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.
---------
[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.
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.