Blood in Antithesis
In the modern world, there is plenty of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis activity going on as described by Hegel, but unfortunately, any kind of prediction of where it will go and how it will end up continues to surprise and dismay the generations. As in Nirvana’s Territorial Pissings, socialization always included the need for the powerful to surveil the population to control any attempts for people to rise up in competition to create a new synthesis that they don’t like. Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you. Whether this was through social gatherings or in the workplace, the human being is made to be useful or discarded. The powerful of course have a double standard with supreme freedom, privacy, and even if they are found out in a corruption scandal, they can squash dissent with all the leverage they have over everyone. To find a way, you have to be on your best behavior, which for the powerful is being useful for exploitation, because best behavior you can count on meaning, less rewards. You can then infer that the powerful refuse to be controlled in this way, so they can hide their arbitrary and false justification for their rewards. The powerful get second, third, fourth, fifth chances, etc., and the weak receive no mercy.
Nirvana – Territorial Pissings: https://youtu.be/9yNPgx0swCM?si=HQWSRagTLqctDxX2
This is what they have planned for you – Carl Vernon: https://youtu.be/nmOadDlG4gc?si=WzXpgEPsPffdjIiE
Larry Ellison predicts rise of the modern surveillance state where ‘citizens will be on their best behavior’ – Christiaan Hetzner: https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveillance-state-police-ai/
We now have people on the left and right politically that are scattered between two areas, the ones who support this control, enforced by a dependent mob, and those who see through the game. The latter tend to talk to each other despite political differences, because their goal is to lift up the powerless and disenfranchised. We’re all going to die in the end, and if one has a modicum of empathy, there’s a lot more meaning to be found in restoring balance. The other strident political voices are tribal with their politics because it’s the only way to secure the current system’s money and benefits. They ignore policy with their heightened emotions because responsibility threatens their position, so any reformer who promises responsible change will be viewed as a punitive parent. The reformer who believes in accountability is demonized, and when that reformer leaves political office, the next reformer will be demonized just the same. The only way through it morally is to look at the whole of the population and economically create spaces for all walks of life, barring any violence and abuse. Accountability is important, but corruption can make it one-sided where only certain segments of the population, who are politically threatening, are to be treated with hypervigilance.
So it isn’t always paranoia. There’s an element of social pressure that really does exist, and it can trigger those who are paranoid sensitive. Instead of negotiating politically for basic rights and trying to live a personal lifestyle that’s sustainable, with the contributions that one puts out in exchange for the consumption one demands from everyone else, the paranoid are lost in persecution mania and everything is seen to be control emanating from bad actors on all sides. Any therapy has to dredge up histories of family members with paranoid tendencies and search out triggering events that set the patient on the wrong path. Where there is blame for society, the paranoid patient scapegoats and attributes too much fault by including so many innocent people in the process. The ones who are paranoid enough to demand political violence one can infer that they have personal struggles, shame, and low self-worth connected to their activism. It’s never a disinterested, scientific pursuit for the well-being of the whole, which is always the most stable intention. It’s all about solving something personal through politics or having designs on celebrities who indirectly make them feel inferior.
Karen Metal: https://youtu.be/o8hYrNsRoTs?si=FhY5aTetF6q9PdxX
Give him a Ticket!: https://youtube.com/shorts/XN5tMXGav9s?si=NJl0ziqlnIP-7C-E
Septum Core: https://youtube.com/shorts/o0c2Hrxi6Gk?si=N8u6GEkpGFUEQ_a8
Election Meltdowns Go MENT-ALLICA: https://youtu.be/9mHST4Q4kTU?si=zGWKBXqcND_AmyYl
‘Why are you closed’ goes Metal!: https://youtu.be/7YPiUtAde2o?si=A1pHT5WdWw20zr5z
No one wants to fight for Israel goes Metal!: https://youtu.be/rwqnTkKSQwA?si=WneLQ4Kz1yk_TH_M
Rage Against the Musician (“Trumpet Fight”): https://youtu.be/9OukIRDK-N0?si=yzujJSPzr_RXy26g
SHE’S BACK | Karen Metal: https://youtu.be/mSOJAjKm8eU?si=UGqE3qgac80LJacI
What hasn’t changed since the past is an obsession with the powerful by the disenfranchised, and Jacques Lacan, like so many other intellectuals wanted to be avant-garde and stay as many steps ahead by taking in lectures from those who took inspiration from Hegel’s predictions, through new voices such as Alexandre Kojève’s, who provided insight on how the idea of oneself in each person interacted with the ideas of self in others. “In Kojève’s hands, Hegel was revolutionized: the Russian’s lectures created a kind of ‘game of seduction,’ masterful in its intelligence, its acumen—and its discordant spirit. Kojève had little interest in sticking to the original scoresheet. Rather, he provided a disconcerting reading of Hegel, based on the concepts of ‘desire’ and ‘recognition’ (Lacan, and not only him, would owe much to these insights), of ‘labor’ (with Marx providing the backdrop), and of ‘death’ (Heidegger), not to forget the red-hot core, namely the ‘master-slave dialectic.’ To simplify things, we could say that this was the atheist mirror-image of a theological interpretation inherited from the Russian philosophers and Eastern studies. Religion, finitude, transcendence, the pain of the laceration between the mundane and the absolute: under Kojève’s lens, the Phenomenology became the twentieth century in Hegel. This ‘new perspective’ would allow Kojève to become a mythical figure in Parisian culture, even without him having ever intended this. Let’s try and imagine the scene: a young Russian émigré, barely thirty-one years old, was thrown almost by chance into an extraordinary philosophical fray. Here he was not addressing any ordinary group of students: for they included Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, Gaston Fessard, Éric Weil, Aron Gurvisch, Roger Caillois, Jean Hyppolite, Raymond Aron, Robert Marjolin, and sometimes André Breton. In short, the best of postwar French culture bowed to a Russian exile who impressed on them his image of Hegel’s system. The image provided by Kojève in fact subtended a conceptual terrain that upset the idealistic-dialectical framework in favor of existence and history. It was here that the game of seduction came in: Kojève did not settle for reading out his lectures, but made his words into ‘a sharp weapon.’ With his impeccable French—lent a captivating originality and charm by his Slavic accent—he was able to catalyze his audience’s attention even to the point of leaving them shocked and exasperated. ‘Kojève was able to enchant an audience of super-intellectuals with an inclination to doubt and critique.'”
Jean Hyppolite in particular was able to combine, Hegel, Marx, and Kojève into something scary. It’s like a primitive man encountering another one and assessing, power differentials, consumption, utility, respect or contempt, and status recognition up against the natural environment; an exploration of the big Other. When one is on one’s own, objects to be consumed are only temporarily satisfying, but recognition from others, especially lasting recognition, provides for extended periods of satisfaction, which also gives a sense of meaning to life, to see positive impacts on others. Those impacts create a promise of reciprocity when we later on need help. On the other hand, being snubbed and rejected leads to dark places. Consciousness can also be trapped in the need to measure oneself against others as a benchmark for meaning. Inspiration can turn into envy and resentment very quickly. “Strictly speaking, there is no object which is simply an object, nor any subject that is only a subject, one without and the other within. My internal life does not exist as such; rather it exists through my exchange with the world, or in my projects which alone confer a meaning upon what is outside…One cannot be understood apart from the other. In relating to this world, desire must rediscover itself, but it is unable to recognize itself without passing through the mediation of this world.”
Beck – Dark Places: https://youtu.be/AW17lc9wMd4?si=JVkAfeTCA9E0xrqG
The self appears first as a recognition of sensations triggered by the environment, and the resistance it puts against the environment in the goal of survival, creates a self-image or concept of self, rating how well it’s doing, and it confers meaning to this life, so “my organic life forms the object of the self’s desire, and through the resistance which it offers or opposes to its negation the self learns the meaning of its independence. However, self-consciousness must find its satisfaction and fulfill itself in this [dualism]. But it can only achieve this if it appears in the form of an other Self, another living self-consciousness. ‘Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.’ The existence of the Other is an ontological, or Being condition of my own existence.” My satisfaction comes from downward comparisons with others or loving cooperative experiences. As in social psychology, people are rated as cooperative or competitive.
We tend to like cooperation more than competition, unless we are guaranteed to win, and so many of our desires are now generated through the sense of how it involves others, which is extrinsic motivation: Do I have permission to like this? Do I like this because culture rewards it? If I disagree with powerful people, what will it cost me? Most importantly, if I like something, is it because it is objectively good for me or is it because I anticipate positive human attention? If I dislike something, is it because of legitimate consequences that are inherent in the object, or do I anticipate cultural punishment? Conversely, intrinsic motivation would ask, what would I like if cultural considerations were not a weighing factor?
I can be brainwashed into thinking my desire, which often times favors the desire of the powerful, and be fooled into thinking it really was my authentic desire. I can also desire that the powerful do something for me, but only in situations where they are weak and have lost some of their leverage, do their desires become forced to negotiate and accommodate. Being forced to negotiate and accommodate is an advanced definition of alienation. A lot of our desires are not based on a single subject looking at an object or situation, but based on the anticipated reactions of others: A linked, distorted, bent, and fused or welded desire. Both sides of the exchange can feel identification with one another but also both can feel enmity when desire is mixed with coercion. The trap is that desire wells up constantly and needs an object, but may repeatedly be an accommodation to the desire of the Other, as a habitual default. I want to be appreciated and I can see the Other demands appreciation as well. We all want to be wanted or needed, but we can habitually consider what Others want, before we consult ourselves on what we really want: A self-abandonment.
That self abandonment is an insecure foundation for self-esteem, because it’s based on how accommodating we are to the desire of others, even if we are being exploited by people who are only utilitarian. Self-sabotage, guilt feelings, and self-punishment are now possible when powerful cultural authorities can manifest as a fifth column in the mind, as a pathological super-ego. Since desire is connected with survival, and our survival relies so much on powerful Others, desire of the Other can force complete accommodation on our part to the point of self-alienation. This goes even further to attack the belief that one can be purely authentic when the influence of: I want this because I’ll be rewarded; I avoid this because I’ll be punished, is recognized. Our sense of self can then unconsciously identify with others and appear authentic simply because of its urgent intensity, full of a fear of rejection, which is anything but authentic. Because survival cannot happen without interdependence with culture, and our reactions are mediated by language, pointers to what is desirable, detestable, or even reactions based on contrarianism and rebellion, they all are evidences of interdependence. “The desire that constitutes the self can only exist if it is for itself an object of another desire. Thus the desire of life becomes the desire of another desire, or rather, in view of the necessary reciprocity of the phenomenon, human desire is always desire of the desire of another. Thus, in human love, desire appears to the self as the desire of the desire of another. The self needs to be beheld by the Other. For the self is essentially desire. Thus what the self expects to find in the Other is desire of its desire. It is only the animal that satiates itself in abstract negation or an indulgence that is a kind of death. But the self’s desire must perpetuate itself and this it can only accomplish if its object is also desire, a desire at once identical with its own desire and alien to it. Thus the self appears in the Other [when we are being commanded through unavoidable interdependence] and the Other appears as the self, [when we accommodate and identify]. Each exists only through this reciprocal recognition: ‘they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.’ In order to exist, each self-consciousness must be recognized by another; consequently each demands from the other the recognition without which it could not exist, except perhaps as a living thing, but not as consciousness of universal life, or absolute desire. The consequence is the familiar struggle for life and death, a struggle for prestige in which man confronts man to gain recognition as a man. For without this recognition in successful struggle each would be unable to ‘prove themselves and each other.'” We only do not have to prove ourselves to others for status, but the Other’s recognition, both positive or negative, provides evidence outside of ourselves that we exist. That’s why there are feelings of loneliness and emptiness when there is social rejection, even if our society provides enough food and shelter to keep us alive. Even worse, if humans are capable of envy and jealousy, what Others desire for us could never be pure advice that would benefit us to the absolute. It would likely be limited so as to not make those Others feel insecure. Only people who can confidently handle their own feelings of insecurity could ever give good advice.
Neil Diamond – I Am… I Said: https://youtu.be/8TYesac3Hmw?si=mR7gGvJ4PKo5rpJE
Once an interaction has occurred, the self-consciousness can now use memory of other objects, or experiences with others, to then go back to itself and reflect on itself. “How can [self-consciousness] be conscious of itself alone while also relating to something else? It can do so, Hegel maintains, only by starting with the other, actively removing it and in so doing turning back to itself. Self-consciousness, therefore, must be the ‘return from otherness.’ As such, it proves to be not simply a state, but a movement–the movement that Hegel calls ‘desire’ (Begierde).” This desire can make comparisons, and obviously, a downward comparison feels better than an upward one. Much of the reflection after an interaction is a scorecard and never a purely solitary reflection. Like in object relations, those relations stay inside of us and motivate us to ruminate, make predictions and or anticipate consequences.
Desire needs the competitive side to win and change it’s identity through some form of success to feed itself, which is to feed the survival scorecard. It then goes into depression in the event of a loss and pursues love in its fall, but then oscillates back to competition and self-assertion after psychological healing. One way to gain wholeness is domination and the other is cooperation, but reciprocity is subjective and many don’t have the energy to make it equal. People may just want to run up the scorecard to infinity. This is where greed can be seen to be more of a social phenomenon, where we may destroy the community in some way while we amass wealth, often through steamrolling, stepping on the toes of others, to gain recognition, through objects of desire, that are made to be more attractive than their practical use by social reward, and through social combat. This is where the socialist zero-sum game mentality comes in, even if it’s only an illusion when productivity has massively increased through capitalism. A person’s sense of independence, which is also an illusion, can rise or fall based on the most recent win or loss. The feeling of being a loser can exist even in a world with longer lifespans and improved technology. “Whether ‘desire’ is the best translation for the German ‘Begierde’ is open to question. Begierde in the Phenomenology is not the feeling of wanting something I lack–it is not the desire for an object–but is more akin to greedy consumption that feeds my sense of self. (Contained within Begierde is the German word for greed, ‘Gier.’) Begierde also encompasses the activity of wantonly destroying things, for no other reason than to affirm one’s sense of self. As Hegel puts it, desire is the movement through which self-consciousness ‘destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself.’ He now points out, however, that desire is not the be all and end all of self-consciousness, but is required by its own experience to mutate into a new shape.”
Through the medium of trade, the war of all against all can stabilize in labor. The results of work can be traded and included in the sense of self, and a collective self can develop, but there’s a threat of alienation when exploitation arises. The conflict then becomes a conflict over ownership. “Labor has a double function. First of all, labor humanizes nature, giving it the form of self-consciousness. It manifests externally what it is in itself, appearing thus as a work, a human Object (die Sache selbst) and no longer a mere thing (Ding) as it was at the level of perception. Nature ceases to be a power over which man has no control and before which he trembles (God without man), In-itself, in its cosmic significance, nature was already self-consciousness; it now becomes such for-itself. Man discovers himself through this labor and is reconciled to nature. Secondly, labor conveys a real coherence and universality upon human existence. This second feature is no less important than the first because it alone authenticates, although the slave is still ignorant of it, that necessary recognition or universality which the slave appeared to have forsaken when he recognized the master without demanding recognition for himself. But recognition from someone whom one does not oneself recognize, or to recognize without recognition in turn, are both false mediations which reverse themselves. It thus becomes necessary for work to be recognized for itself. It is in work—independent and nevertheless a reflection of being-for-itself—that self-consciousness becomes recognizable by others. Furthermore, it must be recognized in practice and this is the source of a new struggle between men. It is not any longer the struggle to the death which initiated the first movement of recognition, but it is still a conflict, because work has no meaning except as collective work. Ultimately, it is the entire human species in the full range of its internal conflict and unity which must find expression and make itself in this work which, consequently, is no longer a particular task but anticipates the fullness of its significance…Of course, the particular effort, inasmuch as it is particular, disappears, but what does not disappear, but is finally acknowledged, is the disappearance of the disappearance, which is nothing else than ‘the Object itself.’ It is simultaneously the product of each and of all. It is both for-the-others, in so far as it is objectified, and for-the-self, as its alienated meaning but nevertheless its own meaning. At this level a meaning of human history becomes a possibility, as a kind of true value; this meaning appears to be at once the projection of the nature of human self-consciousness and something open to rationalization and justification through mutual recognition at the level of created being.”
It’s in this conflict inside the self and the need to find a place in society that those like Hegel, Marx, Kojève, Hippolyte, Lacan and others studied, a Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, where individuals find their purpose and realize freedom through shared, objective habits and laws. This utopian world without alienation is where conflict is sublimated into a recognition of conflict as being normal, where the alienation dissolves into a recognition that “I am part of the structure that produces this conflicting reality.” It’s a recognition of interdependence and seeing your contribution to the workings of it. The conflict is a sign of not finding a place in the world, and when a place is found periodically for meaning, like work in different institutions that try to solve specific problems, where survival panics are deescalated with enough rewards that maintain dignity, a Marxist intrinsic motivation can arise when work becomes something you recognize as yours. The realistic version of this is living in the world as it is and seeing your own contributions having a positive effect on the environment, and that means actually paying attention to the cause and effect you are making, and not getting lost in comparisons and drifting thoughts. Even when something feels imposed, you can metabolize it into your own direction by being creative with your tasks, even in small ways. Labor becomes self-expression, but this cannot be viewed in a utopian attitude of pure leisure with painting or art that most people wouldn’t spend two seconds looking at, especially if artificial intelligence and robotics remain incapable, or are politically barred from creating abundance for general humanity. That is still an open question.
In this world, the work has to make an impact that others recognize as valuable. The more valuable they view it, the more they will work and pay you for it. That’s where the struggle is now, which is being able to please others while they also can please us. Ownership through savings becomes a buffer for when we are too ill or damaged to be able to contribute, but we still need to consume. Social programs, that most western countries already have, can then provide annuities through tax and spend programs to distribute value to so many. The struggle there is the elimination of rewards for those who work hard and contribute much. The taxation cannot go to such a level where motivation dips through an ironic resurgence of alienation. The left want to be recognized for their different ways of life, but that can be an imposition on others where they don’t see the value themselves. They are not going to work and pay for those consumption lifestyles to continue. The exchange cannot be one-sided. Lifestyles have to be self-sustaining enough so as to not force others to agree as to their value, because values are not the same, especially when people often ignore consequences, which are usually wear-and-tear, as well as financial costs associated with these entitlements. The reality is that many ways of life should be only at home, treated as a self-financed hobby, or should be reflected upon as to their purpose or the possible damage that could be accrued.
The Beatles – Taxman: https://youtu.be/gMdcE8jdz70?si=dTnAqSqwoUru6SG9
As Axel Honneth describes of this modern conflict, I think the Greek phronesis, of practical know-how is missing from these kinds of radical demands. “The denigration of individual or collective ways of life—do we arrive at the form of behaviour ordinarily labelled ‘insulting’ or ‘degrading’ today. A person’s ‘honour’, ‘dignity’, or, to use the modern term, ‘status’ refers to the degree of social esteem accorded to his or her manner of self-realization within a society’s inherited cultural horizon. If this hierarchy of values is so constituted as to downgrade individual forms of life and manners of belief as inferior or deficient, then it robs the subjects in question of every opportunity to attribute social value to their own abilities. For those engaged in them, the result of the evaluative degradation of certain patterns of self-realization is that they cannot relate to their mode of life as something of positive significance within their community. For individuals, therefore, the experience of this social devaluation typically brings with it a loss of personal self-esteem, of the opportunity to regard themselves as beings whose traits and abilities are esteemed.”
Plato: Meno: https://rumble.com/v77avl6-plato-meno.html
An Ownership Synthesis
The big problem with these ideas is that they are often imposed by force in so many revolutions so that alienation continues regardless, and often times becomes worse. When people react out of individual frustration, a collective attempt to frustrate individuality is just more frustration. On the other hand, intrinsic motivation is only externally imposed from without in the form of providing information and prompts for triggering the feeling of ownership, but after that, it’s self-generated volition. The individual consciousness is never completely collective and can resist authority. It returns to the individual experience time and again, because at some point the individual consciousness wants to know what it gets out of anything. Roger Scruton criticized Kojève for his point of view that you could level differences between people to the point where history would end, and also that it would be a destination that people would want. “This man was, in my view, a dangerous psychopath, who brought with him from Russia the same kind of nihilistic fervour that had inspired the Bolsheviks, and who took an exhilarated joy in the thought that everything around him was doomed. He could not set eyes on any human achievement without relishing its future ruin. He lived in a Götterdämmerung [societal collapse] of his own imagination, wishing meanwhile to create the kind of post-historical, universal and bureaucratic form of government that would extinguish all real human attachments and produce the only thing he really cared for: the last man, the loveless and lifeless homunculus which he knew in intimate detail since he knew it in himself.”
Kojève tried to view the mish-mash of cultural forces as moving towards a homogeneous state. The rumors of him being a KGB spy and trying to play both sides would coincide with his belief that the meteors of politics would collide and develop a thriving planet of synthesis where human ambition to stand out is leveled in the name of peace. Kojève would use suggestion to point out what was already in existence under U.S. capitalism with the attitude that there was much progress but at the same time point to the end of history to describe how it would look even if it hadn’t materialized yet, or ironically, capitalism was already achieving livable results for many. “The United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist ‘communism’ seeing that, practically, all the members of a ‘classless society’ can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates.” This would be of course ignoring the plight of so many workers doing long hours with no leisure in sight. It also ignored that capitalism was the system that worked best when people were responsible with their money and learned the value of providing some savings for themselves. That buffer keeps prices cheaper, because productivity starts to outpace consumption, which is what wealth is, but for many people the “heart dictates,” consuming without working at all, which would thoroughly deplete resources to the point of poverty: consuming faster than work can produce.
The only way to achieve this kind of Communism and get to the end of history would be, as Kojève’s inspiration of Japanese formalism was, which he called snobbery, to protect aesthetic values by making regulation stylized, and therefore no envy that someone out there was outpacing another when everyone was included in the plan of mutuality that was the end of historical development. By developing all-encompassing procedures, forms of ritual, down to the smallest detail, with the seriousness of the Japanese tea ceremony, there would be beauty despite predictability, like a meditation where things are done not as a means to an end. There wouldn’t be human attachments and personal goals that could be unpredictable and careen into conflict. It was called “animality,” but most animal lovers and observers would see some unpredictability, striving, conflict and telos emanating from animals.
This post-historical man would be “in a position to live according to totally formalized values—that is, values completely empty of all ‘human’ content in the ‘historical’ sense.” Historical sense in that man would not need to progress anymore. The content of the art would be one that reduced the emphasis of utility in activities, but values cannot exist without some utility, and enormous productivity to protect this “enlightened” population from starvation. Certainly machinery would have to advance to the replacement level of workers and produce for consumption in an automated way. Before artificial intelligence could do this in a comprehensive manner, people would still have to work, and be like the robots before they come of age, due to the extensive planning that would reduce risk and anxiety down to as low as possible a level, along with a meditative concentrated workforce, which is what it seems like he was pointing to, even if the words made it unappealing like an empty wasteland populated by homogeneous mechanical people. Kojève wanted to use sublimation to take strivings that caused conflict and direct them towards an automaton homogeneity that kept the wheels turning in an anesthetic pain relief state that’s was dangerously close to a universal numbness. If the sublimation was a pleasant numbness, then hopefully satisfactions from that would be enough to avoid turning into a sleepwalking European Union form of existence. “In the final state there can be no more ‘human beings’ in our sense of an historical human being. The ‘healthy’ automata are ‘satisfied’ (sports, art, eroticism, etc.), and the ‘sick’ ones get locked up…The tyrant becomes an administrator, a cog in the ‘machine’ fashioned by automata for automata.”
Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
U2 – Numb: https://youtu.be/N4jR1RNypG0?si=bkm16cBBZmA5nix4
Intrinsic motivation psychology in later decades put the responsibility instead on individuals to meditate, which all this psychology and philosophy is, a meditation practice, to put some effortful conscientiousness into making a positive impact so as to gain the feeling of ownership despite social structures being populated by pathological people who are ignorant of those healthy feelings. Just like a meditation, the mind wanders away from the object, but when one returns to the object again and again, there’s a point where attention locks in and it feels less effortful. This is the basis of returning attention to some form of work and then when the skill is sustained and eventually becomes habitual, it’s more enjoyable. When it’s enjoyable, the goal becomes overshadowed by the process, but productivity continues. As long as there are cravings, there are personal goals. Regardless of Kojève’s readings of Heidegger, there’s still a mortal individual that feels anxiety and cares about their predicament enough to question any powers that be, especially a bureaucracy surveilling the population while demanding a double standard where they are not surveilled at all. That would be conducive to corruption and not a signal of the end of history, but just another tyranny.
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Intrinsically motivated people can reflect differently about their projects, and it’s easy enough to absorb important self-questioning and prompts, because the suggestions are ego-syntonic and supportive of anyone who has a personal goal. No need for a violent revolution, and personal goals can be connected with the concentration, so that the sense of ownership is not totally lost in ritual stripped of value and meaning. Envy is a bottomless pit if you seek to find even the smallest differences in quality between people. Seeing it’s futility in being able to secure happiness is a way to let go. Envy has to give way to inspiration, which is more like the symbol of the mandala where experts in different areas of the community trade with each other instead of replace each other in bottlenecks of homogeneity, which is what Kojève’s system would be, a bottleneck of sameness, and subjects ironically fighting each other with virtue signaling on who’s more homogeneous. Authenticity can then be found when so called experts and authority figures are exposed as the exploiters, saboteurs, that they are, providing horrendous advice that only benefits themselves, and recognizing that in order to get out of self-abandonment, one has to be independent enough to act without guaranteed recognition, while still tolerating the need for recognition, because that tension never goes away. It’s about risk management. If making a decision for the benefit of someone else risks my survival in some way, I can begin to desire in a way that is less limited by the Other and resist that exploitation. There’s power in shifting from comparison to contribution: From thinking “Why do they have more than me?” to “What do I actually want to do?” is a psychological upgrade. See below for more prompts:
Competence (getting better)
- What skill does this build that I actually want long-term?
- How can I treat this like practice instead of obligation?
Autonomy (self-direction)
- How can I do this my way, even within constraints?
- Where is there room for personal style or decision-making?
Purpose (meaning)
- What is the real purpose of this task?
- Is there a smarter or more direct way to achieve that purpose?
- What part of this is actually necessary vs. just convention?
Interest (pleasure)
- What’s the challenge here?
- What would make this 10% more effective or efficient?
- How would someone excellent approach this differently?
Leading (success)
- What would make me respect how I did this?
- What’s one standard I’ll hold myself to here?
- What would ‘done well’ look like by my criteria?
Action (ending analysis paralysis / Identity-through-action)
- What is the next concrete action I will take?
- When will I start?
- What’s the smallest step that builds momentum?
- Am I clarifying—or avoiding action?
- What am I doing?
- Why does this matter (in one sentence)?
- What’s the next concrete step?
- Did this move things forward?
- What’s the next step?
Without individuals making many individual efforts in this collective direction, alienation and paranoia can continue regardless of outward institutional transformations, because they are mainly seen as just another imposition and burden in historical man. There’s still a debate as to whether this “last man” could ever be productive and do good work. The lack of ownership of action, the futility of certain projects that one undertakes, and the ignorance of the interdependence that we all have, leads to feelings of obligation, persecution, and aggression.
Jacques Lacan was absorbing these influences while realizing that many forms of therapy at the time never looked at the cultural-political aspects impinging on individual psyches.
Marguerite Pantaine
Back in the time of early Lacan, in the 1930s, nobody knew what to do with the paranoid. Things could escalate to violence, and imprisonment was the only option, along with asylums. This was a time before smartphones and police bodycams. Even then, there were always forms of surveillance with eavesdropping and gossip, even if there was a more private space in that era for people to explore, make mistakes, and learn.
Moving closer to a Freudian outlook, Lacan was beginning to learn about people with psychological problems that had no brain injury associated with them. Diagnoses of Hysteria, Paranoia and Erotomania moved in the direction of the surrealists, in the need to watch what naturally bubbled up to the surface of consciousness. Even if they were cognitively impaired, they had their own personal logic for things: a language of madness.
Paranoia became an entry way to examine the software of the mind for Lacan with his thesis On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality. It involved an attack on an actress in a play, Huguette Duflos, in the ironically titled Tout va bien (Everything’s fine). “At 8:00 in the evening on April 10, 1931…Marguerite Pantaine, aged thirty-eight, took a kitchen knife out of her purse and tried to kill the actress…when she arrived at the Theatre Saint-Georges. The play, an undistinguished middle-class comedy about a sentimental lady, her poor but carefree lover, and a rich but boring financier, was designed to show that in the France of the 1930s, despite the economic crisis and the rise of the parties of the Far Right, all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds…Huguette Duflos, confronted by her attacker at the stage door, coolly grabbed the blade of the knife and deflected the blow, in the process severing a couple of tendons in the little finger of her right hand. Marguerite was overpowered and taken to the police station. From there she was sent to the Special Infirmary and then to the women’s prison at Saint-Lazare, where she fell into a delusional state that lasted nearly three weeks. On June 3, 1931, she was confined in the Sainte-Anne asylum on the recommendation of Dr. Truelle, who diagnosed ‘systematic persecution mania based on interpretation delusion, with megalomaniac tendencies and a substratum of erotomania.'”
Naturally, this incident ended up in the newspapers. The attacker Marguerite Pantaine was a post office worker, and a desperate author trying to get published. Typical of interviews with people who knew the perpetrator, even today, they were surprised and unaware of Marguerite’s feelings of being persecuted. The eugenicist Edouard Toulouse believed it was degeneracy. “It is my opinion that every criminal is to some extent degenerate.” He felt that it was important to point out strange behavior, which he felt must have been noticed by others, and to notify authorities before anything got out of hand. “The prevention of crime is not merely possible: it is easy.”
Novelist Pierre Benoit did notice strange behavior. “The would-be murderess used to go regularly to my publisher’s office in the hope of seeing me. One day I actually met her. The unfortunate woman is certainly not normal. She claimed she was targeted in several of my novels, the subjects of which, she repeatedly maintained, were suggested to me by Madame Huguette Duflos. Perhaps the blows aimed at that charming actress were really intended for me.” Huguette “bore some physical resemblance” to a character in one of Benoit’s novels and was constantly in news over her sensational lawsuits. When delusions took over Marguerite, she would constantly repeat how she hated Huguette, and others she wrote letters about and sent to the manager of her hotel and the Prince of Wales. When a period of sanity returned, she would cry and admit the truth that no one was persecuting her. Charges were not brought and she was treated with leniency.
Jacques Lacan took an interest in her and diagnosed her as a paranoid psychosis. “Interpretations significant, extensive, and concentric and grouped around one overriding idea: threats to her son. Emotional preoccupation: her duty toward the latter.” He took over Marguerite’s writings, photographs, and life history without returning any of the items. Lacan wanted to start a new school and be ambitious, but Marguerite “was an unwilling collaborator and reproached Lacan as long as she lived for using her case in support of a psychiatric method that she condemned as repressive.”
Marguerite was a second Marguerite named after an older sister who tragically burned to death when her dress got too close to the fire and lit up. It was a way for the mother to make amends for the accident. The second Marguerite grew up in a rural village, and her mother Jeanne “whom people regarded as slightly crazy, was hypersensitive in her dealings with the rest of the village community. Her anxieties were easily transformed into suspicions: if the woman next door said she thought a sick animal might die, Jeanne would conclude that her neighbor meant to poison it. She often felt she was being spied on or persecuted and interpreted everything as a sign of ill will against herself.”
The parents wanted Marguerite to become a teacher, but she was more interested in religion and longed to return to the countryside. She lived with her married sister and eventually took a job at a post office. She got involved with a man, a local libertine, that was obsessive for three years, but she was able to shake off the attraction, and in the end, could only see him as a cad. She met a female postal worker in another town who spread gossip about Huguette Duflos and Sarah Bernhardt and created a world of celebrity that made the regular world seem drab. She would fill Marguerite’s head with suggestions until she was eventually transferred. Marguerite fell in love with René Anzieu, an inspector in the post office, and “when she decided the moment had come to marry and that he was to be her husband, her family made objections: her lethargy, her habitual daydreaming, and her craze for reading rendered her unsuitable for marriage. But the betrothed couple disregarded all warnings, exchanged confessions about their pasts, and were married on October 30, 1917.”
The marriage was on the rocks right away because the husband was down-to-earth and practical, while Marguerite was all about learning languages and reading books. She didn’t keep the house very well, and “she took to laughing for no apparent reason, moving in fits and starts when she was walking, and compulsively washing her hands.” When her older sister Elise moved in, because she was widowed now that her husband died in the war, she took over those duties. Marguerite felt pushed around by her husband and Elise. When pregnant “the prospective ‘happy’ event only brought on persecution mania, accompanied by fits of melancholy. ‘Her colleagues’ conversation,’ wrote Lacan, ‘seemed to be directed against her. They appeared to be criticizing what she did, slandering her, and predicting misfortune. Passersby in the street whispered about her and looked down their noses. She spotted hostile references to herself in the newspapers.’ Sometimes she would dream of coffins. Sometimes she would get out of bed and hurl an iron at René’s head. One day she slashed the tires of a fellow worker’s bicycle.” She eventually conceived a child, but it was stillborn with an umbilical cord strangled around the neck. When her old friend from the post office called, Marguerite blamed her.
When she was pregnant again, Marguerite fell into a depression, but after the birth she became devoted to her new son Didier. Similar to how Marguerite’s mother had a tragic fire kill her first Marguerite, there was a stillborn child before Didier was born. Marguerite thought back to her childhood and how the parents treated her. She was to be “a child to be cared for and watched over all the more intently because it must be saved from its predecessor’s sad fate. I suffered the consequences of their fear that it might happen again. In order to justify my mother and father, I had to survive at all costs. But they looked on my survival as very uncertain. The slightest attack of indigestion, the faintest draft, was seen as a threat. All this put me in a very peculiar and difficult situation. I was supposed to take the place of a dead girl.'”
Marguerite repeated the same mistakes and became hypervigilant with her son, yet ironically, she also neglected him from time to time. For example, “she would forget to give him his bottle…On another occasion she forgot all about him and let him suck the grease off a wheel. It was then that Elise, the baby’s godmother, decided to make up for her own childlessness by taking charge of Didier herself.” In alienation, she went into fancies about moving to America and becoming a novelist. René and Elise got Marguerite put into a clinic. There she sank into megalomania, and feelings of persecution. When she was let out she left her family and transferred to Paris to find those she imagined were trying to destroy her son. During this time she oscillated between adapting at work and after her shift she would behave like an intellectual, even though she failed many tests and examinations. She was addicted to coffee and haunted libraries.
Overhearing a conversation, she heard the name of Huguette Duflos, and she remembered that she had made a comment that “she was a whore. That must be why she has a grudge against me.” She began stalking Hugette, and a play adaptation she was in of Pierre Benoit’s novel was associated immediately. “Marguerite believed two more leading figures in the Paris theater were among her persecutors. Sarah Bernhardt and Colette were both adored and successful women, living in luxury. Both also embodied an ideal—that of a freedom painfully won and maintained at some cost—to which Marguerite herself had always aspired, though she had never achieved any success, either social or intellectual.”
There were no boundaries when she read the newspaper and all the obscene details were taken in as her own. She eventually believed that the Russian secret police were after her son, Didier. That’s when she started stalking Benoit, who she compared to Robespierre, and she equated journalists and the artist class as Bolsheviks who were responsible for war, poverty, and corruption. “She sent poems and anonymous letters to the Prince of Wales, asking for his protection. She warned him, the object of her erotomania, to beware of the plots fomented against him by revolutionaries and ‘printed in italics’ in the newspapers, and she covered the walls of her room with press clippings about his life and travels.” Hypocritically Marguerite also asked for Communist publications to print stories against Colette and support her accusations.
She then wrote two novels that depicted ideal country life and viewed the city as a place of corrupt influence. In Le Détracteur [The Minimizer], “the heroine took up her cloak and dagger and rode off to conquer Paris and the French Academy. First she observed with the horror and dismay of an innocent the various spectacles presented by a corrupt civilization. Then she came up against the great Buccaneer, her chief persecutor, also known as ‘the Hard-Assed Incorruptible,’ who was in charge of the guillotine. ‘He didn’t drink, and he didn’t have women, but he cravenly killed thousands of them. Blood flowed from the Place du Trône to the Bastille, and the carnage didn’t stop until Bonaparte trained his guns on Paris.’ After traversing the dark alleys of this urban inferno, full of communists and decapitators, the heroine attacked the Republic itself…” Her books that she sent to the Prince of Wales were sent back because of their lack of knowledge of her. She left a manuscript at a publisher. It was rejected and she yelled “you’re a pack of academics and murderers!”
Lacan wanted to move past the always common assumption that things are all degeneracy and constitutional. He saw that a four dimensional approach to include trauma events would send the mind into different directions. Karl Jaspers provided a framework of comparing contents from patients to each other to make finer distinctions in diagnoses. “The French translation of [Jaspers’] General Psychopathology had caused a great stir when it appeared in 1928…In this major work, first published in Berlin in 1913, Jaspers showed how psychiatric thought could be organized on the basis of clinical differentiation between psychoses. To this end he made a distinction between practices of meaning and sciences of causation. The former belonged to the realm of mere [factual], the latter to that of the [explainable]. In the case of [the factual], each state depends on the preceding state: a lover reacts by becoming jealous if he is deceived; a student is miserable when he fails his examination and happy if he passes. But in the case of the [explainable] there is an element of incomprehensibility. And in order to understand it one must resort to a logic different from that of reaction to fact.” Mixing Jaspers with Freud, “Lacan didn’t need to see the [factual] and the [explainable] as distinct: he knew they were hand in glove with one another.”
Self-Punishment
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything, except his reason.” ~ G.K. Chesterton
Throughout Lacan’s oeuvre, there was a tension related to authentic desire vs. desire dictated by other people. It creates an inner conflict where one cannot enjoy a desire without social confirmation as to it’s validity. This is natural of course, since desires can be violent and sadistic, so that filter against crime protects the community from extremists who are incapable of tact. But cultures can make mistakes by deeming some desires as harmful even when there are no outward evidences or they are no more damaging than many culturally sanctioned ones. Even worse, some culturally sanctioned desires may actually be outwardly damaging, but preserved nonetheless.
In anticipation of punishment, internal punishment can takeover before any social police arrive on the scene, as in the case of Marguerite, published under the pseudonym Aimée. “As a human being, a considerable proportion of these reactions take on their meaning according to the social environment which plays a primordial role in the development of the animal-man. These vital social functions, which characterize, in the eyes of the human community, direct relationships of understanding, and which in the representation of the subject are polarized between the subjective ideal of the ego (moi) self and the social judgment of others. The tendency towards [self]-punishment is expressed in this, as it were, directly. The persecutors threaten the child ‘to punish his mother,’ ‘who is slanderous, who does not do what she should, etc.’…Faced with the enigma that such a delusion poses, we cannot refrain from repeating to the patient the same apparently vain question: ‘Why,’ she is asked one day for the hundredth time in our presence, ‘but why did you believe your child [to be] threatened?’ Impulsively she replies ‘To punish me.’ ‘But for what?’ Here she hesitates: ‘Because I was not accomplishing my mission…’ But a moment later: ‘Because my enemies felt threatened by my mission…’ Despite their contradictory character, she maintains the value of these two explanations.”
A symbolic They or Other can fuse completely different individuals together in paranoia so as to necessarily cast blame on innocents and become pathological. “But let us push our analysis further, and observe the very particular character of her persecutors, that is to say above all of her persecutors. Their multiplicity, the absence of any real relationship between them and the patient, clearly highlights their purely symbolic meaning…They are, as we have said, the doublets, triplets and successive ‘prints’ of a prototype. This prototype has a dual value, emotional and representative…The affective power of the prototype is given by its real existence in the life of the patient. We showed above that she was represented by this elder sister, through whom Aimée suffered all the degrees of moral humiliation and the reproaches of her conscience. To a lesser degree the close friend, Miss C. de la N., who for Aimée so eminently represented adaptation and superiority towards her environment, objects of her intimate envy, played a similar role; but according to the ambivalent relationship, precisely specific to envy, a feeling which includes an element of identification; and this brings us to the second meaning of the delusional prototype…What is in fact for Aimée the representative value of her persecutors? Women of letters, actresses, women of the world, they represent Aimée’s image of the woman who, to any degree, enjoys freedom and social power. But here the imaginary identity of themes of grandeur and themes of persecution bursts forth: this type of woman is exactly what she herself dreams of becoming. The same image that represents her ideal is also the object of this hatred…Aimée therefore strikes in her victim her externalized ideal, as the passionate one strikes the unique object of her hatred and her love. But the object that Aimée reaches for has only a purely symbolic value, and she feels no relief from her gesture…However, by the same blow which makes her guilty before the law, Aimée has struck herself, and, when she understands it, she then experiences the satisfaction of the accomplished desire: the delusion, having become useless, vanishes.”
For Lacan, this type of paranoia is cured by the futility of the patient’s desire. It just doesn’t work, both the desire and the actions motivated by it. One of the methods of Lacan’s traversing the fantasy, is to accept elements of futility in them, to weaken their hold on the patient, but unfortunately, many have to act on the fantasy before it sinks in. Benefit is most salient when people can do this in their imagination before acting. This helped Lacan realize the value of therapy that goes beyond the biological. “If in fact organic disorders and historical events only provide us with the triggering of the morbid process, the fixation and structure of the psychosis can only be explained in terms of a psychological anomaly prior to these instances. We have tried to clarify this anomaly without bias. However, what our research has given us is, we insist, a disorder which only makes sense based on personality or, if you prefer, a disorder [originating in the mind].”
When there’s object investment and then an object loss, the body responds in different ways, but paranoia can be a form of a pathological grieving process that can take the patient out of reality when they are directly rejected by the lost object, as opposed to grieving their natural disappearance. It’s a defense mechanism to become frozen in catatonia or to be hebephrenic, which is to have inappropriate or flat emotions as a defense against trauma. “By studying the symptoms of this condition, we come to understand that at the very first stage of erogenous organization (oral orgasm of the infant) the [craving] projection is entirely fixed to the infant’s own body (primitive [self-love] stage), and that it is through the successive investments of the [craving energy] on objects with vital value, then with sublimated value, that the object world is gradually created. We can thus grasp the determinism of certain symptoms of loss of objects, hebephrenocatatonic [word-salad stupor], schizophrenia and hypochondria…This conception of a compensation between narcissistic fixations and object fixations brought incontestable light to the understanding of all psychoses.”
Object loss can then trigger a retrenchment of the emotional investment in objects that have done the rejection, to an emotional investment in one’s ego and a sadistic lashing out against the object that did the rejection, or has been perceived as rejecting. Sometimes the inaccessibility of a successful identity found in an idol is perceived as a rejection done on purpose. It’s a lashing out from inexperience and a pitied incompetence, and these defenses can be triggered before the child is of age to be able to process reality. “…Their entire structure seems to be deducible from the prevalence of [self]-punishment mechanisms…There is a stage in the evolution of narcissistic tendencies which is by far the best known, it is the one which responds to the appearance of the first moral prohibitions in the child, to the establishment of their independence from threats of external sanction, in other words to the formation of [self]-punitive mechanisms or the super-ego. This period responds to an already late stage of [craving] evolution, and separated from primitive [self-love] narcissism by a whole first differentiation of the world of objects (Oedipus complex – castration complex); the moral principle in fact demonstrates itself as [a priori] to the reality principle. This period deserves the name secondary narcissism: in fact, the analysis of cases of morbid fixation at this evolutionary stage makes it possible to demonstrate that it is equivalent to a reincorporation into the ego of a part of the [craving], already projected onto objects (mainly parental objects). This reincorporation has all the character of an organic phenomenon and can be disturbed by various [external] (family anomalies) and [internal] causes. These disorders then remain linked to an emotional fixation with the so-called sadistic-anal economy of the [craving] at this period.”
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
When the craving goes back into the ego, there’s also a hatred towards the rejecting object compounded by a possible object replacement to solve the problem, or a feeling that one is left out of a newly formed relationship by the rejecting object, causing jealousy. Once there’s a perceived rejection, the love turns to hate, and then the hate can color the object as being a persecutor, like the spurned are being stalked by the rejecting people who want to annihilate them. A replacement can take the role of a savior who hasn’t directly rejected the subject as of yet, but then turns into a persecutor when rejection is confirmed. Hatred of an entire category of rejecting people can lead to delusions of grandeur, like one is above them all. “I love him (the homosexual love object). The first possible denial: I don’t like him. I hate him, projected secondarily into he hates me, gives the theme of persecution. This secondary projection is immediate in phenomenology specific to hatred. The second possible denial: I don’t like him. It is she (the object of the opposite sex) that I love, projected secondarily in She loves me, gives the erotomaniac theme. Here the secondary projection, by which the amorous initiative comes from the object, seems to us to imply the intervention of a specific delusional mechanism, which Freud leaves in the dark. The third possible denial: I don’t like him. It is she who loves him, gives, with or without projective inversion, the theme of jealousy. Finally, says Freud, there is a fourth possible denial, it is the one which relates globally to the whole formula and which says: I do not like him. I do not like anybody. I only love me. It would explain the genesis of the themes of grandeur which, in the case analyzed by Freud, are the themes of omnipotence and enormity, specific to [chronic psychotic disorder]. The regression in the case studied by Freud goes in fact to a completely primitive stage of narcissism.”
The ego ideal harbors the highest standards of success in the idols worshipped, and the sexual themes can become hidden more and more until the sexuality is replaced by Platonic love. Underlying all this is admiration where the idol worshipper is deifying the idol. The pain of rejection is acute here, but Platonic love can be protective where admiration dwells within a range of safety, where no propositions are made. For Lacan, admiration is connected with love because we love virtue in others, and skills for survival, especially if they are shared with us. “These characters, as we have seen, also symbolize Aimée’s ego ideal (or her superego), just as the first persecutor had been identified there for an instant. The role of the persecutors, vaguely imbued with erotomaniacal attraction, and at the same time united by indiscernible links to the activity of the major persecutor (“They are not lovers. But they act as if that they were”), reveals, by this very ambiguity, its dependence on the first theme. As for the frankly erotomaniacal theme which forms late (love for the Prince of Wales), its character & transcendental utopia and the mental attitude of pure Platonism which the patient adopts there, according to the description of the classics, take on their full meaning if we bring them closer to the patient’s first romantic attachment.”
The ideal idol is for the imitation of social goals, which has an erotic quality to it that is unconscious. To Be (that identity) or to Have (that identity). Being unable to achieve this goal, or that one, makes the subject go into self-punishment. She also could not Have the idol, with the apparent rejection feeding the paranoia that the idol is doing things to the subject out of contempt. The desire to attack idols is to end the self-persecution and the paranoid beliefs about the idol’s schemes, by eliminating the comparison and the source of rejection, but Aimée’s failure to achieve those ideals was remaining unfulfilled, so the paranoia decreased when the strategy was shown to be fruitless. Whether the idols are alive or dead, the personal failure still remains, as well as the pain of that failure. There’s a humility when accepting personal limitation and a relief when defenses that lie about oneself can be put down.
Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Lacan wasn’t without empathy, even if he was heavily criticized by the patient as being a user and abuser of her personal history. When people cannot find a place of value in society, the longer they stay in limbo, the worse the prognosis. In the following description, Lacan describes the motivation of losers, grifters and hacks in a way that is more humanizing, but also scary in that modern bureaucracies may be populated by such people, who could burst out into violence in unexpected moments if their tenacity loses grip. “Modern society leaves the individual in a cruel state of moral isolation, one especially painful in regard to occupations so indeterminate and ambiguous that they themselves may be a source of permanent internal conflict. Others besides myself have emphasized the extent to which the ranks of paranoia are swelled by those unjustly denigrated as inferior or limited—schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, governesses, women employed in minor intellectual activities, self-educated people of all kinds…That’s why it seems to me this type of subject should greatly benefit from being incorporated, according to his individual abilities, into some kind of religious community. Here, in addition to other advantages, he would experience a disciplined satisfaction of his own self-punishing tendencies. If this ideal solution is not available, any community would serve the purpose so long as to some extent it fulfilled the same conditions: the army, for instance; any militant political or social grouping; or some association devoted to good works, philosophy, or moral uplift. It is well known, moreover, that such kinds of social outgoing afford people with repressed homosexual tendencies a satisfaction that is all the greater because it is sublimated and so less likely to lead to any conscious revelation.”
Francett Pacteau described this limbo as a period of time where the patient searched everywhere for a gratification, but only ended up in the circumstances of the bereft. You hate the object of imitation for having such a high bar of success. The entitlement makes one feel that life is unfair and so are the admired and their standards. Why is the world designed this way? Are they doing this on purpose to keep me out? Because the admired show us the way through inspiration, our inability to achieve the same, sends a signal of personal failure so that we end up alternating between hating the “oppressor,” and hating ourselves with self-bullying to motivate with a too far reaching ambition to be like our idols. It’s you who make it too hard for me! A healthy person says wow that’s too hard. Maybe I should learn some skills, practice, and get better or do something more valuable with my time. “The ego is torn between the need for gratification and a jealousy that can find expression only in an [internal]-subjective aggressivity; this primordial narcissistic ego is at once the object of love, because ‘ideal,’ and of hatred, because it is unattainably ideal. The case of Aimée…shows us that alienated misrecognition is the very condition of subjectivity. What I am, or may become, is formed only in response to imaginary ideals, and specular rivals. My aggressivity is the inescapable undertow of my idealism and my idealization. The case of Aimée, and the many other similar cases it may serve to represent, suggests that the question of the woman’s relation to images of ideal femininity cannot be properly addressed without taking into account the full implications of her narcissism.”
By creating a society that reduces the chance of meaninglessness for individuals, disorders of meaning would be rare, or in many cases only explained by something biological. The psychosis here is not as delusional as schizophrenia, but has more to do with the patient’s deep misunderstanding of the books, newspapers, and conversations she engaged with, as well as the pressures those influences had on her sense of self. Her liberation was a liberation from a social self that was toxic and imposed through repeated cultural suggestion. You’re not good enough. If a person becomes more realistic by not hiding their wounds and accepting their limitations while still taking action in reality, which means accepting real feedback and imagining oneself in the shoes of others, the defensiveness becomes unnecessary.
U2 – Scars: https://youtu.be/p1r-qvaRryo?si=D2K84f1AFcRW-M-y
Despite this success, Lacan cautioned readers. “I should like to note, in conclusion, that if I did not subject my patient to psychoanalysis, the omission, which was not made voluntarily on my part, circumscribes both the scope and the value of my work.” This was not a full psychoanalytic analysis, but it was an attempt to apply theory to case. French Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, Marguerite’s son, who later on worked with Lacan, and was resentful in finding that his mother was analyzed by him years before, he eventually interviewed his mother, and she “‘often told my wife and myself that she found Lacan too attractive and too much of a clown to be trusted.'”
Regardless of the scientific malpractice and incestuousness found all over the history of psychoanalysis, there’s an element of responsibility and ingratitude that you hear from people who are paranoid-narcissists. Self-hatred turns into paranoia as a way to blame someone else to reduce the pressure of self-punishment. Repeated signs of personal failure, which escalate in pain, are ever waiting for any details where blame can be shifted for relief, and in the paranoid, their worldview of suspicion of all people can easily find cherry picked behaviors of nefarious encounters and bad actors of the past and assess human nature as base and untrustworthy. Some of this will become evident as Lacan goes into the brainwashing qualities of language where you can gain some therapeutic relief in criticizing the manipulative messaging one was bombarded with since childhood, but that knowledge doesn’t absolve people from responsibility for our desires, and that’s where a humility has to set in. Now that we know about cultural conditioning, we have to examine our desires, instead of scapegoating. We have to use that knowledge wisely.
The reality is that all people are partially to blame here and there, and so it’s not entirely a projection when there’s blaming, but it becomes so when no personal responsibility is accepted, when the paranoid behave as if faultless, because you notice over time that no real faults are ever addressed by them. It’s rare for people to make a moral inventory on how they contribute to their own malaise. When regular people blame, there’s a relief in finding a realistic fault in others, but when paranoia is extreme, the logical and fact based connection in the blame is absent, but believed wholesale because it feels better. With this understanding, it’s hard to blame in an irresponsible way and mutual forgiveness is now possible for those who are contrite. This is why self-hatred is not only dangerous to oneself, but also to society at large. If a giant proportion of the population succumb to self-hatred, it’s a warning sign of a failing culture.
Lacan wanted his understanding of self-punishment to enter the world of psychoanalysis, but he would have to experience a similar rejection from his own idol, Freud himself. “[Lacan] was so sure his entry into the world of psychoanalysis had been a success that he sent a copy of his thesis to Freud himself, showing that he sought recognition from the master no matter how reticent his French disciples might be. But Lacan was in for a dreadful disappointment. From Vienna, in January 1933, came the laconic reply: ‘Thank you for sending your thesis.’ The great man hadn’t even deigned to open the manuscript that the young stranger had commended to him, no doubt with great ardor.”
Paranoia and Narcissism
Because paranoia is heavily cognitive, there are few medications prescribed and the focus is more on psychotherapy to combat paranoid logic, inaccurate predictions of the intent of others, and increasing a patient’s tolerance for ambiguity. In modern reviews of Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD), resistances are found based on distorted views. As described above, these views are often built on past trauma. When there’s trauma at an early age, methods of isolation and poor coping skills can stunt development in the child into adulthood, when finally there’s a possibility to question those old ways of behaving. “The importance of childhood trauma as a predictor of PPD symptoms indicates that social learning and relationship history may in fact play a causal role in the development of the disorder. Lower social rank is correlated with paranoia. Lower social rank may lead to paranoia due to a change in how the individual experiences social interactions, termed ‘dysphoric self-consciousness.’ A study in graduate business school students found that people with short tenure (1st and 2nd year students), compared to those with seniority, are more likely to personalize antagonistic experiences. This state can be described as hypervigilant…It is also possible that deficits in social cognition may promote suspicion. Lower perspective taking ability in a roleplaying task has been found to predict the development of cluster A personality disorders and delusional disorder…Poor theory of mind skills is related to traits of hostility. In an experimental study, the presence of theory of mind deficits was predictive of paranoid attribution. In total, the role of social context and innate ‘social skills’ in the form of cognitive empathy appears to play an important role in the formation of paranoid thoughts…One of the key insights is that conditioned avoidance is extremely resistant to extinction, a property that perfectly characterizes one of the most vexing aspects of paranoia. Again, this model provides an important clue for psychotherapy and rehabilitation regarding the role of social isolation in perpetuating paranoid ideation.”
In Understanding Paranoia, the author explains the cleft between object-love and self-love and how blaming can help to fuel that disconnect, which extends not only to certain individuals, but categories of people based on ethnicity, religion or politics. There’s a strong bleed-over between narcissism and paranoia in these descriptions. “Paranoid blaming is narcissistic in the sense that the overly negative view of others is associated with an overly positive view of oneself as the perpetually innocent victim, infinitely the butt of persecution and bad luck, who almost never produces any of his or her own problems or makes any of his or her own difficulties. Such a view is also narcissistic in the sense that it becomes a ready-made pretext for what is selfishly desired: seeking recompense or other forms of gratification or salvation, not by changing oneself but by getting that thing, individual, situation, or institution presumed to be the source of all one’s problems—a wife’s independence, a court’s unfair verdict, or a government’s so-called discriminatory policies—to change, and to do so for me, and along the lines I desire.”
The old sadomasochism cycle appears in paranoid criticism where one would like to tempt victimization to provide a reality to the persecution delusion. It stops being a delusion, even if it was influenced by the patient, and so is predictably something that occurs when the patient irritates people and becomes insufferable to the point that others have no recourse but to hurt the patient until they stop. The sadism that annoys people so much kicks in when the paranoid enjoy a perceived revenge, even if targeted at an innocent, because 100% of authority figures are already judged to be guilty. “Bone and Oldham (1994) emphasized the role played by characterological sadomasochism in the development of the paranoid process and of many of its symptoms. Paranoid individuals are masochists in the sense that it is a desire to suffer that contributes to their need to conjure up adversarial relationships with others out of slim stuff. For example, a paranoid woman, self-destructively confounding a paramour’s voting Republican with his being a totalitarian dictator, rashly dubbed the man, someone who loved her, as a hate-filled Nazi. Dynamically, delusions of persecution often express not only a fear of being mistreated but also a secret longing to be harmed—in order to salve one’s conscience. So others in the paranoid individual’s life often willingly oblige, which is why we hear, ‘lock him up and throw away the key’ or other punitive expressions clearly, however unfortunately, provoked, at least to some extent, by the paranoid individual himself or herself. Paranoid individuals are also sadists who desire to put down, defeat, hurt, harm, or maim others. In blaming and accusing others who are innocent, they become as hurtful to others as they imagine others to be hurtful to them. I have seen a number of cases in which members of the mental health professions agonize over how to handle a given paranoid patient, asking themselves, really torturing themselves, with questions without satisfactory answers, such as ‘should we medicate this person against her will’ or even ‘should this person be sentenced to prison for his crime or be let off as not guilty by reason of insanity?’ I have often suspected that the patient secretly relishes putting others through their paces, enjoying every minute of the intellectual confusion and real management uncertainty that surround being a difficult case.”
Grandiosity is also fueled by a need to seem as important enough to be persecuted, while psychopathic tendencies appear in the form of pathological lying. “Psychopathic trends contribute heavily to the paranoid tendency to be free with the truth. Some paranoid individuals get into the bad habit of reflexively, almost deliberately, distorting the past to justify the present, just as they willingly and consciously distort the present to justify something in the here and now. They distort the truth to prove their innocence, to achieve a specific worldly goal, or to settle old and new scores…”
For those who receive treatment, there are different outcomes. Some people benefit from self-help, reading books on the subject, and developing realistic skills in dealing with people, but a few unfortunately succumb to paranoid schizophrenia. “The prognosis is improved and treatment most successful in those patients whose delusions are secondary rather than primary, that is, in patients whose delusions are the product of intellectual and emotional currents that the patient can identify and understand as arising in specific contexts. This is particularly true for patients whose paranoid ideation originates as a response to specific, identifiable interpersonal and situational stress, and who are both willing and in a position to take steps to reduce that stress—by finding new jobs, getting new friends, or just not asking too much of themselves and instead taking on less responsibility and becoming more realistic about their goals and their prospects of attaining them. Also, paranoid individuals who, instead of insisting that they must function at an unrealistically high level or else, are willing to just accept their disability and with it some degree of impairment—settling for remote or no relationships, or seeking quiet work in a pet shop dealing only with animals, or in the post office sorting mail away from stressful human contact—can often look forward to at least a social recovery. In contrast, grandiose megalomanic paranoid individuals without much artistic talent who try to be number one at all times, no matter what, and insist on making a living from writing or painting, only to become bitter with the world when they fail professionally, may do quite poorly. Not surprisingly, such people begin to chain think that ‘no one appreciates me, therefore no one respects me, therefore no one loves me, therefore everyone hates me, therefore everyone is my enemy.'”
Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v6rhsov-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-7.html
There appears to be a reality function that patients have to get in touch with so as to navigate personal choices better. “Patients who are motivated to develop and capable of developing insight into the paranoid process to the point that they are willing, eager, and able to look for evidence of paranoia in themselves in preparation for attempting to understand specifically what it is that makes them paranoid have a better prognosis than patients who do not spot their paranoia or who, after spotting it, have little or no desire to learn and then to do anything about it. Particularly positive prognostically is the ability to understand the interpersonal dynamic basis of specific counterproductive motives, defenses, and illogical cognitions. The prognosis certainly improves when the patient is able and willing to identify, understand, and master such of his or her protoparanoid characterological traits as stubbornness, masochism, and sadism. Patients who become less stubborn adopt less of an ‘I know it all, and don’t argue with me’ view of the world and hence a less ‘my (delusional) theories are the only correct ones’ approach to interpersonal relationships and to life itself. Patients who become less masochistic benefit considerably from no longer needing to see fortune as misfortune in order to have a reason to suffer emotionally, as well as from not actually creating their own misfortune in order to have something that they can go on to complain about. The prognosis also improves for those paranoid individuals who are at least willing to try to live with and around those delusions and hallucinations that they cannot dispel one way or the other, strong-willed individuals who can effectively teach themselves to ignore delusions and hallucinations that they cannot completely get rid of. Prognosis also improves when a patient finds ways to replace a negative with a positive behavior, as when a patient learns to turn hypersensitivity into empathy. Empathic patients can further reduce their paranoia by role-playing—putting themselves [in the shoes of another person]. If a paranoid person is lucky enough to have a spouse who is willing to act in a therapeutic fashion with him or her, that is a good thing. Paranoid individuals do very poorly with passive-aggressive spouses who provoke them, then blame them for feeling provoked, an especially paranoiagenic attitude because it throws paranoid patients into a state of logical shock, forcing them to come up with emergency (paranoid) defenses.”
What Lacan was exploring was what happens when a fusion of self and other clash into something unbearable. In Marguerite’s case, she could not contain the structured variance between her ideal and her real self. But this raises a harder question: what happens when that same structure is no longer confined to one individual? What happens when these tensions are shared between the psyches of two or more people?
Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought – Elisabeth Roudinesco: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780745623146/
De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, 1932: https://www.freud2lacan.com/lacan/
Studies on Marx and Hegel – Jean Hyppolite: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780435834333/
The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève – Marco Filoni: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780810148796/
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel – Alexandre Kojève: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801492037/
The reckless mind: Intellectuals in politics – Lilla, Mark: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781590170717/
The Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts – Axel Honneth: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780745618388/
The Symptom of Beauty – Francett Pacteau: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780674859883/
Self-Determination Theory – Richard M. Ryan, Edward L. Deci: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781462528769/
Lee, R. J. (2017). Mistrustful and Misunderstood: a Review of Paranoid Personality Disorder. Current Behavioral Neuroscience Reports, 4(2), 151–165.
Understanding Paranoia – by Martin Kantor: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780275981525/
The trouble with Islam, the European Union – and Francis Fukuyama – Roger Scruton: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trouble_3605jsp/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/