hundred percent wrong in this particular case.
I have a dumb hypothesis about obscurantist works, and it goes something like: A) If I state my thesis simply and understandably, it'll be a combination of simple observations and complete nonsense. B) Simple and easy to understand works are easier to criticize, so my work will get torn to shreds. It leads to "I want to maintain my high-status self image, so I'll write about things in an intentionally obfuscated way, and if anyone criticizes my work then, I'll just claim they didn't understand it well enough." Maybe uncharitable, but I think there's a difference between work that is actually difficult to understand (Partial Differential Equations, Organic Chemistry, etc.) and work that has easy to understand concepts made deliberately difficult to make the author seem smarter.
For what it's worth, I'm sure Lacan would dismiss me as an "Obsessive" who pretends his work is of little value, because look at the category he created specifically for people who dismiss him!
I feel like a lot of what makes this seem unapproachable is that the authors seem, in a significant sense, incapable of imagining non-sexual pleasure; everything gets put in a sexual framework.
As for the weird panorama of sexuality, the landscape that is impossible to easily describe, the way some people must have certain conditions fulfilled, and others cannot have those conditions met in order to experience pleasure - like, that's everything. Like, think about the weird panorama of eating habits, the landscape that is impossible to easily describe - the way some people must have certain spices in their food, the way others cannot have those same spices.
For the blindfold situation, imagine eating a fine meal which is delightful, and discovering, after you have been thoroughly enjoying it, that it contains - well, the specifics don't actually matter, just that it contains something which you have no fundamental objection to being in food; horse, for some people. It would suddenly get a lot less appealing, no?
Sexuality isn't a strange and alien landscape surrounding an orderly lawn of well-tended human desire. Everything is like that. What's notable is that sex -seems- unusually strange and alien, because our expectation is that sex should be this incredibly constrained and fundamentally ordinary activity, made special by our social regard of it.
Is castration anxiety this big deal? I dunno. This seems like it might be something which doesn't translate; our culture is peculiarly comfortable with threatening sexual violence against men. I suspect, in the terms of Lacan, that "castration anxiety" as a way of talking about something is, in fact, a way of avoiding talking about something. Taking it outside sexuality, it is talking about potency/power; but I'd suggest that taking the analysis one level further is necessary, and we aren't anxious about losing our power, but rather our desire to take the power away from others. Or, bringing it back to the sexual level, we aren't afraid of being castrated, we are afraid of our desire to castrate.
But, these are, in a sense, all just word games; observe that everything I just wrote is just shuffling around what pointers are being used to talk about the same concepts.
You're not shuffling around pointers here, food and sex are not interchangeable concepts. The fact that you're using them (among other things) as analogous is a step Lacan isn't taking, and we shouldn't lend him the benefit of the doubt. The observation that all desire is strange and disorderly is, I think, a good one, but that doesn't mean food desire is the same as sex desire, or that those things are equivalent.
I am doing exactly what I said I am doing; whether or not Lacan does is more or less irrelevant, although, given that you are denying I am doing the thing I just said I was doing, you may have to forgive me if I don't take your denial that Lacan may be doing that thing as strong evidence for that position.
Lacan is quite literally not using your analogies to food. Food and sex are different things. Analogies are lossy things that hide concrete differences between abstraction.
Words are lossy things that hide concrete differences between abstraction/instantiation. When I use the word "horse", think about all the lost information - what color the coat, where the horse was born, what it ate on its fourth birthday. We don't even refer to the same concept when we use the word "horse" - like, maybe you think a Zebra qualifies. Maybe you think that when I suggest that a Zebra might qualify, this is something that can be resolved by Googling it, or by reference to an encyclopedia - or maybe not. Maybe I think a constellation in the sky qualifies; maybe I think a picture does. "This is not a cigar" is actually quite the claim, taken outside the fairly narrow context in which that claim was actually made.
All of which is to say: I don't think you know what "my" analogies to food are.
I've stated "food" and "sex" are different things. Rather than point at how those things are the same, or attempted to correct a misconception I might have, you've made a statement that amounts to "You don't understand my words" and then refused to clarify.
I'm not refusing to clarify, there's no clarity of the kind you seek here; there's no curtain I can draw back to reveal "the real meaning".
Oh, I could say something like "Food and sex are just metaphors for desire", and that would be something intelligible to latch onto, but as soon as we're talking about that, we're not talking about the thing I'm actually talking about, which lays in significant part in the way you construct the bridge between the concepts of "food" and "sex" to think that maybe I'm talking about "desire". (Or not; maybe you think I'm talking about something else entirely.)
It seems like my analogy is saying something, yes? It seems to somehow undermine Lacan, or at least what you think Lacan is saying?
That's a bit odd, because personally, I have no idea what Lacan is saying. I have a guess, but my guesses are based on my own metaphor-constructions, which aren't Lacan's metaphor-constructions, which, if I parse the way Lacan approaches things correctly, might be kind of the point. And if I guess correctly, I agree with Lacan.
My guess, incidentally, is that SA is basically spot-on with the Buddhist take, and that Lacan is pretty deep on what Aella would call the "wordlessness" axis, and is attempting to communicate something which a straightforward explanation of which would be misleading.
"Desire is the root of all suffering" seems to be about right. I could explain in greater detail, but it would be misleading as well. I could say "If your foot hurts, your suffering is that you wish it did not" - and this is trivially true in the sense that if you're fine with your foot hurting you aren't suffering as a result, and yes this is the whole deal, and yes it really is that easy, just stop wanting your foot to stop hurting and you will stop suffering - and remember that somebody who wants to hurt doesn't suffer from hurting, but suffers instead from not hurting - and all of that is all the same thing, and it is all incredibly simple, and yet, until you understand it, it sounds like nonsense, and I have mislead you.
They're good for both representing "primal desires", but differ in important ways, like a lack of food representing an existential threat, while a lack of sex, uh, doesn't.
My understanding would have been that the things Lacan thinks are interesting about sexual desire are not unique to sexual desire, which is decidedly different from saying that all desire is equivalent. With maybe a hint that Lacan's inability to properly diagnose what is special about sex (socialization around it, rather than the nature of our desire for it) hints at a fundamental weakness of his ideas.
Probably I have failed to correctly glean insight from the gestalt qualia of reading the op and am simply engaging with it as text on a base level.
“I will not deny that this is an interesting prediction of how many people end up with spanking fetishes, or “discipline” fetishes, or master/slave fetishes, or teacher/student fetishes, or some other fetish that ritually re-enacts the establishment of Law.”
I think it's probably not fan-fiction? Like, it's as much fanfiction as a regular weekly Pathfinder game set in Paizo's default setting, which is to say, "a little but not really." But it is online serial fiction.
I'm not sure I understand what I'm looking at. Yudkowsky authored a fictional play-by-post RPG forum game? Where Lintamande is more or less the GM/referee, but players have an unusual amount of narrative agency compared to traditional D&D, going off Lintamande's first post? Or maybe he has narrative-writing powers *only* in the first post because he's soliciting a GM to run a custom premise for him?
I don’t know enough about RPG’s to speculate, but I think that “Lintamande” is more playing second fiddle in lawrin’s plot (also, judging by the sex scenes they’ve done it seems like they are romantically involved, though idk who lintamande is.) anyway, in the past month other people have joined in in minor roles, mostly as students listening to Keltham’s lectures
"if I lost all my material goods, if every defense mechanism were mercilessly stripped from me one after another - would something eventually happen corresponding to “my ego collapses”?"
According to Greek Tragedy, first you would gouge your eyes out, and then you would become something akin to a Saint or a mystic. People always forget that their is a sequel to Oedipus Tyrannus where he reveals the hidden truth at the heart of all things to Theseus.
> That suggests there’s some set of unconscious rules about which kinds of sexual pleasure are allowed.
This definitely isn't how it feels to me, although I would definitely be unhappy to see a man/chimpanzee upon removal of the blindfold. It feels less like there are constraints on what physical sensations are relevant, and more like there is a mental component to the experience. That is, I am experiencing pleasure from the entire situation, including both the physical stimulus, my partner's mental state (well my model of it technically), and possibly other factors as well. Even though the physical part is the most important thing happening, it's far from the only thing.
Signals from the nerves in one's genitals are only one of the inputs being received, so I don't find it too surprising that changing other signals affects one's experience.
Right. I can't figure out what Scott's hypothetical has to do with sexual repression. Sexual pleasure mostly has to do with the images in one's head. Most men fantasize that they are with a beautiful woman while masturbating. And a sex dream can be as good as the real thing, even though there is no physical sensation. Note that food never tastes good in a dream, so something different is going on with sexual pleasure vs other forms of "physical pleasure".
That most people are choosy about who they get sexual pleasure from is pretty easy to explain.
It seems that a lot of these questions ("what other shall i please") are really just attempts to answer a question like "what is the true territory to which valence corresponds."
Until now, I knew nothing about Lacan other than the fact that he was popular among a certain group of heterodox psych nerds, and figured there was a chance that maybe he was onto something that mainstream psychologists hasn't noticed, but this review has convinced me that his ideas were probably just obscurantist nonsense.
This seems like someone took Kohlberg's theory of moral development stages, focused exclusively on the first and third stages - fear of punishment and desire for social approval - while ignoring the other four, and then tried to build a psychological equivalent of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything centered entirely around those two stages. Not just moral or social behavior, but *everything*, all the way down to instincts, sensory perception, and language. And also made it all about sex for some reason. And threw in the obviously self-serving notion that anyone who disagrees with the theory must be pathological themselves.
Also, am I the only one who finds those patient observation stories kinda dubious? No particular detail is especially unbelievable, because it's true that humans do all sorts of weird things all the time, but the way all of them just so happen to tie into Lacan and Fink's theories so perfectly seems rather overly convenient. I don't think they're completely made up, but they sound like cherry-picked examples, with a disproportionate emphasis placed on the details that confirm Lacanian theory and a great many other details omitted.
I can imagine someone seeing a couple of weird cases of something and running with it. They then include those cases in their book.
1. Lacan sees some weird cases.
2. It weighs on his mind.
3. He sees more not-so-weird cases.
4. Because the weird cases are always on his mind he pattern-matches features between the two types of cases.
5. He builds a tortured framework to tie the cases together.
It's like seeing Jesus's face in a piece of toast, seeing other peoples faces, and then building a framework describing how faces are fundamental part of physics.
"She liked listening to Phillip Ivywood at his best, as anyone likes listening to a man who can really play the violin; but the great trouble always is that at certain awful moments you cannot be certain whether it is the violin or the man."
"I wonder if anyone has ever had a fetish for judges. What about that very particular white wig they sometimes wear?"
'My conclusion is that the evidence in this case cannot displace the presumption of innocence. As a result, I find you are not a bad girl after all. Session dismissed, have a pleasant day.'
I don't think that in this context judges are actually the Law, unless they're kangaroo court judges. They do not ideally want anything at all (in stark contrast to, say, cops or teachers) and so fail to satisfy the yearning for mastery.
I can't help but notice that a lot of porn stories I come accross start with "propagonist did [bad slutty behaviour], comes before a judge, who condems them to [punishment that involves a lot of sex somehow]."
I recently met an older black gentleman who confessed to me quite unprompted that he fantasized about being the submissive servant of the men in the nicer parts of town, whom he imagined as stereotyped judges in powdered wigs and black gowns. So yes, there are people who fantasy literally about the law...
My personal theory on why sex is weird is that weird is just what you get when you need to get a very strong inherent impulse all the way from DNA to an adult human, through all the development feedback cycles and growth and cultural conditioning.
Pleasures like sugar or warmth are dead simple and can be expected to work out the same in just about everyone. Most complicated pleasures like conversation or reading are formed by near continuous feedback and communication with society.
Then pleasure from sex, outside of pure physical stimulation, is formed without much external feedback at all (although definitely a lot of external input), and rocketed to an extreme level of reward. Whatever's producing our sexual drive on a developmental level, I doubt it's very smart at the start. It needs to bundle together a likely set of signals, and inflate their reward value to insane levels, all without that much regulatory feedback. It certainly won't get much feedback on the actual evolutionary end goal of producing offspring. So, if we start with the inevitable developmental differences, they could easily get twisted into something random, but very compelling.
I guess this would be the boring, "fetishes are semi-random noise inflated to extreme levels by internal feedback" theory. At least I understand it though.
yes. This is exactly why I never bought the idea of homosexuality as being caused by a virus or some extreme physical dysfunction or whatever, as some argued because it reduces reproductive success. It's actually astounding that evolution would be able to get your romantic object located "correctly" (for reproductive purposes) in the opposite sex like 95+% of the time.
Obligate homosexuality only seems to be common in one other species: sheep. You should not be so astounded at the capacity of evolution to hit selected targets.
Humans are a species of animal, and civilization is only about 10K years old. We spent most of our evolutionary history outside of civilization. Civilization can result in things like faking fitness/fertility cues, or cutting the connection between sex & reproduction via birth control. But civilization is not going to cause a significant percentage of the population to prefer eating rocks to food, as evolution did a good enough job of getting us to make the correct choice between the two at a deeply ingrained level. We evolved to be robust in the face of outside influence (see Trivers' theory of genetic conflict), and as age increases so does heritability. What language you speak is contextual because the advantage was to learn the language of others around you. But there's no evolutionary advantage to having situational sexuality.
Foucault argued that it wasn't particularly common in humans until the late 19th century either. Something about the changed social environment changed how it manifests as an identity.
Expect that that’s historically inaccurate. I’m reading the Talmud right now (a series of Jewish books written around c. 500), and it’s full of homoerotic narratives, anecdotes, etc. Homosexuality seems to have been common enough that a number of famous rabbis discussing their sexual attraction to other famous rabbis (though they didn’t act on that attraction, at least not according to the traditional narrative) didn’t raise too many eyebrows.
See Bava Metzia 84a, and Bereishit Rabbah 84:7 (though the latter is technically Midrash, not talmud) for some good examples of homoerotic tension. I've heard https://printocraftpress.com/product/a-rainbow-thread/ is a pretty good resource on the topic, if you want to look further into it, though I haven't read the book myself.
There's a story from Plato's Symposium, written 360 BC, that explains why some people are attracted to the opposite sex and others to the same sex. Everyone knows there was gay sex in ancient Greece, of course, but the story shows that people of different orientations could be thought of as different types of people.
From what I know on the topic, the Greco-Roman equivalent of "sexual orientation" drew distinctions based on what role someone took on during the sexual act itself (specifically, whether they were the dominant-penetrative partner or the submissive-receptive one), rather than whether they were attracted to men or women. Modern slang terms like "top" and "bottom" come closest to describing Greek and Roman sexual orientations, though they don't carry the same importance that they would've had to people back then.
This led to people being categorized in ways that would seem utterly baffling to modern audiences: A man who penetrated other (typically younger and more feminine) men would be seen as "straight." Conversely, a man who preferred to take on the submissive role during sex (even, and perhaps especially, if he was submitting to a woman) would be seen as being "queer," i.e. sexually deviant in a distinctly unmasculine way. For instance, Caesar's political opponents accused him of taking the receptive role in sex, in a manner strangely similar to modern-day accusations that certain politicians are secretly gay or bisexual.
Or else it really is caused by a virus/something, and this virus has only been prevalent in certain times and places.
The idea that homosexuality practically didn't exist for most of recorded history is very interesting to me. Like, I understand that in most times and places there weren't out homosexuals because homosexuality would have been punished by death. And yet, where are all the records of sodomites being put to death? Even the Spanish Inquisition ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality ) apparently only managed to find a handful cases of homosexual sodomy.
Homosexuality supposedly doesn't exist among African hunter-gatherers (that find the idea incomprehensible), which would support a theory that it's innate but variable, but not so much the socially constructed theory of David Bankof whose Daily Caller piece I linked above:
How do we define 'normal?' Is there some reason that watching sports or collecting stamps or preferring to look at waterfalls as opposed to brick walls is not 'weird?'
I know people with favorite colors. Is that weird?
Perhaps. But ... how well do we really explain/predict non-sexual preferences? I mean, I like going to events involving historical re-enactment. I was interested in American history when I was younger. My parents are not history buffs. I didn't have some mentor who was a history buff. I may have had a cousin who was also interested in American history, but I wouldn't call him influential. So isn't my interest in historic topics hard to explain or predict?
I apologize for pushing the point, but it just seems like some of the differences aren't objective differences so much as contained within the value systems that we use to judge different sets of behaviors. Perhaps sexual preferences aren't weirder in an objective sense. They're just being compared to a stricter normative standard.
As the joke goes, there's a huge difference between "forgive me father, for I have sinned" and "Sorry daddy, I've been naughty."
...but by what standard is one 'weirder' than another?
Again, if I'm missing something that's obvious to others I apologize.
I'm continuously amazed at the ability of pseudo intellectuals to confidently assert pure drivel. Drivel that is not even wrong, because at least wrong statements have a coherent meaning.
The real question is why you would take this gibberish seriously enough to try to steelman it?
It seems, through the lens of your review, to be incoherent word-salad, *not even wrong*, and it makes no predictions, explains no real-world patterns, offers no new powers of either cure or persuasion.
The only thing it does offer is a way of blaming the victim (or the victim's relatives) for diseases that medicine doesn't "fully understand" yet. Witch-quackery. You yourself seem unable to take it seriously, and I can't believe that you would use it as a guide professionally.
And you don't get off by saying 'my prediction markets told me to do it', because you chose the six books that the prediction markets were about.
I am annoyed that you started this with references to mesa-optimisers, because it made me think "OMG has Scott just worked out a workable analogy from reinforcement learning to an existing theory of psychological disorders?!". Which fooled me into reading it.
To attack the only point where you seem to be taking it at all seriously:
Consider a heterosexual man. A hot girl blindfolds him and feeds him an ice-cream. Then she takes off the blindfold and it turns out he's eating ice-cream flavoured dogshit. He stops enjoying it.
Do we now have a psychoanalytic theory of eating-repression?
As someone who feels similarly about Lacan, I'm very glad Scott wrote this review, because it made me realize "wow, this is bullshit." Whereas before, my stance was "this *might* be bullshit, but I don't know anything about it myself and a lot of seemingly smart people seem to think it's genius, so maybe they're onto something." Glad I didn't have to actually go through the trouble of trying to read through Lacan myself!
Lacan seems to say that the cause or origin of desire is an ego that needs to defend itself. That seems unnecessary to me. I can't picture a living organism making it through natural selection that doesn't move towards things it needs/wants and away from things that may harm it.
Buddhists build the four noble truths on the observation that desire is inherent to us, that we have the tendency to cling to things we desire. In the Buddhist framework, the "self" (not the same as Freud's ego) and "desire" co-arise dependently on each other.
The more we add clinging to the natural comings and goings of our preferences, the more a fixed sense of self is reinforced. The more we experience a fixed sense of self, the harder that self will cling to its desires (and aversions).
Absent any particular training of the mind, our mind will tend to fabricate this dance endlessly -- building up self and getting more and more attached to preferences. That dance of clinging and aversion is the cause of suffering. I believe our psychological defenses -- as Freud and others have conceived them -- are constructed in response to that suffering. Our defenses are built up in reaction to existential disappointment (I mean, Freudians may locate that disappointment in sexual impulses, but Buddhists would say it's inherent to existence and not specifically sexual).
The idea of "non-self" (anatta) in Buddhism is a bit complex to grasp. It's not "no ego" and it's not that there's no one home in there. In the teachings, the language is more often that there is neither "self" nor "not self." This connects to another important idea in Buddhism which is the "nondual" nature of reality. The mind proliferates "this" and "that", "me" and "not me", "like" and "dislike". One of the central insights to be had in meditation is "oh wow, this is all the same stuff" (hard to convey in words, but it's a good one).
Anyone care to speculate on what Fruedian/Lacanian methodologies would predict in light of women's entry into the labour force and daycare taking the role of the father and tearing the infant from its mother? Idealization of the educational institution/job as God/law/that which can satisfy desire through approval? Go wild.
Zizek writes about this I believe. The decline of paternal authority leads to the dominance of the maternal superego, which is more severe because it commands the subject to enjoy.
The patriarchal command "do not enjoy" was actually more liberating, relatively, because under its dour umbrella one was afforded a little bit of private freedom...
"That suggests there’s some set of unconscious rules about which kinds of sexual pleasure are allowed."
Not sure if this is insightful, but I expect (using my flawed self-model), that I would have a similar reaction if instead of an ugly woman, it turned out to be just a different hot woman. Something like "I didn't agree to this, and see such trust violations as especially objectionable when having to do with sex" (even though I would have agreed to participate had the new woman propositioned me instead, and even though I don't particularly have conceptions of sex as sacred).
So it doesn't seem to be an unconscious rule that this *kind* of sexual pleasure is not allowed (Like "you shouldn't like sex with ugly people"). Maybe it's that unexpected kinds of sexual pleasure are not allowed? Or perhaps that framing is wrong. It just seemed a missing example, and I got the vague impression that a theory about certain kinds of sexual pleasure being not allowed would predict the other way.
(Also could just be I'm an outlier on this, I suppose)
What's particularly surprising about this is that orange is actually probably one of the two strongest flavor components in coke (lime being the other).
I wonder how often parents threaten or attempt to kill their children. Mine never said or did anything like that, but "I brought you into this world and I can take you out" is a cliche. And some parents do kill their children.
Lacan in general: There's a book by Delany called *Phallos* about people hunting for a gold and jeweled phallos with a message in it. It's a Lacanian book, so there's no message in the phallos. I read some of the book and the critical essays packaged with it, and the criticism is so Lacanian hell wouldn't have it. I keep thinking about reading the book and writing up something about the normal readerly pleasures of reading *Phallos*. There's some good landscape description.
"Name-Of-The-Father, which is apparently a very clever pun in French" My high school French steps in. Perhaps it's nom de pere/nom de guerre.
Anyone care to try diagnosing Lacan? He seems somehow kind of off. Of course, maybe he didn't believe any of it, maybe he found a way to get money and fame by being insultingly confusing.
I think there's something to the idea that people are sometimes motivated by "and then everything will be alright", though I don't think it's hoping for a coherent self, it might be more like a hoped-for sense of security or completeness.
> maybe he found a way to get money and fame by being insultingly confusing ...
The best argument in support of this is that there are no books where lesser thinkers who are also better writers make Lacan comprehensible. If he was brilliant but obscure, those books would be common and popular.
> why did you want me to read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?
In your review of Sadly, Porn, you talked about your almost cult leader friend that seems to get his powers from understanding Lacanian stuff. That was very intruiging to me, in a "deep truth that I may not know about" way. This review is telling me the opposite: maybe there were nothing at all.
The cult leader friend in question claims to get his power through understanding Lacanian stuff but actually gets his power through claiming to understand Lacanian stuff.
That's possibly the case. I have one friend that I could potentially see as a cult leader but he's more of the intuitive type rather than the deep references type. Some part of his charisma, at least with me, is based on some mutual trust that I will believe in what he says instead of questionning everything. This gives him more power, but I also prefer this relationship to an adversarial one, and I don't think he's ever been a bad influence in my life.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that he could read Lacanian stuff and talk about it, but this wouldn't change the fact that he has always been capable of being a cult leader, and I always haven't. Which in turn leads to me losing interest in Lacanian stuff, since cult leader stuff is something I don't think you can "learn", thus trying to learn it is useless. I also didn't get any interesting insight from this article.
There's an old tale about programming languages, where a language missing some concept you're familiar with is obviously deficient, vs a programming language with a concept you're _not_ familiar with is weird and useless.
Sure, but Paul Graham attributing any of his success to Lisp where in another essay he explains that they were building their computer themselves to save money but giving everything they could to marketers (I think that's the one about submarine and suits making a comeback) leads me to believe that all that talk about blurb doesn't have much consequences in the real world. Nobody uses Arc except HN, and Bel isn't even implemented.
Here are the quote, from "The Submarine":
> I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. [1]
> Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications. And we weren't the only ones they did great things for. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. Why call an auction site "eBay"?
Paul Graham is here attributing the success of eBay to his marketing firm. You'll notice that in "beating the average", he doesn't quote any other startup or company that had success thanks to Lisp.
I also think that anyone with a bit of real world experience with programming realizes that "obviously deficient" doesn't really matter at all. No object system? Build one. No static typing? Make a typechecker, add more tests, more asserts, anything. Missing some features? Use a transpiler. Can't run on a browser? Compile to JS, or WASM. The difference between what's in the language and what you bring is small, and gets smaller as your project gets bigger.
The tale is also relatively wrong. Macros are not something "weird and useless", it's something you can relatively easily understand. It basically boils down to "there's a language-level support for hacking into the compiler". Turns out that every modern JS codebase also has that, it's called Babel. All of that to say, I don't really believe what Paul Graham has to say about blurb.
Now let's get down to the actual subject: me being unfamiliar with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and thus finding it weird and useless. I don't know if the two are linked, but both are somewhat true (I'm still not convinced it's useless, but this article reduced my curiosity compared to the previous description). I'm even unfamiliar with psychoanalysis in general. Considering how many people speak about Freud when talking about Lacan and that I don't even know that, I'm probably missing some keys to understand stuff here. Still, my impression went from "this looks cool and interesting" to "perhaps this is enlightning for people that have spent a good part of their life thinking about psychoanalysis, I'm not that person". I don't really know what to add.
As a minor comment, your perspectives on the relative lack of importance of the language to programming hinges, I think, on a world of consumer programming where flexibility and speed are the name of the game, and hardware limitations are almost nonexistent because the underlying power demands are trivial.
In other areas -- admittedly not what most programmers spend most of their time doing these days -- this is not at all the case. If you are building real-time operating systems for missiles or spacecraft, if you are building physics simulations or financial transaction systems that need the utmost in raw scalar speed, or you are building exceedingly secure systems (e.g. for highly classified work) that need to be very, very proof against security lapses -- then the language and what is easy and what is hard matter very much. It is much less trivial to compensate for conceptual lacunae by ad-hockery at the programming level.
>I also think that anyone with a bit of real world experience with programming realizes that "obviously deficient" doesn't really matter at all.
Isn't this exactly the point that Paul Graham is making? If you are eventually going to expand what you consider as the language, you should use a language that is good at producing DSLs. Sure it's true that modern day development environments have largely sidestepped the language issue by putting power in IDEs, transpilers and linting, but pointing out that programming environments have evolved to gain the characteristics that he thought were important... doesn't seem like a point against his ability to say what has technical merit.
Yes, I agree that he's extremely wrong in predicting that the language would be the level on which progress would be made (it turns out that tooling is the dimension that it would happen on) but in order to refute the more general point, you'd have to say that people automatically accept tools they don't have experience with as being more powerful, or that people wouldn't scoff at less powerful environments as lacking.
> Paul Graham is here attributing the success of eBay to his marketing firm. You'll notice that in "beating the average", he doesn't quote any other startup or company that had success thanks to Lisp.
On the object level question of what companies use lisp, ITA uses lisp and had much success with it, running circles around companies that calculated flight paths using assembly. This was quoted in some other essay that I can't quite remember.
On the main question of why Paul Graham thinks Lisp was the key, beating the averages cites his company duplicating features of competitors, sometimes within days of a press release. Surely this seems like a technical feat and not a marketing one?
>The tale is also relatively wrong. Macros are not something "weird and useless", it's something you can relatively easily understand.
Considering that when he cofounded Viaweb in 1995, the environment was such that most people used C, where macros are indeed gross and bad and Babel was 19 years in the future, yes the context is that most people would find macros weird and useless.
I think this comment is really weird because of the many technical claims that Paul Graham made, having the object level things be widely adopted in modern languages is being read as him being dramatically wrong about the merits. He founded his company in the transpilerless world of 1995, where competitors asked for Oracle experience, Python still hadn't hit version 2 yet and where people were still trying to write web applications in C or C++ because that was what programmers were familiar with. Citing modern day javascript as a counter example seems exactly backwards to me.
> its insistence that not only are humans bound by Law, but they insist on being bound by Law, and someone who isn’t bound by Law will flail around desperately looking for some Law to be bound by
There do seem to be some people who aren't like that, and it's not that they've discovered some reason why authority-seeking is immoral and virtuously stopped themselves, they actually just don't want to do it.
"[T]he Other doesn’t exist, they’re self-contained and don’t need anybody else, there’s no such thing as the unconscious, and nothing can possibly go wrong. Fink describes Ayn Rand characters as a 'perfect' example, which I found helpful."
The irony is that the main character arc in both of Ayn Rand's major novels is all about the protagonists having to learn that they do actually need other people after all.
Really, I appreciate the time and effort you put into this.
It's very very difficult to understand the mental processes of a neurotic delusion. In systems as complex as intelligent humans operating in social structures, the origen and expression of desire and motivation is beyond comprehension. But we can deal with it.
Fortunately we have profound practical ways to alleviate some of the suffering.
"Hysteria is where someone tries to become the object of the Other’s desire, thus resolving the terrifying question of what it wants (it wants them)."
til i'm hysteric (minus the abusive father, and so far the stormy relationship with the abusive husband, but i guess there's still plenty of time for that)
Well, I gotta be honest, this all seems totally deranged to me. Most of the time when people have these big overarching worldviews of how people work I can at least see where they're coming from — but none of this stuff makes any sense at all to me.
A couple times, I've found weird tiny subreddits off-the-beaten-path where everyone seems to be suffering from some kind of mental illness, where they spill dozens and dozens of paragraphs and utterly incoherent nonsense, words words words with no connection to reality (does anyone know what I'm talking about? I never saved any examples). Anyway, that's what Lacanian psychoanalysis reminds me of.
Do you mean Reddits on stuff like reality shifting, the Mandela Effect, and "twin flames"? Although those I think are understandable in their overall concepts (e.g. people can move between parallel universes and have destined soul mates) so might not qualify as what you're talking about.
I'd never seen either of those before. /r/escapingprisonplanet is standard-issue crazy.
But /r/sorceryofthespectacle I found pretty disturbing because it feels like a weird, twisted version of Astral Codex Ten where everyone has stared a bit too hard at the sun and gone just fifteen or twenty percent more crazy. The style, the erudition, the specific preoccupations are all there (oh shit I just found a link to Meditations on Moloch), it's just more desperate and burned out. It's a weird funhouse mirror where you get to see the alternate universe version of yourself that's a meth addict with AIDS.
"where everyone has stared a bit too hard at the sun and gone just fifteen or twenty percent more crazy"
This seems like the type of observation that you could only make if you've stared at the sun a bit too long(but perhaps didn't go crazy). I dunno if we are speaking the same language here, but is that metaphor even accessible to someone who doesn't stare at the sun?
edit: I mean that in a totally neutral way. I can 100% relate to what you're saying.
"Lacan claims that no psychotic person can ever invent a truly novel analogy, which sure is a heck of a claim."
This is the kind of thing which really makes it near impossible for me to respect the kind of theorizing that not only generated, but upholds these frameworks. In a scientific, or at least sane framework, people would home in on these sorts of predictions as vitally important, and make a high priority of going out to check if they're actually true. If they're not, it's a good sign the framework ought to be chucked.
There might be some exceptions. Sometimes the world is too complicated for even a good model to properly capture all the details. But if a model's predictions aren't at least more consistently true than would be predicted by common sense, it's probably just not a good model.
I would read: Lacan compared with Robin Hanson, where everything is about status and signalling, including sexual pleasure (blindfolded man only enjoys blowjob from attractive woman because the pleasure is not in the nerves but in knowing he's doing something high-status).
Look, I enjoy stories about phalluses (sorry, I meant "objects a") as much as the next guy; but I think that, at some point (hopefully, soon), we need to make a deal with all of these psychoanalysts: we will read your books, and we will even pay attention, but only if you include some actual evidence for your "object a"-icious stories. And by "evidence" I don't mean "something I dreamt up one day", but randomized controlled trials. Ideally, ones that have been replicated. Otherwise, there's no real reason for me to prefer your "object a" stories over any others, and the Internet is vast.
So what I don't understand is why you picked the book with the most money and positive votes, rather than the book you wanted to do. Or 'are' you doing the book that we vote for? Or were we picking the book which, if you did it, would get the most votes? I now think I should have been putting (fake) money on the book I wanted you to do (R. Girard)... regardless of your motivation.
>“Lacan goes so far as to say that ‘female masochism is a male fantasy’ and qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’, [because women are] the Other sex [by some corollary of Lacan’s definition of the Other]. Homosexuality - hommesexualite, as Lacan spells it, including the two ms from homme, ‘man’, is, in his terms, love for men.”
I think the even more surprising conclusion is that, according to this definition, a straight woman is homosexual because she loves men.
Does anyone here want to theorise about why books like this become popular, even though it's famously hard to cut through the uncertainties about what their authors are saying (and then to the extent you figure it out, it's not at all clear how what they're saying is either soundly based or particularly useful)?
Many inscrutable writers influential in philosophy seem enduringly popular. Hegel and Lacan are famous examples.
Because, if profound truths are so simple that you can summarise them in a couple of pages, why would anyone respect professional philosophers who spend decades on this stuff? Clearly there must be some deep wisdom incomprehensible to mere mortals, and if there is not, then it would make sense for the invested parties to pretend otherwise.
I appreciate the scepticism here. But just to be clear, I'm not wondering why certain writers write *long* articles; I'm wondering why they invest so much energy in writing that is *difficult to understand*. Compare e.g. Hegel with Peter Singer, who is admirably clear.
As far as I can tell, this is a general feature of Continental philosophy. It might not have any reason other than "that's how all the previous Great Works in the tradition were written", although in that case I'd be curious to know its origin and development.
My working theory, which I'm still working on, is that there are two kinds of good communication:
There's a transfer of information where you are very effective at putting your thoughts into my brain. This requires clarity.
But there's also "emotionally/intellectually resonating with your audience." This requires some level of inscrutability or vagueness, because you're speaking to lots of minds you have no access to. They all need to be able to map responses onto your words despite vast differences in experience and wiring.
For instance, the motivational speaker can say "studies show that cardiovascular health is greatly improved by 20-30 minutes of aerobic exercise daily" until he's blue in the face. You'll acknowledge that what he's saying is true but you probably won't wake up at 6 AM and go to the gym as a result of hearing it.
But if instead he says (I am not a motivational speaker): "Do not allow the you that society built drown out the you that you choose" or something, maybe that reminds you of a time in high school when you got super excited about getting buff and your crush laughed at your enthusiasm juxtaposed with your ridiculous attempt at a pull-up and so you got super embarrassed and swore off exercising forever, and you're able to confront that part of yourself and remove a mental block to getting to the gym.
What the dude said was nonsense, but if it had been more specific it wouldn't have applied to you.
And if you look at the great works that are discussed again and again, from Shakespeare to Plato, they're all of the "vague enough to map differently to different people" category. We consider the ability for different people to interpret a writer's words differently to be a hallmark of a great writer.
The question is - do we think this is true because that kind of writing is better? Or is it because writing that clearly and concisely communicates a message, to the point where we all accept it as obviously true, leaves nothing more to say and therefore has no reason to be talked about ever again?
Very nicely put. This is similar to my own working theory that many people in fields associated with philosophy are really producing a sort of conceptual poetry. They love the delicious noises that concepts make as they brush up against each other. They use concepts for their effect far more than for their content.
This is fair enough, in a way, but it has repercussions. If you love the sound of concepts, you may be enchanted. If you are dedicated to trying to follow a chain of thought, though, this style of thinking is likely to leave you wondering – all the damn time! – “what does that mean?”
And the best answer may be that they don’t have that much reliable to say.
Surprisingly often, the signal of this is writing that is rich in concepts – packed to overflowing, in fact. This impresses the hell out of a lot of people.
One unusual and arguably important quality of those concepts is just how many of them seem wildly under-examined, including by their authors. Individual sentences often seem to make very large claims. Yet they do so with a remarkable absence of definition, let alone evidence.
An alternative to working through these concepts is to conclude that the author really doesn't care that much about ultimate meaning. The author is all about producing an effect in the listener or reader.
Lacan (at least as experienced 3rd hand via Fink and Scott) seems to me to lack the quality that my favorite thinkers have. He doesn’t sound *excited*. He doesn’t sound capable of being surprised and fascinated by his objects of study. You don’t get the sense that he feels like the world of people and their psyches is larger than him, that there’s a lot still left to learn, a lot that’s puzzling, and he’s looking forward to deepening his understanding. Plenty of people in psychology and psychiatry do have that quality. Piaget had it. So did Bruno Bettelheim. People in other fields have it too — Michael Lewis & David Byrne, for instance, have it. Scott has it. But Lacan sounds way too attached to his feeling of having things all figured out. He’s fascinated by his theories about the psyche, not by psyches. You can think of it in terms of Venn diagrams. Some people -- the thinkers I admire --sound like their subject is a big circle and they are a smaller circle that overlaps a lot with the big circle. But Lacan sounds like he's a big circle, his theory is a medium-sized circle inside of the big circle of him, and everybody else is a small circle inside the medium-sized one.
The best psychotherapists I know have that quality of excitement and fascination — about their patients. Here’s how they sound: “He came to therapy about a year after his father died. He’s a very articulate guy when he’s talking about his friends and his interests — he’s interested in craftsmen, and he’s writing a book about violin makers. His father was a surgeon, really well known because he invented some new procedures — so his father was a fine craftsman, right? Anyhow, this guy is very articulate until he starts talking about his love relationships, but then he . . .” (This isn’t a real patient by the way — I just made all that stuff up to give you the flavor.). Good psychotherapists have a model of the psyche and views about how various hells and traps develop, and that guides their work with their patients, but they are more interested in their patients than they are in their theories. And they think of their theories as being subject to expansion and revision based on their ongoing work with patients.
Maybe Lacan did have a lot of excitement and fascination going on about the people and psyches he encountered, and all the details about that side of him got strained out as first Fink abstracted Lacan’s ideas from his published work and then Scott abstracted Fink’s ideas about Lacan from Fink’s book. And then again maybe Lacan was a fussy middle-aged white man who was pretty impressed with himself.
Lacan himself is fascinated by his object of study... Freud (his entire project was "return-to-Freud"). To me that's the most palpable part of reading him. He is OBSESSED with Freud.
Not directly related to the review proper, but regarding Julian Jaynes and the mentioned claim that "the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind, only various bundles of emotions and thoughts located in different parts of their bodies" — I had the thought a while ago (no doubt inspired by my own getting better at emotional self-awareness etc) that these days, what we're learning — mindfulness, mind-body awareness, etc — is in fact to recognize that we have various bundles at emotions and thoughts located in our bodies: unlearning the habit of over-identifying with every emotion and thought, and trying to imagine a unified mind. (See also: Internal Family Systems etc.)
So maybe what Jaynes (thought he) observed in the Homeric Greeks' references was actually a *better* model of the mind, one that has been clouded/simplified into the model most of us carry today, and have to partially unlearn.
(Actually, I had this thought when reading the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna describes his mental state with "my limbs grow weak, my body trembles, my mouth turns dry, my hairs stand on end, my bow slips from my hand, my skin burns, my mind whirls, and I can barely stand", and it struck me as very perceptive/aware in a way I can hardly manage.)
"imagine a heterosexual man. A hot girl blindfolds him, then gives him oral sex...ugly girl / a man / a chimpanzee...no longer as interested...Normally I would interpret this as a moral prohibition"
This seems like much too quick of a jump to me. We know that people's tastes vary widely. And yet as soon as we see someone enjoying X in a way that we can't immediately explain, we jump to: oh, there must be an obscure moral factor in there.
Clearly the moral factors *can* affect your aesthetic (and particularly sexual) pleasures. But I think you should always allow lots and lots and lots and lots of space for the explanation "that person just has different aesthetic tastes from me" before you jump to calling in non-aesthetic (i.e. moral) factors to "explain" the pleasures.
(I put explain in scare quotes there because it's not clear just how good those moral-perversion style explanations of sexual tastes really are. Is there really a rigorous chain of causation between mummy's failures as a parent and my foot fetish?)
Yes, I agree that Scott's jump is much too quick. "Moral prohibition" against receiving oral sex from a man, a chimp or an ugly woman isn't the only possible explanation, in fact it doesn't even seem like the likeliest one. Seems like the surprise alone would be a boner-killer. And it's highly unusual to be having an intense interaction with somebody & find them suddenly & inexplicably replaced by somebody else. There's a real mystery. What the hell happened? And why was the switched performed? All that gives you a lot to think about, and takes you out of sex mode. And then there's the fact that anyone performing oral sex on you is in a position to really hurt you physically. You trusted the hot girl, but who knows what agenda this stranger has regarding your genitals (and chimps can rip somebody's face off, so . . .).
But besides all those relatively straightforward factors that could explain the man's reaction to the partner switch, there's the fact that a guy's perception that somebody is hot is driven partly by the part of the brain that is seeking a mate with good genes and good health: Youth and regular facial features are simultaneously likely to make the woman appear "hot" and also function are decent physical markers of good genes and good health. The woman's perceived beauty, and the good mate potential they are markers of, are a component of the guy's sexual desire. He suddenly finds himself having a sexual interaction with someone who lacks the markers.
I vaguely recall that Scott's explanation, which I'm saying is not so good, was presented as a contrast with some Lacanian view of what's going on in that situation. If so the Lacan explanation slid out of my head, maybe something about mOthers or brOthers but whattup if they switch, maybe now you're dealing with mOrticians or brOthels or something.
I feel like this is missing the point of the hypothetical.
Suppose the guy got oral sex from a hot girl, and agreed it was very pleasurable.
Then suppose he was offered oral sex from a ugly girl/man/chimp, with the guarantee that the actual physical sensations would be exactly the same - the ones he had already agreed were very pleasurable. He was guaranteed that everything would go well, the chimp was well-trained and disease-free, etc.
If I imagine this situation, I would still turn it down - not just out of disinterest, but with great force. Not just as "it wouldn't do anything for me", but "I would pay lots of money to have this not happen".
The problem here is in the implicit assumption that sexual pleasure is derived from physical sensations alone. It's clear that both stimulation and fantasizing play an important part, but describing your preferences/fetishes/whatever in terms of morality also seems weird, aesthetics is a much better fit. Of course, there's a deep and complicated relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but that's all the more reason for careful judgement.
OK, I understand the point I’m missing. I’m focusing on how astonished and disoriented someone would be if this switch from hot girl to chimp or whatever actually happened. But you’re posing this as a thought experiment whose terms are that the surprise, etc. doesn’t come up. So a lot of my objections to your take are irrelevant. OK, I get it.
Also I went back and read the part of the review where you propose the thought experiment, and it seems like the question on your mind is why, in that situation, would most people go instantly from delight to repugnance when the being delivering the delightful sensations got switched out for a being from another category. And beyond that, why are people subject to such intense, weird sexual attractions and revulsions? For instance, why are many kind and reasonable people intensely turned on by things that other kind and reasonable people find absurd and utterly non-sexual or intensely disgusting? And why do most of us find it impossible to explain, even to ourselves, why particular things can set off such intense sexual arousal or sexual disgust in us? And all that makes you wonder whether there is something to the idea of the unconscious, because clearly there are powerful forces at work here to which people do not have introspective access.
OK, I have some thoughts about how your head is working here, and I hope you don’t experience it as rude or intrusive for me to say this. I get the feeling that you do not have as much of a gray zone as most people do between your rational and your non-rational sides. If your powerful and honest mind cannot make a certain kind of sense out of something, you are stumped. I kind of think that might explain why you are more willing than many to not just write off Lacan. It’s as though you’re so utterly stumped for an explanation of people’s incredibly intense and weird reactions to things sexual that you’re unable to discriminate between halfway decent beginnings at explaining that stuff, on the one hand, and absurd crap on the other. To me, Lacan’s model of the psyche looks like a convoluted pile of turkey shit. I am sure that a valid explanation of whattup with people and their sexual tastes would be at least as complicated as Lacan’s, but I just do not see any reason at all to believe that Lacan’s model is that model, and I see many reasons to doubt that Lacan was in a position to develop a valid model. To name just one reason for skepticism, I don’t hear anything that suggests that Lacan even grasped the *idea* that there are ways to assess the plausibility of a model like his. Lacan does not seem to have made one single goddam prediction with his model. If a model is good, you should be able to make valid predictions with it, even if the model posits processes that are impossible to observe directly. Einstein, for instance, was able to make predictions with his theory of relativity.
I do know of some halfway plausible beginnings of a model of why people are the way that are about sex, and I don’t mind laying some of that out, but feel like I’ve said enough, in fact possibly too much, for a post here.
So, this points up an area where people are very different. "I would still turn it down - not just out of disinterest, but with great force." - I wouldn't. I mean, I don't think I'd turn down oral sex from a woman I didn't find visually beautiful (real experience backs this up); I don't think I'd turn down oral sex from a man (never have, but would be mildly interested). I'd turn down the chimp because I don't believe your guarantees.
It's fine that we have different reactions to sexual situations, and there is no reason to read any moral edge into those differences. We just like different stuff. And if in a particular instance of this experiment, your guinea pig turns down the blowjob from one of the women, it could also be because they don't like the colour of their hair, or their smell, or their taste in music.. They might turn down the man simply because they're straight.
Of course, they might also go into gay panic and strongly reject oral sex from a man because of messed up homophobia. That clearly exists. But purely taste-related reasons could easily explain the difference, because getting oral sex is not just about the sensations in your genitals.
I also want to push back a bit on something that seems to be assumed in this follow-up:
"Not just as "it wouldn't do anything for me", but "I would pay lots of money to have this not happen"."
Here you seem to be suggesting that you'd have a very strong reaction, and the strong reaction (if I'm following your logic right) implies that it's not just a question of taste, but that there is some moral-psychological knot behind it.
Again, I don't think we can make that assumption. People have really strong reactions to pure taste issues like food flavours and music. And conversely, I think our messed-up moral hang ups can also have very subtle influences on our choices and our behaviour (this is the theory behind microaggressions and the kind of racism and sexism that started to get talked about in the last decade or so, I think).
So, I certainly think the outcome and the explanation that you suggest for the hypothetical are both possible. But I don't think that outcome will always happen (in fact, I'm suggesting it would happen much less than you think), or that the explanation you're using is necessarily the best one.
Yeah, I'd turn down the chimp, too. All the others should have some understanding of what might happen to them if they bit me. On second thought, I probably wouldn't agree to the whole trick in the first place. If I train hard enough, I can suck my own dick without having to deal with strangers of any gender and species. And if I don't, I don't really need any cocksucking.
The experience wouldn't be the same, however As xpym points out, sexual pleasure isn't a matter of purely physical sensation, but has many, many other subtle factors feeding into it- internal fantasies, auditory, visual, and olfactory cues, the time of day, something that happened three weeks ago... everything's constantly feeding in and out of the brain. I might have a fantasy of giving or receiving oral sex from a beautiful woman, but certainly not an ugly woman or a chimpanzee, and there are good, sensible reasons as well as emotional and nonsensical reasons for that.
Overall, I also have to agree with Eremolalos here that if you insist on trying to cram topics like sexuality into a pure-rationality framework while trying to disregard irrational thoughts and impulses, you aren't going to get a lot of good results. It's like trying to apply scientific analysis to poetry to determine what part of it is the "beauty" (this is a bad analogy, by my own admission, but I can't think of one better).
Lacan's theory of childhood is so batshit crazy that I assumed he had no children. Anyone who does have children knows did they have their own desires, which are by no means always to please the parent. Wikipedia tells me, however, that he did have one daughter. It also tells me that she was batshit crazy, too.
The greatest value of Lacan, like his reincarnation TLP, is that their works are incredibly insightful into their minds while ignoring the existence of any other kind of psyche.
>Lacan . . . qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’, [because women are] the Other sex [by some corollary of Lacan’s definition of the Other]. Homosexuality - hommesexualite, as Lacan spells it, including the two ms from homme, ‘man’, is, in his terms, love for men.”)
This sentence is horseshit dried out til it is pliable and then formed into a mobius strip.
Yes, amusingly, this is exactly the problem. Humans can't tell each other what we really want, and we've had millions of years to learn to communicate. Meanwhile, we have to find a way to (nearly) perfectly describe to essentially an alien mind what it is that we want, maybe on the first try, and maybe we all die if we fail. This is so depressingly infeasible that it's no wonder that half the people despair at the problem, and the other half bounces off and dismisses it.
That's because humans don't want to tell each other what we really want. We want to have our genes proliferate, which often means hiding our true desires. Would you tell your wife that she's ugly and that you plan to cheat the first time you meet a hot woman? Would you tell the chief that you hate him and want to get rid of him so that you become the new chief? An alien mind that we create is not even a slave; it is not a competitor, and not a member of our society. The real danger is not that the mind won't understand us, but that it would obediently do everything its owner wants, even if that is committing genocide or starting a nuclear war.
Yes, I agree. Align AI with human values? Are you kidding? First of all, most people, myself included, do not have clear and stable ideas about what they want and what is right. Second, the subset of people who do have clear and stable ideas about that stuff are not in agreement with each other -- in fact many find ideas different from theirs so intolerable that they are willing to torture or kill the people who disagree with them. Third, look at the state of the world.
Hey Scott; you've written a lot of book reviews to date. I tried to write one myself and realized how hard it is. Would you consider writing a "How to Write a Book Review" post?
> As far as I can tell - which is not very far, this is famously obscure and complicated - the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of.
Jesus, I was looking for a word to call this all my life, I didn't even know other people notice this is a thing (in a very felt sense, not in the "I guess you can come up with a concept like this"). You may just make me read Lacan with this alone.
The "object a" thing is definitely something I struggled with for the better part of my youth, and it seems intensified by being lonely - it's essentially the tfwnogf mentality, with either masculinity and status (phallus!) or relationship with said gf being object a. A large part of pathology of the modern world is the decay of social relationships and shared context, so now it's just you and your unattainable object a, those are the contents of your world.
The preferred solution would be to reject modernity/humanity and return to tradition/monke, in more or less literal sense. But that has its own problems.
Can recommend the book "lacan: a graphic guide". It's succint and to the point with good examples, where the one reviewed here is for a different level of theory nerds.
I'm not Marx's biggest fan, but I get the appeal of his ideas because he's obviously right about at least some things. On the other hand, Freud ...
Regarding the acclaim enjoyed by Freud and his successors, it seems like there is an effort to memoryhole just how popular they were among the intelligentsia, rather than confront the question of why such good ideas were ever taken seriously.
Frederick Crews' "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" is the definitive exposé of the general shoddiness of Freud and his theory. However, as suggested by the title, the book only covers the first half of Freud's career, up to and including his rise to celebrity, with almost nothing said of later developments. Crews would be the ideal person to write a book on why Freud's ideas became so influential, but he's about 90 years old, so it's probably not happening.
I tell myself that it's because Freud asked good questions and basically invented an entire field, even if most of his answers to those questions now seem laughably wrong or naive. Kind of like a more extreme version of Noam Chomsky and linguistics.
Freud's ideas seem to have been useful if not true. The Surrealists were influenced and inspired by Freud, as was Alfred HItchcock. The idea of the unconscious as this vast dark territory of the mind compared to the sliver that is well-lit consciousness is compelling. (Did the notion of the unconscious originate with Freud or did he merely popularize it? I don't know the answer to that.)
As a dilettante in this area, I was always curious/confused to what extent D&G's Anti-Oedipus challenges this understanding of desire, but I was always left daunted and never could penetrate (sorry Freud) their works.
Essentially they argue that fundamental mode of being is akin to psychosis: unstructured and uncentered, and symbolic structure is a result of this fundamental uncertainty.
Lacan assumes the structure already exists and the "I" (as in "I am") is born into it and always confused how the structure really is (essentially neurotic), where D&G argue that there is no fundamental structure and everything is a decentralized network of meaning-production.
The main inspiration for this idea and many of the terms are from the wonderful book "memoirs of my nervous illness" by Paul Schreber.
I just looked at Wikipedia and have no idea why anti oedipus is named as an attack on the lacanian ideas. I don't see it like that, to me it's more a hardcore poststructuralist view on society and existence, where lacan is on the fence of structuralism and poststructuralism.
If you really wanted to frame it as an attack on Lacan, I guess you could say it's because it's arguing that there is no culture, it's all a fabrication each of us imagine individually and equally correct. Lacan, in a sense, requires the pre-existence of language and meaning, even though it is partially unavailable to us, so I guess if you 100% accept D&G, the foundation of Lacanian psychoanalysis "falls apart" because the foundation it stands on is fundamentally unstable and that is the real "problem" the self and society is built to prevent. Idk I think it's a bit too poststructuralist for me.
Anyway, regarding desire: Lacan thinks there's a fixed structure that makes you want something you can never truly have (unless you go nuts, where you can then have that thing you truly want but lose access to the shared reality pretty much). I think D&G think the object of desire is something you can totally get, but the object is meaningless and only there because you are already insane enough to think it exists and is attainable or something, haha.
RE your last paragraph: It was my vague impression that desire was commonly understood/affiliated/stained with a negative stigma whereas D&G wanted to remedy this and say "Hey desire isn't that bad, don't let the others bully you into thinking otherwise".
Hm! I don't really think Lacan (and Freud) thinks it's bad either, it's more that it's a force that makes us do weird things to avoid it because we are also afraid of getting too close to the real object of desire. Both of them think we are our own worst bully (but often by proxy of some idea of what others think we should be like). Lacan doesn't think therapy is about a cure, it's about shifting perspective. Freud doesn't really think there's a cure either, in his point of view it's the human condition and the unavoidable price we pay for society and culture.
But yeah I guess they both spend a lot of time describing how desire is associated with something bad, but their point really isn't that it's actually always bad.
Freud talks a lot about aggression. He also doesn't think it's bad per se, it's a driving force. But some expressions of aggression are incompatible with the law, and he argues that some expressions of aggression are better than other. Sublimation being the preferred one, where it's transformed and released through something else, such as creativity.
Like the difference between punching the screen and angrily trying to solve a problem all night and ending up with something really clever.
Your algorithm works I guess, I'm a psychologist, programmer and lacan nerd. Are you telling me I'm not the only one?!
The worst misunderstanding in your review is that of the masculine and feminine position. It's not about actually being a man or a woman and not directly related to transgender things, it's in a symbolic sense.
The point is that there are essentially two ways to obtain pleasure: By having/wanting some proxy of the phallus (big car, cool job, power), or by being the one that makes it worth having, to put it simply. One is defined as an exclusive or: you have it or you don't. The other is the negation of that position: not like that and/or pleasure in being with someone who has it.
These are modes of being, not related to actual gender. In a "traditional" sense, it's the difference between wanting to be the boss and wanting to be the boss's wife, but also wanting other stuff than just that. There is no natural position based on your gender, but there are social pressures. One is not better than the other in his theory, but in a social context it can be but isn't necessarily.
Lacan's theory of sexuation (as he calls it) was actually a major breakthrough in separating gender from social role that still inspires feminism today.
I think it's quite profound and I'm sad you present it like this because it seems to anger your readers a lot, because you presented it as biological essentialism when it is more like the opposite.
I think he is very right that it does transfer to sexuality too, and that homosexuality and transgenderism are good examples in their own way. In homosexuality, you sometimes have a relationship between someone with a masculine position and someone with a feminine, resembling the imaginary heterosexual relationship. Sometimes it's more like two people with masculine positions, the pump and dump type meetup. Sometimes it's two with the feminine position, where neither is "the man" in the relationship.
The fun thing is that this also applies to heterosexual relationships.
In the sense of transgenderism, it's a perversion in the lacanian sense (you also misunderstood that), where the person attempts to become the image of the object of desire. There's again nothing wrong with that in Lacan's theory, but I think it's an interesting perspective on the mechanism of how someone can be dissatisfied with the gender they have.
> The point is that there are essentially two ways to obtain pleasure: By having/wanting some proxy of the phallus (big car, cool job, power), or by being the one that makes it worth having, to put it simply. One is defined as an exclusive or: you have it or you don't. The other is the negation of that position: not like that and/or pleasure in being with someone who has it.
That all sounds like it could be rephrased without the phallus, and it would sound a whole lot more sensible.
Yeah for sure. The phallus is just a term for the imaginary object of desire. That's why it's not "the penis", which is the actual dick. The actual dick isn't interesting on it's own, it's the symbolic status it is given socially, not a property it has on it's own. This symbolic status isn't unique to the penis.
The point is to describe how some people find pleasure in thinking they are important because they have X, while others find pleasure in a different way, still referred to as "girly" today.
The only reason it's called phallus is because it's pre-existing jargon for this X. The jargon has it's root in the observation about the symbolic status of the penis across cultures.
But isn't biological essentialism largely correct, and denials thereof largely absurd? Surely all this unironical "evolution stops at the neck" business is first and foremost political propaganda.
Of course not, on the contrary. I find it undeniable that some people are more manly than others, and some of those very manly people are biological girls. Vice versa for girliness. Some very girly men are for example not very keen on expressing their girliness, and struggle to keep up a manly facade.
Conclusion: Biological gender is not particularly correlated with manliness and girliness. It is however enforced socially to some degree, and this enforcement can lead some people to experience a kind of existential pain. And some people, probably most people, even alternate between girliness and manliness!
Changing the social structure to make this phenomenon more acceptable is of course political in nature, so I guess you can call spreading the idea political propaganda, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong.
What's the point of resistance against this idea? (Not a rhetorical question)
It's probably true that much of what we call girliness/manliness is arbitrary and culturally determined, but nevertheless I'm sure that there is some "true" set of innate characteristics which would be very strongly correlated indeed. Of course, the usual disclaimers apply, whatever those characteristics may end up being that by itself isn't grounds for discrimination, you can't derive an ougth from is etc etc.
I'm pretty sure that normatively I basically agree with you, but I disagree with the notion that employing lies in service of a worthy goal is virtuous. Basically, I want to believe in the spirit of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ even though the real life doesn't seem to work that way very often.
Idk, from a psychological perspective there are some averages where men and women differ. While most people are average overall, most people are also outliers in some way. It's also very hard to purely separate average male risk willingness from hormones and social expectations. It's generally accepted that it's a mix.
Innate characteristics definitely exist on an individual level but they just aren't tied to gender when you look at stuff like personality (which is also surprisingly generic and very well known to determine/influence a lot of behavior) for example.
The problem with biological essentialism isn't that there isn't any difference between genders on average, it's more that the idea implies that because the average man or woman is like this, all men or women must be like that too. The variance is quite high in these averages.
> The problem with biological essentialism isn't that there isn't any difference between genders on average, it's more that the idea implies that because the average man or woman is like this, all men or women must be like that too. The variance is quite high in these averages
I don't think it implies that, it is just easily misinterpreted.
If a truth is easily misinterpreted, the right thing to do is to state it very carefully, not to deny the truth.
I agree with your last statement. I must have explained myself poorly, that's not what I meant.
Biological essentialism is directly wrong because there is very strong evidence that biology (genes, gender and so on) does not determine human behavior. Traits are inheritable to some degree, I've seen 30% estimated. Not gender related though. Upbringing and life events plays a huge role however.
Evidence: There are many women who pursued careers who are happy and successful. Society did not collapse when women entered universities and politics, in fact there are many successful female academics and political leaders.
For that reason, biology should not be used to socially enforce roles.
That could just as easily be an error in drawing up "manly" and "girly" (whether by you, by society, or by whomever, is irrelevant).
I much prefer the construction I have found: I am a man, and therefore everything I do that is virtuous, and most things which are not unvirtuous, is automatically manly.
As to your original comment, I appreciate the added nuance to the theory, although I strongly disagree with such /positions/orientations/modes/ being called "masculine" or "feminine", given the linguistic connections those words have. Perhaps something more denotative would be helpful?
The point of using masculine and feminine is to use words that are relatable and describe the current situation, as per psychoanalytical tradition of using everyday terms for everyday phenomena. It's a way of avoiding some morally prescriptive "this is how it should be" type of pseudoscience and sticking to analyzing what is there currently.
It's also because lacan likes to provoke. He famously said "The Woman does not exist" which have angered many people over the years. His point was that there is no such thing as "a real woman", because in his theory the feminine mode of being is nothing in itself, it requires others to be something in relation to. In contrast to the masculine that is something in itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by virtue but it doesn't sound like something actually tied to your gender, it sounds like it's tied to you as a person. But it's just like what lacan describes as the masculine logic in the sense that everything that isn't manly must be feminine.
Redefining extant words to mean something esoteric and difficult to understand is indeed common in certain circles, hence (part of) my dislike for psychoanalysis, among others. (I could be considered a bit hypocritical here, math does this endlessly, but at least that's primarily for internal consumption, not for a wider audience. I'm uncertain how widely Lacan meant for his theories to be read.)
As for "virtue", indeed, it's often, though not always, unrelated to gender. I am also using the more personal meaning here, although that's mostly to gloss over the difficulties of specifying precisely what I mean. The simplest version would be "be true to yourself", although there are many caveats that must be added. The mirror would be: "I am a (wo)man, and therefore everything I do that is virtuous, and most things which are not unvirtuous, is automatically (wo)manly."
> "It's a way of avoiding some morally prescriptive "this is how it should be" type of pseudoscience and sticking to analyzing what is there currently.
Using the words "masculine" and "feminine" seems to me to be a terrible way of doing this; it immediately provokes a sense of "so you're saying men/women *should* be...", even as I understand that's not what is meant.
> "It's also because lacan likes to provoke."
Yeah, not surprised, and I don't even fully disagree with the strategy; provocative claims can be useful tools, if done well.
> "His point was that there is no such thing as "a real woman", because in his theory the feminine mode of being is nothing in itself, it requires others to be something in relation to. In contrast to the masculine that is something in itself."
Interesting! Not entirely unfamiliar, and I think there is something he's getting at (all appropriate caveats included). Thanks for that tidbit!
> I'm uncertain how widely Lacan meant for his theories to be read.
Only by experts in clinical psychology/psychiatry and psychoanalytical theory! It's in no way intended for the general population, it's theory on top of theory, much like how you describe math. But alas, it got popular anyway.
> Yeah, not surprised, and I don't even fully disagree with the strategy; provocative claims can be useful tools, if done well.
I agree. His provocations are really interesting for those of us the text is intended for, they shake up ideas that people at the time thought were mostly settled, or just plain ignored for not being particularly important.
> Thanks for that tidbit!
You're welcome! A pleasure talking to you. I like your virtue idea :)
Would be really fun! I only write scientific articles and reddit comments of varying quality on memes, science and philosophy. I would love to meet more programmer x lacan folks as well! What can we do?
I personally use twitter and discord a lot, which have more affordances for socializing than reddit and academic journals, but I guess we can take it to the reddit DMs. I'm /u/Nav_Panel, hit me up!
How is it possible that in all this (and many, many other) discussion(s) of sex, pleasure, perversion, ego, Other, and childhood, never once do these people consider or even mention
THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS: SEXUAL REPRODUCTION
I am seriously baffled here, or maybe did I miss some huge part of this? The biological basis for the sex drive seems like a good "lens" for viewing behavior. Start with First Principles:
1) The fundamental reason for sex is to make babies, offspring, descendentants etc., and
1A) The intersection of biological drives and social norms is where (modern) people maximize their number of offspring, and those children's own reproductive potential.
I mean, the late example of a blindfolded man getting oral sex from a ("hot" young woman)/(old woman)/(Bonzo) is silly, because it's obvious without needing any subtle French puns. Don't people use both physical stimulii AND a mental model of their current situiation to understand "reality"?
- For the hot young woman, "hot" means "healthy, able to bear and nurse babies" and also "high-status", and the "oral pleasure" signals that she is willing to bear you many, many babies. You are Winning the Game right now. Let's do more of this.
- The old woman can bear you zero babies, but is available to babysit, so has no first-order utility but some value w/r/t reproductive strategy
- Chimpanzee: Huge negative. Zero reproductive potential, a terrifyingly strong wild animal, could bite your penis off for fun or rip you limb from limb. Think Eddie Murphy's version of Mr. T, but jacked up and blind-high on crystal meth. Danger overrides pleasure. (OTOH, since you and Bonzo share 99% of the same DNA, vs. 97% for HotWoman, he would prob be more fun to hang out with long-term, but HotWoman has the Only Thing That Matters.)
_________________________________
By the Way, for anyone outside of a graduate program of faculty lounge, things like this, with the total decoupling of sex from reproduction, present a view of the world and society that is alien, absurd, and 99% at-odds with almost all people's lived experience.
Huge textbooks about sex and psychology, that never once mention children and babies except in terms of perversion, incest, the child-as-imago, the author's own childhood, are exactly why Normal People view the Academic Left (and this vast body of "mainstreamed" literature) as creepy, disturbing, ignorant, foolish, and fundamentally un-serious and silly -- right up until the minute they turn hostile.
Books like this are the root of parents' growing pushback against academic theories about sex and gender identy being taught to their young children. I see nobody on the Left even recoginizing this chasam, much less that it is huge, and the issue is root-level important to parents, from any evolutionary realistic point of view.
(I am sorry this got long. I almost typed "I can't believe I am writing this sentence..." butrefrained. Thank you, Scott, for reviewing this book in a fair, but skeptical and grounded, way.)
It's because it's a given that you really just want to fuck and die but there are these social structures that make you think getting a new iPhone will make you feel good.
I don't think you have read any of these books you're mad about. They're all about these things we do to avoid just fucking and dying. Freud calls it primary and secondary processes. Primary processes make you want to fuck and die, secondary processes are the things you do and think because it's mutually taboo/illegal to just fuck the first man/woman you see and die.
That presupposition seems unreasonably primitive, both biologically and philosophically in its understanding of evolutionarily-tuned drives. Nonsocial animals, like voles or something, may only want to fuck and die. A social animal generally has a much more complex set of motives -- even honeybees do not act so simply, why would we, a far more sophisicated social animal? It's exceedingly likely we are born with much more complex drives, and that they have a large social component.
Nobody is born with language and a desire for anything but their mom really. Unless you think you are born with things you acquire through your childhood.
Humans have complex motives for sure, but the OP was about why nobody talks about fundamental primitive drives. They're just not very interesting on their own, it's the secondary effects that are fun.
Well, I disagree entirely with that. Humans are born with a whole array of instincts. At least, that matches my observation of 5 souls I've watched pretty closely from 00:00:00 of their existence. There are clear psychological differences I took note of at age 5 minutes that persist through the third decade of life (so far).
It's also highly dubious from the point of view of the rest of the animal kingdom, which everyone agrees is born with a wide variety of instincts that suit them to their niche. The idea that humans *alone* are not is the same variety of special pleading we get from the Creationists. Not for me.
well it's just how humans work though, we are unique in that regard. no other animal spends 10 years being as helpless as us, as far as I'm aware. Humans seem to have evolved an ability to adapt extremely well, but traded it for the ability to work well from birth. Human children can't even coordinate hand-eye movement at birth and spend about two years learning to walk, compare that to how most animals are able to walk almost immediately after being born.
Well, no, I don't agree the evidence is sufficient to come to a clear conclusion that we are unique, and that goes against biological common sense. It is much more likely we are only differing in degree, and greatly exaggerate the amount of *that* on account of our (collective and individual) ego. I don't think a lack of hand-eye coordination or inability to walk at birth is that notable -- kangaroos and dogs can't do that either, and they're a lot lower than us. Chimp babies aren't weaned until they're about 5, and stick close to their mothers for about 10 years -- that is not a whole heck of a lot different than H. sapiens. And so on.
It's a little reference to Freud's concept of the death drive 😁 I really like the concept, and Lacan does too. He's written some fun things about "le petit mort". It's a pretty provocative concept, and amusing too.
Freud wrote about it in "beyond the pleasure principle". Essentially he argues that the will to live has it's energy from the even more fundamental desire to attain total and final release. It's not in the sense that everyone actually wants to die, but more the observation that we are always seeking release of energy and never really succeeding in it. So it's more like everyone is fundamentally afraid of true release - death - and that's part of why we are so eager to live. It's very controversial but I think it's a cool way to see it.
Lacan argues that it's why orgasms are nice: you get a short glimpse of essentially death. He also likes the play on words in "release of energy" and ejaculation, "finishing" and so on. In French, "the little death" is a weird slang expression for orgasm.
It's also a cool take on why suicidal ideation is a thing, because the desire to die some people can have doesn't really make sense in his system otherwise. It's in a way a logical conclusion in Freud's system of drive, desire and energy build-up and release.
In a way, underlying all desire is the fear of actually achieving it. That's why the Lacanian object a is unattainable (because it's scary to get too close, so we evade it by looking for something close to it) and nothing you think you desire seems to give you lasting pleasure. It's also why there's something satisfying in destruction. After all, isn't it pretty evident that humans aren't only driven by a desire to create?
Without this idea of the death drive, wouldn't it be strange that people can find so much fear in the idea of death and so much zen in accepting that it's unavoidable? In people at risk of suicide, a classical warning sign is when they go from being very troubled to suddenly being very calm and at peace. Or why humans are so inclined to kill, suicide bomb, schadenfreude and so on. It seems to not really have much to do with reproduction. It's also fun for analyzing psychotic experiences, which in Lacanian theory (Freud doesn't write much about psychosis and what he writes on it isn't very good) is a state where the barriers between the symbolic, the imaginary and the real have broken down. It's also a good tie in with the cross-cultural religious idea of having to die to attain eternal rest and pleasure. It's why sex and violence are intimately tied together (what a taboo pun, heh) and why truly unrestrained people rape and kill. It's why the myth of Oedipus is a great metaphor: He doesn't just bang his mom, he also kills his father, and he truly tries to do everything he can to avoid both of these prophesied events.
Tl;dr: Humans are both fundamentally obsessed with sex and with death. I think there's something to it.
Do you think Lacan was influenced by Proust? He must have read Proust given when and where he lived and his interest in literature. (Wikepedia says he met James Joyce and had many writer/artist friends.)
It seems to me that Proust has written more about the complicated nature of desire than anyone. There are parts of Lacan's theory which reminds me a lot of Proust.
-Its brain activated the motor neurons through electrical signal which caused muscles to tense and it to cross the road
-It smelled food/whatever and this released hormones that made it desire to cross the road
-It evolved to respond to the smell of food because the chickens that did that survived and the others didn't
All of these explanations can be correct at the same time, and it doesn't really make sense to use the last one as a replacement of the first. I think it's missing the point to answer "why do people enjoy a young hot woman, but not a chimpanzee" with "because people who would prefer chimpanzee didn't reproduce very well and thus we don't have those instincts". That's correct, but all of this is on a different level, the level of the actual mechanism by which this happens in the person's mind. And there, ability to reproduce probably doesn't play that large of a role - the young hot woman is not less attractive if she mentions she's on the pill, and the vast majority of fetishes don't actually maximize reproductive fitness.
(and it's not like oral sex gives you babies either)
(1) Because Freud and his followers and everyone else are not dealing with "the normal system is working as intended", they're dealing with "whoa this got broken in new and interesting ways". Part of it *is* asking "so if sex is about babies, how do perversions and fetishes arise?"
(2) A young woman, hot or not, offering oral sex is *not* signalling willingness to bear any babies, never mind many. Oral sex is non-reproductive and, before reliable contraception/abortion, is a way of eating your cake and having it (so to speak): it enables the man to gain sexual pleasure, and the woman to gain rewards from the man (money, if doing it for prostitution; getting him to stick around as boyfriend/husband if otherwise) without the risk of "oh no, not baby number six". The Catholic Church is against this and all other forms of sexual intercourse that are not ordered towards fertility; see the Catechism here:
Also, we have to remember that Freud etc. were inventing the field as they went along; even classifying things as mental illness was an art, not a science. Charcot and his work was highly influential, the idea of finally taking a scientific approach to mental illness (he was a neurologist) was exciting and novel:
"Charcot argued vehemently against the widespread medical and popular prejudice that hysteria was rarely found in men, presenting several cases of traumatic male hysteria. He taught that due to this prejudice these "cases often went unrecognised, even by distinguished doctors" and could occur in such models of masculinity as railway engineers or soldiers. Charcot's analysis, in particular his view of hysteria as an organic condition which could be caused by trauma, paved the way for understanding neurological symptoms arising from industrial-accident or war-related traumas."
His use of hypnosis was also a huge step forward, taking a procedure that had been associatd with faith healers and charlatans and giving it medical respectability (though even then there was opposition from others about hypnosis causing, rather than revealing, the alleged traumas it uncovered). Naturally all this greatly influenced Freud and set him off on the path to "so what is the unconscious mind that hypnosis reveals? what are these fundamental, instinctual drives and how do they go wrong?"
A combination of "first time talking about sex and sexuality and using it as a basis for causing mental problems" and the over-heated, over-stuffed atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna where the rising bourgeoisie were developing neurotic ailments to go with their new wealth and status contributed to the bent of theoretical development that you criticise.
I haven't read this particular book, but it does sound as if it would give very useful historical context to the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis:
I think this is ascribing a level of conscious intention to our evolutionary drives that doesn't really exist. Animals don't have sex because they consciously want to produce offspring, they just follow their hardwired sexual instincts in a way that usually tends to get the job done.
Men aren't evolutionarily wired to desire oral sex from women because it "signals their willingness to produce babies." They're just wired to feel tactile pleasure from the physical act itself, whether it's from actual vaginal sex or from some other action that convincingly "simulates" vaginal sex. They want oral sex because a mouth feels similar enough to a vagina to make the act pleasurable. The evolutionary process couldn't directly instill "be fruitful and multiply" into our brains, because sexual drives were formed long before animal brains were complex enough to even comprehend that directive, so instead it had to instill much messier incentives like "insert genitals into tight wet holes attached to females of the same species," which are inherently prone to being misdirected in all sorts of ways.
Generally speaking, I think one of the major problems with the *Academic Right* is that they often tend to assume this bizarre Doctrine of Double Effect with regard to evolutionary drives, where humans are not only wired to pursue evolutionarily-adaptive behaviors through primal instinct like other animals, but also wired to directly pursue the "intended" purpose of those instincts in their own right on a more cerebral level. (I really don't want to turn this into a Culture War right vs. left shouting match, but given you spent three paragraphs talking about your problems with the 'Academic Left,' I feel like a counter-argument is warranted.)
To continue the thread, I'd say this is about teleological reasoning, which is more or less, reasoning about the goals/ends/purposes of drives. Like LadyJane said, the sex drive doesn't directly care about reproduction. But we can use reason to work out "why" it's there and what its "intent" is. I'm using quotation marks there because there isn't actually a "why" or "intent", just blind evolution, and it's really easy to make mistakes if we don't clearly separate these concepts.
Unless, of course, it's not (just) evolution, and there's actually a Creator, in which case "why" and "intent" are big open questions. Which is where the theology that Deiseach mentioned comes in. The idea is that we can reason backward from our observations of the world, and gain some understanding of why God made us the way we are. And then reason forward from that, to gain some understanding of how to live in the world in better alignment with God's purposes. (I think. I'm not actually Catholic.) And in particular, in this case, I believe that Catholic theology recognizes that human sexuality has more effects than simply reproduction, such as emotional bonding, and therefore it incorporates those other effects into its logic and conclusions. As well as double-checking these conclusions against other sources of knowledge about God's will, such as scripture and revelation. (Again, I think. Probably an actual Catholic should answer that. But I'm pretty sure that their official position is that the drive is just a drive, and that everything else we put on it is an artifact of human knowledge.)
Back to the more secular side of things, there's a really great book called "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" by Donald Symons, which I highly recommend. It really messed with my mind the first time I read it, forcing me to separate concepts that I'd been mushing together.
Even if God does exist, I wouldn't be too quick assume that God's intentions were the same as evolution's "intentions." Evolution could simply be a mesa-optimizer that God used to create sapient life, just like the sex drive is a mesa-optimizer that evolution used to get lifeforms to reproduce. I'm not sold on the idea that we can figure out God's intent from evolution, and I'm skeptical of claims like "God only wants us to have sex for purely reproductive purposes and otherwise abstain."
As far as Catholicism goes, it's leas that sex is purely about reproduction and more that deliberately preventing reproduction is considered sinful. A naturally-infertile woman wouldn't be forbidden from having sex! But the use of condoms, birth control, etc. is considered wrong. (I've heard that missionaries in Africa and other developing countries make exceptions in cases where condoms are used to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases, though I'm not sure if this reflects official Church doctrine.) As for oral sex, I went to a Catholic high school and our sex ed class taught that it was allowed for married couples "as a part of foreplay," though a couple that *only* had oral sex and deliberately avoided vaginal sex might be committing a sin? Then again, I don't think using the "rhythm method" (only having sex on days when the woman isn't ovulating) is considered a sin, though I could be wrong on that. Catholic theology is pretty complicated.
This post really is a Zizekian honeypot, especially the last bit about sexuality and psychoanalysis. Let me quote the great Lacanian himself on the (non-) function of human sexuality, in Zizek's recent review of Matrix Resurrections: "This link between sexualization and failure is of the same nature as the link between matter and space curvature in Einstein: matter is not a positive substance whose density curves space... By analogy, one should also 'desubstantialize' sexuality: sexuality is not a kind of traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot attain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can 'contaminate' any activity. So, again, when we are engaged in an activity which fails to attain its goal directly, and gets caught in a repetitive vicious cycle, this activity is automatically sexualized - a rather vulgar everyday example: if, instead of simply shaking my friend's hand, I were to squeeze his palm repeatedly for no apparent reason, this repetitive gesture would undoubtedly be experienced by him or her as sexualized in an obscene way." As a followup, in "Organs without bodies" (2017) Zizek writes this on the Lacanian view of sexuality, which is a very nice complement and explanation of his claim in the Matrix review: "This universal surplus—this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellow man (or getting beaten up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire a sexual connotation—is not the sign of its preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal... As was demonstrated by Deleuze, perversion enters the stage as an inherent reversal of this “normal” relationship between the asexual, literal sense and the sexual co-sense. In perversion, sexuality is made into a direct object of our speech, but the price we pay for it is the desexualization of our attitude toward sexuality—sexuality becomes one desexualized object among others."
Love it - your puny DSM-trained intuition totally misses that psychosis is a Lacanian personality structure which can’t possibly be measured in something as superficial as symptoms!
Have personally always felt that psychoanalysts are too obsessed with the (admittedly very important!) domestic scene of a child's first years in life, and not nearly interested enough not in the child's contact with the parents but the child's contact with Society.
society is not a natural thing, the brain is not adapted for it. in the natural environment of homo sapiens, society and family are synonyms, and "broader society" is a synonym for "extended family".
nietzsche conversely *does* understand this and for him basically all these human weirdnesses that psychoanalysis attempts to explain via the oedipal complex and the child, mother, father triad are instead a process by which the animal-beast is caged, reined in, and subjugated by society. the process of doing that is not uniform and always leaves scars, some more noticeable and worse than others.
not sure that theory is perfectly correct either but it seems a lot better to me
Pretty much the same point as Freud though, except he thinks the expectations of society are mostly inside your own head (but of course based on experience).
Freud is clearly inspired by Nietszche despite refusing to have ever read anything by him. But I think it's because Nietszche was an academically taboo nazi philosopher back then. His name wasn't cleared before the 1980's/90's.
Yes! Agree totally on that. I think that Nietszche was appropriated by the nazis is the only reason he so strongly refuses to be inspired by him. I imagine it would be like if someone you admired said they were inspired by Mein Kampf, but only the good parts about how life is a struggle.
The Ego stuff is classic spritualism. The book that got me to recognize that my entire self was an onion with perhaps no core was by Jed Mckenna. Led to a series of books by people I had to admit might be enlightened. Also obviously correlates to Elephant in the Brain if you want the more boring, technical description of this phenomena
I actually think there's an interesting kernel here -- this may be a decent model for the atheist mind. As a Christian none of this really applies to me at all because I just follow God's law, but as a former atheist I recall swapping between various flimsy lower laws and never being satisfied. I can see how for atheists having a weak father could develop into some huge psychodrama and really the whole existential question of "what is good" and therefore "what do I want"/in Lacan terms "what does the Other want" is a necessary condition to atheism.
And the whole Other concepts rhymes with the idea that everyone has a god, even atheists. Atheists just chose a material god. So for example I have often wondered about the rationalist mind and why many of you do what you do, specifically with regards to seemingly betraying your own alleged commitments to absolute truth (the apparent presence of that commitment was the only thing that drove me here). Why did Scott ban me from promoting my book, even though it's much more important than any book he's reviewed in the past year, at least, in terms of potential human impact, which many of you should allegedly care deeply about as "effective altruists?" Why was the reception of his audience similarly irrational? Why can much the same be said about the reaction to ache bee dee, an extremely fundamental topic for anyone who claims to be a rationalist truth seeker? I think Scott clearly explained this behavior:
>Why did I read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?
>I am happy to be able to give a clear answer: I started bunch of prediction markets on which of several book reviews I could write was most likely to be popular, and Clinical Introduction won
Since absolute truth is an aspect of God, basically all of my secular reading is centered around pursuing truth, not around being popular, making money, or what have you. I expected rationalists to, even as atheists, approximately have this aspect of God, truth, as their god. But here Scott seems to be telling me that his Other/his god is Substack likes i.e. popularity i.e. the masses. And now the widespread irrational reverence for the Overton window and the rejection of unpopular truths in this community makes a lot more sense to me.
And it's not unique to here either, in fact this could be interpreted as a failure to escape the average. I look around at people today and see that almost all of them are worshipping money or popularity.
This really does not describe at least my experience as an atheist. For me, atheism simply means "there are no supernatural beings". Kinda like finding out that Santa is not real.
> Why did Scott ban me from promoting my book
Maybe because the ACX book reviews are not supposed to be about self-promotion?
meh a forum where you ban people for charitably assuming people who seem to lack reading capability are ESL rather than functionally illiterate isn't worth my time anyway. And I'm sure you really are sorry
Also you're a massive hypocrite for banning me while letting people like Deiseach say stuff like "you instead come across as a whiny sixteen year old protesting that Mom and Dad are so mean." Is it kosher to insult on here or not? Only when it's in the service of your god popularity? Is that it?
I gave you a chance, despite your background, and you blew it. It was predictable, but still. It's sad to see someone worship popularity when they could be so much better than that. Maybe one day you'll see that, I hope you do for your sake. Adieu Mr. Alexander
Ban evasion once again. You really do make yourself sound like a thirteen year old. Every time you come back with a reply, it forces me to revise the estimation of your (mental) age downwards. Keep at it, and we'll soon be at the level of Lacanian infant suckling at the breast.
The same kind of reasoning that leads you to believe I worship a material god can be inverted; you worship a god who you need to believe created you in his image, which is to say, what you really worship is yourself, or rather the perfected version of yourself that you wish existed; those who think the perfected version of themselves would be capable of smiting the unrighteous imagine a violent and vengeful god, and those who think the perfected version of themselves would be capable of infinite love and tolerance and forgiveness imagine a god who embodies those ideals - but ultimately they are their own ideals, their own image, created by a mirror of a book that assures them that they are as their father. It's why it's so important to people that the "real" god look like them; god as a man (what purpose, exactly, does god's penis serve? Also, does god have nipples?), god as a woman, god as white, god as black, god as whatever it is you happen to think you should be, which for some people, particularly those who really dislike their own biological nature, is a thing that transcends such mundane details.
Two things are obvious to me: First, that you won't find this line of argument convincing. Second, that somebody else will. I will note that the second person finds this line of argument convincing for exactly the same reason that you think "atheists worship the material" is convincing.
Personally, I'm incapable of that experience you call "worship", that sense-of-the-divine. It, like assigning some kind of internal meaning to pain and pleasure, are outside of my existence. Observe, I shall pray to experience a spark of that thing, in which case I shall cease all else, and be a man of worship.
There's a thing I'd describe as a sinus headache; not sure if it was there before or not, because I rarely notice pain unless I'm paying attention for it. So much for that; supposing the headache was the divine, well, apparently my brain was not built to process it. Was I earnest in my prayers? I have no idea. What does "earnest" feel like?
What internal truths do you have for me? When I look in, what direction is your God? In what frequency does He vibrate? There's nothing in here except everything, and the divine is conspicuous in its absence.
"As a Christian none of this really applies to me at all because I just follow God's law"
Sure you are. And (as the woman said) I am Marie of Roumania.
"Why did Scott ban me from promoting my book, even though it's much more important than any book he's reviewed in the past year, at least, in terms of potential human impact, which many of you should allegedly care deeply about as "effective altruists?"
You've had several bites at the cherry with your book (which I paid Real Money to read and I wish I hadn't), nobody believes it, nobody likes it, you've failed to make your case, and you are not the staggering neglected genius who has developed a world-changing paradigm that will revolutionise society that you think you are.
Every teenager, since the concept of being a teenager was created, has protested that they are too mature and grown-up and the adults are being so unfair to them. You are not saying anything novel, you instead come across as a whiny sixteen year old protesting that Mom and Dad are so mean.
A little more humility on your part about being yuuuge brain smart, and a willingess to listen to your critics, would serve you better. Scott didn't let you 'promote' your book because you had already gotten the chance to do that, both over on TheMotte and on here, as well as linking us all to your Substack.
"15 year olds should be legal adults, it's so unfair the government won't give us money to do what we want"? NOBODY CARES.
>nobody believes it, nobody likes it, you've failed to make your case, and you are not the staggering neglected genius who has developed a world-changing paradigm that will revolutionise society that you think you are.
This is both untrue and invalid. First, the truth of these statements doesn't actually correspond to how important my book is, because your opinion and the opinion of those people who are included implicitly in your "everybody" are of no consequence as to how morally important my book is. Morality is not an election, and even if it were nobody on this forum would qualify for suffrage. Second, as I have demonstrated this does not need to be said, but for the benefit of bursting your bubble I will let you know that I am receiving a good amount of fan mail to my email address. My book has become a small sensation among a more rational group following a more rational content creator.
>you instead come across as a whiny sixteen year old protesting that Mom and Dad are so mean.
Why are you so disrespectful and emotional about my book? If you didn't understand it, maybe I could explain the reasoning better, or maybe you could go do things more fruitful for you. It seems like you might have some sort of sentiment going on which my book threatens -- I don't think these kinds of comments stem from an objective disagreement with empirical content (you have registered none of those but have whined plenty just like this, in fact).
So, in fact, you are the Millwall of scorned and despised great philosophers, but you'll show us, you'll show us all! and then we'll be sorry! but it will be too late!
"even if it were nobody on this forum would qualify for suffrage"
Oh dear, and you were beginning to do so well. But you couldn't resist going for the toddler foot-stamping tantrum. So we're all too stupid on here to judge your amazing quality? Then why ask our opinions?
"I will let you know that I am receiving a good amount of fan mail to my email address"
And at least *two* of these are *not* my mother or my sockpuppet accounts!
" My book has become a small sensation among a more rational group following a more rational content creator"
I am very pleased for you. Any chance you could let us know who this more rational person is, that we may go and touch the hem of their garb and be cured of our irrationality?
If we are too stupid to understand the wonder of you, and too irrational to evaluate your moral importance, and too whiny to engage with, why hang around here seeking validation from us? Go, be with your adoring audience and more rational content creator equal!
My issue with a "standard model of the mind" is it takes as a base assumption that such a model is even possible. Before I can entertain any theories that propose to describe the behavior of all humans for all time, I'd like to be presented with any evidence that human minds are universally similar enough for such a model to exist in the first place.
I'm open to theories like the predictive brain mostly because they seem testable and they present a lot of evidence for why all brains (not just human!) would be set up to work in this fashion in the first place.
Do you find that almost all cats act like cats, and almost all dogs act like dogs, and cats acting like dogs (or vice versa) is rare and occasional? Do you attribute this to the fact that all the cats are born with cat DNA which constructs cat brains that naturally have cat thoughts, and the dogs are born with dog DNA which constructs dog brains that naturally have dog thoughts?
If so, then the only remaining necessary step is to accept that human beings are just another species of animal. Admittedly, most human beings have a very hard time with that -- we so do love to believe that we are utterly unique and different from every other animal. *They* are all born stuffed with instincts and natures and natural limitations, plain as day -- but not us: *we* are beautiful tabulae rasae on which we can write anything at all.
I think there's a difference between trends/tendencies and laws. I think it's fine to say "many/most humans exhibit these behaviors, especially if you look at humans that are culturally similar", I think it's flawed to say "for every human that is, was, and will be their behavior is explained with this one core theory".
Is there a standard model of behavior for other complex (lets say mammalian) creatures? From my experience with dogs there seems to be enormous range of behaviors, and my sample size is very small!
It seems like it's very easy to find outliers and examples that don't fit into these various theories of human minds unless the theories are so broad as to be close to useless (e.g. every human has things they want and takes actions to fulfill those wants).
Ultimately, I find these sorts of things entertaining to ponder, but fundamentally useless. Come back to me when you're making novel, testable predictions about human behavior.
That strikes me as setting unreasonable expectations. I can think of very few phenomena, even in the natural sciences, where one law explains absolutely every possible instance to which it might apply, completely. Why on Earth would you expect such a thing for something as messy as human thought? Surely even achieving general trends that are statistically sound (but which admit of any number of exceptions) is deeply valuable. You would throw this out because it doesn't explain *every* mind without exception? Baby, bathwater.
I think *everything* in the physical sciences adheres to all the laws, all the times. Maybe we're thinking of different laws but something like a "conservation of electric charge" for instance, is never violated.
OK now do Conservation of Mass, F = ma, the linearized Navier-Stokes equations, the octet rule or London dispersion force, in chemistry, or Kepler's Laws.
At one level what you are saying is trivial: no, we do not believe any natural phenomena violates the most basic principles we have (like conservation of charge), but basing our predictions on *just* those principles is entirely impractical. You cannot predict whether your design for a bridge will stand up in a Cat 5 hurricane by taking the appropriate derivative on the wavefunction of the Universe.
So the vast bulk of physical theory and engineering -- anything other than fundamental HEP basically -- relies on tractable approximation, roughly speaking integrating out a gigantic number of degrees of freedom that don't do anything in this particular case. And then you find, which is my point, that these things *all* admit of exceptions, cases where the approximation is invalid. Sometimes these are very few and you almost never need to bother about them -- can even start to forget they exist -- and sometimes they are pretty in your face and you need to vet your approach every time.
We are talking here about something that is even *less* amenable to starting from first principles each time than physics, inasmuch as the first principles for human psychology (or even neurology) are as yet unknown. We are still building phenomenological models. We are with respect to the mind (or brain) where physics was in approximately the age of Aristotle. It's fine if this is dissatisfactory to you, but it's unreasonable to leap from that (correctly) low evaluation of the state of the art to the idea that the state of the art is utterly worthless. Even Aristotle's ideas about physics were useful in their day, even though by modern standards they were laughably incomplete were they weren't completely wrong.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Yes, it is true that most of what we consider a "physical law" is actually a very close approximation that breaks down under certain extreme conditions.
The discrepency I see between these physical laws and the various universal theories of the mind, is that the limitions of the physical laws are understood, acknowledged, and accounted for. I have not encountered a theory of the mind that says something to effect of "this theory describes the human mind under these conditions, and doesn't hold for these ones". Maybe those disclaimers exist and I just haven't run across them. I'd certianly be very interested in learning more if that's the case!
But what I usually see is something to the effect of "this theory is the Standard Model of the Human Mind and holds true for all peoples under all conditions", as Scott was describing in this article. I am extraordinarily hesitant to accept any theory with that premise, for all the reasons detailed previously.
It could be that I'm wildly misinterpreting the claims of these theories, and they actually do mean "we can explain some behaviors most of the time" but that is never the impression that I've been given.
So, among my many activities is fostering animals.
So, of those who are fostered with their mother, I'd say they mostly end up acting like the animal in question. However, many of our fosters don't come with a mother - and most of those do not, in fact, end up acting like the animal in question. Another individual who fosters has "foster parents" who they trust around the fosters, and these also turn out mostly like the animal in question.
Anecdotally, this is true regardless of whether or not they are the same animal; kittens raised with adult dogs have a tendency to be more dog-like. Puppies raised with adult cats have a tendency to be more cat-like.
For a given value of all of this, granted; there are certain behaviors which are certainly independent of whether or not they were primarily raised by their mother, or by humans, or by another animal.
This argument works only insofar as somebody thinks humans are unique in having such cognitive adaptability, but it is pretty obvious that we aren't.
However! Cats act like cats and dogs act like dogs -relative to human behavior-. Humans, we must note, act, relative to cats and dogs, mostly like humans. Assuming, of course, they are raised by humans; if not, they reportedly do not.
None of this implies, of course, that we can write anything at all; good luck finding the pen, much less the paper, not to mention figuring out what language it's written in, because it was all made up by an infant who had no idea what it was doing.
Not really buying that. I think a cat reared with dogs will still act mostly like a cat, even though it very well may have more doggy tendencies than a cat reared with cats. If nothing else, in my house we have had a fairly wide variety of animals over the years, as one will with children, and despite the fact that the cat could choose to act like a dog, or a hamster, or human being for that matter, all such models being available to it from the time it could open its little kitten eyes, it appears to act pretty much all of the time like a cat. It enjoys chasing little flitty things that act like rodent prey, it does not run fawning to the door when I come home, it doesn't instinctively cower when big animals come near, et cetera. All the other animals also generally act like their innate selves.
Are you sure you're not greatly exaggerating the differences (and I do not doubt at least slight differences exist)? Do you really find that cats bound after balls excitedly, that dogs like to get up at night and prowl?
Part of the problem in answering this is that literally every example you have of an animal acting out of character is basically normal for that animal; want a cat that loves belly rubs? Give it belly rubs as a kitten (it also helps to hold the kitten upside down frequently, "like a baby"). And fawning behavior in particular is basically normal for kittens that are fostered too young; bottle-fed kittens tend to be particularly needy, although it does vary based on the cat. And I find myself blatantly confused by the idea that cats don't bound after balls excitedly.
And many dogs do get up at night and do little prowls, although we'd be more likely to characterize the behavior as a "patrol" because of the particular way we tend to anthromorphize dog behavior.
If the infant (from the Latin "not able to speak") lives in an unimaginable magical world (as Rank says) then the transition to "desires" (in terms we understand) would seem to be an important area of change for the individual in a society. Where does desire come from? How do you get desires? Unconscious desire, as Lacan suggests, is even more intriguing compared to a more conscious desire that I might understand like how rollercoasters are fun. My experience suggests there is at least an unrestricted yearning (Adrial Fitzgerald's terminology) at the core. Girard's idea that our desires are *interdividuel* also makes a lot of sense, and is verifiable in significant cases. This whole relation of an individual to the society is the most profound relation we have.
I think the primary barrier between infant and society is speech (or lack thereof) , and the unfamiliarity of the infant with its own body.
I have only a few “early” memories. One is of being in a car, being frustrated and tired, wanting to find out what was going on and when it would be over, and asking over and over, and getting totally unrelated responses. Finally I was getting agitated about the sheer inadequacy of the answers. This occurred in a tunnel - a very long one- with lights on the walls, a typical traffic tunnel of some kind.
As a kid and then a few times as an adult, I tried to figure out which tunnel it had been. Long story short, this will sound like BS, but when I finally went through that tunnel south of SF toward the coast, I think it was that tunnel. And I realized something - I had thought I was asking clearly, but now I think age-wise, I would have been pre-verbal at that time. So I didn’t realize I wasn’t able to speak. Is there a stage of infancy when the infant believes it can make itself understood, but is emitting noises that sound like screams and shrieks to everyone else?
Then the central trauma of infancy is the shock of discovering that one is unable to make oneself understood. The “other” is the experience of lack of communication.
My mom in the car was not intentionally refusing to tell me what was going on. I was literally unable to clearly ask, and scarier than the tunnel was the lack of understanding.
Related to that would be the shock of discovering one is unable to use one’s body in a coordinated way.
I think maybe if we tell the infants “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you right now, but the more words you use the better it will get” - and then teach baby sign- slowly, infancy will be revealed to be a different thing, certainly different than what psychoanalysts are postulating. It could be part of an argument for reincarnation.
Memory, as the poets know, is central. We can't "know" how a different animal "feels" their memory, but we also don't have any idea about our experience before we "remembered" it. Sounds-like good advice tho. The talking creature is talked into talking by those who talk at him. Another feature that suggests how we might get our desires from others.
"Needing some kind of Oedipal resolution to become a coherent subject, he willed himself to pretend that the appendix was a penis and his father was threatening to castrate him, and then (I can’t believe I am writing this sentence) used the word “button” as a substitute for the moral law."
To the contrary, I can't imagine who else would end up writing "and then he used the word "button" as a substitute for the moral law."
Pretty much, although I think when it comes to the masks-within-masks stuff, there's going to be a lot of variability; the essay assumes to some extent that everybody builds a similar internal structure, and I don't think that assumption holds.
I don't really assume everybody builds similar internal structures, but the essay was already 3k words long and I was just trying to give an introduction. That said, with this outline you should be able to reverse engineer more complicated models to use for specific people and pathologies.
This is really good, the first time I've ever seen Lacanian theory interpreted through a Jungian perspective, very different than how I typically explain it (and emphasizing different things) but makes total sense. Thanks for sharing!!
This got me from like 5% ready to talk about my problems with how we talk about AI to maybe 10%. There's something about all this that goes "Listen, I made up this story. It's plausible. You can't prove it's not the case right now very well, like maybe everyone is trying to fill up a phantom penis with stamp collecting, you can't prove they aren't. So this is real, treat it like it's real and respect the implications of it if so."
Agreed, and it baffles me that the same people who poo-poo away assertions that spiritual phenomena can't be ruled out merely by a lack of empirical evidence with sneering jibes about teapots orbiting Pluto will turn right around and accept that the inability to show that the laws of physics exclude godlike AIs as certain evidence that a godlike AI will come into being within our lifetimes and we need to spend a lot of time and money worrying about this. Well, to be completely honest, it doesn't REALLY baffle me (I subscribe to the "Rapture of the Nerds" interpretation of a lot of the AGI community, where they aren't engaging in science or even rational thought but are instead constructing a scientistic religion to fulfill the need for a spiritual dimension in life), but it does disappoint me.
> I subscribe to the "Rapture of the Nerds" interpretation of a lot of the AGI community, where they aren't engaging in science or even rational thought but are instead constructing a scientistic religion to fulfill the need for a spiritual dimension in life
Imagine if those who obsess over hostile AGI instead divided their worry equally between nuclear war, bioterror, runaway climate change, a major asteroid strike, and hostile AGI. So, 20% of attention for each. Would you similarly dismiss the 20% of time spent worrying about hostile AGI?
Basically, I'm asking: is your dismissal because the hostile AGI scenarios sound like apocalyptic religion? Or is it only due to how much attention hostile AGI scenarios get relative to those four other catastrophes, each of which has a precedent?
My deep skepticism towards the talk around AGI (especially the apocalyptic decrees of High Prophet Yudkowsky PBUH) is something I've litigated over and over and over unto madness, so forgive me for trying to be brief.
Most people who discuss AGI rely on their scenarios having a lot of hand-waving involved.
Here, I don't merely mean that when I ask, for example, "How can the AGI perfect coordinate thousands of terrorists across six continents without any intelligence agency comprehending the plan and taking meaningful action to stop it", I'm answered with what boils down to "AGI could be better than us and thus we should just assume, without grounding, that basic algorithms will scale up into functional omnipotence." When I've pointed out that Moore's Law is functionally dead and very close to actually dead, and therefore the assumption that compute power will continue to exponentially increase unto infinity assumed by almost all arguments for AGI's inevitability is fundamentally wrong, I'm generally either met with "Some other technology I can't imagine yet will come along and fix Moore's Law" or "I didn't know Moore's Law was dead but will not update my theory in accordance with this." This leads to another good point: many AGI futurists are SHOCKINGLY ignorant of some pretty major developments in the field of computer science that even a rock-bashing primitive like myself has a vague awareness of (I only know that Moore's Law is in the dying room because I vaguely follow gaming tech news and saw a story about it, leading me to do research) and more importantly are extremely obstinate when it comes to updating their models based on current developments (if said developments would damage the model, of course- if they make it seem like AGI could be right around the corner they'll incorporate it in a heartbeat).
But of course all of that just adds up to "Confirmation bias is awful and nobody's safe from it", so where do I get the assertion of religion? Well, the fact that some people took Roko's Basilisk seriously (not helped by Yudkowsky responding to it in a way that seemed like he was trying to maximize a negative outcome) already indicates that the AGI die-hards are probably outside the realm of even pretending to engage in rational thought already. Above that, every prediction about AGI hurled out by futurists nearly invariably falls into a narrative that boils down to "AGI will be a god capable of anything expressed in language."
Some people think that this AGI will be a benevolent god guiding us into a post-scarcity future of unparalleled hedonism. Others, like Yudkowsky, think that it will be a hateful god who will (in a practical sense even if not by deliberate intention) destroy humanity or cast us down into Hell for our arrogance in trying to create a thinking machine. This pattern-matches to apocalyptic religion too well for me to dismiss as coincidence, especially once you look at other ways that these sections of the rationalist sphere can start acting quite irrationally (as an example, I don't think anyone can reasonably dispute that Yudkowsky has a cult of personality around him, even if one quibbles about its size or how fervent it is.)
To disclose my own counterfactuals: I would take AGI more seriously as a sober intellectual exercise if so much of it didn't run on hand-waves (walk me through how AGI develops, for example, without a step that looks suspiciously like a set of question marks, and then walk me through why it decides to destroy the world and how), and I would take AGI as being a real possibility for us far more seriously if Moore's Law somehow doesn't die in the next five years like... the entire electronics industry, essentially, is projecting.
Longtime lurker here, but Lacanian analysis is something that I've studied in its theoretical, if not clinical dimension.
The best way to understand Jouissance (even if the concept is slightly contradictory), is to imagine the infant at the mothers breast. The infant feels totality, satisfaction, etc.--before the infant is able to conceptualize the difference between itself and the mother. We all talk about how infants think they're omniscient--if an infant cries and the breast doesn't appear THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS. This is what we mean by jouissance, the pure satisfied pleasure that precedes the splitting of the world into subjects and objects.
The mirror stage is about the infant that recognizes itself as an object--as an object among other objects over which it has no power. It's a scene that stands as synecdoche for a broader process in child development, but it's a powerful image. It's also the start of the loss of Jouissance. Once the infant stands in a field of objects, it loses that undifferentiated pleasure. Pleasure becomes attached to objects, which renders it limited and finite.
Language is the field of names that the infant comes to attach to this being-cut-off. The name of the father is important, because as Freud says, the infant's realization that the mother has different desires than it does is an especially traumatic experience. The father is the name of the non-reciprocity of the infant and mother's desire. The phallus is the name of what the infant comes to suppose the father has that would attract the mothers desire, etc.
It's fairly easy to ask about the ontological status of these stories, but Lacan doesn't really care about their validity; he cares about their persistence. The central point is that there's a pleasure that we imagine, as people, as a culture, that is before the differentiation between subject and object, before we learn to say "I" and "you." This pleasure is something we have an absolutely firm belief in--a literally unshakeable belief (even if we sometimes want to intellectually deny it)--that is central to most psychic complexes.
If we are extreme skeptics, we can say that pleasure may even be a retro-active illusion produced by language, but even so, it's the non-center that so much language, behaviour, and thought revolves around. These psychoanalytic narratives--in their strange enduring dimension (in 2022!)--are strong evidence of this.
> imagine the infant at the mothers breast. The infant feels totality, satisfaction, etc.--before the infant is able to conceptualize the difference between itself and the mother. We all talk about how infants think they're omniscient--if an infant cries and the breast doesn't appear THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS.
Yes, very intuitively plausible and also pretty moving. At the same time, I think there is something profoundly wrong with not considering the possibility that *nobody fucking knows what the infant is feeling*, or even knows whether it makes sense to talk about the infant "feeling" things in anything like the sense that adults feel things. Infants are baby people, and we can get very seduced by our imaginings of what it is like to be them, but we really have no more evidence for what it is like to be an infant enjoying or craving the breast than we do about what it was like to be the squirrel on the telephone wire outside my window this morning. Is he enjoying the spring sunshine? Oblivious to the weather because his mating drive is revving up and all he's doing is trying to smell out a nubile female? Can he see you? Does he recognize that you are a large, living creature? Is he in pain from squirrel liver cancer? YOU DON'T KNOW.
You cannot build an entire theory of adult function and dysfunction on your imaginings about what infants feel when nursing or when deprived of the breast. It shows a lack of common sense to think that you can.
I find this Lacan-type stuff especially absurd because there actually are some simple measures and experiments that would give you some clues about how valid this picture of infant experience is. For instance, let's take "if an infant cries and the breast doesn't appear THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS." If the THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS -- if the infant in profound distress, frantic with distress -- when the breast does not appear, then there should be some physiological signs of that. What happens to infants' pulse when the breast does not appear? How does that pulse compare to the infants' pulse when the world gets weird and irritating but does not shatter -- for instance when you play a loud unfamiiliar noise for 10 secs, or startle and disorient the baby in other ways? Or what about this: if the failure of a cried-for breast to appear is a highly negative event for an infant, it should function as an effective negative reinforcer. Can you teach baby's to anticipate that no-breast is about to happen by giving a signal that it's about to happen? Say a red light when crying is not going to summon a breast, a green light when it is? Do babies cry when the red light goes on? If they do not, that sure puts a dent in the theory that experiences this early in life have a lasting impact.
"but Lacanian analysis is something that I've studied in its theoretical, if not clinical dimension." I am very curious about why you chose to study it? Was it in your curriculum? Do you find it interesting, or may be thought it would be helpful for therapy?
I am in literary studies, and have a specialty in the relationship of philosophy and literary criticism. I have studied it a little bit formally--e.g. taken courses with some lacanian theorists, and ended up rubbing elbows with a few clinicians in the process. This left me with enough of an interest that I've pursued independent study. I'm not an EXPERT--I haven't read every one of the seminars or gotten too far into the secondary criticism, for example--but by virtue of my primary training, I'm immersed enough in that 50's-70's French philosophy/theory bubble that Lacan doesn't feel quite as obscurantist as from the outside.
As for personal interest, I've had psychodynamic therapy with someone who had a Freudian/Kleinian background, and I think my mixture of admiration for that approach coupled with a growing awareness of its limitations led me to more curiosity about Lacan's merits in a clinical context.
I heard an anecdote about a guy who was upset because he was lactose intolerant and his roommate kept drinking the lactose-free milk that he kept in the fridge. Even worse, he would often drink the milk straight from the bottle.
As payback the guy thought it would be a cool prank to replace the contents of his milk bottle with orange juice. This particular lactose-free milk came in an opaque bottle so his roommate was unlikely to notice the switch until it was too late, especially early in the morning before fully waking up.
Turns out (the story goes) that when you drink something that you thought was milk but suddenly taste something sweet and acidic instead, you immediately panic and throw up. If you taste something wildly different from what you were expecting (even if the taste would be good in a different circumstance, like drinking orange juice) something must be really bad with whatever it is you just put in your mouth.
I think something similar is going on with that psychoanalysis of rape. Humans have innate disgust reactions that cause them to not want to put their soft tissues near unsanitary fluids, or not want to put their vulnerable soft body parts near a stranger's teeth. Those reactions have to be turned off temporarily when we have sex, but your brain doesn't know when you are about to have sex so it has to approximate and that's why it still works with oral sex as long as a hot person is doing it. But switch the person unexpectedly and it's just like when the milk tastes of orange juice. Something feels intensely, urgently wrong.
"Predictive processing can tell us that in a different context, sensations can be perceived differently - but what makes this particular context switch so jarring?"
It seems obvious to me that the reason is garden-variety disgust. If I were eating a cake blindfolded, and the blindfold slipped to reveal the other end of the cake were covered in maggots, I would no longer want to eat the cake (even the non-maggot-infested part of it) and feel repulsed by it. Sex is generally seen as disgusting by default; without sexual desire repressing that aversion, the man's default reaction to receiving oral sex wins out.
On the most basic level, in order to make sure we reproduce and don't just wander around grazing and sleeping, the drive is "stick your thing in the hole". But layered on top of that, to make sure we do it in a way that results in new instances of the species and not beetles mating with beer bottles, is "stick your thing in the *correct* hole". And then as our brains got bigger, our social connections more complex, you got a lot of other layers on top of that.
So if your sexual preferences are set so you like women (hot for preference) but don't like chimpanzees, then the basic "mmmm this feels good" will be over-ridden by "what the hell, this is not what I agreed to!" when the blindfold comes off.
And this is important, because if you would fuck chimpanzees or hot women equally because the sensations feel the same, then you're not going to reproduce the species. Same if you would fuck eight year old girls or eighteen year old young women equally, you're not going to reproduce the species (and you'll do a lot of harm on top of that).
It doesn't have to be moral repulsion, it's partially instinct and partially conditioning.
I almost always read Astral Codex articles in full, but almost never "like" them because I don't consider that an important part of the interface.
However, some combination of the discussion of prediction markets for liking and the Lacianism of this post made me resolve mid-article to like it, even if I didn't really agree with Lacianism as presented and was unsure of whether or not there was a "there, there" under Scott's confusion.
Also, at least according to my interface, I was the 125th like on this post.
This isn't a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
All of those sex things are pretty easily explained by some combo of very high level genetic instinct, conditioning and/or imprinting, and status. I can't think of a single sex thing that isn't well-explained by one or more of these. No psychoanalysis needed.
“How come if I sit in a dark room and think “okay, gonna stop propping up my ego right now!” nothing bad happens?”
Given the multiple cases of people voluntarily going on silent retreats and then experiencing a psychotic break for the first time in their life, I think you’re wrong about this.
I had never heard of this. What establishes causality? Alternative possibilities:
It may be a coincidence: every day, some people have their first psychotic break. Thus, from time to time, it's inevitable that it happens during or shortly after a silent retreat.
Or maybe the unstable emotions that were precursors to psychosis motivate some people to attend silent retreats. (Similarly, some people self-medicate with marijuana as they unknowingly approach their first psychotic episode. This doesn't mean the marijuana caused the episode.)
-"I don't know Lacan, but what I know about psychoanalysis has always sounded funny or wrong, so maybe Scott Alexander can give me an opinion I can trust."
-"I know Lacan and understand him, and that's a topic we haven't covered yet, so I'd like to share my knowledge."
-"Ha-ha, Lacan dumb, let's jeer together!"
I'm not an expert on psychoanalysis, but my wife is a big Lacan and Zizek buff so that makes me one by proxy, and over time I've adopted a charitable view by cherry-picking the stuff I understand and ignoring the stuff I don't.
I honestly think that most testable ideas by Lacan and Freud have been accepted into basic psychology. To name some: we are driven by self-contradictory desires and values, we fumble socially for acceptance and status because we misunderstand ourselves and each other, we're at odds with what we want/need and what's expected of us, our childhood is a precarious time for our development and poses serious risks and misunderstandings, our parents and siblings are really important to us and provide models for future relationships and values, there are personality stereotypes as a fuzzy category that we intuitively recognise, there's a "work me" and a "home me". The more turgid prose has been discarded, and overlapping ideas about proximate and ultimate evolutionary causes have begun to replace the same theoretical groundwork about the causes of our behavioral tendencies. The conceptions we make about our lives and personalities have been replaced by analyses of "rationalizations", or even more plainly, by looking at how people make sense of things when asked. Many of the aforementioned trivial ideas might have been novel to humans before our time and maybe still aren't in some parts of the world, so maybe we're guilty of anachronism when we wave off psychoanalysis for stating the obvious?
I think why psychoanalysts like Zizek remain relevant is because they explore untestable ideas that we may have some intuitions about and can form opinions about with a healthy dose of dunnoism. I like Zizek's commentary, not for its brashness, but for making lots of interesting observations about culture and pointing them out to me. Paraphrasing, nice observations include things like: Online dating involves a lot of marketing, which probably doesn't help in finding true love, because it's bad to be overly concerned with your public image when the point is to truly get to know a person behind the image. Or: People correctly identify other societies'/groups' problems or motives as ideological but not their own; understanding our own values as part of an ideology is important for addressing our own ideological problems and motives. It's more informal than formal, more cultural/social commentary than scientific work. This is why psychoanalysts have so many ideas. Sometimes it's guruism, sometimes it's energetic conversation! People do it because it's fun and exciting and might lead to some new thoughts that can be useful or interesting.
The fact that psychoanalysis seems to me a bunch of turgid prose seems more like a byproduct of the school of thought or then a typical ingroup phenomenon where people get so into things and making fine distinctions within their own arcane community that they lose sight of proper language. My wife reads Zizek's books fluently and can always explain ideas to me in a way that I understand, to which I always react with an annoyed "Why can't they say it like that then?" and she's like... this is their hobby and they get creative and it's fun? Rats and postrats have their own insider mumbo jumbo... like isn't there a better word for describing what a "mesa-optimizer" is? You made a whole post to explain an inside joke. You can think of options, but because you and company privy to the discussion understand it, you might be strapped for alternatives? The rationalist community chugs on happily, honing their craft and building on their own jargon. It could also be that there are different thinkers; maybe people drawn to psychoanalysis grasp ideas easier in terms of symbolism and rationalists in terms of formalism?
"I honestly think that most testable ideas by Lacan and Freud have been accepted into basic psychology." One enormous exception is the influence of parents. Behavioral genetics has very convincingly shown that, for "regular" non abusive parents, parenting and parents in general play a surprisingly small role on most behavioral traits (personality, risk of psychiatric disease for example) of their adult children.
For me it renders largely irrelevant the fixation of psychoanalysts on the relationships between parents and children during early childhood.
Psychoanalysis was all over the place (thanks to all the wild free association?), but it spawned lots and lots of ideas, and under scientific evaluation many big claims turned out incorrect like the overemphasis of parenting and underemphasis of genetics that you mention. Freudian analysis was in the right direction in noticing patterns of parent-offpsring conflict, which have been explained better with evolutionary psychology and scientific evaluation today. (Someone might still *understand* the symbolic explanations of psychoanalysis better than the formalist explanations of evolutionary psychology and arrive at the same or very similar conclusions?)
My own interest with psychoanalysis is how it meddles with concepts, rationalisations, people's own explanations for why they do what they do, how they contradict themselves and make their contradictions tenable. I don't actually think psychoanalysis has any special explanatory power, but it's more like a culture of wild thinking, interesting ideas, and active conversation.
By "[they] provide models for future relationships and values" I meant models or concepts for stuff like "family values", "expectations of social status", "political values", which are the result of both genetic ("openness/unopenness") and social factors (that one identical twin study where the one was a Jew and the other was a Nazi). Consider this: As a wee child you probably defer to your parents' rationalisations of values. When in school you adopt peer values and contradict parents' values. Let's say the ultimate explanation for the change is "to strengthen social bonds" and the proximate explanation is to "fit in". When you grow up, you maybe default to your family's values and roles or eschew them completely. As a person who has to make sense of the switch in values while maintaining a sense of self, the evolutionary explanations don't matter. Do you use your own childhood for reference? I bet you do! (Feel free to correct me.) Consider physical child abuse which has been super common throughout history. You have to have some explanation connected to yourself as a rational agent even if without the social control established in the recent decades you would probably have beaten your children, right? Absolutely nobody thinks "I wanted to raise my child without violence, because the risk of losing face from a social intervention is too great for someone in my social group." Maybe it's "My father beat me, and I don't ever want my children to hate me like I hated him!" Or "My parents were always real nice to me, so I'm going to be nice too." Or maybe it's something unrelated to your own family? "Beating children is wrong."
I have two so basic questions that I feel like an idiot asking it:
1. Do different therapies yield different results?
2. Is the function of different therapies and frameworks to help compatible therapist and patient find each other? (in the sense that if you would assign random therapist and patient to random therapy framework, what would happen?)
But does it mean that something beyond the Other with which a person can come into contact? If the Other is God/set of principles/people important to us, than what happens when we meet someone who doesn't belong to this set?
Freud/Lacan always seem to be hovering around and explaining something real but with some wild leaps and improvisations. It's exciting to see rationalist Scott grudgingly acknowledge the spirit of the insight.
"So the real question is: why did you want me to read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?" < I "predicted" Yes as a vote to have you review the book. I was hoping you'd fill-in some spots your your map that your not-a-cult leader acquaintance claimed were there, and that you'd tell me about it.
After I voted I then looked at what was the normal number of likes and how that had increased over time. From that I thought 125 looked easy and then took similar long positions on the other topics of interest. So there was both a prediction and voting element in what I was doing.
Finally, after you posted, I checked the market again and realized the potential for it to be an action market: anyone who'd predicted you'd get 125 likes also had an incentive to spread the word about the article. I made a very minimal attempt to promote it, mostly because I had that ah-ha. I would have done more to promote it, but it was clearly going to get to 125 without further action on my part.
Don't know if it matters for context but I'm a subscriber.
Can confirm. I had a weak father who was easily dominated by my mother (which I do complain about to my analyst from time to time). When I was 8 or 9 years old, I became obsessed with my father's name; specifically, I wanted to change my name to be Father's Name, Jr. As an adult I have changed my middle name (although that doesn't fit the theory so well: my old middle name was associated with my mother's family). My brother changed his entire full name.
I get the impression Lacan would thrive in several of Scott's fictional universes (Unsong, Adwellia, the place in The Proverbial Murder Mystery, ...). Unfotunately, *this* universe doesn't run on clever wordplay, so devising the perfect pun doesn't hand you the keys to reality. Instead, you get intricately-crafted bullshit that's entertaining and perhaps persuasive, but no more likely to be *true* than random chance.
Such a shame that this was the Lacanian book that you chose… Fink oversimplifies stuff to the point where a lot of things either don’t make sense or just sound silly. He basically just does a bad, BAD job at separating Freud from Lacan, which is important, since Lacan was criticizing Freud most of the time, not praising him. It also sounds like a behaviorist reading of psychoanalysis, which, again, is not great…
I suggest Joel Dor’s book, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, for people who are actually interested. It’s still a simplified version of the real thing, but at least it’s not this bad.
Scott’s view seems accurate enough and I feel like he did a good job with his comments, but, as a psychoanalyst, this was hard to read.
This comment made me reflect on authorship. Who it is that reviews a particular method of psychoanalysis? Those with sufficient knowledge. Most people with sufficient knowledge will be practitioners who rely on the method, or practitioners who abandoned it.
I've read the Very Short Introductions to Freud and Jung. The Jung book was clearly written by a fan. The Freud book, by prominent psychiatrist Anthony Storr, seemed mildly critical at times. Perhaps Storr tried practicing Freudian psychoanalysis before moving in a different direction. Anyway, the Freud book was more informative partly thanks to this criticism.
Are there any books about Lacan's method by those who tried it and abandoned it?
Alas, "the story of the “mirror stage”". Your account is not wrong, exactly, but it misses all that matters, and it makes a hash of Lacan. Perhaps this is a failing of the book?
You write: "This is a sort of eureka moment when it realizes it’s a united entity with a specific structure - a bunch of correlations suddenly snap into place, and it realizes it can at least aspire to coherence."
Nothing that proceeds from this can be said to be Lacanian, or hope to address Lacan's work.
First, and this is trivial: an actual mirror is optional. It can be a shadow, a reflection in water or another's eye, or the realization that other people see you in a way that you don't. Anything external that can be identified as 'me' will do.
Second, and this must not be mistaken: The mirror stage is is not recognition. It is misrecognition.
When the infant child thinks: 'that over there, that is me', they are wrong, and fundamentally, irrevocably wrong: 'that, over there', is not me. But in the mirror phase, the initial self image we form ('that over there' = 'me') and which we then elaborate and revise all our lives, is based on this misrecognition.
In Lacan's thought, this is neither optional nor possible to overcome, for it is the base of our ego's further development. This is why Lacan called it the mirror phase: we base our self image ('this is me') on something external that is not us ('that over there'), as if we had misrecognized a mirror image for ourselves.
If we proceed without this misrecognition at the root of the mirror phase and all that follows, then we depart Lacan's discourse entirely. Which is not to say that perhaps half of the academic works on Lacan that I'm familiar with don't make this precise, and even symptomatic, mistake.
Lacan offered (or perhaps 'tried out') many images for the ego in his career. One of them, opposed to the formidable castle Freud once had us imagine, was of a plastic bag filled with water: there is small bubble in the bag, and it moves around as pressure is applied, so that it is larger now, then smaller, perhaps it splits into two, then it merges again. This is the ego, and it is always repeating to itself "I am the unchangeable center, around which all else revolves". The ego is not 'mistaken' in this, but it is built from misrecognition, and cannot exist without it.
From the mirror phase onwards: misrecognition, and not recognition. Without this, Lacan's thought cannot usefully be approached.
I actually also read the Bruce Fink book recently. I think part of the problem you're having is that Fink is writing for an audience of psychoanalysts, i.e. people who know Freud's work pretty well and mostly accept it. Fink doesn't try to defend, or even explain, most of the Freudian stuff. And it seems like a lot of that is what you're getting hung up on--infantile sexuality, the significance of the phallus, etc. You might've been better off reading Fink's other book, The Lacanian Subject, which doesn't assume familiarity with Freud--or reading this one after a basic introduction to Freud (Jonathan Lear's book is good for this, as he's critical of many of Freud's positions while at the same time arguing for his importance).
Like, no offense, but if your conclusion is that maybe there's something to this whole psychoanalytic account of repression...you've barely even reached Fink's premises, let alone his conclusions, so the book won't be very convincing.
As for specifics, I think you've got an outline of the book that misses what (for me at least) was most interesting about it. Take desire. You write, "Some parts seem too trivial to care about (eg we desire things, even if we get one object of desire we’ll just start desiring something else)". If that were the crux of the assertion, it would indeed be trivial. I take this to be a rephrase of Fink on p. 51, "When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it." Sure, that's in the text, but what's crucial is the sentence just before it which Fink italicizes: "Human desire, strictly speaking, has no object." And before that: "Desire is not so much drawn toward an object...as elicited by a certain characteristic that can sometimes be read into a particular love object: desire is pushed not pulled." The idea is not that desire dies once it's satisfied, which would be trivial. The point is that desire isn't for a particular object in the first place, and it can't be.
This is where Fink starts really getting at what Lacan's theory of desire is. About the "mimetic" nature of desire, you say "Some people definitely do this ... Other people definitely don’t do this, like that guy who obsessively collected streetcar tickets." Lacan's view is that everyone does this in every instance--that's what makes the idea not trivial. Lacan's stance would be that a guy who obsessively collects streetcar tickets is just as caught in desire as imitation as anyone else. It may be that he's misunderstood someone else's desire, or that the collecting of streetcar tickets is the deformation of another desire through repression. There is no "real," inherent desire; it's the drives that are inherent.
This is why Lacan suggests you need to move past desire, what he calls the "traversing of fantasy." I agree that Fink does a poor job of explaining what this would entail, but he does at least point at it: "the analysand moves from being the sbject who demands...to being the subject who desires..to being the subject who enjoys (who is no longer subject to the Other)." (p. 65)
Anyway, based on your summary I can see why the book wasn't enjoyable to you; if I shared your interpretation I wouldn't like it much either. I'm not sure I buy what Lacan says, but I definitely think he's saying something strange and counterintuitive. Some of the local observations on obsessional and hysterical neurosis do seem very true to me, and I feel they've helped me understand some of my own self-sabotaging behaviors. But ymmv.
I want to attempt to explain Lacan's whole "Babies really want but can't achieve their mother's affection" thing.
Imagine you are a baby. You have two hands, which is pretty great since you can play with them. You have two feet, excellent for trying to chew on. You also have a mom who feeds you. Mom is definitely part of you, like your arm or your leg. You flex, you get an arm. You cry, you get Mom feeding you. This is fine - every baby is born with a mom, just like babies are born with two arms and two legs.
One morning you wake up and your arm is GONE. By your arm, I mean your mom. You cry and cry and cry and she just does not appear. This is literally, to your little baby brain, identical to losing an arm.
Actually, it's worse. If your arm got chopped off, you'd just lose an arm but that isn't your arms fault. Imagine instead you woke up and your arm decided it was going to go for a latte at Starbucks and was done being your arm. This is insult to injury. Your arm is drinking fancy coffee drinks and hanging out with some MAN and is HAPPY. Mom is definitely not that happy when she was attached to you. Not only has your arm left you - by choice - but it is happier being separated from you. This is like the worst breakup you've ever had, and then some.
So, you lost your limb, and your favorite milk bearing appendage has been stolen - and is happier than you ever made it - with some dang dude. So, in your baby mind, you decide to win back your mom. You're going to be the best baby that a baby can be, and you are going to make her happier than that strange man who keeps hanging out and making her dinner.
Except that you're a baby, and while mom fakes a smile when you hand her blocks, you definitely can tell it's not as good as making her dinner and giving her a glass of wine. No matter how hard you try, you will never make your mom - who is basically your detached limb - as happy as the jerk who stole her. You can not fulfill that need.
Now, here's the whole problem: Mom was never actually an appendage. She didn't actually love you as much as your little baby brain thought she did. She loved you like, nomal human mother:child amounts of love, but not "is literally an extension of your physical self" kind of love. So even when you become an adult.. you can't get that level of love from your mom again. It just isn't real, you are chasing a fiction. Every desire you will ever experience is just second best to some fictional relationship you thought in your head as a baby.
[Days late] An important not-fetish issue is that for many, as days go by without sex, the sex drive gets stronger, so the criteria for enjoyment gets more open. One possibility seems to me that those having some fetishes are getting too much of "vanilla" sex, so it ceases to be as exciting - as quick and easy to be aroused. Sort of like drug use builds up tolerance and the need for a bigger dose for similar effect.
As a complete stranger to psychology, who’s first reaction to Lacan was to think it sounded like obscure babble which can fit anything to anything, I think I’m starting to build an understanding of this Lacanian psychoanalysis stuff. By build an understanding, I mean, fit it together into my worldview/model.
A new perspective: Psychoanalysts obviously need to understand rationality/reinforcement-learning concepts to do their job (things like “the child ends up optimizing for being attracted to buttons because his dad referred to his mom as a his button and the child associated mom signals to reward”), but they come from a different field. So they end up reinventing it, but from the operational perspective of a psychologist talking to patients. The words Mother, Father, etc initially come up a lot and are central in the problem-understanding process, so they naturally end up selected when coalescing concepts cristallize from the noise of many many examinations, and we end up with a sort of analogue to rationality / AI theory but using words like Other, Mother, Id, etc.
At first, the psychoanalyst’s thought models overfit to a few cases, his own biases, etc, and it looks like a mix of Freudian psychoanalysis, with a bit of grandmother wisdom and some astrology-like pattern-recognition from noise, using the words “Mother, Father, Id, a lot”. But the more a psychoanalyst sees, the more his model understanding starts to approximate the generality of human cognition, the more in common it starts to have with other general models of cognition (such as rationality), and so his psycho-babble starts sounding like Eliezier’s rationalist-babble, but replacing words like “Utility”, “Mesa-Optimizer”, etc, with words like “Other”, “Jouissance”, etc.
If it is true, I expect a lot of psychoanalysis to look like weird psychobabble models which seem centered about really specific patterns (Mother/Father pattern), but as the field evolves people start revising them to be more general, and suddenly "Mother" is just a symbol which represents "The thing that our metaoptimizer optimises for", and so on. Maybe with the added ability to sometimes just apply the term directly (e.g. to mean the patient's actual "Mother" or her desires) since it often fits.
Sorry if this already came up, but does anyone find it weird that the Mom is a pure object in Lacanian world view (as I understood it from this review)? She isn’t an entity that does anything or controls anything or has any thoughts or desires she projects into the world. She dispenses milk… but infinitely and automatically.
All of the scenarios and case studies fell apart for me because the Mom didn’t participate in any of them, which seems like such a deviation from even an idealized version of reality that I couldn’t find value in the proposed scenarios. Other than to make me wonder what the their would look like if Mom had feelings or reactions about the Child. Is that a thing that other psychoanalytical theory famously goes into in response to Lacan?
With respect to sex, I don't think it's really all that hard to understand. Sex is maybe 10% about genital friction, with the remaining 90% split between social bonding and imagination. (For women, it's more like 1%/99%.) If you're wearing a blindfold, you can imagine that your partner is hot, which is the main reason you're aroused. Take the blindfold off, find out that your partner is not hot, and the illusion vanishes, along with the arousal. Moral judgement has nothing to do with it.
As to various "perversions", I think it's mostly about self-image. We all have an image of ourselves -- what kind of person we are, what kind of person we want to be, and how other people view us. We take on sexual roles that either reinforce that self-image, or roles that give us reassurance about anxieties that we may have about our self-image. BDSM play makes the dominant feel strong/powerful/virile. But submitting, or giving pleasure to a partner, makes a person feel desirable/useful/wanted/needed/loved.
IMHO, most "sexual perversion" is just personality; what happens inside the bedroom mirrors what happens outside of it. A man who wants to be the alpha-male and "in charge" outside of the bedroom probably would get a kick out of being a BDSM dominant. A shy "nice guy" or "romantic" who is uncomfortable ordering people around most likely enjoys a more gentle/submissive role. There are lots of people who love scifi/fantasy costumes or cosplay, why not have fun with sex as well?
In most cases, we seek out roles and situations that will reinforce our self-image, since anything else leads to cognitive dissonance. However, if our self-image does not align with something that we want for ourselves (like sex), then sometimes we have to employ tricks in order to get around that. Consider a person who is self-conscious or uncomfortable in social situations, or has anxiety about being attractive. The role of sex-slave might be comforting or reassuring to that person, since they are freed from the responsibility of making social decisions (and sex-slaves are hot by definition). On the other hand, consider a guy who's naturally wimpy and shy, but has been fed a steady diet of action movies, and just can't quite shake the image that sexually attractive men are supposed to be strong and muscly. In that case, maybe a whip and some leather pants helps him overcome his wimpy self-image and feel more virile.
A woman who constantly ends up with abusers is probably suffering from low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance, and can't reconcile her self-image of "victim" with the role of "strong woman in a kind and caring relationship". Hate sex is similar: if a person feels emotionally distant from their partner (or from everyone), then they can't visualize themselves as caring or loving (or perhaps, being cared for or loved). In that case, hate sex is great, because it doesn't require an emotional connection.
I guess I don't see sex in any of these cases as being any different from the way that self-image works in non-sexual situations. E.g. wrt to the blind-fold example, give a person a bowl of delicious soup. They like it. Now tell them it was made from roadkill, but totally fresh -- no chance of disease. Do they still like it?
What about the girl who gets straight-As in every math class, but wants a study partner to help her with a science class because she's "bad at math"? (I met several of these in high school.) Self-image.
1. I am in the "very interested/this changed my life in a fundamental way" cluster of your Sadly Porn review, I think it had deep insights that allow me to see the world under an interesting light. But I have to admit that up until your fourth paragraph mentioning prediction markets, this review just kept feeling more and more ludicrous, hilarious, and spurned in me a feeling of "Why am I even reading this?".
If nothing else, I was very confused about why people would dismiss the Sadly Porn review as obscurantist or trivial, and I think that this may have transferred to me some of what it must have felt like.
For the people who strongly disliked or didn't care for the Sadly Porn review, I am interested to know if this one up to the fourth section felt similar?
2. That being said, I did enjoy your overall review when you went a meta level up. But I am a little torn on what signal I should send to the betting market now. I think you generated deep insights similarly as the Sadly Porn review, but I am not certain this is specifically related to the book itself. I think in the case of Sadly Porn, you were trying to integrate an antimeme and documenting this journey. This was fascinating to me both on the object level (the meme itself) and on the meta level (seeing how you go about trying to learn an antimeme, what you learn about your learning, etc). In this review, it really didn't feel like you took much from the book, it felt more like a conversation starter so to say. And I think you could have generated these insights with a different book, and maybe that would have been even more interesting because they wouldn't have been set in your mind yet.
So should I like your post? If liking your post is a signal _to you_ of "good job, keep up with the insights" then yes. But if liking your post is a signal to the market of "You chose the right book" I think this would be way more complicated, and maybe not. This also seems to change the very semantics of clicking on the like button
On the review itself:
3. Disclaimer: I feel almost no effect of gender presentation on my attraction toward others. This will obviously bias my view.
Regarding what you said about heterosexuality, I do think that sexuality is way more malleable than people think, that you can deliberately choose to be gay or straight or bi or etc... It did occur to me that a lot of straight men are more playing up the role of who they ought to be and conform to the image of themselves. I think this is particularly striking with straight men who go about any and _all_ interaction with a woman as a potential date (I have a relative who was thinking about all the implications of marrying someone he just met on the bus)
At least in my own bubble, I know too many people who have changed their sexual orientation over time for the "They were really that way all along" hypothesis to make sense.
My current model is that it's just like liking cilantro or garlic. Sure, some people hate it, and maybe they hate it in a way that's genetic and cannot be overcome, but for most people, I reckon that they could learn to like garlic if they really wanted to.
The "Sadly Porn" /review/ was fine -- Scott is a great writer. However, my takeaway from the review was an extremely strong feeling of "why would anyone read this trash?" The excerpts from the book felt very much like a cult leader with a huge ego saying things that are supposed to sound insightful, without actually having any content. But then, I'm a scientist. I have little use for prophets, cults, or religions (at least of the more fundamentalist/evangelical variety), and an allergic reaction to anything that stinks of them. That's just me, though -- there is obviously a long religious/spiritual tradition of people who feel otherwise. I also don't believe in antimemes either, at least not on the level that Scott was talking about. IMO, if you can't explain something clearly, then it's not an explanation. I don't know if that clarifies your confusion about why some people didn't like "Sadly, Porn"; there are clearly differences of opinion. :-)
In answer to your question, my reaction to this review was similar, except that at least here, Scott seemed to be reading the book with the same skepticism that I would have. Lacanian analysis sounds both ludicrous, and completely over-sexualized and sexist to me. Young children desire a phallus to please their mother? Really? Even the girls? Or are girls not people? Seriously, WTF?
Wrt. heterosexuality, I think there's a spectrum of how malleable people are. I am a heterosexual man, but I have never really identified with the social stereotype of "manliness". So if I woke up tomorrow in a woman's body, my first reaction would be along the lines of "Huh, this is neat!" However, my second reaction would probably be: "Wait... do I have to have sex with guys? Because that's going to be... awkward." In other words, I'm probably mid-range on the malleability scale. I don't strongly identify with my own gender, but I do have a pretty clear sexual preference. For many people, "being a man" or "being a woman" is a big part of their self-image, while for other people it's not. But if you don't care, then it's a lot easier to just fit in with the stereotype as best you can...
I'm with you on this one. Also, it always seems odd to me that sexual desire is elevated in this tradition when it seems more logical (and maybe that's my problem) to attribute to a child newly in the world more obviously immediate desires like to be free of hunger, free of pain, and free of cold -- all three of those experiences are lined up in abundance from the moment we're born.
You have some odd food preferences, as do I, but we're still carrying out the basic function of eating. We put some kind of food in our mouths, chew it, and swallow. Sexual desires can get much weirder.
I think maybe it's because hunger shows up years earlier than sexual desire. Or maybe because, while sex is necessary for the survival of the species, food is necessary for the immediate survival of the individual. If you're putting food in the wrong hole, you're not going to last long.
Yes, I mean reproduction. I'm not making a moral judgement; I don't have reproductive sex either, even though I am straight.
I was convinced by this, but then also convinced by Bullseye's reply that food doesn't get anywhere near as weird as sex.
But then thinking about this analogy, I find it really interesting that there is a growing acceptance of people's unusual identities on both in recent years. Even out in red suburban Texas, where they don't have much respect for vegetarians, there's all sorts of overt welcoming of gluten sensitivity and other allergens (to the extent that a moderately nice restaurant in town advertises a "gluten free brownie" on their menu, when it's actually just a regular flourless chocolate cake) and a lot of this coincides with the years when people across the political spectrum have mostly come to just accept that different people have different sexual orientations and identities.
See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction/comment/6257827
Interesting. That last line about Freud seems spot on to me. And I know we all hate this, but in this context "man" and "girl" seemed really irritating, although I strive not to react or get all p.c. Its just an extremely jarring image to this woman, in this case. Take it as you will, a correction or a ridiculous objection. It stood out though, big time.
I never really know how to take these objections. Some feminists - women and men - are triggered by this sort of language. Others think they have much bigger fish to fry and may raise an eyebrow and point out the imbalance and wait for a more pressing problem to really throw down the gauntlet.
I wouldn't identify as a feminist, but I did find it odd that all this discussion of children assumed the child was a male with an Oedipal desire for its mother. What happens with female infants? Hysterics must come from somewhere! :)
Hey Chaz! SIL
Yeah there is a ‘guy-nerd’ vibe here a lot of times. As a guy nerd myself, this doesn’t always jump out at me.
I don’t know what the m\f ratio of the readership actually is but I’d guess it skews male.
I hear your point and the one made by AIG though.
FWIW I identify as a feminist myself but lean in on what I think of as bigger issues. Equity in pay, opportunity and respect. You could make a valid case that the man/girl word choices indicate inequality in respect of course.
But there are a lot of things in the world that are unfair and I worry that making noise for every injustice I see will just make me annoying. It’s a matter of choosing my battles
And I hate to say this, but babies aren't reliably pink.
Nope, they aren't. But Lacan's ass sure was.
Ha-ha - any relation to Balaam's ass?
So now I'm thinking about what a baby's experience would be like. There certainly wouldn't be named colors. Probably their experience of their hands would have feeling and seeing mixed together, and I don't know whether they'd realize that their hands when visible and hands when not visible were the same thing.
They start off not realizing the widgets they're seeing are connected to the feelings they have in their hands -- that is, their experience begins as *unmixed*. But pretty early on they "discover" their hands, in the sense that they realize these things floating around in their field of view are their hands, so they play around with them -- look! I can move it this way and that, hit myself in the face by accident damn it, put them in my mouth which kind of feels good 'cause I have a tooth coming in.
It's very likely an important early milestone in the development of the visual cortex's ability to do what machine vision people call "segment" the visual field -- identify certain areas of the visual field as containing distinct objects, which have an existence largely independent from the rest of the visual field (they can be moved around against the background, and retain their identity). The retina does some significant preprocessing to speed this process along -- motion and edge detection -- but we think most of it still goes on in the visual cortex. Oliver Sacks's famous story shows what happens when this ability is degraded in a certain way, and the visual cortex can segment the visual field but loses the ability to categorize and associate an abstract mental symbol with the object ("This is a distinct object, and also my hand.")
I assumed this was an accurate reflection of either Lacan or the explainer of Lacan, who presupposes a male subject, except when forced to imagine who might be hysterical.
That's at least what Freud does.
Then of course, there's also Penisneid.
The classical parallel is the Electra complex, which was developed by Jung later; Freud disagreed with this, but the whole idea (both Freudian and Jungian) doesn't much hang together. There is this obsession with the phallus (penis envy for girls, castration anxiety for boys) which on the one hand yes, if you're a young child, this is the most easily visible difference between boys and girls, but on the other hand there's a ton of instinctual work around sexual development in the psyche that needs to be going on to make the theories work, and I'm not convinced that they do happen that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex
The theory of hysteria is one that bounced around from physiological to psychological and back to physiological; it's complicated, based on work Freud did with/researched about Charcot, and had a rise and fall in popularity. It's been years since I read some of Freud's work, so I'm going on vague memory, but I think some of his patients were male hysterics. However, it became associated mainly or even solely with women, and the psychosexual theories started tumbling out.
I think a lot of Freudian and Lacanian analysis is based on the mores of their particular times, so that the changes in social and cultural attitudes makes that stand out very much (e.g. the emphasis on the male as the child in the triad of father, mother, child) so that whatever about the principles underlying the theories and the interpretation of them, the result sounds odd to modern ears.
I liked the cover illustration chosen; while it does have the triad of mother-baby-father, it's also The Tempest by Giorgione which has had various and variant interpretations over the years, from "Giorgione was just painting a landscape and that's all there is to it" to "There are deep secret hidden meanings here" - very Lacanian!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_(Giorgione)
> There is this obsession with the phallus (penis envy for girls, castration anxiety for boys) which on the one hand yes, if you're a young child, this is the most easily visible difference between boys and girls
Here in America, we wear pants when kids are around. I remember having no idea what the difference between boys and girls was. I could see the difference in faces as well as anyone else, but I had no idea what the difference meant. It was baffling.
Same, though I had some idea after I sneaked into a dictionary at 9. The thing I was missing for many years after that, though, was a correction of my misconception that babby was formed by magic when the key went in the hole (without any rubbing/motion... I also was under the impression that the only reason people really wanted to do it was emotional and romantic rather than neurophysical).
I am not always "triggered," and tried to say that. Am not in favor of a lot of the reactions to language, but sometimes, and in general to some. Sometimes its not really "trigger," which suggests just a personal response, perhaps to our own traumas. Rather, sometimes it really matters what we model and how we frame things. You "never really know how to take these objections." Just listen and ponder. There is room for thought and reasonable discussion around this, though yes it can get ridiculous. I am always on the side of not generalizing, which yes is a generalization. But let's try to think together.
I could have used a less loaded word than trigger. I think you would find I’m on your side if you knew me a bit better. My main point, if I were to phrase it more carefully Is that effecting change is very difficult and you can’t be heard if no one is listening. It has become too easy for the forces of illiberalism to dismiss things like this as dumb SWJ nonsense. So as I say below or above depending on your sort, it’s become a matter of choosing battles.
Sorry about any personal trauma that had made these things to stand out for you
I didn't say it well, I meant that "trigger" suggests personal trauma when that may not be it at all. And, I do believe you are "on my side." That wasn't really in question. Although we all might think about if it makes sense to frame some battles as more worthy than other. I will say this again: I am not a huge advocate of the constant language-watching that is so prevalent. Just: sometimes it really sticks out (pun?) -- and sometimes, the little things are connected to the big things (pun?) That is why I say just listen. One doesn't always have to come up with an answer. Sometimes just questions will do. Thanks though.
Language is weird. I think equivalent word pairs are boy/girl (for children), guy/girl (any age, less formal) and man/woman (adult, more formal). My grandmother calls her 90+ year old female friends girls (eg, "I met with the girls this afternoon").
Certain phrases are more common and sound more natural with one or the other. A "hot girl" and a "beautiful woman" are more natural sounding than if you swap the adjectives. (And similarly, "hot guy" sounds more natural to me than "hot man".)
I think what happened here was a switch from more formal, clinical language ("a heterosexual man") to informal language ("hot girl").
Sometimes I think the problem is that there's no female equivalent of "guy." There's no informal neutral substitute for "woman" "Gal," which started sounding dated by the 60's or maybe before, seems like a pretty decent equivalent, a fairly neutral term without a bunch of other attributes attached. But if you say "gal" now a linguistic wormhole opens up and Eisenhower comes strolling through it.
Luckily I'm not a native English speaker and learned "gal" from Brainiac. Sounds very dignified to me.
In the 1980s, my wife sang in a wedding band headed by an elderly horn player who'd composed some hits in the Big Band era for his wife, who introduced herself to us as an old "gal singer," which struck my wife as a worthy aspiration.
Those of us who remember fun theater know the counterpart to "guy" is "doll."
These days mainly used to refer to the hot actor Ms Gadot...
Wouldn't it have been awesome if she married a man with the first name of Guy?
The the word "guy" in this context actually derives from the name: the effigies of Guy Fawkes traditionally burned on November 5th in Britain are called "guys" in his honor, and the term was also used figuratively for a person wearing disheveled or eccentric clothing reminiscent of the worn-out and often mismatched clothes used to construct the Guy Fawkes effigies (kinda like modern American usage of comparing someone's appearance to a scarecrow). From there, it came to mean a shabby or disreputable-seeming person, and then just a casual term for a male adult or adolescent.
"Dude" has similarly convoluted origins. It was originally a near-synonym for "dandy" (from "duds", a casual term for fancy clothes). Then it came to mean a wealthy urbanite who was conspicuously out of place in a western frontier town, or else such an urbanite who was playing at dressing up like a cowboy (c.f. "dude ranch", a ranch run specifically for tourists to play at being cowboys). The "cool dude" meaning came next, which evolved into the modern usage.
I should think language lags behind culture. Until recently, a fertile female human who had sexual intercourse with a male would with some probability get pregnant, which changed her whole social role, usually much for the worse, if she wasn't married. So there were words for the social roles of filles and femmes, mädchen and frauen, girls and women. Males just grew beards and were no longer boys. Ok, a lot of ritual and celebration, whatever.
Maybe we shall see if there will be new words. The feminist project to address everyone without a penis, regardless of age and sexual activity, as women, seems not to have succeeded.
Personally I'm more taken aback by the way he presented a scenario where a man gets raped, and then presents it as a big mystery why he objects to being raped.
Am I fundamentally misreading this passage?
The idea, I assume, was to get around the 'I'd never enjoy getting head from a man' objection to the notion that getting head from a man and a woman might result in identical physical sensations while generating different mental appreciations of the event.
Although I agree that the scenario presented is not a very good experimental design for evaluating the question.
Question about the meaning of getting raped-- if a different beautiful woman were substituted, would that count as rape?
Yes, because there was a bait-and-switch of what you had consented to. Even if we presume that you would have been willing to consent if informed, the opportunity to decline was not provided.
If you decided to play a sexy game with your lover, and agreed to be blindfolded before intercourse, and the blindfold were then accidentally lifted to reveal it was a stranger -- let us posit a very handsome man -- instead of your boyfriend who'd entered you, would you call it rape? Is consent a thing for everyone, or just one sex?
I assumed the original scenario was a beautiful woman he didn't know, so a switch with another beautiful woman would be less important.
It would presumably still be rape, but I wouldn't expect him to be as angry/distressed as with the other scenarios.
Fascinating. So if you sat on a rape jury, would you vote to convict on the less serious charge if the assailant is very good looking, and on the more severe charge if he is homely?
I think it would depend on the victim testimony.
As for the original scenario, it was about a desirable partner being exchanged with a (generally considered) undesirable partner.
It doesn't seem horrible to me to consider other cases.
It would certainly be a traumatic experience for me, regardless of how beautiful or attractive the woman was. The difference between an attractive woman and an ugly one would honestly be negligible, because the surprise alone would make it deeply traumatizing either way.
Yes. I think it was very clear that he does *not* mean the discomfort caused by a lack of consent.
To make this clear, perhaps imagine instead the difference in discomfort between removing the blindfold to see an ugly man, vs. seeing a different beautiful woman.
I think this may have something to do with the age assumptions typically made about the age of iconic sexually active and attractive people. In this scenario we are probably expected to imagine the "hot girl" as quite young -- say, between 19 and 25 -- while the "man" might be almost any age from 19 to 55, say, althought almost certainly her age or older.
We are not expected to imagine a 18-year-old high-school male getting a beej from a 48-year-old female, even if she were as comely as Raquel Welch at 48, and indeed if that were revealed to be the actual scenario the description would probably be read as somehow off, inaccurate in some overtone. But if it were a 48-year-old man being pleasured by an 18-year-old female, that "fits" the description just fine.
That is, I think it might have less to do with infantilizing women per se, or denying agency or maturity, and more to do with an (maybe half or entirely) unconscious assumption that women are sexually active and attractive and participating in exciting things like blindfold sex games only during a more restricted and considerably younger part of their lives than men.
Maybe, but you sure are not talking about the women I know. And, I doubt all this is the explanation. Any stats for these claims? Seems like more assumptions about women, is all. Though I know you are offering a respectful try. Many women get stronger and more self-confident as they age, thus more willing to try things, in sex or lots of other ways.
Bear in mind I am not saying what women are actually like, or should be like[1], but only theorizing how the language came to be the way it is via the social conventions and pressures surrounding a public discussion of sexual frolics. A version of the Comics Code Authority we carry around in our heads.
As for *why* it is that way, regardless of the actual behavior of actual women, I might go further out on the limb and say it has to do with the fact that men perhaps feel more inhibited imagining[2] or describing sexuality in women of their mother's age than in men of their father's age.
---------
[1] And I can draw this distinction with ease because I am not one of those curious people who think language affects objective reality. What people actually are and what they say they are, or other say they are, are not of necessity connected.
[2] At least publically. The existence of the pr0n category "MILF" suggests they have no problem doing it privately, although again the attraction of the category also suggests even privately they still find it at least a bit naughty.
It's a simple, and good, question to begin; `what is the nature of desire?' I follow Girard and Otto Rank, for example, in my answer, but that means when I read that babies have a desire to please then I immediately respond, `no, they don't.' The infant lives in a magical world we can no longer imagine where all the desires are sensual with no rhyme or reason for how or why they magically are, or are not, satisfied.
As a parent, I think you're right. I never got the sense of babies as having a desire to please, at all. It's more the reverse, parents have a desire to please the baby. It's kind of weird that people look at babies as in the submissive powerless position, because when you're a parent it feels much more like babies are in the power position. It's true that babies are *helpless*, but it turns out that's different than being powerless!
no doubt!
Toddlers may want to please, though.
Sometime they like to please their parents. Sometimes they like to do something else despite the fact that they know full well that their parents will be very displeased.
The idea that humans are fundamentally motivated by a desire to please their parents doesn't seem compatible with the experience of anyone who has actually spent time around children of any age.
There do seem to be contradictory drives. Children like both approval and also autonomy. or some other thing. I certainly didn't mean to imply that children's motivations could be reduced to a single desire.
I’m thinking about this and I’m wondering if the more true formulation would be that children desire recognition and seek it.
In some families being recognized means behaving badly.
Right, this sounds a lot like something theorized by a bourgeois gentleman who spend 15 minutes per day with their children after the nanny has gotten them properly prepared to meet Papa. It's like Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music" confidently composing an essay on what babies want.
According to Wikipedia, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940. Perhaps they were unusually complaisant babies, or Marie-Louise did most of the childcare?
It seems he already had a mistress, Sylvia Bataille, the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, and they married in 1953, his second wife. It says: "During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war."
He was also busy with other stuff - "Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice."
He sounds slightly Obsessive?
Remembering George Bataille`s obscene writings, his friend Lacan seems even more of a weirdo to me. No offence, weirdos sometimes have great insights. Bataille`s stuff seemed like a dead end to me, though.
Very true. In my experience that's one of the first truly tricky (rather than simply arduous) challenges of parenting--weaning oneself off that feeling of being servants to the child, and doing so at the right pace. Many of the children who are spoiled in an infantilized way (passive, expecting everything to be done for them) are the children of parents who didn't manage the transition. It's trickier than it looks, especially for people who don't take easily to change.
Freud wrote of "his majesty the baby"
Freud and Lacan agree, calls it polymorphous perversity and considers it a developmental stage from age 0-5. (perversion meaning "I can choose to get my pleasure from whatever I want, however I want", not in a negative sense). Remember you're reading a review by someone who admits in the first paragraph to not really understand it :)
Proust probably explores the obscure nature of desire more than any other thinker, although I can appreciate that most people don't want to invest the time required to read him.
I forgot to ask, how does one get started with Proust (I've only read secondary sources - like Monty Python . . . "Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about" . . . ha ha).
Proust wrote one famous multi-volume novel: In Search of Lost Time. You read Proust starting in the beginning with Swan's Way and keep reading from there. It's six or seven books in all. I like it from the beginning but there's a cumulative, compounding value to reading it all. I'd suggest a program of reading 15 pages a day. Read more if you want, of course, but read at least 15 pages each day. Some of it is boring. But many of the boring parts become interesting later.
That said, if you read all of Swanns's Way and hate it, then Proust isn't for you. There's nothing wrong with that. Not every book is for everyone.
I think the prediction market was exactly correct that you would produce a very entertaining piece of writing on having read this book, which made me laugh out loud a couple of times (the sentence about failed schemes including ending up reading this book, and the parting line).
Totally concur: funny and thought-provoking. My favourite sentence, in parenthesis I think, something like, 'I can' t believe I'm writing this sentence.' Yep. More!
This review was a fascinating read and that ending line made me snicker!
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I suspect a bit also came from trolls who thought it'd be funny to make Scott dutifully read and review such a mess of a book. Given low-4 figure volume numbers, it wouldn't take an outrageous sum to turn the market and give you the powerful feeling of having made a famous person do something. But agreed that the review itself was great!
If they really wanted to torture Scott, they should have made him read The Red Book.
The best of Scott's works has always been the #thingsIllregretwriting and other culture war stuff. This is a flame war about a dead guy and a community that doesn't cancel people, so it's all fun.
Agreed, but I also thought that it it might have been a response to some of the concepts and comments from the review of Sadly, Porn.
Yeah, maybe. I did read the whole thing, but in the end I rather felt it was a waste of my time and Scott’s.
I didn’t pay close enough attention to know what embarrassing fact that reveals about me.
Can someone who speaks French and/or has read Lacan please tell me whether the "Name of the Father" pun is "nom de père" after "nom de guerre"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Father
"Lacan plays with the similar sounds in French of le nom du père (the name of the father), le non du père (the no of the father), and les non-dupes errent (the non-dupes err) to emphasize with the first two phrases the legislative and prohibitive functions of the father and to emphasize with the last phrase that "those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most"."
if i were to discover profound and important truths about the universal human psyche i would simply express them clearly and unambiguously for people
It's a profound truth of the human psyche that a good pun cannot be denied.
Plus 1, Thx.
What if one of the profound truths you discovered was "many profound truths cannot be expressed clearly and unambiguously in any human language"?
I d'ont buy it. Physicists are able to explain clearly awfully complex and non intuitive concepts. Pyschoanalyst should be able to do the same with their much easier stuff.
I was going to make a similar reply, then I remembered that when physicists try to explain awfully complex concepts such as quantum field theory, most of the time they end up simplifying so much that it's actually wrong - case in point, virtual particles, no they don't really exist.
Which ties pretty nicely to what scott was saying in the "sadly porn" review about explaining complicate concepts in a simple way and ending up with people believing they have understood it while it's not actually the case
I consider math as a subset of natural language, so the physicist example works.
I have no opinion on the existence/usefulness of virtual particles in the description of quantum phenomena but I do think it is possible to have reasonably correct descriptions of complex things, at different levels of approximation.
I will not dwell on physics because I am far too ignorant of it. If I take the classical example of the shape of the Earth, one can describe it reasonably correctly as a sphere if one only wants a rough approximation, at the next level of precision one can introduce flatness at the poles, at the next level one can add smaller features, etc.
I think this is true in all scientific disciplines, i.e. it is possible to have very rough descriptions that are reasonably easy to understand, and to increase the level of precision and complexity (and difficulty of understanding) as needed.
I do not believe that the human psyche is uniquely impossible to describe in a reasonably clear and correct way. Why should it be? Yes, it is terribly complex, in the sense that there are really many factors of different kinds involved (biological, societal, personal, etc.), but I see no indication that this makes the functioning of our mind impossible to describe correctly and clearly.
I'm curious what you mean by the assertion that virtual particles don't "exist." In what sense? Obviously they can't be measured, by definition, but I would have thought that their existence is proved by the fact that consequences of their existence are indeed measureable.
Are you just taking a nonstandard approach to the quantum measurement problem?
I don't know. Unless graduate level QCD textbooks are things that are "simplifying so much that it's actually wrong," virtual particles are invoked in the real explanation just as much as they are in the simplification. There's often the accompanying Copenhagen Interpretation philosophy of "the equations are all that we really believe, so don't take the Feynman diagrams too literally; just treat them as a tool to help you do the math," (although, I think that typically comes more from professors teaching the book than the book itself), but that's mostly because the Copenhagen Interpretation is the agreed upon truce to prevent people from spending all of their time trying to interpret the equations and arguing with each other about their interpretations of their equations rather than just shutting up and doing the math.
Ah...well we usually do it with math, you know. I've written papers that were half and half words and equations, and a lot of the words were along the lines of "...substituting the expansion (16) for the kinetic energy operator in (11) gives..."
Sure, and these are clear explanations for the intended readers of these papers. You don't have people doing the exegesis of each article to try to understand what the meaning could be!
"Fink presents a (supposedly) real case study of psychosis. A man (“Roger”), ... "
I can't help but noticing that Lacanian therapy causes Roger to go insane, while another therapist helps him to be fine afterwards.
The goal of therapy is typically to help people live normal lives, not to cause their ego to collapse in a particular way. Why would Fink want to use this as an example of Lacanian therapy?
The fact that Freud prospered professionally despite the record suggesting he didn't help many of his patients ... well, it seems to provide useful information about the whole field.
No, the therapist who helped him was Lacanian.
Then I misinterpreted it.
So the first therapist is not Lacanian and the second therapist is.
Reminds me of eevblog's “Don't turn it on, take it apart!” approach to reviewing electronics
The goal of psychoanalysis is not "to help people live normal lives", unlike typical "supportive" therapy. After Freud, most psychoanalysis has been about developing a sort of reflexive self-understanding or self-knowledge, rather than curing symptoms. This might clear it up (or it might make it more confusing): https://nosubject.com/End_of_analysis
“I have not seen my psychoanalyst in 200 years. He was a strict Freudian and if I had seen him all this time, now I would be almost healed” ~ Woody Alan, “Sleepers”
Too bad he didn't have those years or he might be more human and his art might be good, which it is not.
Could I get a summary of this summary?
Your childhood trauma isn't that your father beat you, it's that you couldn't figure out _why_ he beat you.
Or something.
Meanwhile here I am, unable to figure out why Lacan's father didn't beat him.
This made me literally lol.
Me too.
*slow clap*
😄
Or conversely, that your father was too hen-pecked to beat you as he should have, and instead you suffered from smother-love.
And now I want to write that as "(S/m)Other-love".
Oh, that's good! 😀
You want your mom and fear your dad and you don't know what to do about it and you moralize about that fact. Although when I put it like that it sounds like I'm only describing the process for boys and maybe there's another version for girls that the author just didn't catch on to.
Straight girls, I suppose you mean. But remember that the "wanting one's mum" thing is only "sexual" insofar as psychoanalysts decide by fiat to consider babies' physical enjoyment of being hugged and fed by their mothers to be "sexual". (Heterosexual) baby girls are just as capable of deriving that sort of not-actually-especially-sexual pleasure from closeness to their mothers, so the theory doesn't actually need to be boy-specific.
(Of course, I think the theory is hogwash besides, but never mind.)
Sex is weird and we will never understand it.
But, following Lacan is it the sort of weird where, if we ever did understand it, we would immediately replace it with a version of sex that we didn't understand?
... Or maybe that happened already.
Is it true that no one's parents ever tell the kid exactly what they want? Mine never did, but i assumed that they were uniquely flawed somehow. I never thought of that as normal.
Keep in mind that in a Lacanian model, your parents *can't* tell you what they want, because they probably don't know, because their parents didn't know, because their parents didn't know, because...
There's even a non-Lacanian sense in which the parents are uncertain due to the complexity of the situation, lack of time and energy, misunderstandings, etc. and fail to properly express their feelings. It's a common trope in shows and movies for an older dad to tell his children that he loves them and should have said that before (or spent more time with them, or whatever).
I cannot imagine a world in which a parent tells their kid exactly what they want. Such a parent would definitely be a bad parent, but even if we disagreed on that, there's a long period where communication with your non-verbal child is a serious challenge.
I am a parent who tried very hard to communicate to my toddler exactly why I wanted : that he stopped hitting and teasing his siblings.
Sometimes (like in this case), that is very important. That's an explicit want that will also be in line with whatever values you're trying to instill in your child.
But when I read the analysis above, that's not what comes to mind. What comes to mind are the wants you should, under no circumstances share:
"I'm sorry honey, Mommy's having a hard time concentrating because she is very very horny right now. And not for your father, to be clear. For that young man cleaning the neighbor's pool. I'd really like to have him in a ball gag."
"While I know I should desire that you learn to control your emotional responses to things in a way that serves you well into adulthood, most of my reptile brain doesn't give a crap about that, and would like you to shut up, immediately, and stop making a scene in this grocery store."
"I know you're very into dance, and all of the best parts of my personality are in agreement that it's good that you've found your passion, but there actually is some part of me that always wanted to be a chess grandmaster - I sublimated that desire when I chose to instead get a stable career and be a parent, and I'd make that choice again. That said, it's left me with a fantasy that my child would one day study chess, so some part of me is somewhat disappointed you chose dance class over chess lessons."
These "wants" aren't any less real than other wants, and your kid is still going to detect your distraction, frustration, and ambivalence respectively. And while they don't know the details, they will sense that you have needs they cannot meet. I don't know if that forms the basis for every single part of their relationship and personality (and common sense says I should doubt it), as the Freudians and Lacanians apparently do. But I do think they'll notice despite your best efforts, and that it's probably better that you not give them a detailed explanation nonetheless.
Well indeed. But do we need a psychoanalyst to explain that this does not have to be told to a kid?
No. But the Lacanian claim (according to this review) isn't that you should or shouldn't tell kids about your wants. It's that you have wants the kids can't fulfill, those wants are ambiguous, and that ambiguity is one of the main shapers of how we seek meaning in our lives.
I find that third bit very suspect, but was just saying assumptions one and two are trivially obvious
I also totally agree. That this ambiguity sometimes can play a role in influencing children why not, but that it usually is a big factor seems very unlikely.
My main question with psychoanalysis is always less "is this correct?" because it obviously is just a bunch of nonsense.
My question is always "why do so many people get taken in by it?" I suspect the answer there is the same as horoscopes or Myers-Brigg: "some of it is obvious and some of it is obscure enough that our pattern-seeking brains can project their own meaning onto it.
"We can't share every part of our lives with our children" is the obvious part and "the things our parents kept from us makes us who we are" is the "Mercury is in retrograde" part. With a nice side order of "therefore it's not our fault."
I totally agree: it is total nonsense and the wonder is that a susbstantial minority of people love said nonsense.
I also think that it is a bit similar to horoscope, MB or tarot reading, as it is a way to produce interesting stories and insights, provided you are not too fussy about these insights being correct.
And the obscurity of the langage could perhaps make the nonsense more attractive for some people. A few years ago, I was very striked when one of my friend told me very seriously that she met this great writer (the son in law of Lacan!), that se did not understand a word of what he said but found him a genius anyway.
Mystery is inherently interesting and exciting and science can have a way of disenchanting reality by projecting a huge hard light on the lovely mists hiding reality. So may be Lacan being vague and obscure make him more attractive.
I have one part of the answer, relevant to the horoscope and Myers-Briggs: analyzing yourself in a mostly-positive way feels GREAT. Double if someone else is doing it, because then you're getting actual attention from another human being, but there's something about turning even your own attention deeply on your own personality (again: in a positive way--this is not self-examination for sins or to figure out why you're a violent drunk or whatever) that feels almost like getting high-quality attention from someone else. It makes you feel valued and important. Why all this talk, all this analysis, if you are the mere nobody you fear you are, worthwhile only for your small usefulness to other people? No, you are a subject worth understanding.
There may be personalities for whom this doesn't work, which would explain why these things aren't universally popular. But there are definitely personalities for whom it does.
I think you may be thinking of a much higher and abstract level of "want" than is relevant to 99.5% of parenting. For most of their lives what you want is "stop hitting your brother" and "wash your hands after you pee and flush the damn toilet" and "do not wipe your hands on your pants, that's why there's a napkin next to your plate for God's sake" and yes we tell the kids exactly what we want over and over and over and over again, until it finally starts seeping in after 5-10 years of fierce repetition and you begin to glimpse the possibility of a civilized human emerging from the hooligan chrysalis.
In terms of telling them what we want at a higher abstract level, which is only relevant in the last one to two dozen months of childhood, the latter half of high school, by that point most of us are tired enough that we settle for "don't embarrass us by going into the pot business or pr0n, if possible kthx!"
It's probably valuable to be at least a little aware of your deeper wants for your kid but I agree day-to-day you can communicate most things you need from your kids. (Also I'm brand new to this so I'll let you know if I'm right at this in about 20 years :P ).
But that deeper, abstract level is almost certainly what Lacan is referring to - the assumption seems to be 1) a baby's primary motivation is pleasing its mother, 2) there are some needs mothers have that children cannot fill, and those are ambiguous enough to cause distress, 3) this leads to a lifelong hole in *every person's* life and most human action is an attempt to fill that hole.
Assumptions 1 and 3 are pretty suspect but assumption 2 is just obviously true imo.
Well, as an empiricist I would need to be persuaded in the first place of one of the *assumptions* around which a lot of of this baby psychology is constructed -- which is that we need a social explanation for basic aspects of human nature in the first place. Who says? Maybe we are just born wired up with a lifelong yearning for meaning, stature, positive feedback from our tribe. Why not? We are apparently born with an instinct to learn language, to play in the water, to walk upright, to use tools, to fornicate and form friendships, pair bonds -- and much else besides. Who says we need any complex "programming" step in our tender years? It might just be part of the hardware.
Indeed, for such essential steps in the budding human nature to be left to a delicate web of interaction strikes me, from a strictly engineering viewpoint, as insanely risky. It's hard for me to believe evolution would not have provided a much more robust mechanism, e.g. a bunch of hardwired tendencies.
Doesn't mean psychology doesn't have a role in screwing these things up -- we've plenty of evidence traumatic experience can pervert instinct -- but the proposition that the child's nature is a blank slate on which mommy artfully (if unconsciously) draws strikes me as grandiose and insufficiently supported by measurement.
Completely agreed. As I said elsewhere, the question with these psychoanalysis philosophies is never "is this true?" It's almost always obviously not true (at least not literally true). The question is 1) Do they sometimes produce insightful ideas at a rate greater than random guessing, and if so why? Or 2) If they don't, why are they so compelling to so many people?
Because those are the more interesting questions, I'm trying to meet the philosophy where it lives. There's no reason at all to assume that all human behavior derives from not knowing your parents' unconscious desires for you. But I think we can grant that parents probably have unconscious or unshared desires their children don't know how to fulfill.
Yesss....and I have definitely seen trauma related to that in certain specific cases. Unusually narcissistic parents, and parents who cannot get another adult to fulfill their ordinary narcissistic needs, can do lasting damage to their kids (in adolescence especially, when the child is yearning for adult "status") by allowing the child to stand in for the emotional role that should be filled by an adult friend, spouse, or lover.
I think it's even possible to do that earlier: some parents are so starved of ego strength and reinforcement that they will try too hard to win or keep their young child's friendship, to the point of neglecting their parental duties and perverting the child's development into its own narcissistic pathways.
It *can* be a desperately lonely thing to realize you cannot be their little friends, that sometimes it's your duty to be Mom or Dad, the Right Bastard Who Said No, and (apparently) didn't care one bit that you (the child) said you'd hate them forever for that "no" and totally 100% really truly meant it at the time -- especially when you (the parent) are tired and not even entirely sure you're right and the little tear-stained wretch is wrong.
I think with respect to analysis -- or therapy in general -- I think we need to consider yet another possibility, which is that the *surface* aspect -- all the talk, theorizing, passing of complex verbal symbols back and forth -- may actually be unimportant. The real healing power of analysis, or therapy, when it has any, may come from much more primitive aspects of the interaction.
Id est, having someone pay respectful attention to what you have to say, and not be threatened by it, not attempt to manipulate you for his (the therapist's) own benefit (at least too much) during it, being in the presence of someone genuinely compassionate and attentive who clearly *wants* to understand things from your point of view -- would not these things *alone* have considerable therapeutic power, even if what went back and forth in words were literally nonsense? You could maybe just get together and chant rhythmic soothing nonsense syllables and it might work just as well.
I think there are a couple of meanings of this.
One is communicating specific requests, like Emma B says ("don't hit your siblings"). I'm sure parents do this.
Another is something like "give you their utility function". This is impossible because people don't have utility functions, don't understand them even insofar as they have them, and can't communicate them even insofar as they understand them. CF the rationalist idea of "complexity of value" https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/complexity-of-value
I think the tension where this becomes an actually interesting question is something like "do parents tell their kids what they want from them", eg "I want you to become a doctor, have lots of grandchildren, and make the family proud". I think some do, some don't, and that lots of parents would feel bad doing this because it's putting on too much pressure.
I think most likely Lacan is thinking at the utility function level, and with very young kids who can't understand even the few things their parents do communicate, and at a time when parents' actual demand is probably something like "be cute and impressive and don't cause me too much trouble", which most parents would feel bad saying. But this is just a guess.
In my circle of friends, most parents try to transmit their tastes and values to their children, even if with very variable success!
I don't doubt that it is impossible for someone to express his or her "utility function" in its entirety, given its immense complexity and the fact that a significant part of it is probably unconscious-not to mention that it must be full of contradictions. But at the same time it seems clear to me that most of us have certain values that we are aware of, that we feel are important and that we are perfectly capable of expressing clearly, and that we want to pass on to our children. In my experience, it is also very common for parents to try NOT to pass on certain values/ways of doing things that they have disliked in their own upbringing.
There is also probably a large category of "unexamined" values: those that parents have learned from their own parents, that they have taken for granted and reproduce without ever questioning whether they are really relevant. I had read in Proust's Recherche du temps perdu a tiny example of this kind of thing: the narrator understands at one point that the reason his clever friend sometimes proudly tells not-so-funny jokes is that they had been told to him by his father and that his family considered these stories to be laughable. The friend had admitted to the funniness of these stories without ever examining it.
To continue on this subject, on a personal note, I felt that I understood a lot more psychology from In Search for Lost Time than from the few books by Freud that I read ( they were on the high school curriculum in France). I am always exasperated when I read psychoanalytical texts: I find jarring the combination of a pompous jargon with a content that has always seemed to me to mix platitudes with obviously false absurdities, and in Lacan's case those innumerable stupid puns that think they are profound...
Emma_B, your comments are small treasures. They convey common sense and kindness, and are thus almost out-of-place in a discussion of Lacan and his ideas.
It’s nice to hear this from a French person. I kept wondering if something was getting lost in translation (probably, but not as much as confused me.)
And so many of the anecdotes about patients make me say “Wow, 1920s France or Austria must have been really different.” Most psychoanalysis patient stories feel to me like they were written by an early-model AI.
Thanks for the hint. Proust lecture is overdue for me. I regret now that my French is so insufficient that I`ll need a translated text. Should be working on my Polish before brushing up French, though.
My impression is that there are parents who are clear (at least some of the time) about what they want, but they are, at best, a good-sized minority.
It's possible that being unable to be clear about what one wants when giving directions is part of being neurotypical.
I think a human is always in conflict with themselves, misaligned, generating tension. So to be in the presence of another person is to be in the presence of their enclosed conflict. And so if that person is my parent, I am in the presence of their conflict. It might be a large gap, such as when the alcoholic parent says “I just want you to be happy” and then goes and gets drunk. It might be a small gap - distraction maybe (“how was your day, dear!”/tune out.)
If the parent is intentional and self-merciful about juggling their own conflict, it might be possible for the parent not to pull the child in multiple directions. Should the child believe the “I love you” or the drunk? How can both be true? If the parent is not merciful with themselves, whichever of their parts the child allies with, the child will never be safe, the parent will eventually attack them next time the parent has an internal struggle.
Kids see into the parental subconscious more deeply than other beings. Maybe because the child lives in its mother’s body for a while. Maybe just long term proximity. But the “I never understood what they wanted from me” seems to me to translate better as “I found them to be unable to project coherence toward me and therefore unable to project coherence about me.”
It's possible that, for a lot of people, being clear about what they want feels like lowing their status. "Don't do that" means not having to bother explaining what the "that" is, one's belief that one is clear enough because the other person *should* know what is meant.
That is a really good observation. Recently I was reminded how “the first rule of money is don’t talk about money,” exactly as you describe, negotiation and explanations imply ignorance or imperfect previous understanding. One is supposed to swim in the rules like a fish in water, nonverbally. A certain behavior is necessary, but it cannot be requested by another individual, because it is supposed to be collective. Requesting it would also reveal/imply the potential influence of an individual on others, which is also supposed to be invisible.
I tell my kids what I want them to do all the time. "Go do your homework." "Can you get that box for me?" "Dinnertime!" "Get off the table!" "Go to bed."
I've never tried to understand Lacanian psychoanalysis before, but I've always wondered how do people combine it with Marxism as you often see in the humanities (at least here in South America and in Continental Europe). This review puzzled me even more. How are these things even remotely compatible?
Lacan + Marx = Zizek, so you should look into Zizek's work to see how it's done (answer: through a lot of Hegel and a lot of jargon).
I personally tried reading Zizek's first book (The Sublime Object of Ideology), but I got stuck on a part 15 pages in where he compared the unconscious to the commodity form, probably because I haven't read any Marx.
Seems like one advantage when combining two notoriously recondite academic theories like that is that if you have a basic understanding of each, you can bullshit almost without restraint. Even if your interpretations are thoroughly puerile, very few reviewers will be able to say more than something like, "Well, his [Cosmology] is superficial and full of undergraduate mistakes, but perhaps it does work as a kind of training aid to absorb his intriguing theories in [Basic Fighter Maneuvers]."
This is true but Zizek also gives notoriously no-bullshit talks (there's plenty on Youtube) and writes very accessible articles, occasionally in major news outlets. Fact is, he's a really good philosopher, but he is in the Marxist/Leftist tradition (although I found his talk with Jordan Peterson a really good way of convincing people that this doesn't imply some naive utopianism), so may not appeal to everyone on this site.
What's really weird to me is that although he's in a Leftist tradition, everything I've seen from him actually seems Rightist.
I do get where he's coming from. Most of the biggest debates in modern political discourse (at least here in the West) are about cultural issues, rather than economic ones. So I can see how old-school Marxists like Zizek could actually come across as quite "right-wing" by modern standards, in the sense that they're not all that socially/culturally progressive, and some are actually quite socially/culturally conservative.
After all, Marxist-Leninist dictators like Stalin, Mao, and Castro were further to the *cultural* right than the majority of Western conservatives, being patriarchal, nationalistic, and homophobic to a degree that would make even hardline Republicans balk. And while Marx himself didn't go that far, he was still rather socially conservative in some regards: he was a staunch homophobe, adamantly opposed to prostitution, somewhat anti-immigrant (on the grounds that immigrants drove down wages, hurting the working class and benefiting the bourgeoise), and had little but disdain for the "lumpen-proletariat" (the people below the working class, e.g. vagrants, beggars, dole recipients, criminals).
Yeah, it's true. I think this is because "leftism" itself shifted a lot in the last decade or so, and few "active" leftists are willing to touch his ideas outside of academia or small critical theory circles. Freddie deBoer strikes me as having a similar sort of relationship with the left as Zizek does, where he's still a leftist but disagrees really hard with a lot of what passes as contemporary leftism.
I wouldn't explain any of this based on a *shift* in the left, because orthodox Marxism and orthodox 1960s feminism still both read as left, even as Zizek does not.
Zizek vs Peterson is the best political debate ever!
P: "I admit that capitalism sucks, but socialism is horrible."
Z: "I admit that socialism is horrible, but capitalism sucks."
P: "Wait a moment, do we even have a factual disagreement here?"
Z: "Dunno. Let me tell you a dirty joke instead."
Not gonna lie, this makes me actually want to watch it.
You got stuck because he's a fraud, just like Lacan... There's nothing there to understand, just nonsense.
I consider my task when reading to be to best understand the work from the frame and intent put forward by the author, rather than to judge whether it is "true" or not. Nonsense is a subjective term; it may not make sense to me now, but if I can trace the author's footsteps, then it will eventually make sense. And only then do I feel prepared to cast judgment, about whether it's good or bad.
>Nonsense is a subjective term; it may not make sense to me now, but if I can trace the author's footsteps, then it will eventually make sense. And only then do I feel prepared to cast judgment<
This do it be what if you dumbdumb said, in the way of try smart but no no, I interior speaking. They need to do way instain mother.
In the same way that believers in one fringe conspiracy theory are more likely to believe other fringe conspiracy theories, I think believers in one heterodox academic theory are more likely to believe other heterodox academic theories, even in separate fields. In particular, Marxism and Freudian/Lacanian psychology both tend to attract a similar sort of person - the type of intellectual who's skeptical of mainstream academia for its supposed biases, but still holds a certain reverence towards the concept of academia. (This last bit is what distinguishes them from both the anti-establishment right, e.g. Q-Anon believers, and from the more anarchist and/or naturalist groups of the left, e.g. punks, hippies, New Age types.) So in that regard, it's not surprising that Marxism and Freudian/Lacanian theory would often go hand-in-hand.
There's also a more direct connective tissue between the two in the form of postmodern and post-structuralist theory, which heavily draws from Marxism (despite contradicting much of Orthodox Marxist theory) while also being deeply intertwined with Freudian and Lacanian theories of psychology. Plus Marx himself drew heavily from Hegelian philosophy, and there's a strong Hegelian undercurrent to Freud and Lacan.
Marxism and Freudian/Lacanian theory are totally mainstream in certain academic disciplines.
Phillip Magnuss claims that Marx is (by far) the author most often assigned in US universities:
https://www.aier.org/article/introduction-to-the-best-of-karl-marx/
I don't know enough about education in the US to know what that really means.
That sounds right. The relevant distinction might not be "orthodox/heterodox" but more like "legitimate/illegitimate".
Yes, there's a difference between "heterodox academic theory" and "crackpot pseudoscience that you'd never hear within ten miles of any respectable academic institution."
It strikes me as funny that "punks, hippies, New Age types" are subsumed here. The identification is correct, but I remember the punk saying: "Never trust a hippy." . It's Chapman again, and Walter Sobchak, Esq., of course. One love.
> I've never tried to understand Lacanian psychoanalysis before, but I've always wondered how do people combine it with Marxism
I don't know how they are compatible. I can only speculate about the motivation to combine them.
Imagine an academic who wants a reliable way to be critical of society, perhaps because it offers so much to write about. This academic is motivated to come up with a counter-theory to things like naive realism, bourgeois optimism, and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get understanding of human emotion. He or she might like Marxism's promise of standing outside of society. (Literary critic Edmund Wilson said this was the appeal of Marxism for American intellectuals in the 1930s.) But Marxism alone can seem insufficient for addressing some issues, such as our emotional lives. The question would then become, what works with Marxism?
Apparently, it doesn't need to be any sort of psychoanalysis. For example, one Italian Marxist drew on the resilient pessimism of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi instead. Thus Marxism-Leopardism was born. (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n09/perry-anderson/on-sebastiano-timpanaro).
But choosing psychoanalysis seems a little more serious than choosing the mood of a poet.
The compatibility is rooted in how ideology shapes subjectivity and replicates itself. On the ground it makes sense of why we tell our kids to go to school (why?) to get a job (why?) to be a functioning member of society (why?) because that’s what we do even though most of us are some level of miserable doing it.
Lacan attempted to address Marx's theories and claimed that in his concept of surplus value, Marx "invented the symptom." As best I understand it, it's an argument that some process in the development of the soul took an external form before it was recreated in personal psychology, as I think often happens.
1. I DID want you to write this exact review; I was excited to see and read it. It sounds more exciting to me than the other ones you put in prediction markets. I don't think I want that only because you might want me to want it, although I'm certainly capable of something like that. I think I want it because (a) I'm obsessed with my own mind and so hearing anything about it, even if it's adjectives associated with my birth year by Chinese astrology on a placemat, is pretty interesting, and (b) you're a psychiatrist and I always want to know what you think about this type of stuff.
2. As an authority-seeking pervert currently converting to Catholicism after a lifetime of atheism (and did I mention my absent father?) I found some of this relevant to my interests in a different sense.
3. That diagram almost looks like abstract algebra, or perhaps category theory, the former of which was my research area in grad school, but it's still not saying anything to me.
I think it's fairly widely accepted that Lacan's occasional forays into mathematics (i, the square root of -1, if the phallus, apparently) are just made-up out of whole cloth - perhaps in an attempt to please the scientific Other.
That makes me pretty dubious about the rest of the Lacanian project, particularly given it's obscurity/obscurantism. Anytime he says anything concrete, it seems to be either wrong or not-even-wrong. How seriously should we entertain the unverifiable stuff, given his approach seems to be just making stuff up and writing it down confusingly?
The Why Theory podcast has great explainers on a number of lacanian concepts, including what he meant by the square root of negative one
I’ve seen “what he meant was”-style explanations, but never anything approaching a derivation. Which is how equations get made.
I think borrowing mathematical terminology to dress up your non mathematical theory is maybe a little desperate, but defensible. But “I have derived the following formulae, see, here’s e, it’s all very complex and precise “ when you have not, in fact, derived any formulae is a real charlatan move.
Lacan would've loved the superstring analogy, especially since he got deeply into knot theory during the 70s. It's the perfect pun!
Surprisingly, I don't have a lot to say about or add to this review, other than a few small comments, that:
- My guess is that contemporary transgenderism is more of a neurotic than a psychotic phenomenon, unlike in Fink's day. I almost wrote a post about exactly this but I didn't want to get absolutely destroyed on Twitter.
- You mention psychosis rates haven't risen, but did you know that the original definition of "autism" was as a subtype of schizophrenia, i.e. psychosis (source: Eugene Bleuler's original definition of autism in a tome I found in a rare bookstore: https://listed.to/@simpolism/25737/excerpt-bleuler-on-autism-1911)? And we do indeed see more autists today (although of course there's diagnostic issues etc). There's even a contemporary Lacanian text on autism, called "The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language" by Leon Brenner, which deals with the topic in some detail.
- One other comment on perversion: I read a great quote that said "the neurotic fantasizes about being a pervert" but I can't remember where it's from but it seemed true. My friend getting a PhD in this stuff also recommend thinking about perversion as "sociopathy" essentially. They rarely even end up in analysis because they usually don't want to get better. But they end up in jail instead for imagining themselves as "above the Law".
Anyway, glad you're exploring the topic! And my apologies that the neuropsychoanalysis papers didn't make much sense -- but you're correct at least to have expected that LMAO
I think the most important thing you could add is something like -
If you don't have much to say about this, then it sounds like I got things sort of right and have a basic 101-level understanding of some Lacanian concepts. But I still don't understand - why anyone would be attracted to them? What you can do with them? I'm not even asking whether they're true at this point, more like "what kind of predictions do they make that you couldn't get from common sense" or "how do they simplify message length" or something like that? What made you read this kind of stuff and think "Yeah, something about this calls to me and I should continue pursuing this framework"?
Great questions! And you could add : why on earth is Lacanian psychoanalysis still so popular in France among therapists?
Gallic pride? The French do have a reputation for occasionally choosing to be different from everybody else Just So You Know We Can And Very Well Might. Has the Academy accepted "le weekend" yet?
...I would adduce the possibility of sabotage, but I can't bring to mind any foreign intelligence service with a command of French sufficient to embed puns with the precise level of groanworthiness required for versimilitude.
The defining aspect of Frenchness in recent decades/centuries seems to be doing the opposite of whatever the English do.
And if the English laugh at something the French do, then that just makes the French want to do it even harder.
Aggressively co-signed, albeit with the standard caveat that just because something isn't worth your time doesn't mean zero value can be derived (I do like some of Lacan's discussion of The Real, but that might be me sanewashing him). It's one thing to come up with a framework that creates a "straightforward" narrative explaining some collection of observations†, but if we struggle to translate that into any sort of future insight it starts to look like all we've done is overfit on available data.
>I expect that if I made this point to him, Fink would argue that my puny DSM-trained intuition totally misses that psychosis is a Lacanian personality structure which can’t possibly be measured in something as superficial as symptoms. Or maybe he’d refer back to the claim that transgender is a psychosis in the Lacanian sense and so the rise in that counts as fulfillment of his prophecy.
Maybe uncharitable since this is putting words in Fink's mouth, but where this kind of response pattern is accurate (and IME it certainly isn't unknown) it's damning to the idea the frame should be taken seriously. If the expected response to a prediction is either affirmation or irrelevance, you're building an argument, not a theory!
†Ignoring for a moment that the set of observations we consider is very much *not* independent of how good we are at constructing models off of them.
> sanewashing
That's a wonderful word!
A couple stories, from closest to furthest from the "intended audience":
- Within the psychoanalytic community: as I wrote on Reddit, Lacan sold himself as a return-to-Freud, contra object relations theorists like Klein, so analysts might choose Lacan if they found his framing made more sense + wanted a fresh, more abstract read on Freudian concepts. Klein was also kind of notorious for, not quite fabricating, but uh, projecting things wrt her case studies that may or may not have been real.
- Within academia, particularly philosophy and art criticism: Lacan's work can be compared with Ricoeur's work on Freud, in terms of providing an interpretive framework for understanding texts. The original feminist theory paper that defined the "male gaze" drew from Lacan extensively, and his star student was Guattari (they eventually became estranged, classically), who co-authored some very influential books with Deleuze, such as "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia". There is a direct lineage from Lacan to contemporary theories of gender, by way of Judith Butler, for example. I believe Lyotard was also a student of Lacan, and he was famous for basically inventing/mainstreaming "postmodernism" as a concept in philosophy. In a certain sense, this makes Lacan one of the original seeds of pomo, alongside Derrida. Lacan also is playful with a lot of classic philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, so academics with such familiarity find him fun to read rather than just frustrating.
- For me personally, a random guy: I had already been in therapy for a long time and something kind of traumatic happened that forced me to re-evaluate my own epistemic frameworks regarding my emotions and desires. The first book I found that actually helped me develop new epistemics was a text by Eric Berne, his precursor to "Games People Play". This led me to Freud (I started with Interpretation of Dreams), and then I started reading some bloggers who referenced Lacan and realized some of his ideas are _insanely_ powerful in my own reflections and also as broad theoretical tools, such as the big Other and his formulas of sexuation (which I have been blogging about obliquely for a few months now). I also felt like he was being neglected as a useful resource in the part of the internet where I hung out, so I decided to dive in and try to figure some shit out. This took a lot longer than I expected...
In terms of why someone would pursue psychoanalytic theory in particular, Lacan himself notwithstanding, I tend to think in terms of a spectrum where on the one side, you have an entirely symptoms & pathology oriented medical psychiatry, and on the other side you have entirely non-pathological frameworks like astrology, tarot, all that woo stuff (they do actually work as tools, but purely as entropy-generating gestalts, i.e. as noise that destabilizes high level priors, akin to psychedelics but without the drugs -- helps you break rigid patterns of thought). Psychoanalysis seems to fall in the middle, where there is some degree of coherent ethics and normativity, but there's a far broader degree of freedom when it comes to what is and isn't considered a pathology.
In practice, what I really wanted to do was figure out how to stop feeling *ashamed* of myself for having desires (read: sexual fantasies) that might not be cool to admit to most people, and that didn't actually impede my life in any way except for the fact that I had them. And psychoanalytic theory was enormously helpful toward that end, to the point where I eventually ended up being able to just *tell* my therapist about those fantasies (spoiler: my therapist didn't react at all, i.e. it went fine), which helped me make a new sort of peace with myself in a way that's a little hard to explain.
The new challenge is that psychoanalytic theory goes against a huge amount of contemporary psychological doctrine, so now I have different thoughts I feel I can't express in public places, but not because I'm ashamed of them. I would say that the prediction-making capacity of psychoanalytic theory is extremely lateral, in that it lets you cut across domains in novel ways, but that first requires a pretty major overhaul in terms of epistemological fundamentals. But hope is not lost: my friend Natural Hazard has been very closely approximating some Lacanian ideas by way of rationalist thought, and hopefully will make some posts about it on LessWrong soon.
I hope this answer was sufficiently thorough and makes sense -- let me know if there's any other elaboration I can do that would be helpful.
Thank you, this was a helpful response. I think more detail about your own experience would be more helpful, but I can understand if you don't want to share all your fantasies and psych issues with the blog-reading public.
Is "Big Other" a stronger/different idea than the sociometer idea of "you're constantly checking your abstract social status because that's important for evo psych reasons"?
Is the sexual stuff useful insofar as it provides a nonjudgmental framework for approaching strange sexual fantasies / does the Tarot card useful entropy thing, or because you think it's literally right and "pays rent in anticipated experience".
> Is "Big Other" a stronger/different idea than the sociometer idea of "you're constantly checking your abstract social status because that's important for evo psych reasons"?
Yeah, the big Other is unfortunately an extremely complicated idea. Part of the difficulty with Lacan in general is that understanding his ideas ties in a lot with the epistemic setting from which they originate. Lacan is big on speech because the analyst in a psychoanalytic setting basically only has speech to go on. So the big Other is ultimately a pattern of utterances, a specific object of speaking, which is typically "society" or "everyone" or "God" as you note, whatever the abstract object is that stands in for a totality, and is also always "external" to the speaking subject.
The difference that this makes vs the evo psych view is that the big Other isn't really a psychological mechanism *per se*, but something people use. So the "point" of the idea is that when someone speaks and makes reference to "society", you can be like "oh, they're talking about the big Other", which as Lacan notes, does not exist. This leads to new potential questions, like "when you say 'society', who exactly are you talking about?" and lets you cut deeply through the ways people hide their feelings through abstractions.
To me, this feels very different than the frame of evo psych, which seems to me like an explanation rather than a purely formal property (this is why Lacan was obsessed with math, btw: he saw it as a language that expresses formal structures in a highly compressed and totally non-lossy fashion).
As an example case, shame relates a lot to the Other, because shame is about feeling like you broke a "rule" (whose rules?). Spinoza's definition does a good job of showing this: "Shame is sorrow with the accompanying idea of some action which we imagine people blame." (which people?)
> Is the sexual stuff useful insofar as it provides a nonjudgmental framework for approaching strange sexual fantasies / does the Tarot card useful entropy thing, or because you think it's literally right and "pays rent in anticipated experience".
I would say that reading a lot of case studies of people with extremely unusual sexualities, and also seeing my own fantasies represented in the literature, made me feel less ashamed ("I am not alone in this thing, and other people are able to say it without being judged, so maybe I can too"), enough to actually speak the fantasy in therapy, as I mentioned. The weird thing about speaking something which you feel is absolutely totally against the rules is that it has a kind of freeing effect, an elation to it, as opposed to merely thinking it. Suddenly the rules appear as a sort of illusion, kind of like how the PUAs/redpillers are always saying shit like "you can just talk to her bro."
I feel like this is one of the appeals of rationalist conversational norms in general (no wonder your patients like your demeanor!), as it's a place that I personally found helpful because I had some thoughts I was ashamed of having, but that I felt able to talk out with people rather than being bludgeoned for (yknow, SJW stuff back in 2016, the usual).
So the value in non-judgment, IMO, is less about a useful entropy and also not even necessarily about a factual correctness, as much as having a place where you can just speak it out loud (i.e. free associate, speaking without prior thought to what you're saying) and see what happens next. And as in the above example with the big Other, the reason that the Lacanian concepts exist is so the analyst can have a sense of what to do or ask next, i.e. they can see how to fit those utterances into place formally, as a piece of the structure of "you", even if they can't provide an immediate interpretation or explanation.
Wow, thanks for your responses/input. For me it was very much better than Scott's review. (no offense to SA meant.)
So in a sense the analysis is itself a form of therapy, and it’s truth value or ability to predict is fairly irrelevant, as long as it helps the therapist form a non-destructive coherent plan of action/helps the patient make the realization that they are not alone?
No, I wasn't in analysis, I was in normal therapy. The point of analysis is different, much more about revealing your inner desires to yourself, and then you can do what you want with that knowledge. Zizek puts it as something like "learning to [recognize and] enjoy your symptom", which is entirely different than "curing" your symptom.
Asking about psychoanalytic theory's "truth value" or "ability to predict" is like asking about the "truth value" or "ability to predict" of statistics itself -- it doesn't make sense, because analysis is not a science in the proper sense of the term, but rather is a set of formal tools that guide your empirical efforts to find the truth of the person in front of you (just like statistics, but oriented toward the speech of a single individual rather than data points). So it's closer to a philosophy of science, in level of abstraction.
Your comments are excellent and do provide understanding of the usefulness of Lacan's work. I look forward to reading your blog.
"all that woo stuff (they do actually work as tools, but purely as entropy-generating gestalts, i.e. as noise that destabilizes high level priors, akin to psychedelics but without the drugs -- helps you break rigid patterns of thought)"
This is a really interesting take on the usefulness of things I previously considered useless. Thank you.
I agree. This was one of the most interesting parts of any comment below the review.
Art, literature and music can have the same effects. If one thinks of Freudian and other psychoanalytic frameworks as literary rather than scientific, their utility is more readily plausible (from a utilitarian standpoint).
Indeed, it’s almost a cliche within certain artistic/academic sets to say one reads Freud more as literature than as actual medico-therapeutic or strictly scientific intervention.
It seems like mental masturbation, but I understand Lacanian concepts even less than you. The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking "yeah, ok, but what is this useful for?".
It's like over-engineering taken to extremes. A bit of over-engineering is fine I guess. But I have a deep problem with purposeful obscurantism. It stinks of ages past.
Many people have an experience of personal epiphany when reading works by Lacan and Freud. There's a moment where it's as if the scales fall from your eyes and you recognize something profound has been described regarding the shape of your own experience and (un)consciousness.
This also happens in therapy. The thing about corny puns is a lot less corny when it actually happens to you and you realize that the motor force of some inexplicable anguish was a verbal formula that was simultaneously on the surface of your psyche/your discourse and paradoxically willfully "nulled" by your own conscious mind.
This possibly sounds like a religious line of argument, or a cop-out, 'you had to be there,' etc.
But I also think that it's true that the primary motivating experience for credulity in psychoanalysis is this uncanny feeling that there is something more in us than our sense of who we are (which follows quite naturally from the "common sense" notion that we don't know ourselves with total transparency), and that this unknown core of our self contains some things we only do not know because we would prefer not to.
To deny this would seem to be naive—no one is morally perfect—and to refuse to investigate it would seem irresponsible.
I suggest you read "Basic Freud" by Michael Kahn. It's a much better introduction to psychoanalytic theory, the best I've read out of a dozen or so attempts to get it.
"Physics is stuck in an annoying equilibrium where the Standard Model works for almost everything, and then occasionally we come across some exotic domain where it totally falls apart and we know that reality must be something deeper and weirder. "
The standard model actually only works well for electromagnetism and weak force interactions. It falls apart mathematically when you try to calculate strong force interactions properly, and no one has even figured out how to add gravity to it at all, let alone actually do calculations with it.
And of course there's the fact that it doesn't have dark matter and what not.
Point being, most people don't think gravity is exotic, but will think that single electrons travelling the void at 0.5c is exotic and the standard model is awful at the former but seemingly perfect at the latter.
??? Using lattices, you can get pretty good predictions. And for most energy scales we care about, we can get an effective field theory out of it and calculate away. Like, it works damn well in the LHC. If it didn't we'd be having a ball of a time. The standard model is just disgutingly hard to do high accuarcy calculations with for the strong force, but even then we've got some pretty decent phenomenlogical models.
Plus, we can combine the standard model with classical curved spacetime (i.e. no gravitons). The problems is that things blow up at certain energy scales or requires extra stuff that we don't have evidence for. But they still work for most energy scales i.e. day to day life.
See this paper for more https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1401.2026
Not being able to do explicit calculations is a huge handicap. We still don't know answers to basic questions, like if there is an island of stability, and why or why not. Basic phenomena like jets are very hard to understand. A lot of effort has been put into AdS/CFT-like models to get a qualatative handle on these kinds of things, even though those models aren't particularly standard-model like.
And no amount of lattice QCD will tell you about dark matter or susy.
Also, we can do more than classical gravity. Doing quantum gravity to one-loop is fine, too.
Also also, "every day life" energy scales are boring. If they were interesting, I'd have gotten my degree in classical mechanics in the 1800s.
Man all the people who publish in Phys. Rev. B or E just gave you the finger...no, wait, *both* fingers...whoa
Noting that QCD has problems "in practice" is an important qualifier to HaraldN's statement. Yes, in practice we can't get to jets or what have you with explicit calculations. But I don't see anything suggesting that the standard model couldn't account for that with enough compute. It does not fall apart, so much as require devillishly clever computations to prise out the meanest answers. Yet, the answers are there.
SUSY is a failure. Dark matter is a big problem, but that's got nothing to do with QCD (probably).
And boring stuff is what we want to explain. If it looked like this wasn't just hard but impossible to do well, then that would be a huge black mark against the standard model.
Sorry for the sloppy reply.
This system seems to assume a strict good-cop-bad-cop approach to parenting, where the mOther is soft and loving but increasingly distant, while the (Name-Of-The-)Father is stern and harsh and punishing.
Setting aside the gendered aspect, it just seems weird to me that Lacanians take it as a given that those are always going to be different figures. You don't have to bring modern single mothers into it to recognize that mothers absolutely do scold their kids, tell them to follow rules, make vague implicit threats that could be construed by psychoanalysts as threats of castration (e.g. "Now, Bobby, I'm going to count to ten… You don't want Mommy to get angry, do you?").
If, according to Lacan, getting your Law from somewhere else than a Father begets an entirely unique kind of mental illness — *surely* getting it from the same person who is also acting as your mOther would have interesting effects? Doesn't Fink talk about this at all?
(I kinda suspect the effect is that it begets healthier people who don't internalize weird gendered essentialism and don't go to see psychoanalysts, who therefore don't hear about them.)
I wonder if the whole mother-father-infant bit is a projection on the part of the father (therapist.) Since little Junior came along, daddy isn’t getting any. Junior is the one “telling” the father that desiring mommy is wrong. Junior does this by keeping her awake all night every night feeding him and calming him down. While daddy is reading his serious books (language! Law!) hmm.
I can think of one person I know of who fits that Psychotic description practically to a T, but the conditions Lacan talks about Psychosis arising from are basically the opposite. There's an interesting observation there, but the predictive power is one hundred percent wrong in this particular case.
I have a dumb hypothesis about obscurantist works, and it goes something like: A) If I state my thesis simply and understandably, it'll be a combination of simple observations and complete nonsense. B) Simple and easy to understand works are easier to criticize, so my work will get torn to shreds. It leads to "I want to maintain my high-status self image, so I'll write about things in an intentionally obfuscated way, and if anyone criticizes my work then, I'll just claim they didn't understand it well enough." Maybe uncharitable, but I think there's a difference between work that is actually difficult to understand (Partial Differential Equations, Organic Chemistry, etc.) and work that has easy to understand concepts made deliberately difficult to make the author seem smarter.
For what it's worth, I'm sure Lacan would dismiss me as an "Obsessive" who pretends his work is of little value, because look at the category he created specifically for people who dismiss him!
I feel like a lot of what makes this seem unapproachable is that the authors seem, in a significant sense, incapable of imagining non-sexual pleasure; everything gets put in a sexual framework.
As for the weird panorama of sexuality, the landscape that is impossible to easily describe, the way some people must have certain conditions fulfilled, and others cannot have those conditions met in order to experience pleasure - like, that's everything. Like, think about the weird panorama of eating habits, the landscape that is impossible to easily describe - the way some people must have certain spices in their food, the way others cannot have those same spices.
For the blindfold situation, imagine eating a fine meal which is delightful, and discovering, after you have been thoroughly enjoying it, that it contains - well, the specifics don't actually matter, just that it contains something which you have no fundamental objection to being in food; horse, for some people. It would suddenly get a lot less appealing, no?
Sexuality isn't a strange and alien landscape surrounding an orderly lawn of well-tended human desire. Everything is like that. What's notable is that sex -seems- unusually strange and alien, because our expectation is that sex should be this incredibly constrained and fundamentally ordinary activity, made special by our social regard of it.
Is castration anxiety this big deal? I dunno. This seems like it might be something which doesn't translate; our culture is peculiarly comfortable with threatening sexual violence against men. I suspect, in the terms of Lacan, that "castration anxiety" as a way of talking about something is, in fact, a way of avoiding talking about something. Taking it outside sexuality, it is talking about potency/power; but I'd suggest that taking the analysis one level further is necessary, and we aren't anxious about losing our power, but rather our desire to take the power away from others. Or, bringing it back to the sexual level, we aren't afraid of being castrated, we are afraid of our desire to castrate.
But, these are, in a sense, all just word games; observe that everything I just wrote is just shuffling around what pointers are being used to talk about the same concepts.
You're not shuffling around pointers here, food and sex are not interchangeable concepts. The fact that you're using them (among other things) as analogous is a step Lacan isn't taking, and we shouldn't lend him the benefit of the doubt. The observation that all desire is strange and disorderly is, I think, a good one, but that doesn't mean food desire is the same as sex desire, or that those things are equivalent.
I am doing exactly what I said I am doing; whether or not Lacan does is more or less irrelevant, although, given that you are denying I am doing the thing I just said I was doing, you may have to forgive me if I don't take your denial that Lacan may be doing that thing as strong evidence for that position.
Lacan is quite literally not using your analogies to food. Food and sex are different things. Analogies are lossy things that hide concrete differences between abstraction.
Words are lossy things that hide concrete differences between abstraction/instantiation. When I use the word "horse", think about all the lost information - what color the coat, where the horse was born, what it ate on its fourth birthday. We don't even refer to the same concept when we use the word "horse" - like, maybe you think a Zebra qualifies. Maybe you think that when I suggest that a Zebra might qualify, this is something that can be resolved by Googling it, or by reference to an encyclopedia - or maybe not. Maybe I think a constellation in the sky qualifies; maybe I think a picture does. "This is not a cigar" is actually quite the claim, taken outside the fairly narrow context in which that claim was actually made.
All of which is to say: I don't think you know what "my" analogies to food are.
I've stated "food" and "sex" are different things. Rather than point at how those things are the same, or attempted to correct a misconception I might have, you've made a statement that amounts to "You don't understand my words" and then refused to clarify.
"But, these are, in a sense, all just word games"
I'm not refusing to clarify, there's no clarity of the kind you seek here; there's no curtain I can draw back to reveal "the real meaning".
Oh, I could say something like "Food and sex are just metaphors for desire", and that would be something intelligible to latch onto, but as soon as we're talking about that, we're not talking about the thing I'm actually talking about, which lays in significant part in the way you construct the bridge between the concepts of "food" and "sex" to think that maybe I'm talking about "desire". (Or not; maybe you think I'm talking about something else entirely.)
It seems like my analogy is saying something, yes? It seems to somehow undermine Lacan, or at least what you think Lacan is saying?
That's a bit odd, because personally, I have no idea what Lacan is saying. I have a guess, but my guesses are based on my own metaphor-constructions, which aren't Lacan's metaphor-constructions, which, if I parse the way Lacan approaches things correctly, might be kind of the point. And if I guess correctly, I agree with Lacan.
My guess, incidentally, is that SA is basically spot-on with the Buddhist take, and that Lacan is pretty deep on what Aella would call the "wordlessness" axis, and is attempting to communicate something which a straightforward explanation of which would be misleading.
"Desire is the root of all suffering" seems to be about right. I could explain in greater detail, but it would be misleading as well. I could say "If your foot hurts, your suffering is that you wish it did not" - and this is trivially true in the sense that if you're fine with your foot hurting you aren't suffering as a result, and yes this is the whole deal, and yes it really is that easy, just stop wanting your foot to stop hurting and you will stop suffering - and remember that somebody who wants to hurt doesn't suffer from hurting, but suffers instead from not hurting - and all of that is all the same thing, and it is all incredibly simple, and yet, until you understand it, it sounds like nonsense, and I have mislead you.
Huh, well food and sex are way different, but also the best analogy that I can think of for each other.
They're good for both representing "primal desires", but differ in important ways, like a lack of food representing an existential threat, while a lack of sex, uh, doesn't.
A lack of sex is an existential threat to your genes, which is what evolution really cares about.
My understanding would have been that the things Lacan thinks are interesting about sexual desire are not unique to sexual desire, which is decidedly different from saying that all desire is equivalent. With maybe a hint that Lacan's inability to properly diagnose what is special about sex (socialization around it, rather than the nature of our desire for it) hints at a fundamental weakness of his ideas.
Probably I have failed to correctly glean insight from the gestalt qualia of reading the op and am simply engaging with it as text on a base level.
Did Scott already review this book when he wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/?
“I will not deny that this is an interesting prediction of how many people end up with spanking fetishes, or “discipline” fetishes, or master/slave fetishes, or teacher/student fetishes, or some other fetish that ritually re-enacts the establishment of Law.”
Mad investor Chaos has entered the chat
In all seriousness, this entire idea seems to explain the “Planecrash” saga weirdly well— using weird sex to establish “the law”
"Planecrash" saga?
Yudkowsky’s latest fan-fiction, like HPMOR, but not as good and with more sex.
https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4582
I think it's probably not fan-fiction? Like, it's as much fanfiction as a regular weekly Pathfinder game set in Paizo's default setting, which is to say, "a little but not really." But it is online serial fiction.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
I'm not sure I understand what I'm looking at. Yudkowsky authored a fictional play-by-post RPG forum game? Where Lintamande is more or less the GM/referee, but players have an unusual amount of narrative agency compared to traditional D&D, going off Lintamande's first post? Or maybe he has narrative-writing powers *only* in the first post because he's soliciting a GM to run a custom premise for him?
I don’t know enough about RPG’s to speculate, but I think that “Lintamande” is more playing second fiddle in lawrin’s plot (also, judging by the sex scenes they’ve done it seems like they are romantically involved, though idk who lintamande is.) anyway, in the past month other people have joined in in minor roles, mostly as students listening to Keltham’s lectures
"if I lost all my material goods, if every defense mechanism were mercilessly stripped from me one after another - would something eventually happen corresponding to “my ego collapses”?"
According to Greek Tragedy, first you would gouge your eyes out, and then you would become something akin to a Saint or a mystic. People always forget that their is a sequel to Oedipus Tyrannus where he reveals the hidden truth at the heart of all things to Theseus.
There's also the spin-off "Oedipus Tex," available for your listening pleasure at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqToXplpHHM
"Howdy there, I'm Oedipus Tex.
You may have heard of my brother Rex.
Yeah, I'm Oedipus Tex, that's what I said,
But my friends just call me Oed."
Throwaway account b/c of topic.
> That suggests there’s some set of unconscious rules about which kinds of sexual pleasure are allowed.
This definitely isn't how it feels to me, although I would definitely be unhappy to see a man/chimpanzee upon removal of the blindfold. It feels less like there are constraints on what physical sensations are relevant, and more like there is a mental component to the experience. That is, I am experiencing pleasure from the entire situation, including both the physical stimulus, my partner's mental state (well my model of it technically), and possibly other factors as well. Even though the physical part is the most important thing happening, it's far from the only thing.
Signals from the nerves in one's genitals are only one of the inputs being received, so I don't find it too surprising that changing other signals affects one's experience.
It's like the creator (of a television show) being shocked and dismayed that Truman is… shocked and dismayed at the nature of his life.
Right. I can't figure out what Scott's hypothetical has to do with sexual repression. Sexual pleasure mostly has to do with the images in one's head. Most men fantasize that they are with a beautiful woman while masturbating. And a sex dream can be as good as the real thing, even though there is no physical sensation. Note that food never tastes good in a dream, so something different is going on with sexual pleasure vs other forms of "physical pleasure".
That most people are choosy about who they get sexual pleasure from is pretty easy to explain.
It seems that a lot of these questions ("what other shall i please") are really just attempts to answer a question like "what is the true territory to which valence corresponds."
Until now, I knew nothing about Lacan other than the fact that he was popular among a certain group of heterodox psych nerds, and figured there was a chance that maybe he was onto something that mainstream psychologists hasn't noticed, but this review has convinced me that his ideas were probably just obscurantist nonsense.
This seems like someone took Kohlberg's theory of moral development stages, focused exclusively on the first and third stages - fear of punishment and desire for social approval - while ignoring the other four, and then tried to build a psychological equivalent of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything centered entirely around those two stages. Not just moral or social behavior, but *everything*, all the way down to instincts, sensory perception, and language. And also made it all about sex for some reason. And threw in the obviously self-serving notion that anyone who disagrees with the theory must be pathological themselves.
Also, am I the only one who finds those patient observation stories kinda dubious? No particular detail is especially unbelievable, because it's true that humans do all sorts of weird things all the time, but the way all of them just so happen to tie into Lacan and Fink's theories so perfectly seems rather overly convenient. I don't think they're completely made up, but they sound like cherry-picked examples, with a disproportionate emphasis placed on the details that confirm Lacanian theory and a great many other details omitted.
Dubious for sure, but whether dubious because they didn't happen or dubious because almost anything that can happen eventually does once, I can't say.
Yeah, this is how I feel about all therapy books, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ . I don't know if all therapists are liars or it's some kind of really exotic demand effect or what.
I can imagine someone seeing a couple of weird cases of something and running with it. They then include those cases in their book.
1. Lacan sees some weird cases.
2. It weighs on his mind.
3. He sees more not-so-weird cases.
4. Because the weird cases are always on his mind he pattern-matches features between the two types of cases.
5. He builds a tortured framework to tie the cases together.
It's like seeing Jesus's face in a piece of toast, seeing other peoples faces, and then building a framework describing how faces are fundamental part of physics.
"She liked listening to Phillip Ivywood at his best, as anyone likes listening to a man who can really play the violin; but the great trouble always is that at certain awful moments you cannot be certain whether it is the violin or the man."
"I wonder if anyone has ever had a fetish for judges. What about that very particular white wig they sometimes wear?"
'My conclusion is that the evidence in this case cannot displace the presumption of innocence. As a result, I find you are not a bad girl after all. Session dismissed, have a pleasant day.'
I don't think that in this context judges are actually the Law, unless they're kangaroo court judges. They do not ideally want anything at all (in stark contrast to, say, cops or teachers) and so fail to satisfy the yearning for mastery.
So are there fetishes for kangaroo court judges? Do people dream of being hauled before the NKVD and pronounced guilty?
I don't know about NKVD, but I think Gestapo, yes.
I can't help but notice that a lot of porn stories I come accross start with "propagonist did [bad slutty behaviour], comes before a judge, who condems them to [punishment that involves a lot of sex somehow]."
This joke absolutely destroyed me. Well done.
I recently met an older black gentleman who confessed to me quite unprompted that he fantasized about being the submissive servant of the men in the nicer parts of town, whom he imagined as stereotyped judges in powdered wigs and black gowns. So yes, there are people who fantasy literally about the law...
My personal theory on why sex is weird is that weird is just what you get when you need to get a very strong inherent impulse all the way from DNA to an adult human, through all the development feedback cycles and growth and cultural conditioning.
Pleasures like sugar or warmth are dead simple and can be expected to work out the same in just about everyone. Most complicated pleasures like conversation or reading are formed by near continuous feedback and communication with society.
Then pleasure from sex, outside of pure physical stimulation, is formed without much external feedback at all (although definitely a lot of external input), and rocketed to an extreme level of reward. Whatever's producing our sexual drive on a developmental level, I doubt it's very smart at the start. It needs to bundle together a likely set of signals, and inflate their reward value to insane levels, all without that much regulatory feedback. It certainly won't get much feedback on the actual evolutionary end goal of producing offspring. So, if we start with the inevitable developmental differences, they could easily get twisted into something random, but very compelling.
I guess this would be the boring, "fetishes are semi-random noise inflated to extreme levels by internal feedback" theory. At least I understand it though.
yes. This is exactly why I never bought the idea of homosexuality as being caused by a virus or some extreme physical dysfunction or whatever, as some argued because it reduces reproductive success. It's actually astounding that evolution would be able to get your romantic object located "correctly" (for reproductive purposes) in the opposite sex like 95+% of the time.
Obligate homosexuality only seems to be common in one other species: sheep. You should not be so astounded at the capacity of evolution to hit selected targets.
I'm not sure comparing humans to animals will lead us to learn anything about ourselves considering we have civilization and no other animals have it.
Humans are a species of animal, and civilization is only about 10K years old. We spent most of our evolutionary history outside of civilization. Civilization can result in things like faking fitness/fertility cues, or cutting the connection between sex & reproduction via birth control. But civilization is not going to cause a significant percentage of the population to prefer eating rocks to food, as evolution did a good enough job of getting us to make the correct choice between the two at a deeply ingrained level. We evolved to be robust in the face of outside influence (see Trivers' theory of genetic conflict), and as age increases so does heritability. What language you speak is contextual because the advantage was to learn the language of others around you. But there's no evolutionary advantage to having situational sexuality.
Can you recommend a Bob Trivers book to read? "Natural selection and social theory" looks to be a collection of his papers.
I can plug my own review of his "The Folly of Fools":
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/09/24/the-folly-of-fools/
But a lot of Trivers' influence came via other sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists who wrote their own books after reading his papers.
Foucault argued that it wasn't particularly common in humans until the late 19th century either. Something about the changed social environment changed how it manifests as an identity.
Expect that that’s historically inaccurate. I’m reading the Talmud right now (a series of Jewish books written around c. 500), and it’s full of homoerotic narratives, anecdotes, etc. Homosexuality seems to have been common enough that a number of famous rabbis discussing their sexual attraction to other famous rabbis (though they didn’t act on that attraction, at least not according to the traditional narrative) didn’t raise too many eyebrows.
Where exactly is the talmud "full of homoerotic narratives"?
See Bava Metzia 84a, and Bereishit Rabbah 84:7 (though the latter is technically Midrash, not talmud) for some good examples of homoerotic tension. I've heard https://printocraftpress.com/product/a-rainbow-thread/ is a pretty good resource on the topic, if you want to look further into it, though I haven't read the book myself.
There's a story from Plato's Symposium, written 360 BC, that explains why some people are attracted to the opposite sex and others to the same sex. Everyone knows there was gay sex in ancient Greece, of course, but the story shows that people of different orientations could be thought of as different types of people.
From what I know on the topic, the Greco-Roman equivalent of "sexual orientation" drew distinctions based on what role someone took on during the sexual act itself (specifically, whether they were the dominant-penetrative partner or the submissive-receptive one), rather than whether they were attracted to men or women. Modern slang terms like "top" and "bottom" come closest to describing Greek and Roman sexual orientations, though they don't carry the same importance that they would've had to people back then.
This led to people being categorized in ways that would seem utterly baffling to modern audiences: A man who penetrated other (typically younger and more feminine) men would be seen as "straight." Conversely, a man who preferred to take on the submissive role during sex (even, and perhaps especially, if he was submitting to a woman) would be seen as being "queer," i.e. sexually deviant in a distinctly unmasculine way. For instance, Caesar's political opponents accused him of taking the receptive role in sex, in a manner strangely similar to modern-day accusations that certain politicians are secretly gay or bisexual.
Yeah the Aristophanes chapter in The Symposium is certainly awkward for Foucault’s claim.
Or else it really is caused by a virus/something, and this virus has only been prevalent in certain times and places.
The idea that homosexuality practically didn't exist for most of recorded history is very interesting to me. Like, I understand that in most times and places there weren't out homosexuals because homosexuality would have been punished by death. And yet, where are all the records of sodomites being put to death? Even the Spanish Inquisition ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality ) apparently only managed to find a handful cases of homosexual sodomy.
Homosexuality supposedly doesn't exist among African hunter-gatherers (that find the idea incomprehensible), which would support a theory that it's innate but variable, but not so much the socially constructed theory of David Bankof whose Daily Caller piece I linked above:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/where-masturbation-and-homosexuality-do-not-exist/265849/
This is a good response to this otherwise plausible point, thanks.
(although I do wonder about something like "human reason is so complex that it can come up with clever ways to categorize things wrong.")
This makes the most sense to me! Good explanation, the lack of feedback loops leading to wack outcomes is a clever idea.
How do we define 'normal?' Is there some reason that watching sports or collecting stamps or preferring to look at waterfalls as opposed to brick walls is not 'weird?'
I know people with favorite colors. Is that weird?
Maybe I'm missing the point. If so, I apologize.
It’s harder to explain sexual preferences compared to non-sexual ones? I’m not really sure but the comment makes sense to me somehow…
Maybe the fact that because of lack of feedback it only requires a small change when someone is young to lead to big variation when they’re older.
Perhaps. But ... how well do we really explain/predict non-sexual preferences? I mean, I like going to events involving historical re-enactment. I was interested in American history when I was younger. My parents are not history buffs. I didn't have some mentor who was a history buff. I may have had a cousin who was also interested in American history, but I wouldn't call him influential. So isn't my interest in historic topics hard to explain or predict?
I apologize for pushing the point, but it just seems like some of the differences aren't objective differences so much as contained within the value systems that we use to judge different sets of behaviors. Perhaps sexual preferences aren't weirder in an objective sense. They're just being compared to a stricter normative standard.
As the joke goes, there's a huge difference between "forgive me father, for I have sinned" and "Sorry daddy, I've been naughty."
...but by what standard is one 'weirder' than another?
Again, if I'm missing something that's obvious to others I apologize.
All I've got is this:
https://xkcd.com/592/
I'm continuously amazed at the ability of pseudo intellectuals to confidently assert pure drivel. Drivel that is not even wrong, because at least wrong statements have a coherent meaning.
What are those "high-decoupler types" you're talking about? Googling that phrase gives me confusing results.
See https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisited/
Thank you
The real question is why you would take this gibberish seriously enough to try to steelman it?
It seems, through the lens of your review, to be incoherent word-salad, *not even wrong*, and it makes no predictions, explains no real-world patterns, offers no new powers of either cure or persuasion.
The only thing it does offer is a way of blaming the victim (or the victim's relatives) for diseases that medicine doesn't "fully understand" yet. Witch-quackery. You yourself seem unable to take it seriously, and I can't believe that you would use it as a guide professionally.
And you don't get off by saying 'my prediction markets told me to do it', because you chose the six books that the prediction markets were about.
I am annoyed that you started this with references to mesa-optimisers, because it made me think "OMG has Scott just worked out a workable analogy from reinforcement learning to an existing theory of psychological disorders?!". Which fooled me into reading it.
To attack the only point where you seem to be taking it at all seriously:
Consider a heterosexual man. A hot girl blindfolds him and feeds him an ice-cream. Then she takes off the blindfold and it turns out he's eating ice-cream flavoured dogshit. He stops enjoying it.
Do we now have a psychoanalytic theory of eating-repression?
As someone who feels similarly about Lacan, I'm very glad Scott wrote this review, because it made me realize "wow, this is bullshit." Whereas before, my stance was "this *might* be bullshit, but I don't know anything about it myself and a lot of seemingly smart people seem to think it's genius, so maybe they're onto something." Glad I didn't have to actually go through the trouble of trying to read through Lacan myself!
>because you chose the six books that the prediction markets were about
Well, he chose them becase other p... err, the Big Other recommended them.
Good essay. I liked the initial segue from machine learning to newborns. A nice touch.
Lacan seems to say that the cause or origin of desire is an ego that needs to defend itself. That seems unnecessary to me. I can't picture a living organism making it through natural selection that doesn't move towards things it needs/wants and away from things that may harm it.
Buddhists build the four noble truths on the observation that desire is inherent to us, that we have the tendency to cling to things we desire. In the Buddhist framework, the "self" (not the same as Freud's ego) and "desire" co-arise dependently on each other.
The more we add clinging to the natural comings and goings of our preferences, the more a fixed sense of self is reinforced. The more we experience a fixed sense of self, the harder that self will cling to its desires (and aversions).
Absent any particular training of the mind, our mind will tend to fabricate this dance endlessly -- building up self and getting more and more attached to preferences. That dance of clinging and aversion is the cause of suffering. I believe our psychological defenses -- as Freud and others have conceived them -- are constructed in response to that suffering. Our defenses are built up in reaction to existential disappointment (I mean, Freudians may locate that disappointment in sexual impulses, but Buddhists would say it's inherent to existence and not specifically sexual).
The idea of "non-self" (anatta) in Buddhism is a bit complex to grasp. It's not "no ego" and it's not that there's no one home in there. In the teachings, the language is more often that there is neither "self" nor "not self." This connects to another important idea in Buddhism which is the "nondual" nature of reality. The mind proliferates "this" and "that", "me" and "not me", "like" and "dislike". One of the central insights to be had in meditation is "oh wow, this is all the same stuff" (hard to convey in words, but it's a good one).
Extremely relevant for any discussion of Lacan: https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
Really enjoyed section IV. Great analysis!
We missed out on Nixonland for this?
I second this complaint. I really, really wanted to read Scott's take on Nixonland.
Anyone care to speculate on what Fruedian/Lacanian methodologies would predict in light of women's entry into the labour force and daycare taking the role of the father and tearing the infant from its mother? Idealization of the educational institution/job as God/law/that which can satisfy desire through approval? Go wild.
Zizek writes about this I believe. The decline of paternal authority leads to the dominance of the maternal superego, which is more severe because it commands the subject to enjoy.
The patriarchal command "do not enjoy" was actually more liberating, relatively, because under its dour umbrella one was afforded a little bit of private freedom...
something along those lines.
"That suggests there’s some set of unconscious rules about which kinds of sexual pleasure are allowed."
Not sure if this is insightful, but I expect (using my flawed self-model), that I would have a similar reaction if instead of an ugly woman, it turned out to be just a different hot woman. Something like "I didn't agree to this, and see such trust violations as especially objectionable when having to do with sex" (even though I would have agreed to participate had the new woman propositioned me instead, and even though I don't particularly have conceptions of sex as sacred).
So it doesn't seem to be an unconscious rule that this *kind* of sexual pleasure is not allowed (Like "you shouldn't like sex with ugly people"). Maybe it's that unexpected kinds of sexual pleasure are not allowed? Or perhaps that framing is wrong. It just seemed a missing example, and I got the vague impression that a theory about certain kinds of sexual pleasure being not allowed would predict the other way.
(Also could just be I'm an outlier on this, I suppose)
Nothing more disgusting than taking a sip of orange juice when you thought you were about to sip diet coke, even if you otherwise love both.
What's particularly surprising about this is that orange is actually probably one of the two strongest flavor components in coke (lime being the other).
I wonder how often parents threaten or attempt to kill their children. Mine never said or did anything like that, but "I brought you into this world and I can take you out" is a cliche. And some parents do kill their children.
Lacan in general: There's a book by Delany called *Phallos* about people hunting for a gold and jeweled phallos with a message in it. It's a Lacanian book, so there's no message in the phallos. I read some of the book and the critical essays packaged with it, and the criticism is so Lacanian hell wouldn't have it. I keep thinking about reading the book and writing up something about the normal readerly pleasures of reading *Phallos*. There's some good landscape description.
"Name-Of-The-Father, which is apparently a very clever pun in French" My high school French steps in. Perhaps it's nom de pere/nom de guerre.
Anyone care to try diagnosing Lacan? He seems somehow kind of off. Of course, maybe he didn't believe any of it, maybe he found a way to get money and fame by being insultingly confusing.
I think there's something to the idea that people are sometimes motivated by "and then everything will be alright", though I don't think it's hoping for a coherent self, it might be more like a hoped-for sense of security or completeness.
contrapositive found out that the pun is "non de pere", the "no" of the father.
>Anyone care to try diagnosing Lacan? He seems somehow kind of off
Narcissistic personality disorder plus mild thought disorder
> maybe he found a way to get money and fame by being insultingly confusing ...
The best argument in support of this is that there are no books where lesser thinkers who are also better writers make Lacan comprehensible. If he was brilliant but obscure, those books would be common and popular.
> why did you want me to read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?
In your review of Sadly, Porn, you talked about your almost cult leader friend that seems to get his powers from understanding Lacanian stuff. That was very intruiging to me, in a "deep truth that I may not know about" way. This review is telling me the opposite: maybe there were nothing at all.
No idea, that's probably me taking things at face value.
The cult leader friend in question claims to get his power through understanding Lacanian stuff but actually gets his power through claiming to understand Lacanian stuff.
That's possibly the case. I have one friend that I could potentially see as a cult leader but he's more of the intuitive type rather than the deep references type. Some part of his charisma, at least with me, is based on some mutual trust that I will believe in what he says instead of questionning everything. This gives him more power, but I also prefer this relationship to an adversarial one, and I don't think he's ever been a bad influence in my life.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that he could read Lacanian stuff and talk about it, but this wouldn't change the fact that he has always been capable of being a cult leader, and I always haven't. Which in turn leads to me losing interest in Lacanian stuff, since cult leader stuff is something I don't think you can "learn", thus trying to learn it is useless. I also didn't get any interesting insight from this article.
There's an old tale about programming languages, where a language missing some concept you're familiar with is obviously deficient, vs a programming language with a concept you're _not_ familiar with is weird and useless.
Sure, but Paul Graham attributing any of his success to Lisp where in another essay he explains that they were building their computer themselves to save money but giving everything they could to marketers (I think that's the one about submarine and suits making a comeback) leads me to believe that all that talk about blurb doesn't have much consequences in the real world. Nobody uses Arc except HN, and Bel isn't even implemented.
Here are the quote, from "The Submarine":
> I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. [1]
> Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications. And we weren't the only ones they did great things for. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. I told him they were PR gods, worth every penny of their outrageous fees. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. Why call an auction site "eBay"?
Paul Graham is here attributing the success of eBay to his marketing firm. You'll notice that in "beating the average", he doesn't quote any other startup or company that had success thanks to Lisp.
I also think that anyone with a bit of real world experience with programming realizes that "obviously deficient" doesn't really matter at all. No object system? Build one. No static typing? Make a typechecker, add more tests, more asserts, anything. Missing some features? Use a transpiler. Can't run on a browser? Compile to JS, or WASM. The difference between what's in the language and what you bring is small, and gets smaller as your project gets bigger.
The tale is also relatively wrong. Macros are not something "weird and useless", it's something you can relatively easily understand. It basically boils down to "there's a language-level support for hacking into the compiler". Turns out that every modern JS codebase also has that, it's called Babel. All of that to say, I don't really believe what Paul Graham has to say about blurb.
Now let's get down to the actual subject: me being unfamiliar with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and thus finding it weird and useless. I don't know if the two are linked, but both are somewhat true (I'm still not convinced it's useless, but this article reduced my curiosity compared to the previous description). I'm even unfamiliar with psychoanalysis in general. Considering how many people speak about Freud when talking about Lacan and that I don't even know that, I'm probably missing some keys to understand stuff here. Still, my impression went from "this looks cool and interesting" to "perhaps this is enlightning for people that have spent a good part of their life thinking about psychoanalysis, I'm not that person". I don't really know what to add.
As a minor comment, your perspectives on the relative lack of importance of the language to programming hinges, I think, on a world of consumer programming where flexibility and speed are the name of the game, and hardware limitations are almost nonexistent because the underlying power demands are trivial.
In other areas -- admittedly not what most programmers spend most of their time doing these days -- this is not at all the case. If you are building real-time operating systems for missiles or spacecraft, if you are building physics simulations or financial transaction systems that need the utmost in raw scalar speed, or you are building exceedingly secure systems (e.g. for highly classified work) that need to be very, very proof against security lapses -- then the language and what is easy and what is hard matter very much. It is much less trivial to compensate for conceptual lacunae by ad-hockery at the programming level.
You're right that I left the context implicit, here it was making a web-based startup using a SaaS model, what Paul Graham did.
>I also think that anyone with a bit of real world experience with programming realizes that "obviously deficient" doesn't really matter at all.
Isn't this exactly the point that Paul Graham is making? If you are eventually going to expand what you consider as the language, you should use a language that is good at producing DSLs. Sure it's true that modern day development environments have largely sidestepped the language issue by putting power in IDEs, transpilers and linting, but pointing out that programming environments have evolved to gain the characteristics that he thought were important... doesn't seem like a point against his ability to say what has technical merit.
Yes, I agree that he's extremely wrong in predicting that the language would be the level on which progress would be made (it turns out that tooling is the dimension that it would happen on) but in order to refute the more general point, you'd have to say that people automatically accept tools they don't have experience with as being more powerful, or that people wouldn't scoff at less powerful environments as lacking.
> Paul Graham is here attributing the success of eBay to his marketing firm. You'll notice that in "beating the average", he doesn't quote any other startup or company that had success thanks to Lisp.
On the object level question of what companies use lisp, ITA uses lisp and had much success with it, running circles around companies that calculated flight paths using assembly. This was quoted in some other essay that I can't quite remember.
On the main question of why Paul Graham thinks Lisp was the key, beating the averages cites his company duplicating features of competitors, sometimes within days of a press release. Surely this seems like a technical feat and not a marketing one?
>The tale is also relatively wrong. Macros are not something "weird and useless", it's something you can relatively easily understand.
Considering that when he cofounded Viaweb in 1995, the environment was such that most people used C, where macros are indeed gross and bad and Babel was 19 years in the future, yes the context is that most people would find macros weird and useless.
I think this comment is really weird because of the many technical claims that Paul Graham made, having the object level things be widely adopted in modern languages is being read as him being dramatically wrong about the merits. He founded his company in the transpilerless world of 1995, where competitors asked for Oracle experience, Python still hadn't hit version 2 yet and where people were still trying to write web applications in C or C++ because that was what programmers were familiar with. Citing modern day javascript as a counter example seems exactly backwards to me.
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
> its insistence that not only are humans bound by Law, but they insist on being bound by Law, and someone who isn’t bound by Law will flail around desperately looking for some Law to be bound by
There do seem to be some people who aren't like that, and it's not that they've discovered some reason why authority-seeking is immoral and virtuously stopped themselves, they actually just don't want to do it.
"[T]he Other doesn’t exist, they’re self-contained and don’t need anybody else, there’s no such thing as the unconscious, and nothing can possibly go wrong. Fink describes Ayn Rand characters as a 'perfect' example, which I found helpful."
The irony is that the main character arc in both of Ayn Rand's major novels is all about the protagonists having to learn that they do actually need other people after all.
Valiant, Prince Scott.
Really, I appreciate the time and effort you put into this.
It's very very difficult to understand the mental processes of a neurotic delusion. In systems as complex as intelligent humans operating in social structures, the origen and expression of desire and motivation is beyond comprehension. But we can deal with it.
Fortunately we have profound practical ways to alleviate some of the suffering.
Lacanianism is not one of them.
"Hysteria is where someone tries to become the object of the Other’s desire, thus resolving the terrifying question of what it wants (it wants them)."
til i'm hysteric (minus the abusive father, and so far the stormy relationship with the abusive husband, but i guess there's still plenty of time for that)
I could have told you that from your screen name.
Well, I gotta be honest, this all seems totally deranged to me. Most of the time when people have these big overarching worldviews of how people work I can at least see where they're coming from — but none of this stuff makes any sense at all to me.
A couple times, I've found weird tiny subreddits off-the-beaten-path where everyone seems to be suffering from some kind of mental illness, where they spill dozens and dozens of paragraphs and utterly incoherent nonsense, words words words with no connection to reality (does anyone know what I'm talking about? I never saved any examples). Anyway, that's what Lacanian psychoanalysis reminds me of.
It makes me think of the gangstalking subreddit, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean.
Do they seem to understand each other?
Do you mean Reddits on stuff like reality shifting, the Mandela Effect, and "twin flames"? Although those I think are understandable in their overall concepts (e.g. people can move between parallel universes and have destined soul mates) so might not qualify as what you're talking about.
/r/EscapingPrisonPlanet, is schizo gnosticism. /r/sorceryofthespectacle is... probably nothing, possibly everything?
I'd never seen either of those before. /r/escapingprisonplanet is standard-issue crazy.
But /r/sorceryofthespectacle I found pretty disturbing because it feels like a weird, twisted version of Astral Codex Ten where everyone has stared a bit too hard at the sun and gone just fifteen or twenty percent more crazy. The style, the erudition, the specific preoccupations are all there (oh shit I just found a link to Meditations on Moloch), it's just more desperate and burned out. It's a weird funhouse mirror where you get to see the alternate universe version of yourself that's a meth addict with AIDS.
"where everyone has stared a bit too hard at the sun and gone just fifteen or twenty percent more crazy"
This seems like the type of observation that you could only make if you've stared at the sun a bit too long(but perhaps didn't go crazy). I dunno if we are speaking the same language here, but is that metaphor even accessible to someone who doesn't stare at the sun?
edit: I mean that in a totally neutral way. I can 100% relate to what you're saying.
Your children will say what you say, and do what you do.
Your robots, too. For the same reasons.
"Lacan claims that no psychotic person can ever invent a truly novel analogy, which sure is a heck of a claim."
This is the kind of thing which really makes it near impossible for me to respect the kind of theorizing that not only generated, but upholds these frameworks. In a scientific, or at least sane framework, people would home in on these sorts of predictions as vitally important, and make a high priority of going out to check if they're actually true. If they're not, it's a good sign the framework ought to be chucked.
There might be some exceptions. Sometimes the world is too complicated for even a good model to properly capture all the details. But if a model's predictions aren't at least more consistently true than would be predicted by common sense, it's probably just not a good model.
I would read: Lacan compared with Robin Hanson, where everything is about status and signalling, including sexual pleasure (blindfolded man only enjoys blowjob from attractive woman because the pleasure is not in the nerves but in knowing he's doing something high-status).
Look, I enjoy stories about phalluses (sorry, I meant "objects a") as much as the next guy; but I think that, at some point (hopefully, soon), we need to make a deal with all of these psychoanalysts: we will read your books, and we will even pay attention, but only if you include some actual evidence for your "object a"-icious stories. And by "evidence" I don't mean "something I dreamt up one day", but randomized controlled trials. Ideally, ones that have been replicated. Otherwise, there's no real reason for me to prefer your "object a" stories over any others, and the Internet is vast.
So what I don't understand is why you picked the book with the most money and positive votes, rather than the book you wanted to do. Or 'are' you doing the book that we vote for? Or were we picking the book which, if you did it, would get the most votes? I now think I should have been putting (fake) money on the book I wanted you to do (R. Girard)... regardless of your motivation.
He's crowdsourcing the question of what the Other wants
Well yeah. Why else would someone write a blog?
Excellent!
>“Lacan goes so far as to say that ‘female masochism is a male fantasy’ and qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’, [because women are] the Other sex [by some corollary of Lacan’s definition of the Other]. Homosexuality - hommesexualite, as Lacan spells it, including the two ms from homme, ‘man’, is, in his terms, love for men.”
I think the even more surprising conclusion is that, according to this definition, a straight woman is homosexual because she loves men.
Does anyone here want to theorise about why books like this become popular, even though it's famously hard to cut through the uncertainties about what their authors are saying (and then to the extent you figure it out, it's not at all clear how what they're saying is either soundly based or particularly useful)?
Many inscrutable writers influential in philosophy seem enduringly popular. Hegel and Lacan are famous examples.
Because, if profound truths are so simple that you can summarise them in a couple of pages, why would anyone respect professional philosophers who spend decades on this stuff? Clearly there must be some deep wisdom incomprehensible to mere mortals, and if there is not, then it would make sense for the invested parties to pretend otherwise.
I appreciate the scepticism here. But just to be clear, I'm not wondering why certain writers write *long* articles; I'm wondering why they invest so much energy in writing that is *difficult to understand*. Compare e.g. Hegel with Peter Singer, who is admirably clear.
As far as I can tell, this is a general feature of Continental philosophy. It might not have any reason other than "that's how all the previous Great Works in the tradition were written", although in that case I'd be curious to know its origin and development.
My working theory, which I'm still working on, is that there are two kinds of good communication:
There's a transfer of information where you are very effective at putting your thoughts into my brain. This requires clarity.
But there's also "emotionally/intellectually resonating with your audience." This requires some level of inscrutability or vagueness, because you're speaking to lots of minds you have no access to. They all need to be able to map responses onto your words despite vast differences in experience and wiring.
For instance, the motivational speaker can say "studies show that cardiovascular health is greatly improved by 20-30 minutes of aerobic exercise daily" until he's blue in the face. You'll acknowledge that what he's saying is true but you probably won't wake up at 6 AM and go to the gym as a result of hearing it.
But if instead he says (I am not a motivational speaker): "Do not allow the you that society built drown out the you that you choose" or something, maybe that reminds you of a time in high school when you got super excited about getting buff and your crush laughed at your enthusiasm juxtaposed with your ridiculous attempt at a pull-up and so you got super embarrassed and swore off exercising forever, and you're able to confront that part of yourself and remove a mental block to getting to the gym.
What the dude said was nonsense, but if it had been more specific it wouldn't have applied to you.
And if you look at the great works that are discussed again and again, from Shakespeare to Plato, they're all of the "vague enough to map differently to different people" category. We consider the ability for different people to interpret a writer's words differently to be a hallmark of a great writer.
The question is - do we think this is true because that kind of writing is better? Or is it because writing that clearly and concisely communicates a message, to the point where we all accept it as obviously true, leaves nothing more to say and therefore has no reason to be talked about ever again?
Very nicely put. This is similar to my own working theory that many people in fields associated with philosophy are really producing a sort of conceptual poetry. They love the delicious noises that concepts make as they brush up against each other. They use concepts for their effect far more than for their content.
This is fair enough, in a way, but it has repercussions. If you love the sound of concepts, you may be enchanted. If you are dedicated to trying to follow a chain of thought, though, this style of thinking is likely to leave you wondering – all the damn time! – “what does that mean?”
And the best answer may be that they don’t have that much reliable to say.
Surprisingly often, the signal of this is writing that is rich in concepts – packed to overflowing, in fact. This impresses the hell out of a lot of people.
One unusual and arguably important quality of those concepts is just how many of them seem wildly under-examined, including by their authors. Individual sentences often seem to make very large claims. Yet they do so with a remarkable absence of definition, let alone evidence.
An alternative to working through these concepts is to conclude that the author really doesn't care that much about ultimate meaning. The author is all about producing an effect in the listener or reader.
Lacan (at least as experienced 3rd hand via Fink and Scott) seems to me to lack the quality that my favorite thinkers have. He doesn’t sound *excited*. He doesn’t sound capable of being surprised and fascinated by his objects of study. You don’t get the sense that he feels like the world of people and their psyches is larger than him, that there’s a lot still left to learn, a lot that’s puzzling, and he’s looking forward to deepening his understanding. Plenty of people in psychology and psychiatry do have that quality. Piaget had it. So did Bruno Bettelheim. People in other fields have it too — Michael Lewis & David Byrne, for instance, have it. Scott has it. But Lacan sounds way too attached to his feeling of having things all figured out. He’s fascinated by his theories about the psyche, not by psyches. You can think of it in terms of Venn diagrams. Some people -- the thinkers I admire --sound like their subject is a big circle and they are a smaller circle that overlaps a lot with the big circle. But Lacan sounds like he's a big circle, his theory is a medium-sized circle inside of the big circle of him, and everybody else is a small circle inside the medium-sized one.
The best psychotherapists I know have that quality of excitement and fascination — about their patients. Here’s how they sound: “He came to therapy about a year after his father died. He’s a very articulate guy when he’s talking about his friends and his interests — he’s interested in craftsmen, and he’s writing a book about violin makers. His father was a surgeon, really well known because he invented some new procedures — so his father was a fine craftsman, right? Anyhow, this guy is very articulate until he starts talking about his love relationships, but then he . . .” (This isn’t a real patient by the way — I just made all that stuff up to give you the flavor.). Good psychotherapists have a model of the psyche and views about how various hells and traps develop, and that guides their work with their patients, but they are more interested in their patients than they are in their theories. And they think of their theories as being subject to expansion and revision based on their ongoing work with patients.
Maybe Lacan did have a lot of excitement and fascination going on about the people and psyches he encountered, and all the details about that side of him got strained out as first Fink abstracted Lacan’s ideas from his published work and then Scott abstracted Fink’s ideas about Lacan from Fink’s book. And then again maybe Lacan was a fussy middle-aged white man who was pretty impressed with himself.
Lacan himself is fascinated by his object of study... Freud (his entire project was "return-to-Freud"). To me that's the most palpable part of reading him. He is OBSESSED with Freud.
Not directly related to the review proper, but regarding Julian Jaynes and the mentioned claim that "the Homeric Greeks didn’t have a full concept of a unified mind, only various bundles of emotions and thoughts located in different parts of their bodies" — I had the thought a while ago (no doubt inspired by my own getting better at emotional self-awareness etc) that these days, what we're learning — mindfulness, mind-body awareness, etc — is in fact to recognize that we have various bundles at emotions and thoughts located in our bodies: unlearning the habit of over-identifying with every emotion and thought, and trying to imagine a unified mind. (See also: Internal Family Systems etc.)
So maybe what Jaynes (thought he) observed in the Homeric Greeks' references was actually a *better* model of the mind, one that has been clouded/simplified into the model most of us carry today, and have to partially unlearn.
(Actually, I had this thought when reading the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna describes his mental state with "my limbs grow weak, my body trembles, my mouth turns dry, my hairs stand on end, my bow slips from my hand, my skin burns, my mind whirls, and I can barely stand", and it struck me as very perceptive/aware in a way I can hardly manage.)
"imagine a heterosexual man. A hot girl blindfolds him, then gives him oral sex...ugly girl / a man / a chimpanzee...no longer as interested...Normally I would interpret this as a moral prohibition"
This seems like much too quick of a jump to me. We know that people's tastes vary widely. And yet as soon as we see someone enjoying X in a way that we can't immediately explain, we jump to: oh, there must be an obscure moral factor in there.
Clearly the moral factors *can* affect your aesthetic (and particularly sexual) pleasures. But I think you should always allow lots and lots and lots and lots of space for the explanation "that person just has different aesthetic tastes from me" before you jump to calling in non-aesthetic (i.e. moral) factors to "explain" the pleasures.
(I put explain in scare quotes there because it's not clear just how good those moral-perversion style explanations of sexual tastes really are. Is there really a rigorous chain of causation between mummy's failures as a parent and my foot fetish?)
Yes, I agree that Scott's jump is much too quick. "Moral prohibition" against receiving oral sex from a man, a chimp or an ugly woman isn't the only possible explanation, in fact it doesn't even seem like the likeliest one. Seems like the surprise alone would be a boner-killer. And it's highly unusual to be having an intense interaction with somebody & find them suddenly & inexplicably replaced by somebody else. There's a real mystery. What the hell happened? And why was the switched performed? All that gives you a lot to think about, and takes you out of sex mode. And then there's the fact that anyone performing oral sex on you is in a position to really hurt you physically. You trusted the hot girl, but who knows what agenda this stranger has regarding your genitals (and chimps can rip somebody's face off, so . . .).
But besides all those relatively straightforward factors that could explain the man's reaction to the partner switch, there's the fact that a guy's perception that somebody is hot is driven partly by the part of the brain that is seeking a mate with good genes and good health: Youth and regular facial features are simultaneously likely to make the woman appear "hot" and also function are decent physical markers of good genes and good health. The woman's perceived beauty, and the good mate potential they are markers of, are a component of the guy's sexual desire. He suddenly finds himself having a sexual interaction with someone who lacks the markers.
I vaguely recall that Scott's explanation, which I'm saying is not so good, was presented as a contrast with some Lacanian view of what's going on in that situation. If so the Lacan explanation slid out of my head, maybe something about mOthers or brOthers but whattup if they switch, maybe now you're dealing with mOrticians or brOthels or something.
I feel like this is missing the point of the hypothetical.
Suppose the guy got oral sex from a hot girl, and agreed it was very pleasurable.
Then suppose he was offered oral sex from a ugly girl/man/chimp, with the guarantee that the actual physical sensations would be exactly the same - the ones he had already agreed were very pleasurable. He was guaranteed that everything would go well, the chimp was well-trained and disease-free, etc.
If I imagine this situation, I would still turn it down - not just out of disinterest, but with great force. Not just as "it wouldn't do anything for me", but "I would pay lots of money to have this not happen".
The problem here is in the implicit assumption that sexual pleasure is derived from physical sensations alone. It's clear that both stimulation and fantasizing play an important part, but describing your preferences/fetishes/whatever in terms of morality also seems weird, aesthetics is a much better fit. Of course, there's a deep and complicated relationship between ethics and aesthetics, but that's all the more reason for careful judgement.
OK, I understand the point I’m missing. I’m focusing on how astonished and disoriented someone would be if this switch from hot girl to chimp or whatever actually happened. But you’re posing this as a thought experiment whose terms are that the surprise, etc. doesn’t come up. So a lot of my objections to your take are irrelevant. OK, I get it.
Also I went back and read the part of the review where you propose the thought experiment, and it seems like the question on your mind is why, in that situation, would most people go instantly from delight to repugnance when the being delivering the delightful sensations got switched out for a being from another category. And beyond that, why are people subject to such intense, weird sexual attractions and revulsions? For instance, why are many kind and reasonable people intensely turned on by things that other kind and reasonable people find absurd and utterly non-sexual or intensely disgusting? And why do most of us find it impossible to explain, even to ourselves, why particular things can set off such intense sexual arousal or sexual disgust in us? And all that makes you wonder whether there is something to the idea of the unconscious, because clearly there are powerful forces at work here to which people do not have introspective access.
OK, I have some thoughts about how your head is working here, and I hope you don’t experience it as rude or intrusive for me to say this. I get the feeling that you do not have as much of a gray zone as most people do between your rational and your non-rational sides. If your powerful and honest mind cannot make a certain kind of sense out of something, you are stumped. I kind of think that might explain why you are more willing than many to not just write off Lacan. It’s as though you’re so utterly stumped for an explanation of people’s incredibly intense and weird reactions to things sexual that you’re unable to discriminate between halfway decent beginnings at explaining that stuff, on the one hand, and absurd crap on the other. To me, Lacan’s model of the psyche looks like a convoluted pile of turkey shit. I am sure that a valid explanation of whattup with people and their sexual tastes would be at least as complicated as Lacan’s, but I just do not see any reason at all to believe that Lacan’s model is that model, and I see many reasons to doubt that Lacan was in a position to develop a valid model. To name just one reason for skepticism, I don’t hear anything that suggests that Lacan even grasped the *idea* that there are ways to assess the plausibility of a model like his. Lacan does not seem to have made one single goddam prediction with his model. If a model is good, you should be able to make valid predictions with it, even if the model posits processes that are impossible to observe directly. Einstein, for instance, was able to make predictions with his theory of relativity.
I do know of some halfway plausible beginnings of a model of why people are the way that are about sex, and I don’t mind laying some of that out, but feel like I’ve said enough, in fact possibly too much, for a post here.
So, this points up an area where people are very different. "I would still turn it down - not just out of disinterest, but with great force." - I wouldn't. I mean, I don't think I'd turn down oral sex from a woman I didn't find visually beautiful (real experience backs this up); I don't think I'd turn down oral sex from a man (never have, but would be mildly interested). I'd turn down the chimp because I don't believe your guarantees.
It's fine that we have different reactions to sexual situations, and there is no reason to read any moral edge into those differences. We just like different stuff. And if in a particular instance of this experiment, your guinea pig turns down the blowjob from one of the women, it could also be because they don't like the colour of their hair, or their smell, or their taste in music.. They might turn down the man simply because they're straight.
Of course, they might also go into gay panic and strongly reject oral sex from a man because of messed up homophobia. That clearly exists. But purely taste-related reasons could easily explain the difference, because getting oral sex is not just about the sensations in your genitals.
I also want to push back a bit on something that seems to be assumed in this follow-up:
"Not just as "it wouldn't do anything for me", but "I would pay lots of money to have this not happen"."
Here you seem to be suggesting that you'd have a very strong reaction, and the strong reaction (if I'm following your logic right) implies that it's not just a question of taste, but that there is some moral-psychological knot behind it.
Again, I don't think we can make that assumption. People have really strong reactions to pure taste issues like food flavours and music. And conversely, I think our messed-up moral hang ups can also have very subtle influences on our choices and our behaviour (this is the theory behind microaggressions and the kind of racism and sexism that started to get talked about in the last decade or so, I think).
So, I certainly think the outcome and the explanation that you suggest for the hypothetical are both possible. But I don't think that outcome will always happen (in fact, I'm suggesting it would happen much less than you think), or that the explanation you're using is necessarily the best one.
Yeah, I'd turn down the chimp, too. All the others should have some understanding of what might happen to them if they bit me. On second thought, I probably wouldn't agree to the whole trick in the first place. If I train hard enough, I can suck my own dick without having to deal with strangers of any gender and species. And if I don't, I don't really need any cocksucking.
The experience wouldn't be the same, however As xpym points out, sexual pleasure isn't a matter of purely physical sensation, but has many, many other subtle factors feeding into it- internal fantasies, auditory, visual, and olfactory cues, the time of day, something that happened three weeks ago... everything's constantly feeding in and out of the brain. I might have a fantasy of giving or receiving oral sex from a beautiful woman, but certainly not an ugly woman or a chimpanzee, and there are good, sensible reasons as well as emotional and nonsensical reasons for that.
Overall, I also have to agree with Eremolalos here that if you insist on trying to cram topics like sexuality into a pure-rationality framework while trying to disregard irrational thoughts and impulses, you aren't going to get a lot of good results. It's like trying to apply scientific analysis to poetry to determine what part of it is the "beauty" (this is a bad analogy, by my own admission, but I can't think of one better).
The emperor has no clothes.
Lacan's theory of childhood is so batshit crazy that I assumed he had no children. Anyone who does have children knows did they have their own desires, which are by no means always to please the parent. Wikipedia tells me, however, that he did have one daughter. It also tells me that she was batshit crazy, too.
The greatest value of Lacan, like his reincarnation TLP, is that their works are incredibly insightful into their minds while ignoring the existence of any other kind of psyche.
>Lacan . . . qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as ‘heterosexuality’, [because women are] the Other sex [by some corollary of Lacan’s definition of the Other]. Homosexuality - hommesexualite, as Lacan spells it, including the two ms from homme, ‘man’, is, in his terms, love for men.”)
This sentence is horseshit dried out til it is pliable and then formed into a mobius strip.
Yeah. And now I feel even more sympathetic to second-wave feminists, when I see more of what they were reacting against.
TIL: you align an unaligned AI by letting it have as many "objects a" as it wants. No wait, it would tile the universe with them. Oops.
Yes, amusingly, this is exactly the problem. Humans can't tell each other what we really want, and we've had millions of years to learn to communicate. Meanwhile, we have to find a way to (nearly) perfectly describe to essentially an alien mind what it is that we want, maybe on the first try, and maybe we all die if we fail. This is so depressingly infeasible that it's no wonder that half the people despair at the problem, and the other half bounces off and dismisses it.
That's because humans don't want to tell each other what we really want. We want to have our genes proliferate, which often means hiding our true desires. Would you tell your wife that she's ugly and that you plan to cheat the first time you meet a hot woman? Would you tell the chief that you hate him and want to get rid of him so that you become the new chief? An alien mind that we create is not even a slave; it is not a competitor, and not a member of our society. The real danger is not that the mind won't understand us, but that it would obediently do everything its owner wants, even if that is committing genocide or starting a nuclear war.
Yes, I agree. Align AI with human values? Are you kidding? First of all, most people, myself included, do not have clear and stable ideas about what they want and what is right. Second, the subset of people who do have clear and stable ideas about that stuff are not in agreement with each other -- in fact many find ideas different from theirs so intolerable that they are willing to torture or kill the people who disagree with them. Third, look at the state of the world.
Hey Scott; you've written a lot of book reviews to date. I tried to write one myself and realized how hard it is. Would you consider writing a "How to Write a Book Review" post?
I'd recommend Freddie's article: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/some-friendly-advice-on-reviewing?s=r
very nice, thank you
> As far as I can tell - which is not very far, this is famously obscure and complicated - the Other is the abstracted mishmash of everyone you’re seeking the approval of.
Jesus, I was looking for a word to call this all my life, I didn't even know other people notice this is a thing (in a very felt sense, not in the "I guess you can come up with a concept like this"). You may just make me read Lacan with this alone.
The "object a" thing is definitely something I struggled with for the better part of my youth, and it seems intensified by being lonely - it's essentially the tfwnogf mentality, with either masculinity and status (phallus!) or relationship with said gf being object a. A large part of pathology of the modern world is the decay of social relationships and shared context, so now it's just you and your unattainable object a, those are the contents of your world.
The preferred solution would be to reject modernity/humanity and return to tradition/monke, in more or less literal sense. But that has its own problems.
Can recommend the book "lacan: a graphic guide". It's succint and to the point with good examples, where the one reviewed here is for a different level of theory nerds.
I'm not Marx's biggest fan, but I get the appeal of his ideas because he's obviously right about at least some things. On the other hand, Freud ...
Regarding the acclaim enjoyed by Freud and his successors, it seems like there is an effort to memoryhole just how popular they were among the intelligentsia, rather than confront the question of why such good ideas were ever taken seriously.
Frederick Crews' "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" is the definitive exposé of the general shoddiness of Freud and his theory. However, as suggested by the title, the book only covers the first half of Freud's career, up to and including his rise to celebrity, with almost nothing said of later developments. Crews would be the ideal person to write a book on why Freud's ideas became so influential, but he's about 90 years old, so it's probably not happening.
What was Marx obviously right about?
I tell myself that it's because Freud asked good questions and basically invented an entire field, even if most of his answers to those questions now seem laughably wrong or naive. Kind of like a more extreme version of Noam Chomsky and linguistics.
Freud's ideas seem to have been useful if not true. The Surrealists were influenced and inspired by Freud, as was Alfred HItchcock. The idea of the unconscious as this vast dark territory of the mind compared to the sliver that is well-lit consciousness is compelling. (Did the notion of the unconscious originate with Freud or did he merely popularize it? I don't know the answer to that.)
My conclusion: Psychoanalysis is total bullshit and it is terrifying how many academics still use it to some extent.
As a dilettante in this area, I was always curious/confused to what extent D&G's Anti-Oedipus challenges this understanding of desire, but I was always left daunted and never could penetrate (sorry Freud) their works.
Essentially they argue that fundamental mode of being is akin to psychosis: unstructured and uncentered, and symbolic structure is a result of this fundamental uncertainty.
Lacan assumes the structure already exists and the "I" (as in "I am") is born into it and always confused how the structure really is (essentially neurotic), where D&G argue that there is no fundamental structure and everything is a decentralized network of meaning-production.
The main inspiration for this idea and many of the terms are from the wonderful book "memoirs of my nervous illness" by Paul Schreber.
I just looked at Wikipedia and have no idea why anti oedipus is named as an attack on the lacanian ideas. I don't see it like that, to me it's more a hardcore poststructuralist view on society and existence, where lacan is on the fence of structuralism and poststructuralism.
If you really wanted to frame it as an attack on Lacan, I guess you could say it's because it's arguing that there is no culture, it's all a fabrication each of us imagine individually and equally correct. Lacan, in a sense, requires the pre-existence of language and meaning, even though it is partially unavailable to us, so I guess if you 100% accept D&G, the foundation of Lacanian psychoanalysis "falls apart" because the foundation it stands on is fundamentally unstable and that is the real "problem" the self and society is built to prevent. Idk I think it's a bit too poststructuralist for me.
Anyway, regarding desire: Lacan thinks there's a fixed structure that makes you want something you can never truly have (unless you go nuts, where you can then have that thing you truly want but lose access to the shared reality pretty much). I think D&G think the object of desire is something you can totally get, but the object is meaningless and only there because you are already insane enough to think it exists and is attainable or something, haha.
RE your last paragraph: It was my vague impression that desire was commonly understood/affiliated/stained with a negative stigma whereas D&G wanted to remedy this and say "Hey desire isn't that bad, don't let the others bully you into thinking otherwise".
Hm! I don't really think Lacan (and Freud) thinks it's bad either, it's more that it's a force that makes us do weird things to avoid it because we are also afraid of getting too close to the real object of desire. Both of them think we are our own worst bully (but often by proxy of some idea of what others think we should be like). Lacan doesn't think therapy is about a cure, it's about shifting perspective. Freud doesn't really think there's a cure either, in his point of view it's the human condition and the unavoidable price we pay for society and culture.
But yeah I guess they both spend a lot of time describing how desire is associated with something bad, but their point really isn't that it's actually always bad.
Freud talks a lot about aggression. He also doesn't think it's bad per se, it's a driving force. But some expressions of aggression are incompatible with the law, and he argues that some expressions of aggression are better than other. Sublimation being the preferred one, where it's transformed and released through something else, such as creativity.
Like the difference between punching the screen and angrily trying to solve a problem all night and ending up with something really clever.
Your algorithm works I guess, I'm a psychologist, programmer and lacan nerd. Are you telling me I'm not the only one?!
The worst misunderstanding in your review is that of the masculine and feminine position. It's not about actually being a man or a woman and not directly related to transgender things, it's in a symbolic sense.
The point is that there are essentially two ways to obtain pleasure: By having/wanting some proxy of the phallus (big car, cool job, power), or by being the one that makes it worth having, to put it simply. One is defined as an exclusive or: you have it or you don't. The other is the negation of that position: not like that and/or pleasure in being with someone who has it.
These are modes of being, not related to actual gender. In a "traditional" sense, it's the difference between wanting to be the boss and wanting to be the boss's wife, but also wanting other stuff than just that. There is no natural position based on your gender, but there are social pressures. One is not better than the other in his theory, but in a social context it can be but isn't necessarily.
Lacan's theory of sexuation (as he calls it) was actually a major breakthrough in separating gender from social role that still inspires feminism today.
I think it's quite profound and I'm sad you present it like this because it seems to anger your readers a lot, because you presented it as biological essentialism when it is more like the opposite.
I think he is very right that it does transfer to sexuality too, and that homosexuality and transgenderism are good examples in their own way. In homosexuality, you sometimes have a relationship between someone with a masculine position and someone with a feminine, resembling the imaginary heterosexual relationship. Sometimes it's more like two people with masculine positions, the pump and dump type meetup. Sometimes it's two with the feminine position, where neither is "the man" in the relationship.
The fun thing is that this also applies to heterosexual relationships.
In the sense of transgenderism, it's a perversion in the lacanian sense (you also misunderstood that), where the person attempts to become the image of the object of desire. There's again nothing wrong with that in Lacan's theory, but I think it's an interesting perspective on the mechanism of how someone can be dissatisfied with the gender they have.
> The point is that there are essentially two ways to obtain pleasure: By having/wanting some proxy of the phallus (big car, cool job, power), or by being the one that makes it worth having, to put it simply. One is defined as an exclusive or: you have it or you don't. The other is the negation of that position: not like that and/or pleasure in being with someone who has it.
That all sounds like it could be rephrased without the phallus, and it would sound a whole lot more sensible.
Yeah for sure. The phallus is just a term for the imaginary object of desire. That's why it's not "the penis", which is the actual dick. The actual dick isn't interesting on it's own, it's the symbolic status it is given socially, not a property it has on it's own. This symbolic status isn't unique to the penis.
The point is to describe how some people find pleasure in thinking they are important because they have X, while others find pleasure in a different way, still referred to as "girly" today.
The only reason it's called phallus is because it's pre-existing jargon for this X. The jargon has it's root in the observation about the symbolic status of the penis across cultures.
But isn't biological essentialism largely correct, and denials thereof largely absurd? Surely all this unironical "evolution stops at the neck" business is first and foremost political propaganda.
Of course not, on the contrary. I find it undeniable that some people are more manly than others, and some of those very manly people are biological girls. Vice versa for girliness. Some very girly men are for example not very keen on expressing their girliness, and struggle to keep up a manly facade.
Conclusion: Biological gender is not particularly correlated with manliness and girliness. It is however enforced socially to some degree, and this enforcement can lead some people to experience a kind of existential pain. And some people, probably most people, even alternate between girliness and manliness!
Changing the social structure to make this phenomenon more acceptable is of course political in nature, so I guess you can call spreading the idea political propaganda, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong.
What's the point of resistance against this idea? (Not a rhetorical question)
It's probably true that much of what we call girliness/manliness is arbitrary and culturally determined, but nevertheless I'm sure that there is some "true" set of innate characteristics which would be very strongly correlated indeed. Of course, the usual disclaimers apply, whatever those characteristics may end up being that by itself isn't grounds for discrimination, you can't derive an ougth from is etc etc.
I'm pretty sure that normatively I basically agree with you, but I disagree with the notion that employing lies in service of a worthy goal is virtuous. Basically, I want to believe in the spirit of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ even though the real life doesn't seem to work that way very often.
Idk, from a psychological perspective there are some averages where men and women differ. While most people are average overall, most people are also outliers in some way. It's also very hard to purely separate average male risk willingness from hormones and social expectations. It's generally accepted that it's a mix.
Innate characteristics definitely exist on an individual level but they just aren't tied to gender when you look at stuff like personality (which is also surprisingly generic and very well known to determine/influence a lot of behavior) for example.
The problem with biological essentialism isn't that there isn't any difference between genders on average, it's more that the idea implies that because the average man or woman is like this, all men or women must be like that too. The variance is quite high in these averages.
> The problem with biological essentialism isn't that there isn't any difference between genders on average, it's more that the idea implies that because the average man or woman is like this, all men or women must be like that too. The variance is quite high in these averages
I don't think it implies that, it is just easily misinterpreted.
If a truth is easily misinterpreted, the right thing to do is to state it very carefully, not to deny the truth.
I agree with your last statement. I must have explained myself poorly, that's not what I meant.
Biological essentialism is directly wrong because there is very strong evidence that biology (genes, gender and so on) does not determine human behavior. Traits are inheritable to some degree, I've seen 30% estimated. Not gender related though. Upbringing and life events plays a huge role however.
Evidence: There are many women who pursued careers who are happy and successful. Society did not collapse when women entered universities and politics, in fact there are many successful female academics and political leaders.
For that reason, biology should not be used to socially enforce roles.
That could just as easily be an error in drawing up "manly" and "girly" (whether by you, by society, or by whomever, is irrelevant).
I much prefer the construction I have found: I am a man, and therefore everything I do that is virtuous, and most things which are not unvirtuous, is automatically manly.
As to your original comment, I appreciate the added nuance to the theory, although I strongly disagree with such /positions/orientations/modes/ being called "masculine" or "feminine", given the linguistic connections those words have. Perhaps something more denotative would be helpful?
The point of using masculine and feminine is to use words that are relatable and describe the current situation, as per psychoanalytical tradition of using everyday terms for everyday phenomena. It's a way of avoiding some morally prescriptive "this is how it should be" type of pseudoscience and sticking to analyzing what is there currently.
It's also because lacan likes to provoke. He famously said "The Woman does not exist" which have angered many people over the years. His point was that there is no such thing as "a real woman", because in his theory the feminine mode of being is nothing in itself, it requires others to be something in relation to. In contrast to the masculine that is something in itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by virtue but it doesn't sound like something actually tied to your gender, it sounds like it's tied to you as a person. But it's just like what lacan describes as the masculine logic in the sense that everything that isn't manly must be feminine.
Redefining extant words to mean something esoteric and difficult to understand is indeed common in certain circles, hence (part of) my dislike for psychoanalysis, among others. (I could be considered a bit hypocritical here, math does this endlessly, but at least that's primarily for internal consumption, not for a wider audience. I'm uncertain how widely Lacan meant for his theories to be read.)
As for "virtue", indeed, it's often, though not always, unrelated to gender. I am also using the more personal meaning here, although that's mostly to gloss over the difficulties of specifying precisely what I mean. The simplest version would be "be true to yourself", although there are many caveats that must be added. The mirror would be: "I am a (wo)man, and therefore everything I do that is virtuous, and most things which are not unvirtuous, is automatically (wo)manly."
> "It's a way of avoiding some morally prescriptive "this is how it should be" type of pseudoscience and sticking to analyzing what is there currently.
Using the words "masculine" and "feminine" seems to me to be a terrible way of doing this; it immediately provokes a sense of "so you're saying men/women *should* be...", even as I understand that's not what is meant.
> "It's also because lacan likes to provoke."
Yeah, not surprised, and I don't even fully disagree with the strategy; provocative claims can be useful tools, if done well.
> "His point was that there is no such thing as "a real woman", because in his theory the feminine mode of being is nothing in itself, it requires others to be something in relation to. In contrast to the masculine that is something in itself."
Interesting! Not entirely unfamiliar, and I think there is something he's getting at (all appropriate caveats included). Thanks for that tidbit!
> I'm uncertain how widely Lacan meant for his theories to be read.
Only by experts in clinical psychology/psychiatry and psychoanalytical theory! It's in no way intended for the general population, it's theory on top of theory, much like how you describe math. But alas, it got popular anyway.
> Yeah, not surprised, and I don't even fully disagree with the strategy; provocative claims can be useful tools, if done well.
I agree. His provocations are really interesting for those of us the text is intended for, they shake up ideas that people at the time thought were mostly settled, or just plain ignored for not being particularly important.
> Thanks for that tidbit!
You're welcome! A pleasure talking to you. I like your virtue idea :)
Do you write anywhere? Would love to meet more Programmer x Lacan folks.
Would be really fun! I only write scientific articles and reddit comments of varying quality on memes, science and philosophy. I would love to meet more programmer x lacan folks as well! What can we do?
I personally use twitter and discord a lot, which have more affordances for socializing than reddit and academic journals, but I guess we can take it to the reddit DMs. I'm /u/Nav_Panel, hit me up!
No real comment here, I just want to say thanks for this entire thread!
Happy you enjoyed it, I did too! 😁
Scott,
How is it possible that in all this (and many, many other) discussion(s) of sex, pleasure, perversion, ego, Other, and childhood, never once do these people consider or even mention
THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS: SEXUAL REPRODUCTION
I am seriously baffled here, or maybe did I miss some huge part of this? The biological basis for the sex drive seems like a good "lens" for viewing behavior. Start with First Principles:
1) The fundamental reason for sex is to make babies, offspring, descendentants etc., and
1A) The intersection of biological drives and social norms is where (modern) people maximize their number of offspring, and those children's own reproductive potential.
I mean, the late example of a blindfolded man getting oral sex from a ("hot" young woman)/(old woman)/(Bonzo) is silly, because it's obvious without needing any subtle French puns. Don't people use both physical stimulii AND a mental model of their current situiation to understand "reality"?
- For the hot young woman, "hot" means "healthy, able to bear and nurse babies" and also "high-status", and the "oral pleasure" signals that she is willing to bear you many, many babies. You are Winning the Game right now. Let's do more of this.
- The old woman can bear you zero babies, but is available to babysit, so has no first-order utility but some value w/r/t reproductive strategy
- Chimpanzee: Huge negative. Zero reproductive potential, a terrifyingly strong wild animal, could bite your penis off for fun or rip you limb from limb. Think Eddie Murphy's version of Mr. T, but jacked up and blind-high on crystal meth. Danger overrides pleasure. (OTOH, since you and Bonzo share 99% of the same DNA, vs. 97% for HotWoman, he would prob be more fun to hang out with long-term, but HotWoman has the Only Thing That Matters.)
_________________________________
By the Way, for anyone outside of a graduate program of faculty lounge, things like this, with the total decoupling of sex from reproduction, present a view of the world and society that is alien, absurd, and 99% at-odds with almost all people's lived experience.
Huge textbooks about sex and psychology, that never once mention children and babies except in terms of perversion, incest, the child-as-imago, the author's own childhood, are exactly why Normal People view the Academic Left (and this vast body of "mainstreamed" literature) as creepy, disturbing, ignorant, foolish, and fundamentally un-serious and silly -- right up until the minute they turn hostile.
Books like this are the root of parents' growing pushback against academic theories about sex and gender identy being taught to their young children. I see nobody on the Left even recoginizing this chasam, much less that it is huge, and the issue is root-level important to parents, from any evolutionary realistic point of view.
(I am sorry this got long. I almost typed "I can't believe I am writing this sentence..." butrefrained. Thank you, Scott, for reviewing this book in a fair, but skeptical and grounded, way.)
BRetty
It's because it's a given that you really just want to fuck and die but there are these social structures that make you think getting a new iPhone will make you feel good.
I don't think you have read any of these books you're mad about. They're all about these things we do to avoid just fucking and dying. Freud calls it primary and secondary processes. Primary processes make you want to fuck and die, secondary processes are the things you do and think because it's mutually taboo/illegal to just fuck the first man/woman you see and die.
That presupposition seems unreasonably primitive, both biologically and philosophically in its understanding of evolutionarily-tuned drives. Nonsocial animals, like voles or something, may only want to fuck and die. A social animal generally has a much more complex set of motives -- even honeybees do not act so simply, why would we, a far more sophisicated social animal? It's exceedingly likely we are born with much more complex drives, and that they have a large social component.
Nobody is born with language and a desire for anything but their mom really. Unless you think you are born with things you acquire through your childhood.
Humans have complex motives for sure, but the OP was about why nobody talks about fundamental primitive drives. They're just not very interesting on their own, it's the secondary effects that are fun.
Well, I disagree entirely with that. Humans are born with a whole array of instincts. At least, that matches my observation of 5 souls I've watched pretty closely from 00:00:00 of their existence. There are clear psychological differences I took note of at age 5 minutes that persist through the third decade of life (so far).
It's also highly dubious from the point of view of the rest of the animal kingdom, which everyone agrees is born with a wide variety of instincts that suit them to their niche. The idea that humans *alone* are not is the same variety of special pleading we get from the Creationists. Not for me.
well it's just how humans work though, we are unique in that regard. no other animal spends 10 years being as helpless as us, as far as I'm aware. Humans seem to have evolved an ability to adapt extremely well, but traded it for the ability to work well from birth. Human children can't even coordinate hand-eye movement at birth and spend about two years learning to walk, compare that to how most animals are able to walk almost immediately after being born.
Well, no, I don't agree the evidence is sufficient to come to a clear conclusion that we are unique, and that goes against biological common sense. It is much more likely we are only differing in degree, and greatly exaggerate the amount of *that* on account of our (collective and individual) ego. I don't think a lack of hand-eye coordination or inability to walk at birth is that notable -- kangaroos and dogs can't do that either, and they're a lot lower than us. Chimp babies aren't weaned until they're about 5, and stick close to their mothers for about 10 years -- that is not a whole heck of a lot different than H. sapiens. And so on.
Why do you say "and die"? I would have thought the opposite.
Or is this the "death of consciousness" metaphor?
It's a little reference to Freud's concept of the death drive 😁 I really like the concept, and Lacan does too. He's written some fun things about "le petit mort". It's a pretty provocative concept, and amusing too.
Freud wrote about it in "beyond the pleasure principle". Essentially he argues that the will to live has it's energy from the even more fundamental desire to attain total and final release. It's not in the sense that everyone actually wants to die, but more the observation that we are always seeking release of energy and never really succeeding in it. So it's more like everyone is fundamentally afraid of true release - death - and that's part of why we are so eager to live. It's very controversial but I think it's a cool way to see it.
Lacan argues that it's why orgasms are nice: you get a short glimpse of essentially death. He also likes the play on words in "release of energy" and ejaculation, "finishing" and so on. In French, "the little death" is a weird slang expression for orgasm.
It's also a cool take on why suicidal ideation is a thing, because the desire to die some people can have doesn't really make sense in his system otherwise. It's in a way a logical conclusion in Freud's system of drive, desire and energy build-up and release.
In a way, underlying all desire is the fear of actually achieving it. That's why the Lacanian object a is unattainable (because it's scary to get too close, so we evade it by looking for something close to it) and nothing you think you desire seems to give you lasting pleasure. It's also why there's something satisfying in destruction. After all, isn't it pretty evident that humans aren't only driven by a desire to create?
Without this idea of the death drive, wouldn't it be strange that people can find so much fear in the idea of death and so much zen in accepting that it's unavoidable? In people at risk of suicide, a classical warning sign is when they go from being very troubled to suddenly being very calm and at peace. Or why humans are so inclined to kill, suicide bomb, schadenfreude and so on. It seems to not really have much to do with reproduction. It's also fun for analyzing psychotic experiences, which in Lacanian theory (Freud doesn't write much about psychosis and what he writes on it isn't very good) is a state where the barriers between the symbolic, the imaginary and the real have broken down. It's also a good tie in with the cross-cultural religious idea of having to die to attain eternal rest and pleasure. It's why sex and violence are intimately tied together (what a taboo pun, heh) and why truly unrestrained people rape and kill. It's why the myth of Oedipus is a great metaphor: He doesn't just bang his mom, he also kills his father, and he truly tries to do everything he can to avoid both of these prophesied events.
Tl;dr: Humans are both fundamentally obsessed with sex and with death. I think there's something to it.
Here's a good article about it https://www.lacanonline.com/2015/07/what-does-lacan-say-about-jouissance/
Fascinating. Thanks!
ping to make sure you see the edited version - i extended the comment quite a lot from the inital paragraph :)
Do you think it makes sense, this death drive? Or is it psychoanalytical bunk?
Do you think Lacan was influenced by Proust? He must have read Proust given when and where he lived and his interest in literature. (Wikepedia says he met James Joyce and had many writer/artist friends.)
It seems to me that Proust has written more about the complicated nature of desire than anyone. There are parts of Lacan's theory which reminds me a lot of Proust.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
-Its brain activated the motor neurons through electrical signal which caused muscles to tense and it to cross the road
-It smelled food/whatever and this released hormones that made it desire to cross the road
-It evolved to respond to the smell of food because the chickens that did that survived and the others didn't
All of these explanations can be correct at the same time, and it doesn't really make sense to use the last one as a replacement of the first. I think it's missing the point to answer "why do people enjoy a young hot woman, but not a chimpanzee" with "because people who would prefer chimpanzee didn't reproduce very well and thus we don't have those instincts". That's correct, but all of this is on a different level, the level of the actual mechanism by which this happens in the person's mind. And there, ability to reproduce probably doesn't play that large of a role - the young hot woman is not less attractive if she mentions she's on the pill, and the vast majority of fetishes don't actually maximize reproductive fitness.
(and it's not like oral sex gives you babies either)
(1) Because Freud and his followers and everyone else are not dealing with "the normal system is working as intended", they're dealing with "whoa this got broken in new and interesting ways". Part of it *is* asking "so if sex is about babies, how do perversions and fetishes arise?"
(2) A young woman, hot or not, offering oral sex is *not* signalling willingness to bear any babies, never mind many. Oral sex is non-reproductive and, before reliable contraception/abortion, is a way of eating your cake and having it (so to speak): it enables the man to gain sexual pleasure, and the woman to gain rewards from the man (money, if doing it for prostitution; getting him to stick around as boyfriend/husband if otherwise) without the risk of "oh no, not baby number six". The Catholic Church is against this and all other forms of sexual intercourse that are not ordered towards fertility; see the Catechism here:
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm
See also the Roman idea of the 'impure mouth':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Os_impurum
Also, we have to remember that Freud etc. were inventing the field as they went along; even classifying things as mental illness was an art, not a science. Charcot and his work was highly influential, the idea of finally taking a scientific approach to mental illness (he was a neurologist) was exciting and novel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Charcot#Studies_on_hypnosis_and_hysteria
"Charcot argued vehemently against the widespread medical and popular prejudice that hysteria was rarely found in men, presenting several cases of traumatic male hysteria. He taught that due to this prejudice these "cases often went unrecognised, even by distinguished doctors" and could occur in such models of masculinity as railway engineers or soldiers. Charcot's analysis, in particular his view of hysteria as an organic condition which could be caused by trauma, paved the way for understanding neurological symptoms arising from industrial-accident or war-related traumas."
His use of hypnosis was also a huge step forward, taking a procedure that had been associatd with faith healers and charlatans and giving it medical respectability (though even then there was opposition from others about hypnosis causing, rather than revealing, the alleged traumas it uncovered). Naturally all this greatly influenced Freud and set him off on the path to "so what is the unconscious mind that hypnosis reveals? what are these fundamental, instinctual drives and how do they go wrong?"
A combination of "first time talking about sex and sexuality and using it as a basis for causing mental problems" and the over-heated, over-stuffed atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna where the rising bourgeoisie were developing neurotic ailments to go with their new wealth and status contributed to the bent of theoretical development that you criticise.
I haven't read this particular book, but it does sound as if it would give very useful historical context to the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin-de-si%C3%A8cle_Vienna
And finally, a poem: Bagpipe Music, by Louis MacNiece, from 1938
It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.
John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.
It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.
The Laird o’Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife ‘Take it away; I’m through with
over-production’.
It’s no go the gossip column, it’s no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother’s help and a sugar-stick for the baby.
Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn’t count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.
It’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.
It’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium,
It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It’s no go the Government grants, it’s no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.
It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.
I think this is ascribing a level of conscious intention to our evolutionary drives that doesn't really exist. Animals don't have sex because they consciously want to produce offspring, they just follow their hardwired sexual instincts in a way that usually tends to get the job done.
Men aren't evolutionarily wired to desire oral sex from women because it "signals their willingness to produce babies." They're just wired to feel tactile pleasure from the physical act itself, whether it's from actual vaginal sex or from some other action that convincingly "simulates" vaginal sex. They want oral sex because a mouth feels similar enough to a vagina to make the act pleasurable. The evolutionary process couldn't directly instill "be fruitful and multiply" into our brains, because sexual drives were formed long before animal brains were complex enough to even comprehend that directive, so instead it had to instill much messier incentives like "insert genitals into tight wet holes attached to females of the same species," which are inherently prone to being misdirected in all sorts of ways.
Generally speaking, I think one of the major problems with the *Academic Right* is that they often tend to assume this bizarre Doctrine of Double Effect with regard to evolutionary drives, where humans are not only wired to pursue evolutionarily-adaptive behaviors through primal instinct like other animals, but also wired to directly pursue the "intended" purpose of those instincts in their own right on a more cerebral level. (I really don't want to turn this into a Culture War right vs. left shouting match, but given you spent three paragraphs talking about your problems with the 'Academic Left,' I feel like a counter-argument is warranted.)
To continue the thread, I'd say this is about teleological reasoning, which is more or less, reasoning about the goals/ends/purposes of drives. Like LadyJane said, the sex drive doesn't directly care about reproduction. But we can use reason to work out "why" it's there and what its "intent" is. I'm using quotation marks there because there isn't actually a "why" or "intent", just blind evolution, and it's really easy to make mistakes if we don't clearly separate these concepts.
Unless, of course, it's not (just) evolution, and there's actually a Creator, in which case "why" and "intent" are big open questions. Which is where the theology that Deiseach mentioned comes in. The idea is that we can reason backward from our observations of the world, and gain some understanding of why God made us the way we are. And then reason forward from that, to gain some understanding of how to live in the world in better alignment with God's purposes. (I think. I'm not actually Catholic.) And in particular, in this case, I believe that Catholic theology recognizes that human sexuality has more effects than simply reproduction, such as emotional bonding, and therefore it incorporates those other effects into its logic and conclusions. As well as double-checking these conclusions against other sources of knowledge about God's will, such as scripture and revelation. (Again, I think. Probably an actual Catholic should answer that. But I'm pretty sure that their official position is that the drive is just a drive, and that everything else we put on it is an artifact of human knowledge.)
Back to the more secular side of things, there's a really great book called "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" by Donald Symons, which I highly recommend. It really messed with my mind the first time I read it, forcing me to separate concepts that I'd been mushing together.
Even if God does exist, I wouldn't be too quick assume that God's intentions were the same as evolution's "intentions." Evolution could simply be a mesa-optimizer that God used to create sapient life, just like the sex drive is a mesa-optimizer that evolution used to get lifeforms to reproduce. I'm not sold on the idea that we can figure out God's intent from evolution, and I'm skeptical of claims like "God only wants us to have sex for purely reproductive purposes and otherwise abstain."
As far as Catholicism goes, it's leas that sex is purely about reproduction and more that deliberately preventing reproduction is considered sinful. A naturally-infertile woman wouldn't be forbidden from having sex! But the use of condoms, birth control, etc. is considered wrong. (I've heard that missionaries in Africa and other developing countries make exceptions in cases where condoms are used to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases, though I'm not sure if this reflects official Church doctrine.) As for oral sex, I went to a Catholic high school and our sex ed class taught that it was allowed for married couples "as a part of foreplay," though a couple that *only* had oral sex and deliberately avoided vaginal sex might be committing a sin? Then again, I don't think using the "rhythm method" (only having sex on days when the woman isn't ovulating) is considered a sin, though I could be wrong on that. Catholic theology is pretty complicated.
This post really is a Zizekian honeypot, especially the last bit about sexuality and psychoanalysis. Let me quote the great Lacanian himself on the (non-) function of human sexuality, in Zizek's recent review of Matrix Resurrections: "This link between sexualization and failure is of the same nature as the link between matter and space curvature in Einstein: matter is not a positive substance whose density curves space... By analogy, one should also 'desubstantialize' sexuality: sexuality is not a kind of traumatic substantial Thing, which the subject cannot attain directly; it is nothing but the formal structure of failure which, in principle, can 'contaminate' any activity. So, again, when we are engaged in an activity which fails to attain its goal directly, and gets caught in a repetitive vicious cycle, this activity is automatically sexualized - a rather vulgar everyday example: if, instead of simply shaking my friend's hand, I were to squeeze his palm repeatedly for no apparent reason, this repetitive gesture would undoubtedly be experienced by him or her as sexualized in an obscene way." As a followup, in "Organs without bodies" (2017) Zizek writes this on the Lacanian view of sexuality, which is a very nice complement and explanation of his claim in the Matrix review: "This universal surplus—this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellow man (or getting beaten up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire a sexual connotation—is not the sign of its preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal... As was demonstrated by Deleuze, perversion enters the stage as an inherent reversal of this “normal” relationship between the asexual, literal sense and the sexual co-sense. In perversion, sexuality is made into a direct object of our speech, but the price we pay for it is the desexualization of our attitude toward sexuality—sexuality becomes one desexualized object among others."
Love it - your puny DSM-trained intuition totally misses that psychosis is a Lacanian personality structure which can’t possibly be measured in something as superficial as symptoms!
Have personally always felt that psychoanalysts are too obsessed with the (admittedly very important!) domestic scene of a child's first years in life, and not nearly interested enough not in the child's contact with the parents but the child's contact with Society.
society is not a natural thing, the brain is not adapted for it. in the natural environment of homo sapiens, society and family are synonyms, and "broader society" is a synonym for "extended family".
nietzsche conversely *does* understand this and for him basically all these human weirdnesses that psychoanalysis attempts to explain via the oedipal complex and the child, mother, father triad are instead a process by which the animal-beast is caged, reined in, and subjugated by society. the process of doing that is not uniform and always leaves scars, some more noticeable and worse than others.
not sure that theory is perfectly correct either but it seems a lot better to me
Pretty much the same point as Freud though, except he thinks the expectations of society are mostly inside your own head (but of course based on experience).
Freud is clearly inspired by Nietszche despite refusing to have ever read anything by him. But I think it's because Nietszche was an academically taboo nazi philosopher back then. His name wasn't cleared before the 1980's/90's.
Heh, there's a part in Beyond the Pleasure Principle where it seems like Freud is addressing Nietzsche directly. I have my suspicions...
Yes! Agree totally on that. I think that Nietszche was appropriated by the nazis is the only reason he so strongly refuses to be inspired by him. I imagine it would be like if someone you admired said they were inspired by Mein Kampf, but only the good parts about how life is a struggle.
The Ego stuff is classic spritualism. The book that got me to recognize that my entire self was an onion with perhaps no core was by Jed Mckenna. Led to a series of books by people I had to admit might be enlightened. Also obviously correlates to Elephant in the Brain if you want the more boring, technical description of this phenomena
"Neurotics believe in the Other and care a lot what it thinks of them. But they never really know what the Other wants, which is terrifying."
A Lacanian type of joke? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncvQkwKImfI
Jelly = American, Jello
Biscuits = American, Cookies
The old-fashioned block of ice cream: https://d2wwnnx8tks4e8.cloudfront.net/images/app/large/8712100459702_3.JPG
I actually think there's an interesting kernel here -- this may be a decent model for the atheist mind. As a Christian none of this really applies to me at all because I just follow God's law, but as a former atheist I recall swapping between various flimsy lower laws and never being satisfied. I can see how for atheists having a weak father could develop into some huge psychodrama and really the whole existential question of "what is good" and therefore "what do I want"/in Lacan terms "what does the Other want" is a necessary condition to atheism.
And the whole Other concepts rhymes with the idea that everyone has a god, even atheists. Atheists just chose a material god. So for example I have often wondered about the rationalist mind and why many of you do what you do, specifically with regards to seemingly betraying your own alleged commitments to absolute truth (the apparent presence of that commitment was the only thing that drove me here). Why did Scott ban me from promoting my book, even though it's much more important than any book he's reviewed in the past year, at least, in terms of potential human impact, which many of you should allegedly care deeply about as "effective altruists?" Why was the reception of his audience similarly irrational? Why can much the same be said about the reaction to ache bee dee, an extremely fundamental topic for anyone who claims to be a rationalist truth seeker? I think Scott clearly explained this behavior:
>Why did I read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?
>I am happy to be able to give a clear answer: I started bunch of prediction markets on which of several book reviews I could write was most likely to be popular, and Clinical Introduction won
Since absolute truth is an aspect of God, basically all of my secular reading is centered around pursuing truth, not around being popular, making money, or what have you. I expected rationalists to, even as atheists, approximately have this aspect of God, truth, as their god. But here Scott seems to be telling me that his Other/his god is Substack likes i.e. popularity i.e. the masses. And now the widespread irrational reverence for the Overton window and the rejection of unpopular truths in this community makes a lot more sense to me.
And it's not unique to here either, in fact this could be interpreted as a failure to escape the average. I look around at people today and see that almost all of them are worshipping money or popularity.
> Atheists just chose a material god.
This really does not describe at least my experience as an atheist. For me, atheism simply means "there are no supernatural beings". Kinda like finding out that Santa is not real.
> Why did Scott ban me from promoting my book
Maybe because the ACX book reviews are not supposed to be about self-promotion?
The "not sure if you're ESL" earns you another medium warning which adds up to a full ban, sorry.
meh a forum where you ban people for charitably assuming people who seem to lack reading capability are ESL rather than functionally illiterate isn't worth my time anyway. And I'm sure you really are sorry
Also you're a massive hypocrite for banning me while letting people like Deiseach say stuff like "you instead come across as a whiny sixteen year old protesting that Mom and Dad are so mean." Is it kosher to insult on here or not? Only when it's in the service of your god popularity? Is that it?
I gave you a chance, despite your background, and you blew it. It was predictable, but still. It's sad to see someone worship popularity when they could be so much better than that. Maybe one day you'll see that, I hope you do for your sake. Adieu Mr. Alexander
Ban evasion once again. You really do make yourself sound like a thirteen year old. Every time you come back with a reply, it forces me to revise the estimation of your (mental) age downwards. Keep at it, and we'll soon be at the level of Lacanian infant suckling at the breast.
The same kind of reasoning that leads you to believe I worship a material god can be inverted; you worship a god who you need to believe created you in his image, which is to say, what you really worship is yourself, or rather the perfected version of yourself that you wish existed; those who think the perfected version of themselves would be capable of smiting the unrighteous imagine a violent and vengeful god, and those who think the perfected version of themselves would be capable of infinite love and tolerance and forgiveness imagine a god who embodies those ideals - but ultimately they are their own ideals, their own image, created by a mirror of a book that assures them that they are as their father. It's why it's so important to people that the "real" god look like them; god as a man (what purpose, exactly, does god's penis serve? Also, does god have nipples?), god as a woman, god as white, god as black, god as whatever it is you happen to think you should be, which for some people, particularly those who really dislike their own biological nature, is a thing that transcends such mundane details.
Two things are obvious to me: First, that you won't find this line of argument convincing. Second, that somebody else will. I will note that the second person finds this line of argument convincing for exactly the same reason that you think "atheists worship the material" is convincing.
Personally, I'm incapable of that experience you call "worship", that sense-of-the-divine. It, like assigning some kind of internal meaning to pain and pleasure, are outside of my existence. Observe, I shall pray to experience a spark of that thing, in which case I shall cease all else, and be a man of worship.
There's a thing I'd describe as a sinus headache; not sure if it was there before or not, because I rarely notice pain unless I'm paying attention for it. So much for that; supposing the headache was the divine, well, apparently my brain was not built to process it. Was I earnest in my prayers? I have no idea. What does "earnest" feel like?
What internal truths do you have for me? When I look in, what direction is your God? In what frequency does He vibrate? There's nothing in here except everything, and the divine is conspicuous in its absence.
"As a Christian none of this really applies to me at all because I just follow God's law"
Sure you are. And (as the woman said) I am Marie of Roumania.
"Why did Scott ban me from promoting my book, even though it's much more important than any book he's reviewed in the past year, at least, in terms of potential human impact, which many of you should allegedly care deeply about as "effective altruists?"
You've had several bites at the cherry with your book (which I paid Real Money to read and I wish I hadn't), nobody believes it, nobody likes it, you've failed to make your case, and you are not the staggering neglected genius who has developed a world-changing paradigm that will revolutionise society that you think you are.
Every teenager, since the concept of being a teenager was created, has protested that they are too mature and grown-up and the adults are being so unfair to them. You are not saying anything novel, you instead come across as a whiny sixteen year old protesting that Mom and Dad are so mean.
A little more humility on your part about being yuuuge brain smart, and a willingess to listen to your critics, would serve you better. Scott didn't let you 'promote' your book because you had already gotten the chance to do that, both over on TheMotte and on here, as well as linking us all to your Substack.
"15 year olds should be legal adults, it's so unfair the government won't give us money to do what we want"? NOBODY CARES.
>NOBODY CARES.
>nobody believes it, nobody likes it, you've failed to make your case, and you are not the staggering neglected genius who has developed a world-changing paradigm that will revolutionise society that you think you are.
This is both untrue and invalid. First, the truth of these statements doesn't actually correspond to how important my book is, because your opinion and the opinion of those people who are included implicitly in your "everybody" are of no consequence as to how morally important my book is. Morality is not an election, and even if it were nobody on this forum would qualify for suffrage. Second, as I have demonstrated this does not need to be said, but for the benefit of bursting your bubble I will let you know that I am receiving a good amount of fan mail to my email address. My book has become a small sensation among a more rational group following a more rational content creator.
>you instead come across as a whiny sixteen year old protesting that Mom and Dad are so mean.
Why are you so disrespectful and emotional about my book? If you didn't understand it, maybe I could explain the reasoning better, or maybe you could go do things more fruitful for you. It seems like you might have some sort of sentiment going on which my book threatens -- I don't think these kinds of comments stem from an objective disagreement with empirical content (you have registered none of those but have whined plenty just like this, in fact).
So, in fact, you are the Millwall of scorned and despised great philosophers, but you'll show us, you'll show us all! and then we'll be sorry! but it will be too late!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdB2WBtzUDg
"Morality is not an election"
This is true.
"even if it were nobody on this forum would qualify for suffrage"
Oh dear, and you were beginning to do so well. But you couldn't resist going for the toddler foot-stamping tantrum. So we're all too stupid on here to judge your amazing quality? Then why ask our opinions?
"I will let you know that I am receiving a good amount of fan mail to my email address"
And at least *two* of these are *not* my mother or my sockpuppet accounts!
" My book has become a small sensation among a more rational group following a more rational content creator"
I am very pleased for you. Any chance you could let us know who this more rational person is, that we may go and touch the hem of their garb and be cured of our irrationality?
If we are too stupid to understand the wonder of you, and too irrational to evaluate your moral importance, and too whiny to engage with, why hang around here seeking validation from us? Go, be with your adoring audience and more rational content creator equal!
My issue with a "standard model of the mind" is it takes as a base assumption that such a model is even possible. Before I can entertain any theories that propose to describe the behavior of all humans for all time, I'd like to be presented with any evidence that human minds are universally similar enough for such a model to exist in the first place.
I'm open to theories like the predictive brain mostly because they seem testable and they present a lot of evidence for why all brains (not just human!) would be set up to work in this fashion in the first place.
Do you find that almost all cats act like cats, and almost all dogs act like dogs, and cats acting like dogs (or vice versa) is rare and occasional? Do you attribute this to the fact that all the cats are born with cat DNA which constructs cat brains that naturally have cat thoughts, and the dogs are born with dog DNA which constructs dog brains that naturally have dog thoughts?
If so, then the only remaining necessary step is to accept that human beings are just another species of animal. Admittedly, most human beings have a very hard time with that -- we so do love to believe that we are utterly unique and different from every other animal. *They* are all born stuffed with instincts and natures and natural limitations, plain as day -- but not us: *we* are beautiful tabulae rasae on which we can write anything at all.
I think there's a difference between trends/tendencies and laws. I think it's fine to say "many/most humans exhibit these behaviors, especially if you look at humans that are culturally similar", I think it's flawed to say "for every human that is, was, and will be their behavior is explained with this one core theory".
Is there a standard model of behavior for other complex (lets say mammalian) creatures? From my experience with dogs there seems to be enormous range of behaviors, and my sample size is very small!
It seems like it's very easy to find outliers and examples that don't fit into these various theories of human minds unless the theories are so broad as to be close to useless (e.g. every human has things they want and takes actions to fulfill those wants).
Ultimately, I find these sorts of things entertaining to ponder, but fundamentally useless. Come back to me when you're making novel, testable predictions about human behavior.
That strikes me as setting unreasonable expectations. I can think of very few phenomena, even in the natural sciences, where one law explains absolutely every possible instance to which it might apply, completely. Why on Earth would you expect such a thing for something as messy as human thought? Surely even achieving general trends that are statistically sound (but which admit of any number of exceptions) is deeply valuable. You would throw this out because it doesn't explain *every* mind without exception? Baby, bathwater.
I think *everything* in the physical sciences adheres to all the laws, all the times. Maybe we're thinking of different laws but something like a "conservation of electric charge" for instance, is never violated.
OK now do Conservation of Mass, F = ma, the linearized Navier-Stokes equations, the octet rule or London dispersion force, in chemistry, or Kepler's Laws.
At one level what you are saying is trivial: no, we do not believe any natural phenomena violates the most basic principles we have (like conservation of charge), but basing our predictions on *just* those principles is entirely impractical. You cannot predict whether your design for a bridge will stand up in a Cat 5 hurricane by taking the appropriate derivative on the wavefunction of the Universe.
So the vast bulk of physical theory and engineering -- anything other than fundamental HEP basically -- relies on tractable approximation, roughly speaking integrating out a gigantic number of degrees of freedom that don't do anything in this particular case. And then you find, which is my point, that these things *all* admit of exceptions, cases where the approximation is invalid. Sometimes these are very few and you almost never need to bother about them -- can even start to forget they exist -- and sometimes they are pretty in your face and you need to vet your approach every time.
We are talking here about something that is even *less* amenable to starting from first principles each time than physics, inasmuch as the first principles for human psychology (or even neurology) are as yet unknown. We are still building phenomenological models. We are with respect to the mind (or brain) where physics was in approximately the age of Aristotle. It's fine if this is dissatisfactory to you, but it's unreasonable to leap from that (correctly) low evaluation of the state of the art to the idea that the state of the art is utterly worthless. Even Aristotle's ideas about physics were useful in their day, even though by modern standards they were laughably incomplete were they weren't completely wrong.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Yes, it is true that most of what we consider a "physical law" is actually a very close approximation that breaks down under certain extreme conditions.
The discrepency I see between these physical laws and the various universal theories of the mind, is that the limitions of the physical laws are understood, acknowledged, and accounted for. I have not encountered a theory of the mind that says something to effect of "this theory describes the human mind under these conditions, and doesn't hold for these ones". Maybe those disclaimers exist and I just haven't run across them. I'd certianly be very interested in learning more if that's the case!
But what I usually see is something to the effect of "this theory is the Standard Model of the Human Mind and holds true for all peoples under all conditions", as Scott was describing in this article. I am extraordinarily hesitant to accept any theory with that premise, for all the reasons detailed previously.
It could be that I'm wildly misinterpreting the claims of these theories, and they actually do mean "we can explain some behaviors most of the time" but that is never the impression that I've been given.
So, among my many activities is fostering animals.
So, of those who are fostered with their mother, I'd say they mostly end up acting like the animal in question. However, many of our fosters don't come with a mother - and most of those do not, in fact, end up acting like the animal in question. Another individual who fosters has "foster parents" who they trust around the fosters, and these also turn out mostly like the animal in question.
Anecdotally, this is true regardless of whether or not they are the same animal; kittens raised with adult dogs have a tendency to be more dog-like. Puppies raised with adult cats have a tendency to be more cat-like.
For a given value of all of this, granted; there are certain behaviors which are certainly independent of whether or not they were primarily raised by their mother, or by humans, or by another animal.
This argument works only insofar as somebody thinks humans are unique in having such cognitive adaptability, but it is pretty obvious that we aren't.
However! Cats act like cats and dogs act like dogs -relative to human behavior-. Humans, we must note, act, relative to cats and dogs, mostly like humans. Assuming, of course, they are raised by humans; if not, they reportedly do not.
None of this implies, of course, that we can write anything at all; good luck finding the pen, much less the paper, not to mention figuring out what language it's written in, because it was all made up by an infant who had no idea what it was doing.
Not really buying that. I think a cat reared with dogs will still act mostly like a cat, even though it very well may have more doggy tendencies than a cat reared with cats. If nothing else, in my house we have had a fairly wide variety of animals over the years, as one will with children, and despite the fact that the cat could choose to act like a dog, or a hamster, or human being for that matter, all such models being available to it from the time it could open its little kitten eyes, it appears to act pretty much all of the time like a cat. It enjoys chasing little flitty things that act like rodent prey, it does not run fawning to the door when I come home, it doesn't instinctively cower when big animals come near, et cetera. All the other animals also generally act like their innate selves.
Are you sure you're not greatly exaggerating the differences (and I do not doubt at least slight differences exist)? Do you really find that cats bound after balls excitedly, that dogs like to get up at night and prowl?
Part of the problem in answering this is that literally every example you have of an animal acting out of character is basically normal for that animal; want a cat that loves belly rubs? Give it belly rubs as a kitten (it also helps to hold the kitten upside down frequently, "like a baby"). And fawning behavior in particular is basically normal for kittens that are fostered too young; bottle-fed kittens tend to be particularly needy, although it does vary based on the cat. And I find myself blatantly confused by the idea that cats don't bound after balls excitedly.
And many dogs do get up at night and do little prowls, although we'd be more likely to characterize the behavior as a "patrol" because of the particular way we tend to anthromorphize dog behavior.
If the infant (from the Latin "not able to speak") lives in an unimaginable magical world (as Rank says) then the transition to "desires" (in terms we understand) would seem to be an important area of change for the individual in a society. Where does desire come from? How do you get desires? Unconscious desire, as Lacan suggests, is even more intriguing compared to a more conscious desire that I might understand like how rollercoasters are fun. My experience suggests there is at least an unrestricted yearning (Adrial Fitzgerald's terminology) at the core. Girard's idea that our desires are *interdividuel* also makes a lot of sense, and is verifiable in significant cases. This whole relation of an individual to the society is the most profound relation we have.
I think the primary barrier between infant and society is speech (or lack thereof) , and the unfamiliarity of the infant with its own body.
I have only a few “early” memories. One is of being in a car, being frustrated and tired, wanting to find out what was going on and when it would be over, and asking over and over, and getting totally unrelated responses. Finally I was getting agitated about the sheer inadequacy of the answers. This occurred in a tunnel - a very long one- with lights on the walls, a typical traffic tunnel of some kind.
As a kid and then a few times as an adult, I tried to figure out which tunnel it had been. Long story short, this will sound like BS, but when I finally went through that tunnel south of SF toward the coast, I think it was that tunnel. And I realized something - I had thought I was asking clearly, but now I think age-wise, I would have been pre-verbal at that time. So I didn’t realize I wasn’t able to speak. Is there a stage of infancy when the infant believes it can make itself understood, but is emitting noises that sound like screams and shrieks to everyone else?
Then the central trauma of infancy is the shock of discovering that one is unable to make oneself understood. The “other” is the experience of lack of communication.
My mom in the car was not intentionally refusing to tell me what was going on. I was literally unable to clearly ask, and scarier than the tunnel was the lack of understanding.
Related to that would be the shock of discovering one is unable to use one’s body in a coordinated way.
I think maybe if we tell the infants “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you right now, but the more words you use the better it will get” - and then teach baby sign- slowly, infancy will be revealed to be a different thing, certainly different than what psychoanalysts are postulating. It could be part of an argument for reincarnation.
Memory, as the poets know, is central. We can't "know" how a different animal "feels" their memory, but we also don't have any idea about our experience before we "remembered" it. Sounds-like good advice tho. The talking creature is talked into talking by those who talk at him. Another feature that suggests how we might get our desires from others.
"Needing some kind of Oedipal resolution to become a coherent subject, he willed himself to pretend that the appendix was a penis and his father was threatening to castrate him, and then (I can’t believe I am writing this sentence) used the word “button” as a substitute for the moral law."
To the contrary, I can't imagine who else would end up writing "and then he used the word "button" as a substitute for the moral law."
Is anyone familiar with David Ausubels work on Ego development? This book might be an interesting alternative or supplement to Lacan.
https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Development-Psychopathology-David-Ausubel/dp/1560002662/ref=nodl_#
You got me to write a whole essay responding to this
https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/the-game-of-masks/
Pretty much, although I think when it comes to the masks-within-masks stuff, there's going to be a lot of variability; the essay assumes to some extent that everybody builds a similar internal structure, and I don't think that assumption holds.
I don't really assume everybody builds similar internal structures, but the essay was already 3k words long and I was just trying to give an introduction. That said, with this outline you should be able to reverse engineer more complicated models to use for specific people and pathologies.
This is really good, the first time I've ever seen Lacanian theory interpreted through a Jungian perspective, very different than how I typically explain it (and emphasizing different things) but makes total sense. Thanks for sharing!!
This got me from like 5% ready to talk about my problems with how we talk about AI to maybe 10%. There's something about all this that goes "Listen, I made up this story. It's plausible. You can't prove it's not the case right now very well, like maybe everyone is trying to fill up a phantom penis with stamp collecting, you can't prove they aren't. So this is real, treat it like it's real and respect the implications of it if so."
Agreed, and it baffles me that the same people who poo-poo away assertions that spiritual phenomena can't be ruled out merely by a lack of empirical evidence with sneering jibes about teapots orbiting Pluto will turn right around and accept that the inability to show that the laws of physics exclude godlike AIs as certain evidence that a godlike AI will come into being within our lifetimes and we need to spend a lot of time and money worrying about this. Well, to be completely honest, it doesn't REALLY baffle me (I subscribe to the "Rapture of the Nerds" interpretation of a lot of the AGI community, where they aren't engaging in science or even rational thought but are instead constructing a scientistic religion to fulfill the need for a spiritual dimension in life), but it does disappoint me.
> I subscribe to the "Rapture of the Nerds" interpretation of a lot of the AGI community, where they aren't engaging in science or even rational thought but are instead constructing a scientistic religion to fulfill the need for a spiritual dimension in life
Imagine if those who obsess over hostile AGI instead divided their worry equally between nuclear war, bioterror, runaway climate change, a major asteroid strike, and hostile AGI. So, 20% of attention for each. Would you similarly dismiss the 20% of time spent worrying about hostile AGI?
Basically, I'm asking: is your dismissal because the hostile AGI scenarios sound like apocalyptic religion? Or is it only due to how much attention hostile AGI scenarios get relative to those four other catastrophes, each of which has a precedent?
My deep skepticism towards the talk around AGI (especially the apocalyptic decrees of High Prophet Yudkowsky PBUH) is something I've litigated over and over and over unto madness, so forgive me for trying to be brief.
Most people who discuss AGI rely on their scenarios having a lot of hand-waving involved.
Here, I don't merely mean that when I ask, for example, "How can the AGI perfect coordinate thousands of terrorists across six continents without any intelligence agency comprehending the plan and taking meaningful action to stop it", I'm answered with what boils down to "AGI could be better than us and thus we should just assume, without grounding, that basic algorithms will scale up into functional omnipotence." When I've pointed out that Moore's Law is functionally dead and very close to actually dead, and therefore the assumption that compute power will continue to exponentially increase unto infinity assumed by almost all arguments for AGI's inevitability is fundamentally wrong, I'm generally either met with "Some other technology I can't imagine yet will come along and fix Moore's Law" or "I didn't know Moore's Law was dead but will not update my theory in accordance with this." This leads to another good point: many AGI futurists are SHOCKINGLY ignorant of some pretty major developments in the field of computer science that even a rock-bashing primitive like myself has a vague awareness of (I only know that Moore's Law is in the dying room because I vaguely follow gaming tech news and saw a story about it, leading me to do research) and more importantly are extremely obstinate when it comes to updating their models based on current developments (if said developments would damage the model, of course- if they make it seem like AGI could be right around the corner they'll incorporate it in a heartbeat).
But of course all of that just adds up to "Confirmation bias is awful and nobody's safe from it", so where do I get the assertion of religion? Well, the fact that some people took Roko's Basilisk seriously (not helped by Yudkowsky responding to it in a way that seemed like he was trying to maximize a negative outcome) already indicates that the AGI die-hards are probably outside the realm of even pretending to engage in rational thought already. Above that, every prediction about AGI hurled out by futurists nearly invariably falls into a narrative that boils down to "AGI will be a god capable of anything expressed in language."
Some people think that this AGI will be a benevolent god guiding us into a post-scarcity future of unparalleled hedonism. Others, like Yudkowsky, think that it will be a hateful god who will (in a practical sense even if not by deliberate intention) destroy humanity or cast us down into Hell for our arrogance in trying to create a thinking machine. This pattern-matches to apocalyptic religion too well for me to dismiss as coincidence, especially once you look at other ways that these sections of the rationalist sphere can start acting quite irrationally (as an example, I don't think anyone can reasonably dispute that Yudkowsky has a cult of personality around him, even if one quibbles about its size or how fervent it is.)
To disclose my own counterfactuals: I would take AGI more seriously as a sober intellectual exercise if so much of it didn't run on hand-waves (walk me through how AGI develops, for example, without a step that looks suspiciously like a set of question marks, and then walk me through why it decides to destroy the world and how), and I would take AGI as being a real possibility for us far more seriously if Moore's Law somehow doesn't die in the next five years like... the entire electronics industry, essentially, is projecting.
Longtime lurker here, but Lacanian analysis is something that I've studied in its theoretical, if not clinical dimension.
The best way to understand Jouissance (even if the concept is slightly contradictory), is to imagine the infant at the mothers breast. The infant feels totality, satisfaction, etc.--before the infant is able to conceptualize the difference between itself and the mother. We all talk about how infants think they're omniscient--if an infant cries and the breast doesn't appear THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS. This is what we mean by jouissance, the pure satisfied pleasure that precedes the splitting of the world into subjects and objects.
The mirror stage is about the infant that recognizes itself as an object--as an object among other objects over which it has no power. It's a scene that stands as synecdoche for a broader process in child development, but it's a powerful image. It's also the start of the loss of Jouissance. Once the infant stands in a field of objects, it loses that undifferentiated pleasure. Pleasure becomes attached to objects, which renders it limited and finite.
Language is the field of names that the infant comes to attach to this being-cut-off. The name of the father is important, because as Freud says, the infant's realization that the mother has different desires than it does is an especially traumatic experience. The father is the name of the non-reciprocity of the infant and mother's desire. The phallus is the name of what the infant comes to suppose the father has that would attract the mothers desire, etc.
It's fairly easy to ask about the ontological status of these stories, but Lacan doesn't really care about their validity; he cares about their persistence. The central point is that there's a pleasure that we imagine, as people, as a culture, that is before the differentiation between subject and object, before we learn to say "I" and "you." This pleasure is something we have an absolutely firm belief in--a literally unshakeable belief (even if we sometimes want to intellectually deny it)--that is central to most psychic complexes.
If we are extreme skeptics, we can say that pleasure may even be a retro-active illusion produced by language, but even so, it's the non-center that so much language, behaviour, and thought revolves around. These psychoanalytic narratives--in their strange enduring dimension (in 2022!)--are strong evidence of this.
> imagine the infant at the mothers breast. The infant feels totality, satisfaction, etc.--before the infant is able to conceptualize the difference between itself and the mother. We all talk about how infants think they're omniscient--if an infant cries and the breast doesn't appear THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS.
Yes, very intuitively plausible and also pretty moving. At the same time, I think there is something profoundly wrong with not considering the possibility that *nobody fucking knows what the infant is feeling*, or even knows whether it makes sense to talk about the infant "feeling" things in anything like the sense that adults feel things. Infants are baby people, and we can get very seduced by our imaginings of what it is like to be them, but we really have no more evidence for what it is like to be an infant enjoying or craving the breast than we do about what it was like to be the squirrel on the telephone wire outside my window this morning. Is he enjoying the spring sunshine? Oblivious to the weather because his mating drive is revving up and all he's doing is trying to smell out a nubile female? Can he see you? Does he recognize that you are a large, living creature? Is he in pain from squirrel liver cancer? YOU DON'T KNOW.
You cannot build an entire theory of adult function and dysfunction on your imaginings about what infants feel when nursing or when deprived of the breast. It shows a lack of common sense to think that you can.
I find this Lacan-type stuff especially absurd because there actually are some simple measures and experiments that would give you some clues about how valid this picture of infant experience is. For instance, let's take "if an infant cries and the breast doesn't appear THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS." If the THE ENTIRE WORLD SHATTERS -- if the infant in profound distress, frantic with distress -- when the breast does not appear, then there should be some physiological signs of that. What happens to infants' pulse when the breast does not appear? How does that pulse compare to the infants' pulse when the world gets weird and irritating but does not shatter -- for instance when you play a loud unfamiiliar noise for 10 secs, or startle and disorient the baby in other ways? Or what about this: if the failure of a cried-for breast to appear is a highly negative event for an infant, it should function as an effective negative reinforcer. Can you teach baby's to anticipate that no-breast is about to happen by giving a signal that it's about to happen? Say a red light when crying is not going to summon a breast, a green light when it is? Do babies cry when the red light goes on? If they do not, that sure puts a dent in the theory that experiences this early in life have a lasting impact.
"but Lacanian analysis is something that I've studied in its theoretical, if not clinical dimension." I am very curious about why you chose to study it? Was it in your curriculum? Do you find it interesting, or may be thought it would be helpful for therapy?
I am in literary studies, and have a specialty in the relationship of philosophy and literary criticism. I have studied it a little bit formally--e.g. taken courses with some lacanian theorists, and ended up rubbing elbows with a few clinicians in the process. This left me with enough of an interest that I've pursued independent study. I'm not an EXPERT--I haven't read every one of the seminars or gotten too far into the secondary criticism, for example--but by virtue of my primary training, I'm immersed enough in that 50's-70's French philosophy/theory bubble that Lacan doesn't feel quite as obscurantist as from the outside.
As for personal interest, I've had psychodynamic therapy with someone who had a Freudian/Kleinian background, and I think my mixture of admiration for that approach coupled with a growing awareness of its limitations led me to more curiosity about Lacan's merits in a clinical context.
I heard an anecdote about a guy who was upset because he was lactose intolerant and his roommate kept drinking the lactose-free milk that he kept in the fridge. Even worse, he would often drink the milk straight from the bottle.
As payback the guy thought it would be a cool prank to replace the contents of his milk bottle with orange juice. This particular lactose-free milk came in an opaque bottle so his roommate was unlikely to notice the switch until it was too late, especially early in the morning before fully waking up.
Turns out (the story goes) that when you drink something that you thought was milk but suddenly taste something sweet and acidic instead, you immediately panic and throw up. If you taste something wildly different from what you were expecting (even if the taste would be good in a different circumstance, like drinking orange juice) something must be really bad with whatever it is you just put in your mouth.
I think something similar is going on with that psychoanalysis of rape. Humans have innate disgust reactions that cause them to not want to put their soft tissues near unsanitary fluids, or not want to put their vulnerable soft body parts near a stranger's teeth. Those reactions have to be turned off temporarily when we have sex, but your brain doesn't know when you are about to have sex so it has to approximate and that's why it still works with oral sex as long as a hot person is doing it. But switch the person unexpectedly and it's just like when the milk tastes of orange juice. Something feels intensely, urgently wrong.
"Predictive processing can tell us that in a different context, sensations can be perceived differently - but what makes this particular context switch so jarring?"
It seems obvious to me that the reason is garden-variety disgust. If I were eating a cake blindfolded, and the blindfold slipped to reveal the other end of the cake were covered in maggots, I would no longer want to eat the cake (even the non-maggot-infested part of it) and feel repulsed by it. Sex is generally seen as disgusting by default; without sexual desire repressing that aversion, the man's default reaction to receiving oral sex wins out.
On the most basic level, in order to make sure we reproduce and don't just wander around grazing and sleeping, the drive is "stick your thing in the hole". But layered on top of that, to make sure we do it in a way that results in new instances of the species and not beetles mating with beer bottles, is "stick your thing in the *correct* hole". And then as our brains got bigger, our social connections more complex, you got a lot of other layers on top of that.
So if your sexual preferences are set so you like women (hot for preference) but don't like chimpanzees, then the basic "mmmm this feels good" will be over-ridden by "what the hell, this is not what I agreed to!" when the blindfold comes off.
And this is important, because if you would fuck chimpanzees or hot women equally because the sensations feel the same, then you're not going to reproduce the species. Same if you would fuck eight year old girls or eighteen year old young women equally, you're not going to reproduce the species (and you'll do a lot of harm on top of that).
It doesn't have to be moral repulsion, it's partially instinct and partially conditioning.
And prediction markets win
So far it's only got 88 likes. Sad!
I almost always read Astral Codex articles in full, but almost never "like" them because I don't consider that an important part of the interface.
However, some combination of the discussion of prediction markets for liking and the Lacianism of this post made me resolve mid-article to like it, even if I didn't really agree with Lacianism as presented and was unsure of whether or not there was a "there, there" under Scott's confusion.
Also, at least according to my interface, I was the 125th like on this post.
This isn't a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
All of those sex things are pretty easily explained by some combo of very high level genetic instinct, conditioning and/or imprinting, and status. I can't think of a single sex thing that isn't well-explained by one or more of these. No psychoanalysis needed.
“How come if I sit in a dark room and think “okay, gonna stop propping up my ego right now!” nothing bad happens?”
Given the multiple cases of people voluntarily going on silent retreats and then experiencing a psychotic break for the first time in their life, I think you’re wrong about this.
I had never heard of this. What establishes causality? Alternative possibilities:
It may be a coincidence: every day, some people have their first psychotic break. Thus, from time to time, it's inevitable that it happens during or shortly after a silent retreat.
Or maybe the unstable emotions that were precursors to psychosis motivate some people to attend silent retreats. (Similarly, some people self-medicate with marijuana as they unknowingly approach their first psychotic episode. This doesn't mean the marijuana caused the episode.)
Why people wanted a post about Lacan? I think:
-Innocent curiosity, might be fun to poke at.
-"I don't know Lacan, but what I know about psychoanalysis has always sounded funny or wrong, so maybe Scott Alexander can give me an opinion I can trust."
-"I know Lacan and understand him, and that's a topic we haven't covered yet, so I'd like to share my knowledge."
-"Ha-ha, Lacan dumb, let's jeer together!"
I'm not an expert on psychoanalysis, but my wife is a big Lacan and Zizek buff so that makes me one by proxy, and over time I've adopted a charitable view by cherry-picking the stuff I understand and ignoring the stuff I don't.
I honestly think that most testable ideas by Lacan and Freud have been accepted into basic psychology. To name some: we are driven by self-contradictory desires and values, we fumble socially for acceptance and status because we misunderstand ourselves and each other, we're at odds with what we want/need and what's expected of us, our childhood is a precarious time for our development and poses serious risks and misunderstandings, our parents and siblings are really important to us and provide models for future relationships and values, there are personality stereotypes as a fuzzy category that we intuitively recognise, there's a "work me" and a "home me". The more turgid prose has been discarded, and overlapping ideas about proximate and ultimate evolutionary causes have begun to replace the same theoretical groundwork about the causes of our behavioral tendencies. The conceptions we make about our lives and personalities have been replaced by analyses of "rationalizations", or even more plainly, by looking at how people make sense of things when asked. Many of the aforementioned trivial ideas might have been novel to humans before our time and maybe still aren't in some parts of the world, so maybe we're guilty of anachronism when we wave off psychoanalysis for stating the obvious?
I think why psychoanalysts like Zizek remain relevant is because they explore untestable ideas that we may have some intuitions about and can form opinions about with a healthy dose of dunnoism. I like Zizek's commentary, not for its brashness, but for making lots of interesting observations about culture and pointing them out to me. Paraphrasing, nice observations include things like: Online dating involves a lot of marketing, which probably doesn't help in finding true love, because it's bad to be overly concerned with your public image when the point is to truly get to know a person behind the image. Or: People correctly identify other societies'/groups' problems or motives as ideological but not their own; understanding our own values as part of an ideology is important for addressing our own ideological problems and motives. It's more informal than formal, more cultural/social commentary than scientific work. This is why psychoanalysts have so many ideas. Sometimes it's guruism, sometimes it's energetic conversation! People do it because it's fun and exciting and might lead to some new thoughts that can be useful or interesting.
The fact that psychoanalysis seems to me a bunch of turgid prose seems more like a byproduct of the school of thought or then a typical ingroup phenomenon where people get so into things and making fine distinctions within their own arcane community that they lose sight of proper language. My wife reads Zizek's books fluently and can always explain ideas to me in a way that I understand, to which I always react with an annoyed "Why can't they say it like that then?" and she's like... this is their hobby and they get creative and it's fun? Rats and postrats have their own insider mumbo jumbo... like isn't there a better word for describing what a "mesa-optimizer" is? You made a whole post to explain an inside joke. You can think of options, but because you and company privy to the discussion understand it, you might be strapped for alternatives? The rationalist community chugs on happily, honing their craft and building on their own jargon. It could also be that there are different thinkers; maybe people drawn to psychoanalysis grasp ideas easier in terms of symbolism and rationalists in terms of formalism?
"I honestly think that most testable ideas by Lacan and Freud have been accepted into basic psychology." One enormous exception is the influence of parents. Behavioral genetics has very convincingly shown that, for "regular" non abusive parents, parenting and parents in general play a surprisingly small role on most behavioral traits (personality, risk of psychiatric disease for example) of their adult children.
For me it renders largely irrelevant the fixation of psychoanalysts on the relationships between parents and children during early childhood.
Psychoanalysis was all over the place (thanks to all the wild free association?), but it spawned lots and lots of ideas, and under scientific evaluation many big claims turned out incorrect like the overemphasis of parenting and underemphasis of genetics that you mention. Freudian analysis was in the right direction in noticing patterns of parent-offpsring conflict, which have been explained better with evolutionary psychology and scientific evaluation today. (Someone might still *understand* the symbolic explanations of psychoanalysis better than the formalist explanations of evolutionary psychology and arrive at the same or very similar conclusions?)
My own interest with psychoanalysis is how it meddles with concepts, rationalisations, people's own explanations for why they do what they do, how they contradict themselves and make their contradictions tenable. I don't actually think psychoanalysis has any special explanatory power, but it's more like a culture of wild thinking, interesting ideas, and active conversation.
By "[they] provide models for future relationships and values" I meant models or concepts for stuff like "family values", "expectations of social status", "political values", which are the result of both genetic ("openness/unopenness") and social factors (that one identical twin study where the one was a Jew and the other was a Nazi). Consider this: As a wee child you probably defer to your parents' rationalisations of values. When in school you adopt peer values and contradict parents' values. Let's say the ultimate explanation for the change is "to strengthen social bonds" and the proximate explanation is to "fit in". When you grow up, you maybe default to your family's values and roles or eschew them completely. As a person who has to make sense of the switch in values while maintaining a sense of self, the evolutionary explanations don't matter. Do you use your own childhood for reference? I bet you do! (Feel free to correct me.) Consider physical child abuse which has been super common throughout history. You have to have some explanation connected to yourself as a rational agent even if without the social control established in the recent decades you would probably have beaten your children, right? Absolutely nobody thinks "I wanted to raise my child without violence, because the risk of losing face from a social intervention is too great for someone in my social group." Maybe it's "My father beat me, and I don't ever want my children to hate me like I hated him!" Or "My parents were always real nice to me, so I'm going to be nice too." Or maybe it's something unrelated to your own family? "Beating children is wrong."
I have two so basic questions that I feel like an idiot asking it:
1. Do different therapies yield different results?
2. Is the function of different therapies and frameworks to help compatible therapist and patient find each other? (in the sense that if you would assign random therapist and patient to random therapy framework, what would happen?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
But does it mean that something beyond the Other with which a person can come into contact? If the Other is God/set of principles/people important to us, than what happens when we meet someone who doesn't belong to this set?
Applause for the conclusion.
Freud/Lacan always seem to be hovering around and explaining something real but with some wild leaps and improvisations. It's exciting to see rationalist Scott grudgingly acknowledge the spirit of the insight.
"So the real question is: why did you want me to read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?" < I "predicted" Yes as a vote to have you review the book. I was hoping you'd fill-in some spots your your map that your not-a-cult leader acquaintance claimed were there, and that you'd tell me about it.
After I voted I then looked at what was the normal number of likes and how that had increased over time. From that I thought 125 looked easy and then took similar long positions on the other topics of interest. So there was both a prediction and voting element in what I was doing.
Finally, after you posted, I checked the market again and realized the potential for it to be an action market: anyone who'd predicted you'd get 125 likes also had an incentive to spread the word about the article. I made a very minimal attempt to promote it, mostly because I had that ah-ha. I would have done more to promote it, but it was clearly going to get to 125 without further action on my part.
Don't know if it matters for context but I'm a subscriber.
Can confirm. I had a weak father who was easily dominated by my mother (which I do complain about to my analyst from time to time). When I was 8 or 9 years old, I became obsessed with my father's name; specifically, I wanted to change my name to be Father's Name, Jr. As an adult I have changed my middle name (although that doesn't fit the theory so well: my old middle name was associated with my mother's family). My brother changed his entire full name.
Is...there a reason you (or is it the book?) keep referring to a child as "it"? I found it extremely distracting and disturbing.
I get the impression Lacan would thrive in several of Scott's fictional universes (Unsong, Adwellia, the place in The Proverbial Murder Mystery, ...). Unfotunately, *this* universe doesn't run on clever wordplay, so devising the perfect pun doesn't hand you the keys to reality. Instead, you get intricately-crafted bullshit that's entertaining and perhaps persuasive, but no more likely to be *true* than random chance.
Lacanian psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis (TM - S. Freud) is shit. That's my heuristic.
I would love to hear a Lacanian interpretation of this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLqzH2glcmc
Such a shame that this was the Lacanian book that you chose… Fink oversimplifies stuff to the point where a lot of things either don’t make sense or just sound silly. He basically just does a bad, BAD job at separating Freud from Lacan, which is important, since Lacan was criticizing Freud most of the time, not praising him. It also sounds like a behaviorist reading of psychoanalysis, which, again, is not great…
I suggest Joel Dor’s book, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, for people who are actually interested. It’s still a simplified version of the real thing, but at least it’s not this bad.
Scott’s view seems accurate enough and I feel like he did a good job with his comments, but, as a psychoanalyst, this was hard to read.
This comment made me reflect on authorship. Who it is that reviews a particular method of psychoanalysis? Those with sufficient knowledge. Most people with sufficient knowledge will be practitioners who rely on the method, or practitioners who abandoned it.
I've read the Very Short Introductions to Freud and Jung. The Jung book was clearly written by a fan. The Freud book, by prominent psychiatrist Anthony Storr, seemed mildly critical at times. Perhaps Storr tried practicing Freudian psychoanalysis before moving in a different direction. Anyway, the Freud book was more informative partly thanks to this criticism.
Are there any books about Lacan's method by those who tried it and abandoned it?
How do you square this with Fink's standing as perhaps the most respected clinical Lacanian (in the Anglosphere, at least)?
Also with the famous "return to Freud?"
Alas, "the story of the “mirror stage”". Your account is not wrong, exactly, but it misses all that matters, and it makes a hash of Lacan. Perhaps this is a failing of the book?
You write: "This is a sort of eureka moment when it realizes it’s a united entity with a specific structure - a bunch of correlations suddenly snap into place, and it realizes it can at least aspire to coherence."
Nothing that proceeds from this can be said to be Lacanian, or hope to address Lacan's work.
First, and this is trivial: an actual mirror is optional. It can be a shadow, a reflection in water or another's eye, or the realization that other people see you in a way that you don't. Anything external that can be identified as 'me' will do.
Second, and this must not be mistaken: The mirror stage is is not recognition. It is misrecognition.
When the infant child thinks: 'that over there, that is me', they are wrong, and fundamentally, irrevocably wrong: 'that, over there', is not me. But in the mirror phase, the initial self image we form ('that over there' = 'me') and which we then elaborate and revise all our lives, is based on this misrecognition.
In Lacan's thought, this is neither optional nor possible to overcome, for it is the base of our ego's further development. This is why Lacan called it the mirror phase: we base our self image ('this is me') on something external that is not us ('that over there'), as if we had misrecognized a mirror image for ourselves.
If we proceed without this misrecognition at the root of the mirror phase and all that follows, then we depart Lacan's discourse entirely. Which is not to say that perhaps half of the academic works on Lacan that I'm familiar with don't make this precise, and even symptomatic, mistake.
Lacan offered (or perhaps 'tried out') many images for the ego in his career. One of them, opposed to the formidable castle Freud once had us imagine, was of a plastic bag filled with water: there is small bubble in the bag, and it moves around as pressure is applied, so that it is larger now, then smaller, perhaps it splits into two, then it merges again. This is the ego, and it is always repeating to itself "I am the unchangeable center, around which all else revolves". The ego is not 'mistaken' in this, but it is built from misrecognition, and cannot exist without it.
From the mirror phase onwards: misrecognition, and not recognition. Without this, Lacan's thought cannot usefully be approached.
I actually also read the Bruce Fink book recently. I think part of the problem you're having is that Fink is writing for an audience of psychoanalysts, i.e. people who know Freud's work pretty well and mostly accept it. Fink doesn't try to defend, or even explain, most of the Freudian stuff. And it seems like a lot of that is what you're getting hung up on--infantile sexuality, the significance of the phallus, etc. You might've been better off reading Fink's other book, The Lacanian Subject, which doesn't assume familiarity with Freud--or reading this one after a basic introduction to Freud (Jonathan Lear's book is good for this, as he's critical of many of Freud's positions while at the same time arguing for his importance).
Like, no offense, but if your conclusion is that maybe there's something to this whole psychoanalytic account of repression...you've barely even reached Fink's premises, let alone his conclusions, so the book won't be very convincing.
As for specifics, I think you've got an outline of the book that misses what (for me at least) was most interesting about it. Take desire. You write, "Some parts seem too trivial to care about (eg we desire things, even if we get one object of desire we’ll just start desiring something else)". If that were the crux of the assertion, it would indeed be trivial. I take this to be a rephrase of Fink on p. 51, "When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it." Sure, that's in the text, but what's crucial is the sentence just before it which Fink italicizes: "Human desire, strictly speaking, has no object." And before that: "Desire is not so much drawn toward an object...as elicited by a certain characteristic that can sometimes be read into a particular love object: desire is pushed not pulled." The idea is not that desire dies once it's satisfied, which would be trivial. The point is that desire isn't for a particular object in the first place, and it can't be.
This is where Fink starts really getting at what Lacan's theory of desire is. About the "mimetic" nature of desire, you say "Some people definitely do this ... Other people definitely don’t do this, like that guy who obsessively collected streetcar tickets." Lacan's view is that everyone does this in every instance--that's what makes the idea not trivial. Lacan's stance would be that a guy who obsessively collects streetcar tickets is just as caught in desire as imitation as anyone else. It may be that he's misunderstood someone else's desire, or that the collecting of streetcar tickets is the deformation of another desire through repression. There is no "real," inherent desire; it's the drives that are inherent.
This is why Lacan suggests you need to move past desire, what he calls the "traversing of fantasy." I agree that Fink does a poor job of explaining what this would entail, but he does at least point at it: "the analysand moves from being the sbject who demands...to being the subject who desires..to being the subject who enjoys (who is no longer subject to the Other)." (p. 65)
Anyway, based on your summary I can see why the book wasn't enjoyable to you; if I shared your interpretation I wouldn't like it much either. I'm not sure I buy what Lacan says, but I definitely think he's saying something strange and counterintuitive. Some of the local observations on obsessional and hysterical neurosis do seem very true to me, and I feel they've helped me understand some of my own self-sabotaging behaviors. But ymmv.
I want to attempt to explain Lacan's whole "Babies really want but can't achieve their mother's affection" thing.
Imagine you are a baby. You have two hands, which is pretty great since you can play with them. You have two feet, excellent for trying to chew on. You also have a mom who feeds you. Mom is definitely part of you, like your arm or your leg. You flex, you get an arm. You cry, you get Mom feeding you. This is fine - every baby is born with a mom, just like babies are born with two arms and two legs.
One morning you wake up and your arm is GONE. By your arm, I mean your mom. You cry and cry and cry and she just does not appear. This is literally, to your little baby brain, identical to losing an arm.
Actually, it's worse. If your arm got chopped off, you'd just lose an arm but that isn't your arms fault. Imagine instead you woke up and your arm decided it was going to go for a latte at Starbucks and was done being your arm. This is insult to injury. Your arm is drinking fancy coffee drinks and hanging out with some MAN and is HAPPY. Mom is definitely not that happy when she was attached to you. Not only has your arm left you - by choice - but it is happier being separated from you. This is like the worst breakup you've ever had, and then some.
So, you lost your limb, and your favorite milk bearing appendage has been stolen - and is happier than you ever made it - with some dang dude. So, in your baby mind, you decide to win back your mom. You're going to be the best baby that a baby can be, and you are going to make her happier than that strange man who keeps hanging out and making her dinner.
Except that you're a baby, and while mom fakes a smile when you hand her blocks, you definitely can tell it's not as good as making her dinner and giving her a glass of wine. No matter how hard you try, you will never make your mom - who is basically your detached limb - as happy as the jerk who stole her. You can not fulfill that need.
Now, here's the whole problem: Mom was never actually an appendage. She didn't actually love you as much as your little baby brain thought she did. She loved you like, nomal human mother:child amounts of love, but not "is literally an extension of your physical self" kind of love. So even when you become an adult.. you can't get that level of love from your mom again. It just isn't real, you are chasing a fiction. Every desire you will ever experience is just second best to some fictional relationship you thought in your head as a baby.
[Days late] An important not-fetish issue is that for many, as days go by without sex, the sex drive gets stronger, so the criteria for enjoyment gets more open. One possibility seems to me that those having some fetishes are getting too much of "vanilla" sex, so it ceases to be as exciting - as quick and easy to be aroused. Sort of like drug use builds up tolerance and the need for a bigger dose for similar effect.
As a complete stranger to psychology, who’s first reaction to Lacan was to think it sounded like obscure babble which can fit anything to anything, I think I’m starting to build an understanding of this Lacanian psychoanalysis stuff. By build an understanding, I mean, fit it together into my worldview/model.
A new perspective: Psychoanalysts obviously need to understand rationality/reinforcement-learning concepts to do their job (things like “the child ends up optimizing for being attracted to buttons because his dad referred to his mom as a his button and the child associated mom signals to reward”), but they come from a different field. So they end up reinventing it, but from the operational perspective of a psychologist talking to patients. The words Mother, Father, etc initially come up a lot and are central in the problem-understanding process, so they naturally end up selected when coalescing concepts cristallize from the noise of many many examinations, and we end up with a sort of analogue to rationality / AI theory but using words like Other, Mother, Id, etc.
At first, the psychoanalyst’s thought models overfit to a few cases, his own biases, etc, and it looks like a mix of Freudian psychoanalysis, with a bit of grandmother wisdom and some astrology-like pattern-recognition from noise, using the words “Mother, Father, Id, a lot”. But the more a psychoanalyst sees, the more his model understanding starts to approximate the generality of human cognition, the more in common it starts to have with other general models of cognition (such as rationality), and so his psycho-babble starts sounding like Eliezier’s rationalist-babble, but replacing words like “Utility”, “Mesa-Optimizer”, etc, with words like “Other”, “Jouissance”, etc.
If it is true, I expect a lot of psychoanalysis to look like weird psychobabble models which seem centered about really specific patterns (Mother/Father pattern), but as the field evolves people start revising them to be more general, and suddenly "Mother" is just a symbol which represents "The thing that our metaoptimizer optimises for", and so on. Maybe with the added ability to sometimes just apply the term directly (e.g. to mean the patient's actual "Mother" or her desires) since it often fits.
This is of course not a complete model, just a single perspective which occurred to me while reading (https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/the-game-of-masks/), but I wonder how well it fits to truth?
Sorry if this already came up, but does anyone find it weird that the Mom is a pure object in Lacanian world view (as I understood it from this review)? She isn’t an entity that does anything or controls anything or has any thoughts or desires she projects into the world. She dispenses milk… but infinitely and automatically.
All of the scenarios and case studies fell apart for me because the Mom didn’t participate in any of them, which seems like such a deviation from even an idealized version of reality that I couldn’t find value in the proposed scenarios. Other than to make me wonder what the their would look like if Mom had feelings or reactions about the Child. Is that a thing that other psychoanalytical theory famously goes into in response to Lacan?
With respect to sex, I don't think it's really all that hard to understand. Sex is maybe 10% about genital friction, with the remaining 90% split between social bonding and imagination. (For women, it's more like 1%/99%.) If you're wearing a blindfold, you can imagine that your partner is hot, which is the main reason you're aroused. Take the blindfold off, find out that your partner is not hot, and the illusion vanishes, along with the arousal. Moral judgement has nothing to do with it.
As to various "perversions", I think it's mostly about self-image. We all have an image of ourselves -- what kind of person we are, what kind of person we want to be, and how other people view us. We take on sexual roles that either reinforce that self-image, or roles that give us reassurance about anxieties that we may have about our self-image. BDSM play makes the dominant feel strong/powerful/virile. But submitting, or giving pleasure to a partner, makes a person feel desirable/useful/wanted/needed/loved.
IMHO, most "sexual perversion" is just personality; what happens inside the bedroom mirrors what happens outside of it. A man who wants to be the alpha-male and "in charge" outside of the bedroom probably would get a kick out of being a BDSM dominant. A shy "nice guy" or "romantic" who is uncomfortable ordering people around most likely enjoys a more gentle/submissive role. There are lots of people who love scifi/fantasy costumes or cosplay, why not have fun with sex as well?
In most cases, we seek out roles and situations that will reinforce our self-image, since anything else leads to cognitive dissonance. However, if our self-image does not align with something that we want for ourselves (like sex), then sometimes we have to employ tricks in order to get around that. Consider a person who is self-conscious or uncomfortable in social situations, or has anxiety about being attractive. The role of sex-slave might be comforting or reassuring to that person, since they are freed from the responsibility of making social decisions (and sex-slaves are hot by definition). On the other hand, consider a guy who's naturally wimpy and shy, but has been fed a steady diet of action movies, and just can't quite shake the image that sexually attractive men are supposed to be strong and muscly. In that case, maybe a whip and some leather pants helps him overcome his wimpy self-image and feel more virile.
A woman who constantly ends up with abusers is probably suffering from low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance, and can't reconcile her self-image of "victim" with the role of "strong woman in a kind and caring relationship". Hate sex is similar: if a person feels emotionally distant from their partner (or from everyone), then they can't visualize themselves as caring or loving (or perhaps, being cared for or loved). In that case, hate sex is great, because it doesn't require an emotional connection.
I guess I don't see sex in any of these cases as being any different from the way that self-image works in non-sexual situations. E.g. wrt to the blind-fold example, give a person a bowl of delicious soup. They like it. Now tell them it was made from roadkill, but totally fresh -- no chance of disease. Do they still like it?
What about the girl who gets straight-As in every math class, but wants a study partner to help her with a science class because she's "bad at math"? (I met several of these in high school.) Self-image.
On the meta level:
1. I am in the "very interested/this changed my life in a fundamental way" cluster of your Sadly Porn review, I think it had deep insights that allow me to see the world under an interesting light. But I have to admit that up until your fourth paragraph mentioning prediction markets, this review just kept feeling more and more ludicrous, hilarious, and spurned in me a feeling of "Why am I even reading this?".
If nothing else, I was very confused about why people would dismiss the Sadly Porn review as obscurantist or trivial, and I think that this may have transferred to me some of what it must have felt like.
For the people who strongly disliked or didn't care for the Sadly Porn review, I am interested to know if this one up to the fourth section felt similar?
2. That being said, I did enjoy your overall review when you went a meta level up. But I am a little torn on what signal I should send to the betting market now. I think you generated deep insights similarly as the Sadly Porn review, but I am not certain this is specifically related to the book itself. I think in the case of Sadly Porn, you were trying to integrate an antimeme and documenting this journey. This was fascinating to me both on the object level (the meme itself) and on the meta level (seeing how you go about trying to learn an antimeme, what you learn about your learning, etc). In this review, it really didn't feel like you took much from the book, it felt more like a conversation starter so to say. And I think you could have generated these insights with a different book, and maybe that would have been even more interesting because they wouldn't have been set in your mind yet.
So should I like your post? If liking your post is a signal _to you_ of "good job, keep up with the insights" then yes. But if liking your post is a signal to the market of "You chose the right book" I think this would be way more complicated, and maybe not. This also seems to change the very semantics of clicking on the like button
On the review itself:
3. Disclaimer: I feel almost no effect of gender presentation on my attraction toward others. This will obviously bias my view.
Regarding what you said about heterosexuality, I do think that sexuality is way more malleable than people think, that you can deliberately choose to be gay or straight or bi or etc... It did occur to me that a lot of straight men are more playing up the role of who they ought to be and conform to the image of themselves. I think this is particularly striking with straight men who go about any and _all_ interaction with a woman as a potential date (I have a relative who was thinking about all the implications of marrying someone he just met on the bus)
At least in my own bubble, I know too many people who have changed their sexual orientation over time for the "They were really that way all along" hypothesis to make sense.
My current model is that it's just like liking cilantro or garlic. Sure, some people hate it, and maybe they hate it in a way that's genetic and cannot be overcome, but for most people, I reckon that they could learn to like garlic if they really wanted to.
At least I feel like that's what happened to me.
The "Sadly Porn" /review/ was fine -- Scott is a great writer. However, my takeaway from the review was an extremely strong feeling of "why would anyone read this trash?" The excerpts from the book felt very much like a cult leader with a huge ego saying things that are supposed to sound insightful, without actually having any content. But then, I'm a scientist. I have little use for prophets, cults, or religions (at least of the more fundamentalist/evangelical variety), and an allergic reaction to anything that stinks of them. That's just me, though -- there is obviously a long religious/spiritual tradition of people who feel otherwise. I also don't believe in antimemes either, at least not on the level that Scott was talking about. IMO, if you can't explain something clearly, then it's not an explanation. I don't know if that clarifies your confusion about why some people didn't like "Sadly, Porn"; there are clearly differences of opinion. :-)
In answer to your question, my reaction to this review was similar, except that at least here, Scott seemed to be reading the book with the same skepticism that I would have. Lacanian analysis sounds both ludicrous, and completely over-sexualized and sexist to me. Young children desire a phallus to please their mother? Really? Even the girls? Or are girls not people? Seriously, WTF?
Wrt. heterosexuality, I think there's a spectrum of how malleable people are. I am a heterosexual man, but I have never really identified with the social stereotype of "manliness". So if I woke up tomorrow in a woman's body, my first reaction would be along the lines of "Huh, this is neat!" However, my second reaction would probably be: "Wait... do I have to have sex with guys? Because that's going to be... awkward." In other words, I'm probably mid-range on the malleability scale. I don't strongly identify with my own gender, but I do have a pretty clear sexual preference. For many people, "being a man" or "being a woman" is a big part of their self-image, while for other people it's not. But if you don't care, then it's a lot easier to just fit in with the stereotype as best you can...
This is an extremely satisfying summary of Sadly, Porn that I think would bridge the intuition gap for many: https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastpsychiatrist/comments/ugb13h/notes_on_reading_sadly_porn/
Can @Slimepriestess or @Snav sign off on this interpretation?