Jacques Lacan Pt. 9

Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis

In the time of Lacan’s Mirror Phase analysis, he began to expand as far as he could with what insecure self-images could do to humans and he helped to explain the strange behaviors people do to regulate their emotions. In the compound of the psychoanalytic office, aggressivity appears in negative transference. For many, therapy is more about airing out what can’t be disclosed in regular environments. “…I am thinking of the kinds of treatment, given to both adults and children, that might be grouped together under the heading psychodramatic treatment, and which seeks its [cure] in the [catharsis] that it tries to exhaust on the level of role-play, and in which, again, classical psychoanalysis provides the principal underlying notions.”

Through transference of past experiences onto an analyst, a personal opinion from a subject “manifests himself as such to the intention of another…Only a subject can understand a meaning; conversely, every phenomenon of meaning implies a subject.” Because humans only have past learning experiences to work with, the blank analyst ideally is a screen to project off of. “…This experience, constituted between two subjects one of whom plays in the dialogue the role of ideal impersonality, may, once it is completed, and providing that it fulfils the conditions of efficiency that may be required of any special research, be resumed by the other subject with a third subject. This apparently initiatory way is simply a transmission by recurrence, which should cause surprise to no one, since it springs from the very bipolar structure of all subjectivity.”

It’s the unconscious intentions surfacing that need to be analyzed, and intentions related to the past have to be sifted from any errors or accidents by analysts who leak out counter-transference reactions providing the patient with personal details. To maintain clarity, the Lacanian Subject is revealed through the speech, desires, contradictions, and unconscious intentions that ego images cannot fully explain. “The analytic experience allows us to feel the pressure of intention. We read it in the symbolic meaning of symptoms, as soon as the subject throws off the defences by which he disconnects them from their relations with his daily life and his history, in the implicit finality of his behaviour and his rejections, in his unsuccessful acts, in the avowal of his privileged phantasies, and in the riddles of his dream life…We can measure it partly in the demanding tone that sometimes underlies his whole discourse, in his unfinished sentences, his hesitations, his inflexions and his slips of the tongue, in the inaccuracies of his descriptions of events, irregularities in his application of the analytic rule [to communicate anything that comes to mind], late arrivals at sessions, calculated absences, and often in recriminations, reproaches, phantasmic fears, emotional reactions of anger, attempts at intimidation; the true acts of violence being as rare as the combination of circumstances that has led the patient to the doctor, and his transformation, accepted by the patient himself, in a convention of dialogue…The capability proper to this aggressive intention is manifest: we constantly observe it in the formative action of an individual on those dependent on him; intended aggressivity gnaws away, undermines, disintegrates; it castrates; it leads to death…This aggressivity is exercised within real constraints of course. But we know from experience that it is no less capable when given expression.”

Images and symbols rapidly manifested in these subjective patterns and reactions that were not taken seriously by older modalities. “After the repeated failures of classical psychology to account for these mental phenomena, which we call images, psychoanalysis made the first successful attempt to understand their psychological reality of cause and effect. This was because it began with their formative effects on the subject: for example, how a person might respond to an authority figure as though they were responding to a punishing parent, and then repeat that pattern throughout life. Psychoanalysis revealed that transient images shape the particular ways in which psychological tendencies are expressed, but that they do so as variations of deeper patterns, called imagos, through which instinctual tendencies themselves take shape, and can have different shapes for different people depending on how an image helps constitute how a person experiences and responds to the world. It’s the same instinct, but how it plays out is individual.”

Each person has their preferred method of symbolization but they at some point devolve into archaic fragmentation, which is similar to what Melanie Klein found in her research. “Among these imagos are some that represent the preferential channels of aggressive intentions, which they provide with a capability that might be called magical. These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that I have grouped together under the apparently structural term of imagos of the fragmented body.”

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 6: https://rumble.com/v4yxvm2-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-6.html

For Lacan, primitive social practices of tattooing, incision, and circumcision, as well as the arbitrary cruelty of modern fashion, that denies dignity for the natural forms of the body, and one could probably add cosmetics and plastic surgery, these are all forms of dealing with the pretense of a unified imaginary self-image that doesn’t correspond to an ever-fragmented reality. Lacan used paintings of Hieronymus Bosch as examples of what this shattered dream material looked like. “These phantasmagorias crop up constantly in dreams, especially at the point when analysis appears to be turning its attention on the most fundamental, most archaic fixations. I remember the dream of one of my patients, whose aggressive drives took the form of obsessive phantasies; in the dream he saw himself driving a car, accompanied by the woman with whom he was having a rather difficult affair, pursued by a flying-fish, whose skin was so transparent that one could see the horizontal liquid level through the body, an image of vesical persecution of great anatomical clarity.”

Lacan reminded the reader, especially those who read Plato, that dialectics prove often to be a failure against negative transferences coming from interlocuters who resist accepting defeat in a debate, and yet psychoanalysis is a talking therapy nonetheless. They stop trying to convince and instead read the defenses that are all about preserving the dignity and security of the ideal self-image. “…The analyst cured even the most serious cases of madness through dialogue; what virtue, then, did Freud add to it? The rule proposed to the patient in analysis allows him to advance in a blind intentionality that has no other purpose than to free him from an illness or an ignorance whose very limits he is unaware of. His voice alone will be heard for a time whose duration remains at the discretion of the analyst. In particular, it will soon become apparent, indeed confirmed, that the analyst refrains from offering any kind of advice or trying to influence the patient in any particular direction. This constraint would seem to run counter to the desired end, and so must be justified by some deeper motive.”

Plato: Euthydemus: https://rumble.com/v74kd5y-plato-euthydemus.html

The person who needs help can often be hostile to the helper leaving them to throw up their hands. Helpers also have to look at their need to fix others which may include their own form of hostility that dreams of annihilating the “problem.” “What, then, lies behind the analyst’s attitude? The concern to provide the dialogue with a participant who is as devoid as possible of individual characteristics; we efface ourselves, we deprive the speaker of those expressions of interest, sympathy, and reaction that he expects to find on the face of the listener, we avoid all expression of personal taste, we conceal whatever might betray them, we become depersonalized, and try to represent for the other an ideal of impassibility. We wish to avoid the trap that already lies concealed in the appeal, marked by the eternal pathos of faith, that the patient addresses to us. It carries a secret within itself. ‘Take upon yourself,’ the patient is telling us, ‘the evil that weighs me down; but if you remain smug, self-satisfied, unruffled as you are now, you won’t be worthy of bearing it.’ What appears here as the proud revenge of suffering will show its true face—and sometimes at a moment decisive enough to enter the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ that interested Freud so much—in the form of that resistance of amour-propre [self-love], to use the term in all the depth given it by La Rochefoucauld, and which is often expressed thus: ‘I can’t bear the thought of being freed by anyone other than myself.’ Of course, at a deeper level of emotional demand, it is participation in his illness that the patient expects from us. But it is the hostile reaction that guides our prudence, and which inspired Freud to be on his guard against any temptation to play the prophet. Only saints are sufficiently detached from the deepest of the common passions to avoid the aggressive reactions to charity…Such reactions should hardly surprise us analysts; after all, do we not point out the aggressive motives that lie hidden in all so-called philanthropic activity?…Negative transference…is the initial knot of the analytic drama.”

Layers of past learning can be too difficult for the conscious mind to keep track of their original sources of inspiration, but they still operate under the radar, so to speak. “This phenomenon represents in the patient the imaginary transference onto our person of one of the more or less archaic imagos, [from significant relationship(s) in the past] which, by an effect of [the] symbolic [network, like tectonic plates keeping the original relationships hidden], degrades, diverts, or inhibits the cycle of such behaviour, which, by an accident of repression, has excluded from the control of the ego this or that function or [bodily symptom unrelated to structural injury], and which, by an action of identification, has given its form to this or that agency of the personality.”

Because the symbolic network has trouble containing certain conflicts in a world where complete disclosure can threaten the subject, past conflicts are not resolved by the ego in a way that can be processed and mastered in a conscious way. The impulse to master returns in current negative transferences, which can be seen more easily if the analyst remains a cipher, or what Lacan calls a “pure mirror of an unruffled surface,” that gives little fodder for the analysand to complain about legitimately, and so the altered personality, which has been developed by repeated imitations and past identifications of significant others, appears in relief when accusations are false and unjustified in that clinical setting. The patient experiences the analyst through the image of another person when there’s nothing else to go off of. “It can be seen that the slightest pretext is enough to arouse the aggressive intention, which reactualizes the imago, which has remained permanent at the level of [a network of interconnected symbolic meanings] that we call the subject’s unconscious, [because it operates and generates symptoms without the patient recognizing those symbolic relations,] together with its intention [toward others, so that the patient may respond to a present person through patterns established in an earlier relationship].”

Lacan then used an example of a girl suffering from astasia-abasia, which makes one uncoordinated in standing, and walking. When she was made conscious of the father-imago, and that her father in actuality was not as supportive as she desired, her symptom was cured. In the case of obsessional-neurosis, the aggressive intention is held back by defenses intended to blunt their effect to such an extent that Lacan described them as absorbing of impact as military fortifications are. The transference may be more muted and difficult to interpret. For example, negative transferences can appear as false politeness, reasonableness, emotional detachment, and repeated agreement, rather than direct anger towards the analyst. The reality is that if symptoms are not getting better, then there’s some kind of resistance to treatment. If the analyst directly challenges the patient’s defenses, they may simply find another way to maintain the current ego organization. The hostility is not necessarily absent; it may be embedded in the very manner in which the patient approaches analysis. The analytic goal at this point is not simply to provoke more hostility that is nakedly obvious, but to recognize how that hostility is organized within the patient’s relationship to the analyst, including efforts to preserve its own sense of control of the analysis and treatment.

Lacan wanted to get around the patient’s desire not to know, as described by Freud’s understanding of Negation, which involved denying unpleasant facts, or only accepting those facts if the blame belonged to someone else. “The content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed…Expressed in the language of the oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this’, or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.'”

For example, with the Marie de la Trinité case study, she had to realize her upbringing was different from that of others, how factual this was, how serious it was for her lack of development, and she had to take responsibility for initiating her personal growth trajectory, rather than continuing blaming others. Months and years of analysis can happen before an analysand with this level of obsession, and in her case, to begin taking account of her desires, wants, and needs as a launching pad to connect with others, who also have their own needs. The symbolic organization, which Lacan would later connect with language, focused on a subject in conflict with others and measured who was superior, inferior, etc., without understanding that relationships are about complementarity and exchange. It doesn’t always have to go into conflict and one-upmanship. One can disengage from organizations, albeit with enough forethought, practicality and planning, and then join different ones, or they can put the effort into creating new organizations. Lacan wanted her actions to be about doing good as opposed to managing a self-image of “good.” Managing images becomes a waste of energy and it inhibits action, or makes the actions appear meaningless when in fact they are not. For example, perfectionists may provide a lot of contribution, but are incapable of enjoying those results due to them always being imperfect in some way. A whole bunch of hostility may arise instead of an acceptance of foibles and new goal metrics to pursue, that would allow for so much more positivity.

Jacques Lacan Pt. 8-1: https://rumble.com/v7grs0c-jacques-lacan-pt.-8-1.html

Jacques Lacan Pt. 8-2: https://rumble.com/v7h1kjo-jacques-lacan-pt.-8-2.html

Where Socrates failed to accept that his interlocuters would prefer to hold on to their resistances, Psychoanalysis found much food for thought in those tendencies. “In short, we designate within the ‘self’ a core that is given to consciousness yet remains opaque to reflection—a core marked by all the ambiguities which, ranging from self-complacency to bad faith, [by lying to oneself], structures the emotional life of the human subject. This ‘I’—even as it acknowledges its own [existence and personal limits]—opposes the concrete challenge of the subject’s self-realization with an [unflagging resistance] born of pretension, misrecognition, and self-deception.”

The ego has trouble accepting the limits of reality, and instead of being practical with it, it tries to escape in ineffectual ways while lacking the reflection necessary to recognize these defenses, hence the need sometimes for psychotherapeutic help. This is because reflection on personal flaws is very unpleasant. When analysis was put into practice, patients often went into what was similar to a Kleinian paranoia, and a space of exploration was provided for what Lacan called “excluded islets, blind spots, or parasitical compulsions.” The time dimension was further involved when the patient was found in the process of fight or flight, inhibition, or when a triggering imago arose from dormancy. “Let us indicate simply what [psychoanalysis] brings to the psychology of the emotions by showing the signification common to states as diverse as phantasmatic fear, anger, active sorrow, or [neurotic] fatigue. The aggressive tendency proves to be fundamental in a certain series of significant personality states, namely, the paranoid and paranoiac psychoses…Thus aggressive reactions form a continuous series, from the violent, unmotivated outburst of the act, through the whole range of belligerent forms, to the cold war of interpretative demonstrations. This series parallels another, that of imputations of harm, the explanations for which—without mentioning the obscure [accusations] to which the paranoiac attributes his discordance with all living things—run the gamut from poison, to evil spells, influence, physical intrusion, diversion of intent, theft of secrets, violation of privacy, injury, spying and intimidation, defamation and character assassination, and damages and exploitation.”

But Lacan also argued that if patients experienced the analyst as an exact double, narcissistic rivalry, involving a mutual ego-ideal, an aggressivity could become so intense that it would obstruct the productive development of transference. This can come about from prospective analysts who are being analyzed by people occupying the positions they want to ascend to. This is exactly what happened to Lacan when he was analyzed by Lowenstein, and illuminated a weak spot in analytic training, which can be seen with all the infighting and scandals found in the history of psychoanalysis. Ambitious students entering psychoanalytic training usually have an ideal of creating their own school.

Jacques Lacan Pt. 4: https://rumble.com/v79hbyq-jacques-lacan-pt.-4.html

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v6b5odm-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-3.html

In a creative way, Lacan described the phenomenological experience of reification that happens when the brain recognizes gestalts and reacts to events and grasps “frames of the movie,” so to say, to construct hardened forms of knowledge, or fixations. “I have shown that in each case this series—in which we find all the successive envelopes of the person’s biological and social status—is based on an original organization of ego and object forms that are also structurally affected thereby, even down to the spatial and temporal categories in which the ego and the object are constituted. [Objects] are experienced as events in a perspective of mirages, as affections with something stereotypical about them that suspends their dialectical movement…Janet, who so admirably demonstrated the signification of feelings of persecution as phenomenological moments of social behaviors, did not explore their common characteristic, which is precisely that they are constituted by stagnation in one of these moments, similar in strangeness to the faces of actors when a film is suddenly stopped in mid-frame. Now, this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge, which constitutes the ego and objects as having the attributes of permanence, identity, and substance—in short, as entities or ‘things‘ that are very different from the gestalts that experience enables us to isolate in the mobility of the field constructed according to the lines of animal desire…Indeed, this formal fixation, which introduces a certain difference of level, a certain discordance between man as organism and his [environment], is the very condition that indefinitely extends his world and his power, by giving his objects their instrumental [versatility] and symbolic polyphony, as well as their potential as weaponry.”

A patient’s growth at the very beginning of childhood starts off with uncoordinated movements along with an experience of a lack of boundaries, as seen between children fighting that are confused about who is a perpetrator or victim. In the mirror stage, the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his or her own body coinciding with self-alienation as craving is invested in a self-image. “I is an other,” or the I is not the actual subject, but it is more symbolic of a permanent whole than a phenomenological experience with its uncertainty and ambivalence. As the child grows into the Oedipus Complex, there’s typically an identification with the same sex parent, and guilt for rivalrous feelings against the parent, which is then followed by an ideal of conduct to reach for that is modeled by that parent. Lastly, there can be “…the conjunction of the subject’s history with the unthinkable innateness of his desire…” Dangerous desires that could lead to blame promote negation: “What happens to me has nothing to do with what I am,” which is followed by a projection: “There’s nothing about you that is worthwhile…It is the very delusion of the misanthropic beautiful soul, casting out onto the world the disorder that constitutes his being.”

Because reality refuses to congeal according to ego-ideals, there’s a “central knot of ambivalent aggressiveness” which equals resentment or a recognition of unfairness. Because of the imperfection of planetary life, disappointment returns again and again, exhausting every angle. This struggle goes all the way back to primordial origins as Melanie Klein discovered, and it “especially enables us to situate the first superego formation as extremely early,” so “… aggressiveness [is] linked to the narcissistic relationship and to the structures of systematic misrecognition and objectification that characterize ego formation…A specific satisfaction, based on the integration of an original organic [disarray] corresponds to the [original image] of this formation, alienating as it may be due to its function of rendering foreign. This satisfaction must be conceived of in the dimension of a vital [rewounding] constitutive of man and makes unthinkable the idea of an environment that is preformed for him; it is a ‘negative’ [craving] that enables the Heraclitean notion of Discord—which the Ephesian held to be prior to harmony—to shine once more.”

The Presocratics: Heraclitus: https://rumble.com/v1gst93-the-presocratics-heraclitus.html

What “ought” to be conflicts with what is. “Thus, there is no need to look any further to find the source of the energy the ego borrows to put in the service of the ‘reality principle,’ a question Freud raises regarding repression…This energy indubitably comes from ‘narcissistic passion.’ Biological impotence is met with again here in the fixation of an imaginary ‘ideal,’ which, as analysis has shown, determines whether or not the ‘instinct’ conforms to the individual’s physiological sex. A point, let it be said in passing, whose anthropological import cannot be too highly stressed. But what interests me here is what I shall refer to as the ‘pacifying’ function of the ego-ideal: the connection between its [craving] normativeness and a cultural normativeness, bound up since the dawn of history with the imago of the father. Here, obviously, lies the import that Freud’s work, Totem and Taboo, still has, insofar as from a mythological event—the killing of the father—it derives the subjective dimension that gives this event its meaning: guilt.”

Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

Language makes “things” clear without the wholehearted support of a muddy reality that is too opaque to be fully understood or mastered, let alone to be exhausted of all meaning. “Who, if not us, will call back into question the objective status of this ‘I,’ which a historical evolution peculiar to our culture tends to confuse with the subject? The specific impact of this anomaly on every level of language deserves to be displayed, and first and foremost as regards the first person as grammatical subject in our languages—the ‘I love’ that [reifies] a tendency in a subject who denies it. An impossible mirage in linguistic forms, among which the most ancient are to be found, and in which the subject appears fundamentally in the position of a determinative or instrumental of the action.”

The “I” may say “I am a person who loves this person,” when in reality the experience is that “there is a desire operating in me that I do not entirely understand.” The first formulation can make love seem like a settled possession of a unified self. The second leaves open the possibility that the desire has a history, contradictions, and unconscious determinants. The concept reifies a tendency through grammar to make a psychological process appear to belong to a stable, self-knowing agent, that refuses to recognize the hostility, rivalry, dependency, or desire that is also involved in the relationship. The concepts can also make categorical denials and also repress what is actually experienced. The conscious “I” does not necessarily know what is motivating it. The familiar grammatical structure of modern languages may prop up assertions that “I do this,” “I think that,” which can encourage a particular picture of the self as the origin and master of its actions. Many people who have seen the hypocrisy of others, or witnessed their own, can catch themselves saying “I believe this,” but behave as if they concluded the opposite. The “I” becomes a kind of lie because it’s pretending to possess a unity and mastery it has not, and CANNOT possess. This constant conflict and lying to oneself is part in parcel with ego turbulence. This includes our reified personal goals that are beyond what experience indicates as possible for the reality of our endeavors. “…The ego represents the center of all resistances to the treatment of symptoms…One cannot overemphasize the irreducible character of narcissistic structure and the ambiguity of a notion that tends to misrecognize the constancy of aggressive tension in all moral life that involves subjection to this structure: for no amount of [generosity of love] could free altruism from it. This is why La Rochefoucauld could formulate his maxim, in which his rigor concurs with the fundamental theme of his thought, on the incompatibility between marriage and delight.”

Maxims – La Rochefoucauld: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781587314957/

Because of these existential circumstances of therapy, there can also be lies embedded in the hopes of patients looking for a utopia arising from a successful analysis, for example. Once they leave the analytical environment, they are back out into the world of the cultural pressure cooker once again. “We would be allowing the cutting edge of analytic experience to become dull if we deluded ourselves, if not our patients, into believing in some sort of pre-established harmony that would free social conformity—made possible by the reduction of symptoms—of its tendency to induce aggressiveness in the subject.”

For Lacan, ambivalence in the partial drives of perversions included an aggressiveness, because desires may be mediated by the judgements of others. Citing Sartre’s view of No Exit, where other people can become a source of torment, “hell is other people,” because their judgments threaten to define us. The gaze of another person can make us conscious of ourselves as an object in someone else’s world. You want to be regarded as intelligent, competent, and worthy of respect, but another person looks at you, judges your behavior, or treats you as inferior. Suddenly, you experience yourself through that person’s judgment. You may feel humiliated, resentful, or compelled to demonstrate your superiority. Other people’s judgements can make you attack yourself emotionally. It hurts, and therefore we are not as free as we might imagine. For Sartre, this can be understood through the conflict between two freedoms: you want to define yourself, but the other person also possesses the freedom to interpret and judge you.

Why do we sometimes admire someone and then resent them? Why can we desire another person’s recognition while simultaneously wanting to defeat or humiliate them? Because in order to feel safe, the ego has to appear unified, and it instead is fragmented based on the leverage other’s opinions have over our own opinion of ourselves. We want to land on the right side of power to be free of self-loathing.

Consequently, others can acquire a double significance:

• They are models: They possess qualities we want to acquire or identify with.
• They are rivals: Their possession of those qualities can make us feel inferior, threatened, or displaced.

Ambivalence betrays an internal conflict, and lies in the fact that the other person can be both the source of gratification and the person through whom a conflict over power is anticipated. Desires involving other people create an unconscious shifting of power positions in the mind as strengths and weaknesses are unconsciously assessed.

• Identification: The person admires the other’s knowledge because it represents an ideal they value.
• Envy: The other’s possession of that quality highlights something the person feels they lack.
• Rivalry: The person wants to reclaim their position as the knowledgeable one.
• Aggression: They may belittle the other person, undermine their credibility, or attempt to defeat them.

This is partially why many narcissistic symptoms involve an inability to understand the mental environment of others. In certain relational patterns, the other person’s independent subjectivity may not be fully engaged. The other person is experienced primarily through the role they occupy in the subject’s psychic life. For Lacan, the other person is not always experienced as wholly separate from oneself. The other can also serve as a mirror, an ideal, a rival, or a figure with whom one identifies. This creates an inherent tension. We can be drawn to someone because they embody something we want, while simultaneously resenting them for possessing it. We can identify with another person and want to imitate them, yet also want to defeat or dominate them. Our decisions have often been filtered through unconscious reflection on how to respond to hierarchies according to our self-interest or self-preservation, with rationalizations that justify any aggression, especially views related to our survival. “The preeminence of aggressiveness in our civilization would already be sufficiently demonstrated by the fact that it is usually confused in everyday morality with the virtue of strength…Were it not superfluous, the prestige of the idea of the struggle for life would be sufficiently attested to by the success of [Darwin’s] theory that was able to make us endorse a notion of selection based solely on the animal’s conquest of space as a valid explanation for the developments of life.”

Citing Hegel once more, Lacan reminded the reader that the Master and Slave dialectic was not static, and that it provided a framework for revolutionary movements seeking to overturn oppressive social relations to construct a different society, in response to the brutal competitive ideology of the nineteenth century. He compared modern Western society with the more natural of the so called “primitive” societies that were being dominated at the time, where there may have been positive developments in technology, but with tradeoffs involving internal as well as external conflicts related to this extreme Darwinian competitiveness. “…The increasing absence of all the saturations of the superego and ego-ideal that occur in all kinds of organic forms in traditional societies, forms that extend from the rituals of everyday intimacy to the periodical festivals in which the community manifests itself. We no longer know them except in their most obviously degraded guises. Furthermore, in abolishing the cosmic polarity of the male and female principles, our society is experiencing the full psychological impact of the modern phenomenon known as the ‘battle of the sexes.’ Ours is an immense community, midway between a ‘democratic’ anarchy of the passions and their hopeless leveling out by the ‘great winged hornet’ of narcissistic tyranny; it is clear that the promotion of the ego in our existence is leading, in conformity with the utilitarian conception of man that reinforces it, to an ever greater realization of man as an individual, in other words, in an isolation of the soul that is ever more akin to its original dereliction.”

The self-images that are used for stability are imitated by role models in society, and as they fail to guarantee personal success, new role models and strategies have to be found in a never-ending chase towards ego-ideals. “The notion of the role of spatial symmetry in man’s narcissistic structure is essential in laying the groundwork for a psychological analysis of space, whose place I can merely indicate here. Animal psychology has shown us that the individual’s relation to a particular spatial field is socially mapped in certain species, in a way that raises it to the category of subjective membership. I would say that it is the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the other’s field that gives human space its originally ‘geometrical’ structure, a structure I would willingly characterize as kaleidoscopic…Such, at least, is the space in which the imagery of the ego develops, and which intersects the objective space of reality. But does it provide us a secure basis?”

The kaleidoscope movement is the movement of the person who keeps changing to fit the mirror, who can’t stop comparing themselves to others, and who eventually loses touch with what their own subject actually wants. The subject is obliterated by the Other. The question “What do I want to do?” has been displaced by “What kind of person must I be?”

Adaptation sounds like a healthy term for what people must do, but it also contains a strain of resistance against doing what we really don’t want to do, or haven’t found the healthy reason Why we should do this or that. Aggressiveness leaks out as groups of individuals, looking for personal survival through the group, against other competitive groups. They feel they need to not just defeat, but also annihilate the Other, or start a revolution to replace the Other. “War is increasingly proving to be the inevitable and necessary midwife of all our organizational progress. The adaptation of adversaries, opposed in their social systems, certainly seems to be progressing toward a confluence of forms, but one may well wonder whether it is motivated by agreement as to their necessity, or by the kind of identification Dante, in the Inferno, depicts in the image of a deadly kiss.”

Self-preservation is not merely survival of the body, but of the body image, as well as a lack of empathy or understanding of the images others hold of themselves. This is part of the reason why modern man may be the beneficiary of past revolutions to increase freedom for citizens, but internally they don’t actually feel that free. They don’t feel free from indignity. “We have a few psychological truths to contribute here too: namely, the extent to which the ego’s supposed ‘instinct of self-preservation’ willingly gives way before the temptation to dominate space, and above all the extent to which the fear of death, the ‘absolute Master’—presumed to exist in consciousness by a whole philosophical tradition from Hegel onward—is psychologically subordinate to the narcissistic fear of harm to one’s own body…In the ’emancipated’ man of modern society, this fracturing reveals that his formidable crack goes right to the very depths of his being. It is a self punishing neurosis, with hysterical/hypochondriacal symptoms of its functional inhibitions, [neurotic] forms of its derealizations of other people and of the world, and its social consequences of failure and crime. It is this touching victim, this innocent escapee who has thrown off the shackles that condemn modern man to the most formidable social hell, whom we take in when he comes to us [psychoanalysts]; it is this being of nothingness for whom, in our daily task, we clear anew the path to his meaning in a discreet fraternity—a fraternity to which we [psychoanalysts] never measure up.”

Lacanian therapy ends up being a therapy of the Subject to see how much the concept of the Other, self-images, and ideal images, have invaded personal territory and taken control of this Subject. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan in The Philosophy of Psychoanalysis illustrated this lack of purity in the human mind and its intersubjectivity. “Ernest Becker has described the exhibition of jealousy in sibling rivalry as ‘all-absorbing, relentless, a critical problem which reflects the basic human condition.’ His observation that sibling rivalry extends beyond childhood is not new, nor are Lacan’s theories on interdependency. Lacan’s originality lies in his claim that the dynamic of mirror-relation identification is the intrasubjective route not only to personal conflict and misunderstandings but also to an organized, unconscious mode of perception, to adult fixations, Desire, a reality discourse, and human bonding.”

Insecurity and paranoia returns again and again with every imagined ego threat or natural shock, culminating in repeated bouts of aggression. Also, with appetites for stimulating Gestalts, the mind clings to peak performances, ideal scenarios, and craves the best conditions possible as the main motivation for life, a Darwinian struggle for survival, and procreation as the engine of meaning. This is like the story of the mirror image lasting and developing forever, which is an uneasy juxtaposition against a real world filled with mortality. “Herein Lacan has made a leap from his early work on the phenomenology of experience to what he calls a formula of equivalence: the equivalence of aggressiveness as a part of [craving] and paranoid states. Aggressiveness can harken back to primary, corporal narcissism, then, or can be a coefficient of secondary narcissism that functions by secondary identification with others (ego ideals). Secondary narcissism permits a person to form a [craving] relationship to the world in general. It also serves to appease aggressiveness through narcissistic identification: self-love displaced onto another.”

Successful therapy demonstrates for the patient what they do in their life based on what they repeatedly project onto the analyst with content built up after a multitude of sessions: Idealization of the “all knowing expert,” an example of unification, followed by a Devaluation equated to malpractice, in response to a feeling of ego-fragmentation. The patient scaffolds their sense of self onto the role model of the analyst, but when they are disappointed by the analyst’s imperfection, it destabilizes that temporary scaffolding, leaving the patient to once again rely on themselves. People who rely on themselves, without perfectionism, have to be able to tolerate the ambiguity of the fragmented real world, which points to Wilfred Bion’s work. “First, an analysand identifies with the analyst in terms of his or her own identity. The emphasis is on likeness and the analyst is perceived as a counterpart. Second, the analytic confrontation aims to reactivate the mirror-stage splitting, that is, to break down the ideal unity or mirror imago that Lacan equates with secondary identification and that was initially counterposed between six and eighteen months to the boundaryless, disconnected sense of body and experience of the pre-mirror stage. In this phase of transference, the analyst is cast as an ideal by the analysand and identified with the Other(A) which, as Schneiderman points out, Lacan has described as the ‘supposed subject of knowing’. In the third stage the ideal image of the analyst should be seen as an illusion, the realization of which parallels a disintegration of the analysand’s supposition of ‘knowing.’ This, Lacan metaphorically terms ‘death,’ for the unified ‘I’—the subject of narcissism or the ideal ego—gives a person a sense of ‘self’ cohesion. Any unraveling of the strands that went into weaving that identity as a conviction of ‘being’ causes a de-being of being: a sense of fragmenting.”

Aggression is a response to defend against the threat of the self-image, and until the patient can accept their own real faults, to develop themselves based on truth, not on false self-images, negative transferences will lash out repeatedly. “The primordial ‘I’ is the scaffolding of individuality that was formed through primary identifications with images, objects, and others as a strategy of defense: to block the apprehension (splitting sensation) which comes from the difficulty of situating the infant body in the world. Secondary—i.e., mirror-stage—identification brings an intimation of unity and continuity via the human Gestalt. When the other (analyst) reflects an ideal unity—supports one’s I identifications—the narcissistic slope of the I is gratified. When the ideal is shattered, the avatar of aggressiveness arises and shows itself in projected blame, disenchantment, intimations of fragmentation, and so forth. The goal of aggressiveness here is to protect the I from perceiving the tenuous fragility of its own formation.”

Jacques Lacan Pt. 5-1: https://rumble.com/v7ddwdc-jacques-lacan-pt.-5-1.html

Jacques Lacan Pt. 5-2: https://rumble.com/v7dhtqs-jacques-lacan-pt.-5-2.html

Like in meditation experiences deep enough to fragment ego structures, by seeing the dangerous and changeable flow of phenomenological experiences, including inner monologues, feelings and sensations arising and passing away, a loss of reliability, of structures that have been an emotional support for decades, the same threat of ego-death appears almost as threatening as actual death. “Lacan has frequently drawn attention to the danger implicit in any disintegration of the I by reason of its close relationship to death; the I is a point of [cross-checking] between the common discourse of everyday speech (in which a subject is caught and ‘alienated’) and his or her psychological reality. The insistence of the I on retaining its (fictional) unity of individual perception constitutes what psychoanalysts call resistance.”

These self-images are all culturally sourced and have to be traced back to their origins to show in relief how language, symbols, including how they relate to each other, construct our desires and motivations via suggestion in a way that would be different, before having the knowledge of how these symbols functioned internally. After analysis, one can find the marionette strings and snip them before being carried away by the influence of the Other. “The fourth stage entails recognition of the I’s source in the Other(A). The French psychoanalyst Moustapha Safouan has said the nicest definition one can give the end of analysis is ‘death’s death,’ for it is a matter of an invitation to live beyond that which fixed one in the identical. Others give identificatory shape to an I that, paradoxically, seeks the meaning of its own alienation through others’ (ego ideals) and in language. If an analysis is to succeed, then, aggressiveness (that is, negative transference) must occur, since it is the initial ‘knot’ of the analytic drama.”

The patient can now experience with meditative distance what was operating the whole time. “Tension, anxiety, conflict, ambiguity, and oscillation characterize all human behavior. They have their explanation in the nonpeaceful coexistence of the specular I of narcissism, aware of but divided from the Other(A) from which it was formed, and forced to verify itself through others, despite the Real flux and instability of human response amid changing patterns of identifications and events. This quest is undertaken, moreover, through the indirect and yet further alienating path of language. Lacan’s I is most appropriately a narcissistic structure, then, since Narcissus died of his failure to embark on the quest for [otherness] (i.e., Echo). ‘I have succeeded there where paranoia fails,’ Freud said, a statement which Lacan interprets to mean that when the subject’s roots in the Other(A) become apparent, an opening can be made through the speaking [Subject] by which one can interrogate the paranoid—i.e., dialectical—instance of knowledge which inhabits us. Narcissism therefore holds the personality together, but its negative effects of alienation, rivalry, grandiosity, and aggressiveness can only be perceptually mediated in the realm of Real event. At such times, the social subject of consciousness may glimpse the movements of the narcissistic subject of identity, briefly rendering it an object of awareness. It is fitting, then, that Lacan should describe his analytic [putting in practice] as a space in which to induce a controlled paranoia [that the patient can reflect on in therapy and outside of therapy]…One can [usually] depend on others to validate one’s narcissism and point the way to the ‘truth’ in the Other(A).”

Similar to Otto Fenichel’s Narcissistic Supply, Lacan found the same motivational energy involved in the specular moi or I. This way so called relationships based on various forms of love can be measured against how much of that love is in fact only self-love. Here the distance between the Subject and the “I” is necessary for further untangling from the influence of the Other. Only the Subject can reflect on the “I.” “Answering Freud’s quandary about the source of energy at the service of the reality principle, Lacan replaced Freud’s biological concept with ‘narcissistic passion’. The goal of this energy is the interaction with others, which is intended to assure the I of its value. Lacan described the object of love (its aim or goal) as identification with the object of love. To be desired is the object of love, more basic than, the desire to be ‘made love to.’ Because the I [cannot] reflect upon itself, it does not know that its goal is recognition: in other words, that to be desired is the [craved] object, not a person per se. Elsewhere Lacan points out that a child does not depend so much on its mother, as on her love.”

Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond – WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

The danger is that ego-ideals are goal posts that keep moving so one can be strung out for a lifetime looking for validation from unreliable sources of attention, especially if there are ever new role models excelling past the old ones. It’s a vicious circle where the Subject’s reflection on the “I” is absent, so the “I” continues to look for confirmation of its value, solidity, permanence, it’s artificial life, through signals from Others. “In such a context Desire derived from lack (want-of-being) elicits Desire as exchange. Consequently, others function as screens onto which the identity drama is projected (‘I am…’) via the ‘play’ of prestige, shame, rivalry, and so on—the supposedly insignificant stuff of everyday life…Others alone cannot terminate or resolve the identity quest. The identity question is endlessly repeated as a circular message from the Other(A) discourse (‘I am…Am I not?’) to the Other(A), via the other.”

This reflection is daunting in that one can now analyze one’s emotions in all relationships, and when there’s a feeling that a person is a darling, adorable, an angel, they can now assess how much of that is truly love for who they are or just a way of turning people into trophies that make us love ourselves more based on their proximity to use, as described by Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. But the more narcissistic a love is, the more turbulent it will be. “From such a perspective, any psychoanalytic theory that hypothesizes ideal ‘ego mastery’ through genital (object) love or integrative ‘wholeness’ is simply a self-deluding myth, a compensatory fiction of ontological wholeness. The ‘I’ can achieve a certain balance and harmony through love. But in the Lacanian intrasubjective dynamic between the I and the Other’s Desire and their refraction through the distortion of language and via the intersubjectivity of relationship, this balance will be like the eternal ebb and flow of the sea.”

Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Lacanian views of love can be cynical in the sense of conflating ALL love as being only narcissistic, but each Subject will have to decide for themselves how much capability they have for love that grows beyond the kaleidoscope of self-images. “By viewing narcissism as the force behind human drive, but by locating its fuel in the Desire to be desired or for recognition, Lacan taught that cognition (as a philosophical dilemma of mind) is governed by narcissism and Desire.”

I think that love cannot go against one’s biological survival where one can be killed by a loved one due to an inability to defend oneself, but the challenge is loving a person for their intentions, despite imperfections, against what the Other may judge, and against an ideal life path that one is attached to. Any vacillation on the part of a Subject attached to one or many specular Is, that wants to enter intimate relationships, has to be honest with partners about those ideals: honest enough with themselves and loved ones, to prevent romantic misunderstandings.

Aggression and Crime

Lacan, like many others fascinated by psychoanalysis, he wanted to know what knowledge it could contribute about the nature of aggression in the endless search for true justice. Because criminology and psychology were separate disciplines, the typical result was an incarceration followed by a psychological examination of the prisoner. Lacan was just as critical of the justice system as he was of the criminal. His abstract use of the term “responsibility,” was what he wanted patients to accept. Maybe before they had any insight to their internal conflicts and aggression, there was less blame from him towards the criminal, who following a “coercion by a force that the subject was unable to resist,” but the result of psychoanalysis had to illuminate responsibility so that recidivism would be less likely, if analysis was to be successful. Unfortunately, the justice system is a part of culture, and Lacan was worried about dehumanizing the patient/prisoner with punishment, which dehumanizes by removing their responsibility, like they are a totally different species of animal that is out of control and in need of a zoo, where we place “exactly a quarter of humanity in the concentration camp.”

Lacan was writing about this in 1950, and so criminology has moved quite beyond that time and has realized that some people literally cannot be released from prison without creating a moral hazard, but he still hit upon the types of crime related to neurosis that was, and still is, culturally induced, like in unjustified wars or political changes that mask or launder different forms of racketeering. The cynical question towards people coming into money was “what’s your angle?” “It sometimes even happens that a society considers itself to be so impaired in its structure that it takes steps to exclude its ills in the form of a scapegoat, or even to regenerate itself by resorting to something external…Let us add that if reliance on the subject’s confession, which is one of the keys to criminological truth, and reintegration of the subject into the social community, which is one of the goals of its application, seem to find an especially favorable form in analytic dialogue, it is above all because this dialogue, which can be continued until it reaches the most radical significations, intersects with the universal—the universal that is included in language and that, far from being eliminable from anthropology, constitutes its very foundation and goal…Psychoanalysis boldly designated these pathogenic effects, whose meaning it was discovering, by the feeling that corresponded to them in lived experience: guilt.”

Neurotic criminals have distorted images that they follow that do not conform to reality and conflict with it. “Their psychopathological structure is not found in the criminal situation that they express, but in their unreal mode of expression…By means of transference, psychoanalysis grants us access to the imaginary world of the criminal, which can open the door to reality for him.”

A person who may act within the law in civilian life may, as in an example Lacan gives, behave reprehensibly under war pressures. “We are referring to the propensity found in military units, on the day of glory that places them in contact with the enemy civilian population, to rape one or more women in the presence of a male who is preferably old and has first been rendered powerless. There is nothing to indicate that the individuals who engage in such an act morally differ—either before or afterward, as sons or husbands, fathers or citizens—from anyone else…We say that it is a real crime, even though it is committed in a precisely Oedipal form, and the perpetrators would be justly punished for it if the heroic conditions under which it is considered to have been carried out did not most often place responsibility for it on the group to which the individuals belong.”

At some point cultural symbols of society and language have to bridge the gap between idea and reality, and distortions for Lacan appeared in how symbols were used. “The structures of society are symbolic; individuals, insofar as they are normal, use them in real behaviors; insofar as they are mentally ill, they express them by symbolic behaviors…The perspective we are presenting here allows us to see that ‘neurotic character’ is the reflection in individual behavior of the isolation of the family unit, the asocial position of which is always found in such cases, whereas neurosis expresses instead the family unit’s structural anomalies. What requires explanation is thus less a criminal acting out by a subject trapped in what Daniel Lagache has quite correctly characterized as imaginary behavior, than the processes by which neurotics partially adapt to reality: these are, as we know, the auto-plastic [coping] mutilations that can be recognized at the origin of symptoms.”

Lacan wanted to humanize the criminal by illuminating the subjects’ super-ego distortions thoroughly enough for them to accept responsibility. “Psychoanalysis simultaneously resolves a dilemma in criminological theory: in unrealizing crime, it does not dehumanize the criminal…The superego must, in our view, be taken as an individual manifestation that is tied to the social conditions of Oedipalism. This is why the criminal tensions included in the family situation become pathogenic only in societies in which the family situation is disintegrating…The fact remains that the imaginary persistence of good and bad primordial objects in avoidance behaviors, which can bring adults into conflict with their responsibilities, leads us to conceptualize the superego as a psychological agency that has a generic signification in man.”

Economics and politics is introduced by Lacan as the place where ideals and pathological imitations are transmitted so the pressure to cut corners, to act out, and “keep up with the Joneses,” leads to all kinds of criminal pursuits from the petty to the felonious. Those who lead society to Lacan are aware of their power and leverage and therefore they are also aware of their guilt for manipulating the public, with all the consequences related to pathological reactions to the pressure the powerful assign to, and exercise on, the powerless. As mentioned in Part 5, the powerful use fear and acceptable levels of comfort to move the public towards places that keep their wealth and self-image safe high on a perch looking down. The control they enact keeps imitation in the Girardian sense of a horizontal instead of a vertical transcendence. “A civilization whose ideals are ever more utilitarian, since it is caught up in the accelerated movement of production, can no longer understand anything about the [atoning] signification of punishment. While it may consider punishment useful as a warning to others, it tends to assimilate it into its correctional goal. And this goal imperceptibly changes objects. The ideals of humanism dissolve into the utilitarianism of the group. And since the group that lays down the law is, for social reasons, not at all sure that the foundations of its power are just, it relies on a humanitarianism in which are expressed both the revolt of the exploited and the guilty conscience of the exploiters, to whom the notion of punishment has become equally unbearable. An ideological antinomy reflects, here as elsewhere, a social malaise…Here the psychoanalyst can indicate to the sociologist the criminogenic functions characteristic of a society which, requiring an extremely complex and extensive vertical integration of social collaboration for the purpose of production, proposes to the subjects it employs for this purpose individual ideals that tend to boil down to an ever more horizontal plane of assimilation.”

Jacques Lacan Pt. 5-2: https://rumble.com/v7dhtqs-jacques-lacan-pt.-5-2.html

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html

There’s a Platonic view of The Good and how potentials in others are to be actualized with each other, even if the complexity of matching desire with desire is such that “ships pass in the night,” or people behave in forced ways that demonstrate a demand for speed in decision-making, suffocating any space needed for people to generate enough energy to authentically match their desires with others, let alone live together in harmony for a lifetime. Acting repeatedly out of compulsion must eventually escalate to aggression. “This formulation designates a process whose dialectical aspect can be summarized by noting that, in a civilization in which the ideal of individualism has been raised to a previously unknown power, individuals find themselves tending toward a state in which they will think, feel, act, and love things exactly at the same times, and in strictly equivalent portions of space, as everyone else…Now, the fundamental notion of an aggressiveness that is correlative to every alienating identification allows us to perceive that, in the phenomena of social assimilation, there must be a limit, based on a certain quantitative scale, at which standardized aggressive tensions are precipitated at points where the mass breaks apart and becomes polarized.”

Because economics desires mass production, which includes a desire for speed and expectation for peak productivity at all times, ideal images can efface the human subject in all the activity, leading to “…a complete separation between the vital group, constituted by the subject and his family, and the functional group in which the vital group’s means of subsistence must be found (a fact that we can sufficiently illustrate by saying that it makes Monsieur Verdoux seem plausible); an anarchy of desire-eliciting images that is all the greater as they seem to gravitate ever more around [the desire to look] that are homogenized in the social mass; and an ever greater involvement of the fundamental passions for power, possession, and prestige in social ideals.”

Monsieur Verdoux – Charlie Chaplin: https://youtu.be/eND72dzh7EU?si=IkwdN-XExmmNbJW5

Bjork – It’s Not up to You: https://youtu.be/ryfCwiwNTYQ?si=DalS-H1rjDy8uArw

Lacan hints that crime is so organized by these pressures so as to achieve a takeover of the supposedly functioning parts of society’s institutions. “Thus even the politician and the philosopher will find something useful here. They will note, in a certain democratic society whose mores are extending their domination around the globe, (1) the appearance of a form of criminality that so riddles the social body now that it is assuming legalized forms in it; (2) the inclusion of the criminal’s psychological type into the set of types comprising the record-holder, the philanthropist, and the star, and even his reduction to the general type of the wage slave; and (3) crime’s social signification reduced to its use in advertising.”

In Hegelian dialectic, crime is often a compensation, or in some cases a form of revenge via revolution where if people cannot earn their keep or hold onto the goal of keeping up with appearances, to maintain an arbitrary dignity, including those mental appearances of disturbing imagoes, they will just take what they need from the Other. Then the powers-that-be have to incarcerate them to defend their power. “This is because human reality is not only the product of a social organization, but a subjective relationship which, by being open to the pathetic dialectic that must submit the particular to the universal, has its point of departure in a painful alienation of the individual to his fellow man and finds its paths in the retaliations of aggression…Only the psychoanalyst, who knows what to attend to in relation to the structure of the ego as such, will understand the coherence of the traits that these subjects present and that are portrayed by their egocentric idealism, their passionate apologetic and that strange satisfaction for the accomplished act in which their individuality appears to enclose itself in its sufficiency…These criminals that we refer to here as criminals of the ego [I] are the voiceless victims of an increasing evolution of the forms guiding culture towards relationships of coercion that are increasingly exterior…And that is why the society where these criminals are produced turns them, not without bad conscience, into scapegoats, assigning them a starring role which reveals the real function they assure there. Hence the movement of opinion that derives all the more pleasure by taking them to be insane and by recognizing the intentions of everyone in them.”

It’s the paradox of individualism in that we want to avoid the powerlessness of dependency, yet we can never be totally independent, or only in extremely rare circumstances. Recognition by others for most people becomes important to our sense of who we are. This creates a tension. We want to be independent, but our identities depend partly on relationships and forms of recognition that we cannot completely control. In the context of criminality, this helps explain how a perceived injury to one’s identity might become entangled with aggression. The person who cannot tolerate the other’s independence may attempt to overcome the conflict by controlling, humiliating, or destroying the other. An act can feel psychologically meaningful to its perpetrator without being justified, necessary, or inevitable. People need recognition from others, yet they resent those others for having the power to grant or withhold it. If this contradiction becomes intolerable, an aggressive act might become a way of resolving it psychologically in the short-term:

• We seek recognition. We want to be valued, respected, loved, or acknowledged as someone who matters.
• We encounter the other person’s independence. Other people have their own priorities and may refuse to give us what we want.
• We experience a conflict. Their independence can feel like rejection, humiliation, deprivation, or a threat to our identity.
• We respond to that conflict. We might accept the other’s independence, negotiate, withdraw, become resentful, or attempt to dominate them.

The crucial point is that the conflict is not necessarily caused by a mentally ill individual. It can emerge from ordinary human relationships, and in fact many criminals have acted on what most people have only thought of doing, even if they pretended their consciousness had always been pure. In the desire to get ahead, for which many people only feel relaxed when they compare themselves with others in a downward comparison, of pulling away from competition, the desire for equality can mask a truer desire to simply turn the tables against the Other.

This can be seen directly with identity politics. Whether it’s about race, religion, or like Lacan referenced, the Battle of the Sexes, the desire is not always for equality, but for surpassing an Other, to punish, or to gain a feeling of superiority, to feel like one is “going somewhere.”

Looking for Simone – Nathalie Masduraud, Valérie Urréa: https://youtu.be/p2EZwFuRd_s?si=TZwUuAhQ4xBDAP_I

For example in a documentary about Simone de Beauvoir’s impact on feminism through the years, even with many shifts over those decades to empower women to take account of their own lives, there’s still a tribalism that moves like a machinery that is never satisfied. In a mixing of feminism and the environment, commentators mulled over a solution of an ethnic matriarchy, as opposed to equality where people can exchange, but otherwise mind their own business with their own lifestyles. In the economic exchange, there’s still a desire to demand deference and to direct others and interfere with their own preferences, to force a look that extracts a forced sense of dignity. A basic dignity is important for all humans, women or men, but demands for dignity can hide an appetite for indignity of the Other, in this case racism against white people, and bigotry against men. “Are we as women closer to the Earth? We can’t be severed from the natural world. We are the natural world. There’s not a more perfect time than now for women to take the lead. For a long time we’ve been under the patriarchal agenda. We have to completely shift it upside down to where it’s brown women leading, you know women of color leading the movement.”

Afternoon Yak – The Simpsons: https://youtu.be/UFsVAjIyVxg?si=JflXd-56JQldCjOc

Modern society requires enormous energy to fuel technology that everyone relies on to live longer lifespans, but with regulations and constrictions to corral humanity into giant environmental social projects that are economically destructive, won’t there just be new forms of resentment arising to each back and forth, to each revolution and counter-revolution, to tax collector enslaving the tax payer? Are smaller and smaller distinctions and inequalities between groups going to keep conflict going based on hairsplitting? Demands for restitution can endlessly go back to past crimes perpetrated by regimes where all the people involved are already deceased. Blood guilt can transfer from generation to generation, even if the innocent are born into a world that has a history of war, international conflict, colonialism, persecution, and atrocity. The sense of an abstract guilt by association can pollute an otherwise clear conscience for a modern person who never contributed such things.

Modern Guilt – Beck: https://youtu.be/6oy1z29G2pk?si=i3K9O0l9YGW33wzc

Even if modern criminology continues to advance and understand how to reduce obvious forms of crime, political crimes can be debated due the arbitrary nature of resentment, and based on which cultures want to criminalize different behaviors, opinions, and affiliations, and what political remedies are required to obliterate the perceived unfairness. The crucial question is: Can a person or political community seek the restoration of its dignity without demanding that somebody else be diminished in the process?

A more humane Lacanian future would be one in which individuals and societies learn to recognize their desires without becoming captive to the coercive demands and expectations of the Other, while recognizing that others also possess their own legitimate desires that must be negotiated rather than dominated. By learning to recognize the aggressivity arising from threatened ego-identities, people could rely less frequently on hostility, humiliation, and retaliation to resolve disagreements, making destructive relationship breakdowns, divorces, and wars increasingly less necessary. When people participate in collective goals because they genuinely want to, have sufficient time to deliberate, can contribute their personal perspectives, and share in the benefits of their participation, the resentment and aggressivity arising from imposed obligations and threatened autonomy become far less likely. The objective would not be to eliminate disagreement, but to create conditions in which disagreement no longer needs to become a struggle for dominance.

Ecrits – Jacques Lacan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393329254/