Jacques Lacan Pt. 5

Family Complexes

Jacques Lacan wanted to take the usual understanding of family, where it’s the responsibility of parents to raise their children to survive and thrive, and to expand that definition with the exploration of cultural influences that go beyond a mere biological inheritance. Because humans have so much adaptability, roles can shift and change related to fatherhood and motherhood so that unconventional groupings are possible. The wealth and knowledge imparted from generation to generation involves cultural complexity, and so behaves as a collective cultural institution. The institution of the family instills sentiments, attitudes and values, along with a language and basic forms of impulse control. For Lacan, the continuity of transmission of the psychic dispositions from generation to generation is so close to innate that it may appear to be more biological than it actually is. One of the ways to see the differences between the biology of heterosexual procreation and culture are the varieties of combinations, including patriarchies and matriarchies, polygamy, different inheritance systems, and adoption. Biological reproduction doesn’t explain the varieties of combination found in different cultures. His exploration was more about inherited complexes than that of inherited instincts.

Lacan’s complexes are reactions and conflicts with objects of knowledge and associations, because life constantly encounters deficiencies in real environments. Objects can be communicated and “as for the individual integration of objectifying forms, this is the work of a dialectical process that makes each new form arise from the conflicts between the preceding one and the real. In this process we must recognise the character that specifies the human order, namely the subversion of every instinctual fixation from which arise the fundamental and infinitely variable forms of culture.” It’s through the understanding of complexes that more sophisticated adaptations can be explained without defaulting only on the belief that it comes from instinct alone. Instinct has to adapt to a variety of social conditions, and those varieties require more than an all or nothing reflex explanation.

The difficulty of control over these psychological phenomenon was how Lacan viewed Freud’s understanding of the unconscious. Freudian slips, dreams, and symptoms happen without conscious control and so the conscious mind can continually be surprised by itself when it fails to direct attention away from what was already habitual or when it tries to control a strong and desperate craving. These contents manifest as feeling-toned imagoes for Lacan, which are “an unconscious representation…Complexes have been shown to play the role of ‘organisers’ in psychic development. They thus control those phenomena which seem to consciousness to be most closely integrated into the personality; so that it is not only the justifications for emotional attitudes but also objectifiable rationalisations that find a motivation in the unconscious. At the same time the importance of the family as a psychical object and occurrence is increased.”

It’s important to note that the knowledge in complexes are imitated from the environment and role-models provide the images that demonstrate a behavior and the rationale behind it. Conversion is the integration and acceptance of those rationales and inversion is a rebellious response through disagreement. Delusional beliefs, which are an imaginary value function, occur when “the subject affirms that a complex is an object of reality.” This leads to a structural organization in the mind of the developing child, that operates unconsciously out of habit in the mind of an adult.

Complexes start off simple and primordial and gain complexity over time through dialectics of acceptance or refusal of what was available in any given environment. “The weaning complex fixes in the psyche the relationship of nourishment, in the parasitic mode required by the demands of the infant; it represents the primordial form of the maternal imago. Consequently, it establishes the most archaic and stable feelings that unite the individual to the family. Here we touch upon the most primitive complex of psychic development, the one that is composed of all subsequent complexes; it is all the more striking to see it entirely dominated by cultural factors and thus, from this primitive stage, radically different from instinct.”

Different forms of weaning, starting with the breast, can manifest traumas in individual ways “such as anorexia nervosa, oral addictions and gastric neuroses…Weaning leaves in the human psyche the permanent trace of the biological relationship it interrupts. This biological crisis is duplicated by a psychic crisis that is doubtless the first whose resolution has a dialectical structure. For the first time, it seems, a vital tension is resolved into a mental intention. By this intention weaning is either accepted or refused.” Because the ego is in a rudimentary stage, the function of choice is absent in this primordial ambivalence. A modern reader may attribute to genetics as to whether acceptance or refusal will win out at the very beginning and develop a life long attitude. Acceptance allows for replacement satisfactions, and refusal means an intention to return to a more archaic mode of satisfaction. “This primordial ambivalence, during the crises that ensure the continuation of development, will resolve itself into psychic differentiations of an increasingly higher dialectical level and of growing irreversibility. The original prevalence will change meaning several times and may therefore undergo very diverse fates; it will nevertheless reappear, both in time and in its own unique tone, which it will impose on these crises and on the new categories with which each will endow lived experience.”

The weaning of breastfeeding happens at different ages depending on the choices of the mother, the disposition of the child, and cultural influences. As weaning is refused, separation anxiety has a chance to be triggered by anticipation of later separations via memory of these prior associations, but not organized by a body image as of yet. “The study of the behaviour of early childhood allows us to affirm that exteroceptive [human presence], proprioceptive [oral fusion-satisfaction] and interoceptive [pre-natal] sensations are not yet sufficiently co‐ordinated by the twelfth month to enable the infant fully to recognise his own body nor, correlatively, to have a notion of what is external to it.”

The asphyxia of birth, coldness on the skin, and the irritation of being moved create a discomfort just before breastfeeding begins. All forms of replacement for the womb have a desire to recreate the wholeness of the womb, even if this is futile. It’s like the mind doesn’t even want to know whether or not if the next form of savoring will fail at achieving permanent satisfaction. Temporary satisfaction are treated with the same importance. “This triad organises the painful tone of organic life which for the best observers dominates the first six months of the human being. These primordial discontents all have the same cause: an insufficient adaptation to the breakdown of the conditions of environment and nourishment that constitute the parasitic equilibrium of [pre-natal] life…Beneath the phantasies of the dream and the obsessions of the waking state there appear with an impressive precision the images of the [pre-natal] habitat and of the anatomical threshold of [post-natal] life.”

Because humans have a longer gestation period to adulthood than other animals do, Lacan viewed us as always pre-maturely born “a premature separation from which comes a malaise that no maternal care can compensate for. Let us recall here the well‐known paediatric fact of the very special affective retardation observed in children delivered before term.” The happiness of the mother and love for her child protect the child from any further trauma. Thus the goal of parenting is to sublimate those biological and organic needs for satisfactions in culturally sustainable ways. Whether people want to use harsh language of “grooming” or “conditioning,” the child has to find satisfactions somewhere else that are strong enough to make an imprint that makes the child want to repeat those experiences. Sublimation as a replacement satisfaction become layers of the self that build and provide nostalgia, so it’s important for parents to build layers that become a healthy return for the later adult and which become supports for further development of the adult so they can manage their own lives happily. Weaning is a grieving of a loss of pleasure until a new pleasurable object is recognized and enjoyed. “The imago must be sublimated so that new relationships can be introduced with the social group and new complexes integrated into the psyche. To the extent that it resists these new [needs and demands], which are those of the progress of the personality, the imago, which is [beneficial] in its origins, becomes a death [mourning] when it makes up for a biological deficiency by the regulation of a social function. This is the case in the complex of weaning. This organic relationship explains why the imago of the mother has a place in the depths of the psyche and why its sublimation is particularly difficult, as we can see in the attachment of the child to his mother’s apron strings and in the sometimes anachronistic duration of this bond.”

This can partly explain positive mother-transferences or father-transferences if a new object symbolizes the same positivity as a compensation for the original lost objects: Sublimation as compensation. But compensations can never recreate the instant gratification of the womb. Like Karen Horney, Jacques Lacan wanted to expand beyond biological instincts to include a sphere of cultural influence. The death instinct turns into an appetite for death which include all forms of self-sabotage involving the irresponsible intake of food and intoxicants, sabotaged relationships, all the way up to suicide. These would include all pleasures groomed or conditioned to repeat that have consequences so that one longs for self-defeating pleasures against all willpower or rationality. Instead of an integration of a healthy self-image with behavior, a disintegration intervenes. “This psychic tendency towards death in the original form that weaning gives to it, can be seen in those special kinds of suicide which are characterised as non‐violent; while at the same time we can see in it the oral form of the complex: the hunger‐strike of anorexia nervosa, the slow poisoning of certain oral addictions and the starvation diet of gastric neuroses. The analysis of these cases shows that by abandoning himself to death the subject is attempting to rediscover the imago of his mother. It is quite generic as can be seen in burial practices, certain types of which clearly display the psychological meaning of a return to the mother’s womb; and as we can also see it in the connections established between the mother and death, both in magical techniques and in the conceptions of ancient theology, and finally as we can observe it in every psychoanalytic experience that is pushed far enough.”

Cultural Psychoanalysis: Karen Horney Pt. 6: https://rumble.com/v704o9a-cultural-psychoanalysis-karen-horney-pt.-6.html

Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Freud & Beyond – War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

The Cure – Pictures Of You: https://youtu.be/UmFFTkjs-O0?si=79bn4DWEfvaqrn2p

The Cure – Homesick: https://youtu.be/6NArAxegClw?si=wSSMRVT74C8IrrPz

Jim E. Brown – I Urinated on a Butterfly: https://youtu.be/uG_RM2Tja3o?si=NJ5qp-5_EZXkynbO

Jim E. Brown – I Texted you a Photo of the Sunset and you Never responded: https://youtu.be/0OcqXuRODF4?si=eXU5mOE5pQEsRoP4

Jim E. Brown – I Have a Horrible Relationship with Food and Self-Image: https://youtu.be/pNPCHu5ICeE?si=YPE3uS2dgrR8BKJD

Jim E. Brown – I Deserve to be Fat: https://youtu.be/Y-XUwyBS774?si=U8HUfoL7oAFlK8WF

Jim E. Brown – I’m Not Worthy of Love and Happiness: https://youtu.be/vq3mtSTHURo?si=YOY-cgvASOX01lCm

Jim E. Brown – I’m Having a Picnic in Fletcher Moss Park All by Myself: https://youtu.be/qWbdKggomoU?si=d-EZssTo_oGCyoyy

Jim E. Brown – I’m Quitting Prozac to Continue Drinking: https://youtu.be/lckf6aOA0Ps?si=eFS6FxF-K7aFZm5V

Jim E. Brown – Every Time I Speak I Regret It Immensely: https://youtu.be/jJ0trKBniDE?si=UmetHwqLvJsi7owl

Jim E. Brown – I Am at My Happiest When I’m Unconscious: https://youtu.be/iHWy_Uou7c4?si=z7vqeCu57ET0UOWi

Jim E. Brown – The Sky is Ugly: https://youtu.be/w9t2dXm-AjU?si=2cy6W5OOhCxw0t39

Once an adult has weaned themselves from the family economy and is able to fend for themselves in the wilderness of the community, any attempts to return to infantile bliss meant abandoning adult goals that were always the goals that demanded further development. Those abandonments endanger the person because they are trying to rely on the skills of parents, or some bureaucratic institutions, full of strangers who are not emotionally invested, to perform those skills for oneself: a lack of adaptation. The damage comes from the lack of skill or the neglect to put new skills to use. Think of any escapism, retrenchment or sadism that are bad alternatives for skillful action. So if the death drive, or death appetite, is an escape from the learning process, then the life appetite would be a learning mentality, which is an acceptance of imperfection and a realistic engagement with imperfect reality. One can see in sabotaged relationships of all kinds, avoidance, destruction, and lingering forms of nostalgia, the pull of regression. “Every return, even partial, to these securities can release ruinous consequences in the psyche that are out of all proportion to the practical benefits of such a return.”

There’s an element of cocooning if one wants to find symbolism of the womb come to life. Attempts at utopia and cultural development end up being a community reenactment of the womb where specialists trade with other specialists to temporarily and intermittently resolve individual weaknesses through social cohesion, as symbolized by the mandala. When societies fail at social cohesion, all kinds of destructiveness develops to the point where it might be better to be dead than to continue to struggle for survival. “The domestic bond; Even when it is sublimated, the imago of the maternal womb continues to play an important psychic role in the life of the subject. That form of it which is most withdrawn from consciousness, that of the pre‐natal habitat, finds an adequate symbolisation in the dwelling house and in its threshold, especially in the more primitive forms of the cavern and the hut.”

Influenced by Hegel, Lacan viewed the goal of weaning as a necessary sacrifice and compensation to connect the subject to the wider community. One is introducing a thesis of how to develop from culture, absorbing criticism from an antithesis from the subject, and if successful, finding a synthesis that works for both the individual and the community. “Hegel proposed that the individual who does not struggle to be recognised outside the family group goes to his death without having achieved a personality…The nostalgia for wholeness; The saturation of the complex is the foundation of maternal feelings; its sublimation contributes to family sentiments; its liquidation leaves traces in which it can be detected since it is this structure of the imago that remains the basis of the mental progress that has remodeled it. If we had to define the most abstract form in which it is found, we would characterise it as a perfect assimilation of totality to being. In this formula, a bit philosophical in appearance, will be recognised the nostalgias of humanity; the metaphysical mirage of universal harmony; the mystical abyss of affective fusion; the social utopia of totalitarian dependency—all derived from the longings for a paradise lost before birth and from the most obscure aspirations for death.”

The Complex of Intrusion

Following Freud and Adler, Lacan referenced the social hierarchy of the family and it’s effects on the psyche. “This could be called the dynastic position he occupies before any conflict arises: he is either the one in possession or the usurper. Infantile jealousy has long struck observers: ‘I saw with my own eyes,’ says St. Augustine, ‘and I observed carefully, a young child devoured by jealousy: he was not yet able to speak, yet he could not prevent himself from going pale at the bitter spectacle of his brother at the breast.’ (Confessions, I, VII)…Jealousy at its most fundamental does not represent biological rivalry but rather a mental identification.” Children observed in their earliest understandings that there could be a rival, revealed patterns of posturing to counter their feelings of fragmentation: parade, seduction, and despotism. “Which of the two is more of a spectator? Or observe the child who lavishes his attempts at seduction on another: who is seducing whom? Finally, in the case of the child who enjoys the proof of the domination he exercises and the one who takes pleasure in submitting to them, who is the more reduced to servitude? Each partner confuses the other’s role with his own and identifies with him…The imago of a fellow human: What then is the structure of this imago? It seems that the imago of the other is linked to the structure of one’s own body, especially to the structure of its relational functions, by a certain objective similarity.”

When there’s love of an object, the rivalry for possession confuses the identity of the subject. Here Lacan is predicting René Girard in that the jealousy is not just a rivalry against scarcity, but a rivalry for being-in-savoring. “Jealousy can still manifest itself long after the subject has been weaned and is no longer in a situation of vital competition with his brother. The phenomenon seems therefore to require as a precondition a certain identification with the sibling’s state.”

Sadomasochism then connects to the death appetite as a rejection of reality and a caving into helplessness in masochism, and sadism tries to repeat dangerous scenarios of the past to find a way to master the situation and reduce that feeling of weakness. “By following out the idea that as we have indicated above, designates the miseries of human weaning as the source of the desire for death, one will recognise in primary masochism the dialectical moment in which by his first games the subject assumes the reproduction of this misery and in that way sublimates and overcomes it. This is indeed how the primitive games of children appeared to the shrewd eye of Freud. The joy that the infant experiences in throwing an object out of his field of vision and then, when the object has been found again, in tirelessly renewing the exclusion signifies that it is indeed the pathetic nature of weaning that the subject is once again inflicting on himself. Once he was obliged to undergo it, but now he triumphs over it by actively reproducing it.”

This then goes into scapegoating when the threat cannot be mastered. An alternative object that is more accessible can be the new object of catharsis. “The object that aggressivity chooses for its primitive death games is in fact some toy or scrap which is biologically indifferent.” It is as if the child wants to attack the rival, but because it cannot, due to helplessness, it needs to attack someone nearby, like kicking the dog, or attack oneself in masochism to blow off some steam. There’s also an imaginary value applied to the object of rivalry. The mind has trouble seeing if something is not worth the effort, because one eventually has to absorb the knowledge that no possession can provide the wholeness of the womb, or the spiritual wholeness that one wants to merge with in the afterlife. It’s a finding and losing the repeats throughout life.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle – War Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html

The Mirror Stage

Lacan’s descriptions of childhood development wanted to emphasize the change between having affects, sentiments, attitudes, or feelings about experience itself, to having feelings about an idea of self. The life or death insecurity can feel that way about a self-image, which is exactly that: imaginary. There’s an opening here for a loss of energy into an extra mental loop, but one that allows for self-reflection, and a competitive desire to sympathize with oneself and measure personal growth conceptually. “The recognition by the subject of his image in the mirror is a phenomenon that is doubly significant for the analysis of this stage: it appears after six months and its study demonstrates the tendencies that at that time constitute the subject’s reality. Because of these [sympathies], the mirror image is a good symbol of this reality: of its affective value, illusory like the image, and of its structure in that it reflects the human form…The perception of the form of a fellow creature as a mental unity is correlative in the living being to its level of intelligence and sociability. In herd animals the imitation of a signal shows it in a reduced form. Its infinite riches is shown in the [deliberate imitation] and [unconscious imitation] structures seen in both the monkey and man. This is the primary meaning of the interest that each shows in their mirror image…Against the background of an attentive suspension of activity there is a sudden manifestation of adaptive behaviour (in this case a gesture referring to some part of his body) followed by a jubilant expenditure of energy which objectively indicates triumph. This twofold reaction enables us to glimpse a sense of understanding which cannot be put into words. I think these characteristics express the secondary meaning that this phenomenon receives from the [craving] conditions accompanying its appearance. These conditions are nothing more than the psychological tensions built up during the months of prematurity and which appear to translate a twofold break in the vital order: a break in that immediate adaptation to the milieu which defines the world of the animal in its [intuitive understanding], and a break in that unity of vital functioning which in the animal puts perception at the service of the drive.”

The body image can then be a template for comparison with other bodies in the environment, with positive emotions when comparisons are downward, and negative emotions when they are upward. We become bothered and concerned by how our image compares to the image we have of others, and even worse, if we undoubtedly search for a futile wholeness, we can misrecognize wholeness achieved in others, based on our own projected concepts of them, and a magical spell can weave over us towards others with perceived advantages. We have trouble seeing that all people are fragmented and never completely whole. Because this is too intellectual and counterintuitive for a child to understand, the habit of putting people on pedestals can extend throughout life. For Jacques Lacan, this misrecognition leads subjects to constantly look to authority figures as people who are “supposed to know,” who appear like infallible “experts.” A credulity permeates the follower. It takes real effort to adjust the attention span and direct it at what the person enjoying is still lacking, because it’s true, that all people lack one thing or another at all times in their lifespan. If you temporarily get what they have, the situation is still the same.

For René Girard, the misrecognition is the assumption that the savoring we are witnessing others enjoying is a permanent situation where objects of envy appear to “have it all,” even when the evidence is readily apparent that rich people exhibit plenty of discordant emotions despite their easy access to resources. The reality of the interdependence of all things, as found in pointing meditations in Buddhism, or economic raw materials found all over the world, and how they contribute to the final product, is replaced by intrusive conceptual cookie cutter concepts that increase tension as we compare our image-body with the image-body of others, and because our body requires utility in objects, those objects become an extension of ourselves. For example, objects appear neutral, until we can see a way we can use them. “The discordance, at this stage in man, of both drives and functions, is merely the consequence of prolonged incoordination of the systems. This results in a stage, affectively and mentally, constituted on the basis of a [spatial awareness] that presents the body as fragmented: on the one hand, psychic interest is displaced onto tendencies aimed at some reassembly of the body itself; on the other hand, reality, initially subjected to a perceptual fragmentation, the chaos of which reaches even its categories, such as ‘spaces,’ which are as disparate as the successive static positions of the child, becomes ordered by reflecting the forms of the body, which, in a way, provide the model for all objects.”

These feelings of surmounting challenges or being defeated by them appear in psychoanalytic content going back to archaic fragmented body images that provide a developmental arc of more or less adaptation. The mind doesn’t just want bodily unity and survival, it also desires unity of the self-image. It’s rooting for itself and its own development. “Here is an archaic structure of the human world whose deep‐rooted vestiges have been revealed by the analysis of the unconscious: phantasies of the dismemberment and dislocation of the body, of which the phantasies of castration are only an image highlighted by a particular complex; the imago of the double whose fantastic objectifications, produced by different causes at different ages of life, reveal to the psychiatrist that it evolves with the growth of the subject; finally the anthropomorphic and organic symbolism of objects which psychoanalysis discovered in such an extraordinary way in dreams and symptoms. The tendency by which the subject restores his own lost unity has a place from the beginning at the centre of consciousness. It is the source of the energy that governs his mental progress—a progress whose structure is determined by the predominance of visual functions. But although the search for his affective unity encourages in the subject the production of forms in which he represents his identity to himself, the most intuitive form is given at this phase by the mirror image. What the subject welcomes in it is its inherent mental unity. What he recognises in it is the ideal of the imago of the double. What he acclaims in it is the triumph of a [beneficial] tendency.”

Lacan wanted to move beyond this narcissism of the body but also that of the double, or self-image. Because the self-image is so powerful, it “has no place for others,” so a grip on reality can be confounded by emotions, affects, and motivations based on self-generated images instead of the direct perception of reality, or a primordial alienation, that is also in competition with the primordial alienation everyone else experiences. “Let us call this a narcissistic intrusion: the unity it introduces into the tendencies will nevertheless contribute to the formation of the ego. However, before the ego affirms its own identity it confuses itself with this image which forms it, but also subjects it to a primordial alienation. It can be said that from this origin the ego retains the ambiguous structure of the spectacle clearly seen in the situations of despotism, seduction and parade described above and gives their form to the sado‐masochistic and scoptophilic drives (desire to see and to be seen), which are essentially destructive of the other. Let us also remark that this primary intrusion helps us to understand all the projections of the completed ego, whether they manifest themselves as [pathological lying and exaggeration] in the child whose personal identity is still vacillating, as in [solipsism] in the paranoiac whose ego has regressed to an archaic stage, or as understanding when they are integrated into the normal ego.”

A lot of Jacques Lacan’s early notes on the mirror stage were preserved by Françoise Dolto and show a progression from instincts to complexes where there’s an understanding that already before birth and after birth there is emotional feeding happening and the complexes are dealing with the reality principle whenever gratification is not instant. “Substitution for <instinct> the notion of complex, organization of tendencies in relation to a concrete life situation from the subject’s past. The experiment showed that each complex corresponded to a certain order of knowledge. Unconscious knowledge. Traces of a certain image of the maternal breast remain in the psyche. This object has nothing to do with what is <categorical> in adult knowledge. The ‘I’ would know the objects in themselves, as they are.”

The trauma of weaning rejects reality while being successful in gaining pleasure affirms it. As the unconscious quickly notices how the environment changes, it can turn into affirmation or rejection, regardless of outward appearances, dissemblance, or defences. “Freud himself said that certain of these drives went against the life force. He referred to them as ‘death instincts,’ rejection of the toy rattle, the trauma of weaning, and, for Freud, the death instinct = primary masochism. So, the unconscious complicates things – drives and counter-drives. – the ‘I’ is both an affirmation of reality and a negation, for example in certain psychoses or negation of reality.”

Due to incomplete neurological development at birth (specifically the delayed myelinization of lower spinal cord neurons), the human infant experiences its own body as uncoordinated and disconnected. Before any psychological synthesis occurs, the infant exists in a state where limbs and functions feel entirely unintegrated. “I believe we must conceive of this image as a spectacular image invested with [craving] energy, comprising: 1) a predominant visual investment; 2) an illusory image, a fantasy, a partial break with reality; 3) this specular image possesses the characteristics that genetic analysis finds correspond to this stage, from 8 to 18 months (the period of this stage): intellectual realism. This specular image evolves throughout life, but when it reappears in adult fantasies, it appears with the characteristics (paranoia) of the imago of the double. To verify that the image of the double relates to the stage of the mirror image. Charlotte Buhler (child couples) conditions that the age gap is not too large (3 months max) the subject must fit the characteristics of the mirror image of the other – corresponding postural, necessary physiological sympathy. How does the infant react to the mirror image itself, even though it has no biological need for it? After seeing itself once, the animal loses all interest in the mirror and doesn’t return. The chimpanzee, however, does return; it plays, but there’s no indication that it recognizes itself. The infant, on the other hand, very quickly makes the connection between image and object. At 37 weeks, called by name, he refers to the mirror. ‘Ah!’ exclamation which precedes by about 6 months the search behind the mirror like the chimpanzee but it is already fixed on the result unlike the chimpanzee.” The activity of bringing together diverse elements into a whole, including a shopping mentality and searches for substitutes, and opportunities to trade up for anything that is sensed as being better or superior. Previously, it was the stage of the fragmented body, and through the mirror image, there is the union of parts into a whole.

Even with the extra expenditure of energy, the self concept provides a foundation for knowledge, a support for courage, but self concepts can be double edged swords, since their failure to adapt increases insecurity:

• Compensation for Helplessness: The unified mental image of the “double” directly compensates for the infant’s underlying biological impotence, weaning trauma, and physical fragmentation.

• The Birth of the Symbol: Because the primary vital object—the mother’s breast—is permanently lost through weaning, the child must find substitutes.

• Anthropomorphization: Unlike animals, who view objects strictly through immediate biological utility, humans project their own physical structures outward. The human subject anthropomorphizes everything, likening external objects to human organs. This primary narcissistic projection is the very root of human language and symbolism.

Because bodies do have form, the role of pattern recognition can begin to notice what repeats with important movements of family members. There’s a lack of personal boundaries because those important shapes become the most important integrations to assimilate before congealing the self-image. Citing psychologist Henri Wallon, Lacan noted that when two young children interact, their individual identities are blurred. The child who acts is simultaneously the spectacle and the spectator. Because the subject’s own “I” is not yet formed, it is easily eclipsed or captured by the image of the other. One is other-focused right from the get-go, because our survival depends on these gradually integrated patterns of expression that fulfill our needs. Therefore image of the peer acts as an alienating intrusion, setting up early dynamics of childhood homosexuality (craving investment in a similar image, and rooting for one’s triumph over circumstances) and scopophilia (the pleasure of looking), inspiration and envy. “This situation is indeed an intrusion. The ‘I’ of the subject, not yet formed, is eclipsed by the ‘I’ of the other…[craving] investment in the object, the smile. Sign of social and sociable satisfaction in itself. Childhood homosexuality is made up of the [craving] investment of this similar image; on the other hand, scopophilia deserves to be placed in the same framework.”

When survival is conceptually integrated in others, including our imaginal wishes that these patterns keep pleasing us, we have to integrate our self-concept. The mirror stage, which doesn’t always relate to an experience with a mirror reflection in an actual mirror, or water reflection, but also how the family applies a name and begins describing the child conceptually, which allows the infant to visually anticipate physical unity. The self-concept brings diverse, fragmented bodily experiences together into a cohesive visual whole—creating the imago of the double. The child begins an emotional cathexis investment in the self-concept and craves for it’s continuity, also its ideal conception of wholeness, and champions itself. Whereas animals, like chimpanzees, lose interest in the reflection, the human child recognizes its significance. The ideal wholeness keeps the child from being too afraid to develop, but at the same time, there’s an insecurity, because real events resist ideal expectations. The conceptual proliferation of thoughts about the self-image can crowd out existential dread, but not completely. Something underneath harbors an insecurity about it that fuels paranoia, and is the primordial source of narcissistic collapse. “I have myself shown in the social dialectic that structures human knowledge as paranoiac—why human knowledge has greater autonomy than animal knowledge in relation to the field of force of desire, but also why human knowledge is determined in that ‘little reality’ (ce peu de réalite), which the Surrealists, in their restless way, saw as its limitation. These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial [captivation] manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality—in so far as any meaning can be given to the word ‘nature.'”

The beginning of narcissism, the need to make the environment subservient to one’s survival, and the search for an impossible wholeness has begun. Symbolization comes together to describe what is better or worse, what is advantageous or disadvantageous. Projection also starts because general concerns are never really general: they are specific to our own quality of life, including struggles against others for scarce resources, pleasure, and attention. The weaning phase is a process, when accepted by the child, that enhances survival, which is the role of good parenting. The shape of the breast and nourishment have to be sublimated, compensated, or replaced by shapes of solid food and other objects of interest that develop more autonomy. “A strong connection exists between narcissism, corresponding to the stage of the fragmented body and weaning, and the unity of its fragmented body. The vital object, the mother’s breast, will not be found again anytime soon; this is the source of symbolism.”

For Lacan, this beginning of identification, which is based on imitation and pattern recognition, is the beginning of dialectical philosophy in that the child has to resolve “his discordance with his own reality.” The ideal I is a fictitious thesis, but sensation and events in reality are antithetical. Each individual has to find a synthesis that works well with reality, while being alienated, through endless proliferation of self-concepts, habits, cravings, and unconscious intentions, a kind of mental noise, that interrupts presence, mindfulness, and the monitoring of feedback in the environment that we need to help us adapt to reality. “I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the [Inner world] and the [Environment]…The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic [supportive]—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity [that defends against real weakness], which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the [Inner world] into the [Environment] generates the inexhaustible [perfectionism] of the ego’s verifications.”

Part of the reason why the unconscious mind is treated like a “structure” is because of how fantasies and dreams manifest. They are inhabited by roads, streets, buildings, etc., where the drama of life, goals and obstacles are built up. Fantasies imagine what it would be like to have doors open to possibility and obstacles superseded. “Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium – its inner arena and enclosure…”

U2 – Street of dreams: https://youtu.be/XkeBlaWayuI?si=lKcIUABhQ-_ANJBV

Because the mirror image is already defensive and a stabilizing force against fragmentation, later defenses are built on this primordial insecurity, which is the recognition that fragmentation is reality, in that imaginary stability is only that: imaginary. Then this ego continues from the already present public influence and develops a public self that moves from concern over individual fragmentation to paranoia with other people with the social I. “This is why I have sought in the present hypothesis, grounded in a conjunction of objective data, the guiding grid for a method of symbolic reduction. It establishes in the defences of the ego a genetic order, in accordance with the wish formulated by Miss Anna Freud, in the first part of her great work, and situates hysterical repression and its returns at a more archaic stage as preliminary to paranoic alienation, which dates from the deflection of the specular I into the social I.”

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4-1: https://rumble.com/v6j1vmm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-4-1.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 4-2: https://rumble.com/v6m6epl-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-4-2.html

Obsessional processes come later than hysteria. It involves:

• dissociation between thoughts and emotions
• intellectualization
• ritualization
• control
• reaction formations

Lacan sees obsession as a more developed defensive organization than hysteria because:

• the ego is more rigidly structured
• control mechanisms are stronger
• symbolic organization is tighter

The person tries to master anxiety through order and separation.

When a person is thoroughly socialized then experiences of paranoia kick in:

• persecutory meanings
• externalized intentions -> Projection
• rigid identity structures -> That fail to adapt to reality
• imaginary rivalries -> That may kick off real ones

The “specular I” means:

• the mirror self
• the image-based ego
• the unified reflection

The “social I” means:

• identity recognized socially
• roles
• symbolic identity
• public selfhood

Paranoia emerges when the mirror-based ego becomes fully socialized, and because the ego was already alienated at its origin, social identity becomes intrinsically unstable, because the foundation of the specular ‘I’ is already unstable, so the self now depends on:

• recognition
• status
• rivalry
• symbolic position
• social meaning

The person becomes caught in:

• how others see them
• what others intend
• what others desire
• comparison and recognition

Rivalry, jealousy, narcissism, and paranoia become structurally linked, in the sense that the structure has weak points, because reality cannot provide a permanent security. One moves from one object to the next until old age, sickness, and death. Like a hall of mirrors, the ego originates through:

• misrecognition
• identification
• alienation
• external images

Diverse psychopathologies are different ways of managing this instability.

• hysteria = unstable desire and repression
• obsession = rigid symbolic control
• paranoia = alienated ego projected socially to blame others

These all arise from the developmental consequences of the mirror-stage structure. Psychological disorders are not random illnesses added onto a stable self. They emerge from tensions already present in ego formation itself.

Because fullness and wholeness requires examples to imitate, or idols to worship, which here because of emotional investment, the differences are marginal, imitation feeds envy. In primordial jealousy the child perceives:

“The other possesses the unity or fullness I seek.”

But because the ego itself was built through identification, the distinction between:

• wanting to be the other
  and
• wanting to possess what the other has

becomes blurred.

This creates the deep ambiguity of human desire.

The rival is both:

• model
• and obstacle

This is why siblings are such an archetypal scene for Lacan:

• imitation and hatred coexist
• love and aggression intertwine
• identity forms through comparison

The jealousy is “primordial” because it is built into ego formation itself.

The ego emerges socially, not privately.

So social life is structured from the beginning by:

• comparison
• recognition
• rivalry
• imitation
• competition for love and attention

This becomes the foundation of what Lacan calls the “dialectic” linking the personal “I” to the social “I.”

The self constantly negotiates:

• how it appears to others
• who it resembles
• who threatens it
• who recognizes it
• who possesses desired qualities

You can see adult versions everywhere:

• status competition
• ideological rivalry
• romantic jealousy
• celebrity worship
• envy on social media
• workplace comparison
• intellectual one-upmanship

Lacan thinks these are not accidental moral failings added onto an otherwise stable self. They grow out of the original mirror-stage structure:

• identity formed externally
• through images
• in relation to rivals
• under conditions of insufficiency

This is also why human desire is rarely purely spontaneous or isolated.

We desire partly because:

• others desire
• others possess
• others embody images we identify with, or want to emulate

The other person becomes both:

• mirror
• and rival

That is primordial jealousy. It even permeates kindness, and so helping can contain unconscious aggression, because helping often creates asymmetry:

• helper vs helped
• competent vs dependent
• strong vs weak

The ego becomes involved. Unconsciously, helping may include:

• superiority
• control
• narcissistic self-confirmation
• desire for recognition
• resentment toward dependency

It means human relations are psychologically mixed. Love, aid, care, rivalry, identification, and aggression interpenetrate. “For such a task, we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressivity that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.”

This confuses things when you have the Freudian cure of “love and work,” when love has preferences that are insecure and people may not behave as we want them to or we may not behave as others want us to. Love would have to be all encompassing and non-perfectionist to marginally heal this lifelong weaning process called life. “At this junction of nature and culture, so persistently examined by modern anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.”

Because of the conflict in the 20th century, Lacan had to conclude that madness wasn’t always diagnosed and kept behind walls. There are in regular people, and in people with positions of power, and those wars, conflicts, and betrayals are the consequence of people not able to negotiate their wants and needs, that can be more peacefully traded. Money measures our energy and how we trade it with others, and dissatisfaction with where we end up in life can escalate into different forms of warfare and revolution. “We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis – just as the [fascination] of the subject by the situation gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury…The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.”

The Ego and the Other person

Now that there’s cathexis, or emotional investment, for the self-image, that image mediates rivalry in the world of competition and negotiation. The mind interrupts its activities with a great expenditure of energy to follow the score of the game, so to speak. Predicting Girard, our desires are mediated by culture. We imitate our desires, and imitation is bound up with envy or inspiration, and the intensity of those feelings are increased if we believe that an important form of wholeness is at stake. We look for wholeness based on an imaginary wholeness that is impossible to replicate. We use symbols, that point to wholeness that only exist in concepts, sourced from an inherited culture and assess values to objects that are open to debate. It’s not an animal fighting over a carcass. It’s a transcendent desire that is imaged based, and that image is weakly supported by fallible human idols who are also trapped in the human predicament of mortality and fragmentation, but only put up fleeting appearances that they have it all or know it all. “The ego is constructed at the same time as the other while the drama of jealousy is being acted out. Because there is in the subject a tendency which draws satisfaction from relating to his mirror‐image, the ego is a dissonance introduced into this specular satisfaction. It implies the introduction of a third object which replaces the affective confusion and the ambiguities of the mirror stage with the competition of a triangular situation. And so the subject, who through identification is committed to jealousy, arrives at a new alternative where the fate of reality is played out. Either he goes back to the maternal object and insists on refusing the real and on destroying the other; or he is led to some other object and accepts it in the form characteristic of human knowledge, that is, as a communicable object, since competition implies both rivalry and agreement. But at the same time, he recognises the other with whom he will either fight or enter into a contract. In short he discovers both the other person and the object as socialised phenomena. Here again human jealousy is distinguished from the immediate rivalry of the biological order, since it forms its objects rather than being determined by them. Jealousy shows itself then as the archetypal social sentiment.”

Lacan then provided his own form of developmental rivalry where for example, sibling rivalry is more likely to happen when the Oedipus Complex is not developed enough in the older child. When the child is developed enough, the younger sibling is treated like a child of the parent, in this case, the older sibling. If the older child feels they may be surpassed, then jealousy manifests. When children are able to assimilate skills that are enough for emotional security, the need for rivalry weakens because each child has found a place for themselves and foresee a realistic future where they will stake their own claim in the world. But if imitated imagoes and adaptations are treated as totally real, when they are only approximations, forms of psychosis can develop through transmitted and imitated insanity. These are the typical neuroses and psychoses with a gradual continuum up to losing a grip on reality.

The Oedipus Complex

The Oedipus Complex is filled out by Lacan and revised to make a distinction between the ego-ideal, which sublimates desire through inspiration into culturally prescribed ways, and the super-ego that represses with prohibitions. To want to be the father or mother is to be jealous of his or her form of savoring, and to have what they want is the gratification of the mother or father, and the perceived wholeness they indicate with their countenances of satisfaction, regardless of how temporary they are. The completion of the Oedipus Complex is when the ego-ideal finds a lasting identification, which are masculine or feminine skills that become more or less successful, and therefore more or less dominant. Regardless of the biological potential for success at survival and mating, identifications are malleable based on a belief that one can master masculine or feminine skills for attraction, which conforms to reality insofar that there is an attraction, even if the biological potential for having children is not there. For Lacan, there’s a desire for unity and integrity, or wholeness, in the ego ideal so that one believes that one can survive well and thrive in the community in a particular manner. Insecurity leads to fragmentation of this image, even if fragmentation of the self-image doesn’t mean damage to the actual body. The desperation to hold together the self-image is similar to the frantic attempts to survive physical threats, or the panic of an addict going through withdrawal symptoms. “Examination of these phantasies as found in dreams and in certain impulses enables us to affirm that they relate to no real body but to [an unconventional] mannequin, to some baroque doll, to a cluster of bodily members in which we can recognise the narcissistic object. This is conditioned by the fact that in man imaginary forms of his own body precede its mastery as well as by the defensive value the subject attaches to these forms as a protection against the anxiety of being bodily torn apart which results from his prematurity.”

In the typical Oedipus Complex, the child has to renounce incest and identify with the same sex parent. If the ego-ideal is healthy, then you have a normative, integrated social subject capable of functioning within the laws of culture, adopting a defined gender role, and directing desire into socially acceptable channels (sublimation-inspiration). The paternal imago involves both repression of desire and the direction of desire towards the ego-ideal. In cases where this process is incomplete, deficient, or distorted—such as when the paternal imago is absent, humiliated, divided, or artificial—the result is a personality that is characterized by certain neuroses or psychoses. The ego-ideal is the hopeful and fantastical of version of oneself demonstrating excellence and wholeness at all times, like a deity, even if these goalposts keep moving, when the real ego manifests modest forms of success in reality, the lack of wisdom, or a willful ignorance, of futility and certain death, makes many objects of desire overrated, even to the point of total exhaustion and injury in the pursuit of the said object.

As there are developments in childhood, there are developments in culture, and Lacan reminds readers that if they become a psychoanalyst, the main people they will be dealing with are bourgeois types who have the freedom to choose their romantic partners and their vocations. A post-Feudal world. Their concerns will be the ones that show up all the time, with their struggle to adapt to a constantly changing world, and relationship disappointments. Lacan tried to thread the needle and accept the fact that there has been a decline of paternal authority and how that has created instability in the personalities of the children as well as the culture. It’s hard to be inspired by fallen idols, and if one imitates role models, as all people have, their fragmentation can be incorporated by us. The way to look at it is based on the potential for contribution that is realistic and possible for each person. A society full of repression, cultural decline, lack of beauty, envy, gatekeeping, is a stifling of potential that connects to flawed fatherhood for Lacan, and how authorities blame others while being unconscious of their own contribution to the problems listed. With protection of a conceptual ego, and its ideal, the sense of shame becomes pathological to the point where one would prefer to displace blame onto an innocent than admit a flaw. Conversely, those who live in reality, who are not perfectionist, they can accept their own foibles and the foibles of others while making incremental improvements in their endeavours. “This decline is conditioned by the worst effects of social progress on the individual. It can be seen most clearly in our day in the collectivities that have suffered most from these effects through economic recession and political catastrophes. These neuroses seem to have evolved in the direction of a character complex since the time of the first Freudian discoveries. Because of the specificity of its form and its universality—it is the kernel of the majority of neuroses—this must be recognised as the great neurosis of our time. Our experience leads us to designate its principle determinant in the personality of the father which is always lacking in some way or another, whether he be absent or humiliated, divided or a sham. It is this lack which, as explained by our theory of the Oedipus complex, exhausts instinctual energy and vitiates the dialectic of sublimation. Impotence and a Utopian spirit are the sinister godmothers who watch over the cradle of the neurotic and imprison his ambition, either because he stifles in himself those creations expected of him by the world into which he comes, or because in the object against which he proposes to revolt he fails to recognise his own activity.”

In psychoses, the Oedipus Complex, super-ego, and ego-ideals become distanced from identification. The internal characters can turn into spies conducting surveillance, or persecutors that stalk. One can also fall into a psychological bubble where one becomes out of touch because the flawed logic of a family or sub-culture keeps one’s viewpoints from being tested by reality and differing viewpoints. “In the psychoses morbid reactions are provoked by family objects in proportion as the reality of these objects decreases and their imaginary influence grows.”

Characters and symbols in the mind may be different from their influence, but eventually family members can be associated with them. “If one starts from relative contingency, in the world of the claimant, of the grievances they allege against their family–passing through the increasingly existential scope that the themes of spoliation, usurpation, and [victimized-filiation] take on, in the paranoiac’s self-conception–to arrive at these identifications with some heir torn from their cradle, with the secret wife of some prince, with the mythical figures of the all-powerful Father, the Filial Victim, the Universal Mother, the Primordial Virgin, where the self of the [psychotic] asserts itself.”

Yet Lacan did not want to put psychosis into the bucket of problems that were only psychological, and he entertained a biological determinant, which today involves the neurotransmitter dopamine. Biology creates the volume and psychology determines the content. Still the transmission culturally of pathological identities and worldviews can work through mimesis, or imitation, which delineates a cultural limitation for psychological expansion, of which the cultural horizon is transcended only periodically with experimentation and creativity. Not just biological viruses, but viral content can spread via the faculty of imitation, creating what people today call a hive mind. “It is, I think, in these délires à deux that we can best grasp the psychological conditions that can play a determining role in psychosis. Excluding the cases in which the delusion emanates from a parent afflicted with some mental disorder that makes him a domestic tyrant, I have constantly encountered these delusions in the family groups that can be called incomplete, especially in the cases where the social isolation which the very incompleteness encourages has its maximum effect, namely in the psychological couple formed by a mother and a daughter, or by two sisters (see my study of the Papins) or, more rarely, by a mother and a son.”

Jacques Lacan Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v78sjms-jacques-lacan-pt.-3.html

For neurotics, Lacan followed the typical Freudian line of studying defenses and transferences to see what humiliations/castrations were prevented from being revealed, but he wanted to stress the importance of the ego-ideal in how the variance between reality and the ideal is the actual wound where the super-ego interjects its brutal self-criticisms. People are not only managing their self-images, but also the images others’ have of the subject, and the consequences of a negative symbol arising from them. Being conscious of the ideal ego becomes a cheat sheet that explains the kinds of fantasies rattling around in the unconscious. “In keeping with the psychology called rationalist, Freud conceived the ego as the system of psychic relations through which the subject subordinates reality to conscious perception; because of this he had to oppose to it, at first under the name of super‐ego, the system of unconscious prohibitions. But it seems to me important to give theoretical balance to this system by joining to it the system of ideal projections which show in the imaginary forms of the ego—from the images of grandeur of the imagination, through the phantasies which polarise sexual desire, to the individual illusions of the will to power—a no less structural condition of human reality. Even though this system is not particularly well defined by the use of the term ‘ego‐ideal,’ which is still confused with the super-ego, its originality can be adequately grasped by indicating that it constitutes, as a secret of consciousness, the very hold that the analyst has on the mystery of the unconscious.”

The drama of the individual is existential and it’s a replay of the primordial separation, and an anticipation of further ones. Life is a gradual acceptance of loss and imperfection. “Although the psychic agencies that escape the control of the ego appear at first to result from the repression of sexuality in childhood, their formation reveals itself, as our experience grows, to be ever closer both in time and in structure to the situation of separation, shown by the analysis of anxiety to be primordial, which is the separation of birth…Indeed it is beginning from an ambivalent identification with his fellow man that through jealous participation and sympathetic competition, the ego differentiates itself, in the common progress of ‘the other’ and of objects. The reality inaugurated by this dialectical interplay will always retain the mark of the structural deformation of the existential drama that conditions it and that can be called the drama of the individual.”

Modern people, after the 19th century, live in less predetermined social institutions. Those older systems provided stability, even if they stifled creativity, were often brutal, tribal, or exploitative. Newer systems provided more freedom for the individual, but that freedom reduced certainty and increased insecurity as individuals had to invent their own financial and networking structures. Stability in the past was based on defined social structures that were not likely to change much over the centuries, but modern society is more fluidly imaged based and subject to fragmentation. Those images are borrowed by the culture and trauma happens each time an image is not fulfilled, or doesn’t cohere. By imitating a role model that leads us to a dead end, we have to constantly change those “exemplars,” experiment with different forms of survival, and may have to tolerate endless periods of trial and error to no avail. As technologies change, processes for survival change, and the stress of adaptation escalates. “The regulation of these effects is centered on the complex to the degree that the forms of social communion in our culture are rationalised—a rationalisation which it determines reciprocally by humanising the ego‐ideal. On the other hand a disordering of these effects comes about because of the growing demands that this culture itself makes on the coherence and creative energy of the ego.”

U2 – COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?): https://youtu.be/bWGapQFwy44?si=5TpY4l36DVhEVzRk

For Lacan, modern neuroses were classified between transference neuroses and character neuroses. Transference neuroses are early conflicts played out with people innocent of the original family dynamic. The early fragmentation of childhood can be returned to for the hysteric, and obsessives may use personal guilt to fuel their rituals. These neuroses are ego-dystonic, in that patients find these manifestations alien to who they really are. Character neuroses are ego-syntonic, and therefore are taken in through imitation and identification. Even further, these ideals can be transmitted by family, even if their behaviors do not conform to those ideals, but are anyways repeatedly talked about as a set of values. “Experience teaches us that the subject models his super‐ego and his ego‐ideal not so much on the ego of the parent as on the [same] agencies of his personality. This means that in the process of identification which resolves the Oedipus complex the child is far more sensitive to the intentions of the parent that are affectively communicated to him than to what can be objectified in his behaviour.”

Introversion and Schizonoïa provide their own patterns for recognition in how interested or inhibited the patient is with the world. It’s one thing to boast about what one may or may not do in the future, but it’s another thing to boast about actions already accomplished. “Nothing other than the eternal entity of desire seems suitable for designating the variations that clinical experience uncovers in the interest that the subject takes in reality, and in the élan [momentum] that sustains his conquest or his creativity. It is no less striking to observe that to the extent that this élan diminishes, the interest that the subject reflects back onto his own self is expressed in a more imaginary way, whether it relates to his physical integrity, his moral value or his social representation.”

There’s a connection between the feeling of triumph or defeat that coincides with exploring the environment or retreating from it. A person may fantasize about personal development, but counter to their conscious intentions, the unconscious moves towards regression instead. “This is why every deficiency in the imago forming the ego‐ideal will tend to produce a certain introversion of the personality by a narcissistic withdrawal of [craving]. This introversion can further express itself as a more or less regressive stagnation of the psychic relationships formed by the weaning complex—which is what is essentially defined by the analytic concept of schizonoïa.”

Conflicts between parents can also be absorbed by the children and role reversals can confuse things further. “Psychoanalysts have stressed the place that disturbances in the [craving] of the mother have in causing neuroses, and a minimum of experience reveals in numerous cases of neurosis a frigid mother whose sexuality, having been diverted into her relations with her children, has subverted the nature of those relations; the mother who smothers the children and indulges in excesses of tenderness which express, more or less consciously, repressed impulses; or the paradoxically dried‐up mother full of unspoken severity and unconscious cruelty in which an altogether more profound fixation of the [craving] finds expression. A correct evaluation cannot be made of these cases without taking into account a correlative anomaly in the father. Maternal frigidity must be understood, and its effects measured, in the vicious circle of [craving] disequilibrium which makes up the family circle in such cases. In our opinion the psychological fate of the child depends above all on the relationship shown between the parental images. This is why a lack of harmony between the parents is always harmful to the child and why the most secret forms of this discord are no less pernicious than the most clearly acknowledged memories of the ill‐matched nature of his parents’ union. Indeed, there is no set of circumstances more favourable to the identification described above as [neurosis inducing] than the very sure perception the child has of the neurotic meaning of the barriers that separate his parents from one another in their relationship. This is especially true for the perception of the father because of the revelatory function his image has in the process of sexual sublimation.”

Children may grow up to repeat different iterations of the same past parental breakups, replaying the child runaway, getting caught in isolation with other pathological people or following rituals of hypochondria and remaining a lifelong prisoner of affective reactive imagoes. Sexual orientation may also invert at different levels of childhood development, especially if one feels powerful imitating forms of masculinity or femininity and contributing those energies that one is good at to attract those looking for those attentions: To Be.

Conversely, there’s a desire To Have, where one may want energies that are opposite to what one gives. Where there is love, there is also hatred. Hatred of an identity that a parent fills out may cause a fear of becoming like them, and then a contrarian attitude to be opposite can develop a different orientation. In another example, if mother’s love is the best, and no other women can compete with it, then the only person who has enough knowledge to represent that person in the next generation is the son. “There is revealed, sometimes on the surface of consciousness but always at the level at direct observation, an affect fixation to the mother which, one can readily appreciate, implies the exclusion of all other women. At a deeper level, but one still graspable even if only by poetic intuition, there is the narcissistic ambivalence by which the subject identifies himself with his mother and identifies the love object with his own mirror image. His mother’s relationship to himself gives the form in which the modalities of his desire and his object choice are forever embedded—a desire motivated by tenderness and education an object who reproduces a certain moment in time of his double. Finally, in the depths of the psyche there appears a castrating intervention properly so called by which the mother gives expression to her own claims to masculinity. Here the essential role of the relationship between the parents appears much more clearly; and analysts emphasise that the mother’s character is also expressed on the conjugal level by a domestic tyranny whose masked or blatant forms, from emotional demands to the confiscation of family authority, betray their fundamental meaning of masculine protest. This protest finds a clear symbolic, moral and material expression in the satisfaction of holding on to the purse strings.” Why bad relationships occur is because the unconscious in one partner doesn’t matchup properly with the unconscious of the other, even if consciously the couple decided to make a commitment anyways.

The movements of unconscious desire do not always align with the rigid societal definitions of what is deemed natural or correct. Instead, the fluid dynamic of sexual identity serves as Lacan’s prime example of how human psychology fails to fit neatly into culturally mandated male and female roles. Many men and women look at cultural ideals and say “that’s not me.” This creates a psychological deadlock because while the traditional, masculine authority structure of the family has been historically eroded, society still demands that we uphold these rigid gender ideals, partially out of a maximization of gender potential for procreation of the next generation. We are left with a profound social contradiction: our entire culture is built around a polarization of the sexes that our actual psychological structures support with a brittle insecurity. “It is not by chance that we close this effort at systematising the family neuroses with psychic inversion. If indeed psychoanalysis began with the open forms of homosexuality and only then went on to recognise the more subtle discordances of inversion, the imaginary impasse of sexual polarisation must be understood in terms of a social [contradiction], since the forms of our culture, customs and art, struggle and thought, are invisibly committed to it.”

From Impulse to Complex

In From Impulse to Complex, Lacan had a discussion about two cases and what a psychoanalytic cure entailed for neuroses and psychoses. It provided a recognition of content that was parasitic, in that it inhabited a worldview that was distorted and generated symptoms. Weaker forms of this just needed enough recall to connect memory to historical fact to clear up a distorted view. But when these worldviews took over and hardened into a transference, the emotional investment in them were that of a complex. “The first case shows in effect a resolution of the symptoms as soon as the Oedipal episodes are clarified, by a [bringing back to life] almost purely [from recollection] and almost before any condensation of the transference, yet quite ready to take place. Morbid manifestation is therefore very malleable, and whose disappearance is translated only as that of a parasite in the personality…The second case, on the contrary, requires the use of extraordinarily archaic fantasies, exhumed not only from memory but from dreams, and whose relation to impressions received from the outside in infancy is obviously limited to an occasional incidence, and only further deepens the question of their origin…Fantasies of dismemberment and bodily fragmentation, polarized between the image of the hidden corpse and those paired images of the male vampire with an old man’s face and the child‐eating ogress. These representations, affectively characterized by the tone of horror, reveal themselves, in the structure, to be in tune with mental revelations of a very different affective quality that can be defined as states of passive bliss…Their complex, joined by certain poetic intuitions very remarkably expressed in literature, is highlighted by the author in the present occasion under the invocation of Saturn, because of the motif of the bloody devouring of the child and its singular relationship as its inverse to an Arcadian dream [of escape to an untroubled state of nature].” Lacan viewed a stage before ego development as one of the “fragmented body,” and if analysis was deep enough it could uncover content from that layer of the psyche.

Lacan had to use extended periods of collecting dreams and free association material in the “psychoanalytic monologue,” which was a way to collect distorted attitudes, and for him, “it is appropriate to distinguish in the intellectual maneuver of the analytic interpretations, that which is of the order of the primordial world of images and that which belongs to the materiality of the facts.” Cenac noted the “importance given to this very primitive, defenseless [driving force].” In one case “a patient whose neurosis protected her against the fear and anguish that had caused her, as a child, an abortion more than likely her mother’s…The patient found the memory of a toilet bucket which seemed to her as big as herself and which contained suspicious things. As she peered into the bucket, her mother screamed in the next room. Various overlaps have shown that these facts were at the time of the birth of her sister.”

At some point, with reality testing and historical verification, attitudes have to shift to match closer to reality so that one can return to a more fulfilling life. Similar to Melanie Klein’s views of therapy, expectations can overrate or underrate real world conditions and demonstrate the distortions operating in the mind of the subject. When you don’t overrate or underrate objects you can enjoy them without holding too tightly, or falling into total rejection of anything good.

Ego Motivations

With Lacan’s understanding of the ego and how we want to see ourselves expand and grow, this naturally fits into positive psychology, and how an understanding of the futility of recreating the womb, can be balanced by moderate endeavors that keep us from too much stress or boredom. One has to find meaning in the meaningless template of environments. It’s unhappy that meaning is not spoon fed to us, but it’s liberating that we are allowed to motivate ourselves. We have to generate meaning instead of passively waiting for it to arrive on our laps.

Because we all look for gratification, flow, emotional regulation, emotional security, we all have challenges that have to be surmounted in order to achieve each individual goal. These challenges for positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi were necessary for a pleasurable flow to materialize. The difficulty is balance. Too much challenge leads to insecurity and stress, and too little leads to boredom. As long as these motivations stay unconscious, a lot of the reason why we do differently than what we want to out of principle is that there are more proximal goals that are just in the right area for mastery that feel more accessible than our principles require of us. There are also fears that bring us to regress and return to older modes of our historical past.

What grabs your interest – Jordan Peterson: https://youtu.be/YFEC85zDwL4?si=gyqy8hcBGsvKyjcJ

If you always need a certain tension to feel alive, then even conflict, like we see in politics, or sports, can be addictive, despite being toxic when stress gets out of control. If appreciation and peace of mind are not valued, but instead a certain intensity, what happens if someone actually succeeds in defeating almost every obstacle, and lose that intensity?

Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft, described the feeling. “The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance. Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I’ve never felt more isolated.” Like being in God Mode in a video game, where all material friction and challenge is removed it means you have to find it elsewhere.

For the super rich, they may not go into luxury hobbies, but instead find it all too easy. If one is in God Mode, then one could act like a God and find challenge in manipulating people for social engineering projects. Journalist Glenn Greenwald recently spoke about that luxury upper class problem of too much boredom, especially when a powerful person is buying the attention spans of labor and directing them towards their individual project without the thought that the individual laborers may have conflicting goals where their dreams are crushed in the implementation. Many evil people think they are heroes, but the underlying aggression Lacan talked about remains. Wholeness can never be perfected, and with unfettered power, those projects can consume whole populations. The aggressivity of asserting the self can secretly want to damage others in order to alleviate boredom and bolster a need for a powerful person to feel meaning again.

“I’d never been around very rich people, very powerful people. You know, I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, went to a kind of working-class, middle- class public school. I never was around this until I started doing law in Manhattan, started getting like a taste of what that world is like. And then just being a journalist, I unfortunately have worked with, you know, billionaires and interacted with billionaires and whatever. I’m by no means the billionaire whisperer, but sometimes I think it’s hard to envision what it means to be a billionaire. Like if you just really think about what it means like someone has a million dollars, it’s like okay, it’s not like you’re rich, but it’s like financially secure. You have a million dollars. You should be able to get through life without being impoverished.”

“Someone has $10 million. 10 times that. Okay, $10 million. That’s that makes you rich. That puts you in the 1%. Then multiply that by 10 again. Now you have $100 million. $100 million. You should be able to have a very luxurious lifestyle and never have to worry about money as long as you’re basically responsible. Like it’s unimaginable wealth. Take that $100 million, multiply it by 10 again, and now you have a billion dollars. 10 stocks of a hundred million.”

“This is one billion. Most of the billionaires we talk about have five of those, 10 of those, 20 of those, a hundred of those, 150, 200 of those. Now, Elon, I think, is worth $750 billion. You know, change varies with the stock market, whatever. But it’s a level of wealth that is very hard to fathom.”

“It’s not just like you’re financially set for life. It’s that it’s unlimited. You couldn’t lose that based on just what you do. Some are overleveraged. Some, but in general, it’s an unfathomable amount of money. It makes you have power on par with like small countries.”

“And then when you work with other billionaires, midsize countries, and you can affect large countries as well. So you put that much wealth in someone’s hand and then the power that accompanies it. Every door flies open. You’re in every top level meeting around the world. People curry your favor. You’re surrounded by people who are in awe of the power and wealth that you have, revere you, or afraid of you, constantly saying how brilliant you are, affirming every little utterance that you have. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen all this up close.”

“There’s almost no way if you’re in that situation that you don’t become convinced of your own supremacy, of your own superiority. It’s not that you just tell yourself, ‘Wow, I got really lucky. I made a ton of money.’ Or even like, ‘Oh, I made a ton of money because I deserved it. I came up with a good idea. I worked hard. I did it well.’ No. That level of money and power will make you, unless you really work hard against it, start believing that no, you’re in a very tiny group of humans who were just born very special. And the amount of power you have will start to make you think like, okay, obviously I remember a billionaire once told me ‘overnight I got really rich. I was so excited. I always wanted a Lamborghini. I went to the Lamborghini store and I was like, Oh my god, I can buy whatever Lamborghini I want.’ He was so excited. But then he realized, ‘Actually, you know what? I can buy every Lamborghini here, not just one. I’m a billionaire now. I can buy all these Lamborghinis.’ And he said as he started realizing more and more that he could just have anything, the kind of the value of it, the temptation of it diminished greatly because a big part of wanting something is the difficulty in getting it. Once that difficulty is gone, it’s why people play hard to get in the dating ritual. If you seem unattainable, people are going to want you more. They’re going to chase after you. But if you’re just like, ‘Hey, I’m here. Let’s whatever.’ It’s easy, and the attraction declines. And that’s the same with that kind of wealth.”

Taio Cruz – Break Your Heart: https://youtu.be/y_SI2EDM6Lo?si=E_2jzqN10bsb-NS3

“So, it’s not most people who become billionaires aren’t content to just say, ‘Oh, now I can consume. I can buy huge houses. I can fly around the world in a private jet. I’ll be respected.’ No, they start thinking like, ‘I want to use this power to shape the world for the better.’ And that very quickly leads to assuming kind of powers that we’ve always thought about and probably should think about as being reserved for whatever God, the universe, nature.”

“I don’t think that power belongs in humanity in the hands of a few human beings who are with this power not because they’ve been selected because of their wisdom or studies but simply because they’ve made billions of dollars. I don’t think we want Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and maybe like 80 other people on the planet deciding how humanity should be fundamentally transformed, how artificial intelligence is going to make humanity dispensable. These kind of paths lead to very dark dark outcomes. Very very dark outcomes. And when it’s not accompanied by a theology or a morality, or when it is accompanied by a morality that’s almost too certain of itself, too self-righteous, too self-confident, self-possessed, not really near people questioning you enough and therefore not really having to question where you think things should go.”

“You’re not talking about how to make cars more energy efficient or how to make planes safer. You’re talking about how to transform humanity by merging human beings into some other transhuman or transcendent form. Merge with some kind of technology, artificial intelligence or whatever is coming. I can’t think of anything that would justify letting people like that who are not really subject to many limits transform humanity in whatever ways they’re hoping about. There’s no question that there’s kind of a quasi utopian drive. They see themselves as philosopher kings, which again almost is inevitable given how they live and what they hear and the affirmation they get and who’s around them and the limitlessness of their wealth and power. And I do consider it very disturbing.”

“When it gets to the building blocks of what it means to be human, I think so much can go wrong in very severe ways that I think we ought to be extremely guarded at least especially when it’s not a collective project, when it’s just individuals with power who don’t really deserve that level of power. I don’t think any individual does. Making these decisions in secret is based on some religious or theological or philosophical worldview that they’ve developed through who knows what, without much transparency or or critique…That seems to me to be a thing that we ought to be extremely resistant to. I can’t imagine what possible benefits could justify taking the risk of transforming humanity into something fundamentally different through the use of technology.”

Do AI Billionaires seek to transform humanity – Gleen Greenwald: https://youtu.be/6ieK_bJI1VU?si=YET5eBr4YiFZYsmF

Naturally, these discussions move into the realm of totalitarianism, and the fact that so many people go along with these philosopher kings has to do with human beings being creatures of comfort. When you have that much money you can use fear, but also comfort to coopt entire populations who simply need the money to get by with their families. It’s a big question to ask “should I enjoy things I’m not willing to lose?” Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw the power of having what you are not able to lose, and how people could remain inanimate while losing their fundamental freedoms. “There is one psychological peculiarity in human beings that always surprises me in times of prosperity and ease, a man will shy from the least little worry on the periphery of his existence, try not to know about the sufferings of others (and his own future), make many concessions even in matters of central, of intimate importance to him, just to prolong his present well-being.”

Arcade Fire – Creature Comfort: https://youtu.be/xzwicesJQ7E?si=_bHF4uzFkP7nnTCj

Yang Jisheng also found similar situations of fear and comfort being able to mobilize the nation of Communist China. “With every level of the bureaucracy presenting the dual face of slave and master, the voice of the lower levels was suppressed by the levels above in a system that acknowledged only positive feedback. The whip of authority and the lure of paradise deprived cadres of rationality and turned them into fanatics, swindlers, and slave drivers.” Typical in dystopian systems, the governments cause problems and then provide solutions to the problems they created in a downward spiral. Instead of ceasing the activity that caused the problem in the first place, it’s more comfortable for to main that power and continue appearing like a savior, than to step down. The illusion is that these situations can only happen in “those” countries, when humans occupy ALL countries. It can happen anywhere. Withdrawal symptoms do not only happen with habit forming substances, but a change in the idea of self poses the same kind of discomfort. As soon as there is an entrenched class of super rich manipulating politics and policy that affects the powerless, part of the delicious resistance is being able to monitor destitute reformers who entertainingly try to change their circumstances.

Then when you add political discourse being funded by politicians, that are already bought and paid for, as well as government funded state media, many consumers of political news become addicted to confirmation bias and comforting personalities only tell their viewers what they want to hear, which brings in money, advertising, government funding with social media engagement. It becomes a debate where participants talk past each other and refuse to listen to counter arguments, display a lack of humility, while each side views the other with brutal contempt. The danger of money is when unethical media types and politicians, who are supposed to protect the powerless, continue with their agendas, even when there are early indications that their policies are causing enormous damage. That’s the sign they are doing it only for their personal comfort.

Media Insider Stuns Parliament: Canadian Media Independence & Trust Is Gone – Northern Perspective: https://youtu.be/70QdEE-9Y4Y?si=HHkUC4TKgXgT6-Po

From Impulse to Complex – Jacques Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/The_Impulsion_Complex-bilingual-final.pdf

Le miroir et la psyché – Gérard Guillerault: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/GUILLERAULT-Le_miroir.pdf

The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience – Jacques Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Lacan-Mirror.pdf

The Oak and the Calf – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780060140144/

Tombstone – Yang Jisheng: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780374277932/

Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/