Accused as being impenetrable, a fraud and a charlatan, Jacques Lacan was also described as an autistic dandy stringing out his followers for a truth they would never find. Despite the controversy, he made a lasting impact on psychoanalysis that is still credited by many as a counterbalance to dogmatic orthodox views. He also brought Saussure’s and Heidegger’s examination of language to the forefront. Equally he challenged those who harbored a desire to eradicate eccentricity in the guise of therapy. By analyzing desire extensively, those who would stick with his logic got to see the limits of both repression and desire.
“I saw the Emperor–this world-soul–riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” ~ G.W.F. Hegel
“The activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It is another’s activity and a loss of his own spontaneity.” ~ Karl Marx
“Publicness initially controls every way in which the world and Da-sein are interpreted, and it is always right…” ~ Martin Heidegger
“Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.” ~ Martin Heidegger
“In his nascent state, man is never simply man. He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave. If the human reality can come into being only as a social reality, society is human only on the basis of its implying an element of Mastery and an element of Slavery, of ‘autonomous’ existences and ‘dependent’ existences. And that is why to speak of the origin of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of ‘the autonomy and dependence of Self-Consciousness, of Mastery and Slavery.'” ~ Alexandre Kojève
“If the opposition of ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ is meaningful only in the context of their reconciliation by ‘synthesis,’ if history necessarily has a final term, if man who becomes must culminate in man who has become, if Desire must end in satisfaction, if the science of man must possess the quality of a definitively and universally valid truth—the interaction of Master and Slave must finally end in the ‘dialectical overcoming’ of both of them.” ~ Alexandre Kojève
“Nothing that surrounds us is object to us, all is subject.” ~ André Breton
“Breton called for the constitution of a new ‘myth’ on which society could be based, to replace what he considered the outmoded economic myths of Marxism and capitalism. ~ Mark Polizzotti
Disillusionment
Instead of jumping to Lacan’s main theories, it’s always good to look at the childhood and adolescence of any thinker. The ideas they were mulling over were based on the time they were born in, the cultural biases, and important influences that would inform their later theories. Nobody grows up in a vacuum, and Jacques Lacan certainly didn’t. Despite being viewed today as a left-leaning intellectual, Jacques was born into a middle class family that was decidedly Catholic. Jacques displayed some of his willful personality right from the beginning.
In the background of a family of successful merchants, Alfred and Émilie, Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was the eldest born. Later on he had a sister Madeleine and brother Marco. “When Jacques was born, Émilie had engaged a young governess named Pauline who was fond of all three children but soon grew especially attached to little ‘Marco.’ Although he was himself his mother’s favorite, Jacques—or ‘Jacquot,’ as they called him—was jealous. At quite an early age he was already willful and domineering, constantly asking for food or money or presents on the grounds that he was the eldest. But he was always very fatherly toward Marco, as if to make up for Alfred’s deficiencies.”
Jacques hated his grandfather Émile who took an active part in parental discipline. “Whenever Émile punished Jacques by standing him in the corner instead of correcting him in a proper paternal way, his reaction was, ‘Well, if that’s a father, I say a curse on fathers!’ Yet his real father, Alfred, was both loving and loved.”
There was typical infighting as different in-laws would overstep their boundaries and provide advice where none was requested. Alfred disliked his father and preferred to spend time with his wife’s family. “He rented a comfortable house in Jouy-en-Josas, on the outskirts of Versailles, which they called the Villa Marco after the younger son. The family had enjoyable country gatherings there…”
In Catholic school, Jacques got an introduction to a French education that was unique and counter-revolutionary, set against creeping modernity. “In philosophy, Descartes enjoyed pride of place. In fact, throughout his schooldays in that elderly fortress of Christianity, the young Lacan was exposed to a classical culture almost untouched by Enlightenment values and closed off from modern thought. Instead, everything was focused on the Christian Cartesianism reflected in the school motto: French without fear, Christian without reproach.”
The Great War interrupted the Lacan family, and Alfred was called up. Jacques’s school converted a section into a hospital and when he witnessed the wounded soldiers it may have influenced him to become a doctor. In his efforts he succeeded in religious studies and Latin translations, but fell short in other subjects. “The comments of his teachers in his reports for the academic year 1916—1917 show him as rather eccentric, a bit conceited, occasionally tiresome, and in particular unable to organize his time properly and behave like the other boys. He was often off sick or playing hooky and suffered from a kind of ennui, a mixture of listlessness and willful melancholy…It was around [1915] that Jacques discovered the works of Spinoza. He hung a diagram on the wall of his bedroom that depicted the structure of the Ethics with the aid of colored arrows. In that world of minor tradesmen this amounted to an act of subversion, a step toward the assertion of his own desires against the wishes of a father he always believed to be set on having his elder son succeed him in the family business.”
At the age of 16 Lacan was part of the Catholic Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul, in which he described their actions as being “not limited, as is often believed, to the distribution of a few meat or vegetable vouchers and weekly visits to the poor, with whom they exchange a few banal words. On the contrary, our Conferences lend their support to all charitable works and address all social issues whose resolution would improve the lot of the people.” The eager contributors at the time liked to post anti-alcohol one-liners because “the public will be far more struck by a concise phrase that falls before their eyes three or four times in succession, and which consequently sticks in their memory, than by a long argument…Another excellent means of propaganda is images and postcards that contrast the results of a sober life with the evils of an intemperate one: for the mind of the common man is easily impressed by sight, and there is a force within him that leads him to imitate what he sees.”
Lacan admitted that the purpose of fighting alcoholism was in the organization’s assessment of the village and their ability to regenerate and produce healthy offspring, especially since this was during WWI, and in interviews with the public “the concierge of the Plaisance neighborhood proclaims that people are drinking as much absinthe as before the war.” Lacan found four categories of people in relation to alcohol: those who were non-drinkers, because they hate the consequences of it, are in horror of what happens to children of alcoholics, or those who simply don’t like the taste of it. The next category were those who looked at alcohol as a substance with health benefits. “Mrs. F…drinks wine and follows the advice of her doctor—who told her that cider is adulterated and bad for her health. But since this same doctor had once prescribed a diet for her, her employer brought her food and fine wine, telling her that ‘it would perk her up,’ and she readily accepted. In another family, both children and parents drink alcohol in their coffee. Generally speaking, the majority of ordinary people are convinced that ‘to have a nip’ is necessary for children’s health…In a family in the Plaisance district, our colleagues recognized from certain signs that the father and mother drank and carefully concealed it from their children: thus, the children are weak and sickly, while the parents appear well-built. A third segment of the population is completely corrupted. Some workers have already suffered the first signs of raging madness: for example, Mrs. E.’s neighbor, who comes home drunk every night, spends his nights furiously pounding the wall with his fists. The son-in-law of another woman, who died before the war from a bout of delirium tremens, drank up to twenty-five absinthes a day. We should note here the corrupting influence of certain professions. Thus, Mrs. F.’s neighbor, a mover by trade, is a drunkard. We have received information about a bricklayer who comes home quite tipsy every night and completely drunk on payday. We also learned that an alcoholic we are visiting was once a cellar boy and that his four sons are dead. Finally, a fourth category consists of workers who have succumbed to alcohol and who have had enough energy to overcome their vice. Unfortunately, they still suffer the consequences of their past: for example, M.S.’s daughter, a former alcoholic, has had a chest ailment for three years and is threatened by tuberculosis.”
As you would expect, like in other fights against myriad intoxicants, if there’s a demand, a supply chain will spring up. “We observed, first of all, that although the manufacture and sale of absinthe were prohibited, stocks of this drink were being sold clandestinely. Among the common people, everyone was trying to find some: Mrs. V…told us that her concierge was looking for absinthe for her son, who was on leave, and couldn’t get any. It’s likely he wasn’t very good at it, because, on the other hand, the concierge of a building in the Saint-Sulpice district, who is in the habit of sniffing out empty bottles thrown in the trash by tenants, reported to one of our colleagues that he had recognized the smell of absinthe several times.”
Looking at this old report, you can read between the lines when it came to class warfare and self-esteem. Some people could afford their addictions more readily than others, and even if it was costly, the working class would still be tempted to imitate the rich. “I will cite a curious detail, which will highlight the muted hostility with which these people receive our advice. Here at the College, a student wrote on a wall this sentence he had read on a leaflet: ‘Alcohol does more havoc than war and plague.’ The next day he saw next to his ‘graffiti’ this reply scrawled by the clumsy hand of a servant: ‘Especially among the rich.’ This observation led to a most instructive exchange of thoughts during the Conference session.” There must also have been a fear of death and a sense of impending doom as to when the ravages of war would greet someone next. Damage from alcoholism would seem a much more distant threat. “It seems that during the war alcoholism, far from declining, has been on the rise: we have just pointed out one of the causes, because our colleagues have been able to observe it themselves; but it is not the only one. Around the war factories, cabarets are proliferating, and workers and women are spending their wages drinking the vitriol of the [bar].”
Lacan’s independence was growing in parallel with his Christian social work, but still with a familial influence concerning that he shouldn’t be too independent. In a letter to his father he recounted a disagreement with his uncle. “Mama told me that she had recounted my altercation with my uncle, and that your response was this: that, without, however, advising me to spend my time verbally ‘beating’ him up, you were pleased to see that I had remained independent of his ideas (so independent that one might think I systematically contradicted them) and that you wished me to keep my own personality, reserving for yourself the right to guide me with your advice when my ideas seemed doubtful or wrong to you.”
Conforming to the phenomenology of the time and scientific attitude, there was a pressure to check the logic of authority figures before wholesale buying into their cultural beliefs. “So, my dear Papa, I would tell you that my personality is defined by this: I absolutely refuse to be brainwashed. Following the scientific method, I first examine the phenomena themselves, then I study the laws that govern them; only then can I consider modifying them, if that is in my interest. I respect tradition because, at least in part, it is made up of concepts and customs that are good for humankind; otherwise, they would not have survived. I am too steeped in evolutionary theories, one is not convinced that every harmful process is eliminated by natural selection. But when I see so-called conservatives piling up all sorts of obstacles in the way of the slow forces that drive society forward, then I hate retrograde ‘tradition.’ Especially since these accumulating forces inevitably end up breaking the dam and then erupt in a sudden and harmful way. You see, if I am for revolutions, I am for slow revolutions, well-prepared and in line with realities, and not with the ludicrous utopias of the dispossessed. Unfortunately, it is quite in the French character to believe that one can transform the habits and ideas of a people with laws and decrees. Article I. All French people will be virtuous. Article II. All French people will be happy. This is the basis of all our reforms, whether in politics, colonization, or education. I abhor the principle of authority…because under a so-called democratic regime, there is no nation more hierarchical than France…In the end, all this will collapse on its own after the war, but we will have to have something to put in its place; And it will not be with words but with a serious study of the facts that we will rebuild France.”
In 1917-18, Jacques was taught by Jean Baruzi, who would later become a friend. He was a rationalistic Catholic thinker who around that time was working a thesis on the life and works of St. John of the Cross. This was after a time when schools were starting to bring in secular ideas and religion was taught in a comparative way. Coupled with Spinoza’s secularizing influence Jacques was introduced to Jansenism, which criticized the decadent Catholic structure. Regardless of moralism inculcated in them, Jacques and Marco moved in different directions with their sexual lives. “At the age of seventeen Jacques had his first sexual experience, with one of his father’s customers, at a wedding at which his brother Marco was an usher…Ever since he was a small child, Marco had always said he wanted to be a priest, though that didn’t stop him from falling in love with a cousin and planning to marry her. But in his teens his choice of a monastic life put an end to any prospects of sex and marriage. ‘My mother was the only woman I ever admired unreservedly,’ he said. ‘She was a true Christian, unlike my father. She had nothing to do with my becoming a priest, but she was very happy about my decision, whereas my father was against it.'”
Already at a young age, Jacques frequented book readings and was exposed to Dadaism, that criticized modern capitalism, war, and tried to make fun of the absurd in bourgeois thinking. He was also introduced to socially minded progressives like André Gide and Jules Romains, as well as conservative Paul Claudel. Surrealism was a response to the popular interest in stream of consciousness and early psychology. Since the Enlightenment failed to stop the Great War, rational thinking was supplanted by an exploration of the unconscious. “He met André Breton and Philippe Soupault and listened spellbound, at Shakespeare & Co., to the first readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was at this period, when he was going through a bad attack of melancholy, that Jacques violently rejected the family and the Christian values he had been brought up in…In about 1923 he heard about Freud’s theories for the first time, but it was the ideas of Charles Maurras (founder of the right-wing group Action française and later a collaborator during the Second World War) that really caught his attention. Though not anti-Semitic himself, he met Maurras several times and went to some meetings of the Action française. The radicalism and elitism he heard propounded there distanced him even further from the family background he hated so implacably.”
This was a background in Europe where traditional views were found to be ineffective. Any viewpoints that made predictions about the future, and failed, were ripe for criticism and revolution. Social Darwinism had a pitiless view of humans and put them in the same attitude of immoral animals, and “survival of the fittest” mentalities threatened any sense of Christian dignity. Decadent empires relied on cognitive distortions like appeal to authority, and colonies rebelled against these old systems. Misguided beliefs about superiority of stock and ethnicity were over-estimated by each country’s blind appraisal of their military power at the start of the Great War. They all felt war would end quickly and decisively, based on their subjective estimation of their preeminence. That superiority did not emerge and millions lost their lives in grueling trench warfare.
Disillusionment of this kind brings out radical questioning so that fears of blasphemy disappear when religious icons suddenly appeared cultural, man made, and just more symbols of control. When a majority of a population is so controlled that they are not able to make decisions according to their own self-interest, there are psychological consequences for means-to-an-end thinking. Each young generation either had to conform to the system to access any scraps of reward or tried to rebel against it in one way or another. This entered into a common criticism of “bourgeois” attitudes, behaviors, and psychology at the turn of the century. Someone young like Jacques would naturally look askance towards his parents’ ambitions and preoccupations along with the entire class of shopkeepers that even had a whiff of pretension, hubris, and smugness that brought up comparisons with historical memory of decadent aristocracy. Unfortunately, those who rebelled also had their own pretensions and snobbery when it came to standing out as a true reformer. Many French at the time needed to differentiate themselves by absorbing German influences in both philosophy and psychology.
Naturally, Jacques’ parents were worried about his new attitude. He dressed like a dandy and was behaving like a naïve social climber. “Lacan was thinking seriously about getting a job as secretary to some influential figure.” He also rejected English philosophy when he read Nietzsche in the original German. “In 1926, while Jacques was scandalizing his family with his taste for free thought and the doctrines of the Antichrist, [Marco] made the final decision to become a monk. The call came to him on May 13, as he was reading the Rule of St. Benedict. He wrote down the word Benedictine, and the sight of it acted on him like a revelation. Jacques was furious when he heard of his brother’s decision and advised him to wait and go on with his law studies. For a year [Marco] did so. Then he went to Saint-Cyr for six months and did his military service as a reserve officer.” By 1929, Marco joined an Abbey and ordained in 1935. Jacques sister Madeleine married a businessman and moved to French Indochina. The family was scattered.
Ambition
By this time in the 20th century, Freud’s ideas were seeping into many areas of medicine in France. There was both a medical approach and an intellectual one. These ideas were filtered through the influences of Pierre Janet, Henri Charcot, and philosopher Henri Bergson. This was a French response to what was considered barbaric German kultur, since both countries were on opposite sides during the Great War.
Even with all these cultural filters, writers and futurists believed they could remake the whole world. “Writers and artists of all kinds saw dreams as the great adventure of the age: they wanted to use the omnipotence of desire to change mankind; they invented a utopia where the unconscious was free of all restraint; and they admired the courage of the dedicated scientist who had defied bourgeois convention and risked scandal and isolation in order to listen in to the most intimate urges of humanity.”
At this tumultuous time Lacan began his studies to follow his ambition of becoming a doctor. He was working in neurology and then he moved on to psychiatry and contributed in high level clinics, including the University of Zurich. This was already after talking therapy stood up on its legs. Any symptoms that could not be connected with brain or nerve injury were referred on to receive treatment from the new therapy. Henri Ellenberger was there to witness some of the events with the young Lacan. He was forced by his father to learn medicine, but he always wanted to be a historian. “We saw each other in the staff room, where he joined in the general horseplay, though his jokes were a cut above the usual run. His witticisms were sharp and hurtful. He affected a sort of aristocratic arrogance. His barbs always struck home, and he didn’t spare even his patients. I remember him saying of someone, ‘He’s very well thought of…by his concierge.’ But Lacan was very charming in private.”
Even if the asylums were still in the world of incarceration and poor inhuman prison conditions, Lacan and contemporaries lived in the world of Freudian classifications and progress. “The younger generation dreamed about the October Revolution, proclaimed themselves surrealists, and fancied they were thoroughly modern. ‘Lacan had a precious way of speaking,’ says Paul Sivadon, ‘and he could be quite sadistic toward his chosen victims…It so happened that Henri Ey made me treasurer for some of his projects…Naturally, this meant collecting contributions. The only person I never got a cent out of was Lacan…The patient who helped in the staff room used, for a small fee, to keep us supplied with cigarettes. Lacan often owed him money. Such trifles are evidence of his ‘anal’ personality. But he was a fine clinician right from the start of his career.'”
At the beginning of Jacques’ career, it was all about biology and structures of the brain and nervous system. Causes of brain damage, for example, could be that of meningitis or from violence or accidents. “Jacques Lacan’s first presentation of a patient was made to the Societe neurologique on November 4, 1926, under the direction of the great neurologist Theophile Alajouanine, a friend of Edouard Pichon and a member of Action française. The case was one of fixed gaze caused by hypertonicity, [muscle stiffness], together with extrapyramidal syndrome [movement disorder], and pseudobulbar disorders [emotional incontinence] of the spinal cord. It was an ordinary enough story concerning an unfortunate man of sixty-five who was taken ill while riding his bicycle and hospitalized at the Salpêtriere. He had a fixed stare and a respiratory tic, and the furrow between the nose and the chin was deeper on the left side of the face than on the right. When the patient bent his knees to sit, he remained poised for a moment above the chair before falling down onto the seat. Lacan’s clinical comments were lengthy, detailed, strictly technical, and devoid of emotion: an arid bit of ordinary hospital routine.”
In the case, Lacan situated the problem that it was “likely that the ocular hypertonia bringing about this special Parinaud’s syndrome is due to a lesion in the region of the basal ganglia and their pathways.” Symptoms arose gradually and the patient recounted that “[they] suddenly appeared as he returned from a bicycle ride (20 to 25 kilometers one way) which happened at first without incident, and in the course of which he fell several times on the way back. In reality, slight disorders with walking seem to have preceded this incident, disorders of the same character as those which set in later in a progressive way that one was able to notice from one examination to another during his stay in the hospital. Those disorders consisted in: Balance disorders with falls, more often towards the right, while walking; muscular stiffness, particularly in the two members on the left side getting worse while walking.”
Lacan was also introduced to psychosis patients and patients with multiple symptoms of body and mind requiring extra classifications and lingering mysteries as to their genesis. “Chronic hallucinatory psychosis, Parkinson’s disease, mental automatism syndrome, hereditary syphilis: such were the sorts of sufferings the young Lacan witnessed at Sainte-Anne’s. Until 1932 he wrote his case histories in collaboration with his fellow students or his teachers: with Adolphe Courtois for biological psychiatry, with Georges Heuyer for infant neuropsychiatry, and with Jean Lévy-Valensi for modern clinical method.”
One Night With Venus A Lifetime With Mercury | Frankenstein | Syphilis: https://youtu.be/52c1aoWr5L0?si=qKeWZ4rKfboBmeks
In one case Lacan co-presented a “40-year-old patient, who, for thirteen months, has experienced a delusion with a detective theme: he was from Beaucaire, and was present at a series of theft scenes, which took place in Paris, entered into thought communication with Paris policemen and the gendarmes in Beaucaire, and had the criminals followed. Finally, he made the trip to Paris to complete his statements to the police, and was interned following an incident at the police station. Without insisting on the details of this very rich, delusional novel, we will say a few words about its underpinnings…When he was interned, the patient was certified: chronic hallucinatory psychosis, and, in fact, the presence of visual, auditive and even genital hallucinations, of an echo of acts and of thinking, seemed obvious. However, two facts were striking at the outset: on one hand, the especially nocturnal or hypnagogic [the transition between sleeping and waking] character of the phenomena, recalling the delusion from dream to dream earlier signaled by Klippel,” a French physician, “the delusional conviction, however, persisting throughout the day; on the other hand, the existence of an important imaginative addition: ‘flight of ideas perceived as [coming from external factors, visual inventions]…Hypnagogic and lucid visions, animated and combined, perhaps sometimes [capable of being called forth] (?)’ (First certification from M. de Clérambault),” who wrote about automatisms and erotomania, in which patients believed in error that a person of higher status was in love with them. Jacques Lacan also stated that Clérambault influenced him towards Psychoanalysis.
The mystery with this patient continued as unexplained changes occurred for the better. “Two months later, the patient presents as an imaginative person. No interpretation. Extremely reduced hallucinations, if not completely disappeared (the phenomena of echoing thoughts and acts seem to have been the last to disappear). An extremely rich imaginative novel, increasing, so to speak, in avalanches; suggestibility and possibility of provoking, in the tales already told, such and such an addition, to which is attached immediate conviction. [Delusions of grandeur and power] become more and more fantastic. The little information obtained on the patient’s antecedents make judgment difficult on his earlier mental constitution. It seems however that the patient has always been an imaginative person or a mythomaniac, [those prone to lie, exaggerate, and fabricate stories out of trauma or self-esteem issues, a] (poet, unstable…). On the other hand, at the beginning of his stay in the asylum, the [signs] of alcoholism were clear. Syphilis is possible (negative biological reactions, pupil irregularity and leukoplakia [white patches inside the mouth, gums and tongue]). Without being able to confirm it, we believe that a [dream production] growth has taken place (toxic or infectious) in someone predisposed. Once the growth finished, the properly [dreamlike] characters of the delusion and their hallucinations become attenuated and tend to disappear. But the original [delusion of grandeur] tendency has undergone a stimulation. Affection tends to take on the aspect of a purer delusion of the imagination, and may thus regress into the framework of ‘chronic systematised post-[dream] delusions through the development of original tendencies’ of Gilbert Ballet,” who studied chronic hallucinatory psychosis.
Like many other clinicians, Lacan had to deal with patients suffering from war trauma. In one case, a patient was suffering from motor impairments and hysteria through a weakness of suggestibility. “The subject was a woman from Brittany, a hysteric whose house had been destroyed by a shell in June 1915. Her peculiar gait and appearance, sometimes reminiscent of a dancing dervish, had made her a picturesque feature of the Paris hospital landscape. ‘The patient in fact moves backwards, walking on tiptoes, at first with long strides and then [hastily]. She interrupts her steps at regular intervals by turning completely around counterclockwise, either to the right or the left.’ She had been trapped by one leg in the shattered floorboards when her house collapsed and had suffered superficial injuries to the scalp, nose, and back. At the Hôpital de Saint-Paul in Bethune the army doctor had told her to stand up straight, and from then on she had walked with her body thrust forward, rocking from side to side and scuffing her feet as children do. She later added another step to her bizarre choreography, crossing one foot in front of the other as she went along…Hers was the only case of hysteria that Lacan put his name to during his psychiatric training. He remembered it clearly in 1933, when he said that this modest contribution to the ‘problem of hysteria’ had acted as a transition to his more recent research in psychiatry. So by then he believed his account of a case that ‘presented no neurological sign of organic origin’ had allowed him to move from neurology to psychiatry. This meant he now regarded the case as one of hysteria in the Freudian sense. By 1932 he had come to understand the meaning of Freud’s work, so there was an inconsistency between the way he presented the case in 1928 and the way he spoke of it in 1933. Neither of the authors of the 1928 account made any reference to hysteria: the terminology they used was exclusively that of Babinski. They employed the term pithiatism—a neologism formed from the Greek words for persuasion and curable—alluding to Babinski’s demolition of Charcot’s theories, in which he suggested that the word pithiatic might replace the word hysterical. Babinski thus, as is well known, made possible the beginnings of modern neurology, though at the same time he also caused hysteria to be reclassified as a kind of simulation, curable by suggestion.”
Surrealists at the breakdown of clinical hysteria looked at it as a sort of rebellion against repression and just another lifestyle. “The surrealists were readier than the psychologists to follow Charcot, as they showed in 1928 when they paid tribute not to him but to Augustine, his famous patient. ‘We surrealists wish hereby to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria, the greatest poetic discovery of the late nineteenth century. And we do so at the very moment when the concept of hysteria appears to have been completely dismantled. We therefore propose a new definition of hysteria as a more or less irreducible mental state characterized by the subversion of the links between the individual and the moral world to which he thinks he for all practical purposes belongs, quite apart from any kind of delusion…Hysteria is not a pathological condition and may be considered in every respect a supreme means of expression.'”
One of Lacan’s early patients was beginning to move him from interest in psychoses to paranoia. “We present a 40-year-old patient, whose general paralysis is certain, and in which the symptomatic mode of the beginning offers a certain interest. For two years, a complete hallucinatory syndrome has been in the foreground, and it is as a persecuted person that she was sent to the special infirmary of the police station where we had the opportunity to examine her and to certify her by internment…From her first words, the patient shows herself to be hallucinated. She complains of being watched, photographed through walls. People are making a film of her life, a ‘talking film.’ Voices threaten to make her suffer the most extreme outrages, to kill her. Genital hallucinations are very intense. The mental automatism syndrome is complete. People steal her thoughts, mimic her voice, she is in constant dialogue with people who inform her of all kinds of facts, of inquiries made about her…Among the voices, some are menacing, such as that of the owner, others are agreeable. She has [unpleasant bodily reactions], she is given electric shocks, they send her combined sensations that she compares to threads of an overly long length. Olfactory hallucinations, bad odors which smell of ‘gonorrhea, heroin, ether, cocaine.’ Gustatory hallucinations, people give her bad tastes, ‘which smell of vinegar.’ She interprets little. She thinks she is the victim of the judicial police, perhaps of soldiers. She doesn’t complain much: ‘What a life!’ she says, smiling. On the whole, this automatism is more or less without thought, almost without ideas of persecution. On the other hand, there are ideas of imaginative grandeur which indicate an intellectual deficit: the policemen who sleep with her have given her 500,000 francs, etc. [The likelihood], euphoria, a little disorientation, the [fabricated] and absurd character of megalomaniac, delusional ideas, make us suspect general paralysis [untreated syphilis] that physical signs confirm: [unclear articulation] on test words, trembling of the tongue and fingers, vivacity of tendinous reflexes. There are no pupillary disturbances. In previous cases: syphilis at age 18, registered prostitute, regular and energetic care at Saint-Lazare [hospital], [mercury and arsenic treatments]. The friend of the patient insists on the regular and prolonged treatment that she received for syphilis…The hallucinations have been going on for two years without any modification, the disturbances which required intervention are rather symptomatic of general paralysis: flight, wandering, masturbation in public.”
She tested positive to signs of neurosyphilis and continued to decline in health. There was nothing but compulsive and meaningless repetitions of words, phrases, vowels and diphthongs. “Euphoria, apathy have become more acute, and currently questioning the patient about the theme of her delusion has been made difficult, since she is so approving and suggestible…The well-constituted mental automatism syndrome has resisted for a long time paralytic dementia. It is when intellectual collapse has been total and complete that we have seen elements of the syndrome become fragmented and its coherence disappear.” The paper left it at the interest in what would happen to the paranoia when purposeful malaria infection was used to induce high fever to combat the syphilis bacteria. It wasn’t until the mid 20th century when antibiotics became the cutting edge for treating syphilis.
In another case, an anti-infective medicine Stovarsol was used along with mercury, arsenic, and malaria therapies. This patient had memory problems and started losing control of his emotions. Treatments improved the situation only temporarily, but gradually worsened. “In September 1922 appears the episode which drew our attention. Having left on a trip to go to the funeral of a relative, [the patient] misses his connecting train, gets lost, falls asleep in a station, gets home without thinking of offering any explanation for the use of his time. From that moment on, ‘taciturn, inert, behaving like a child,’ he has serious memory problems, difficulty with his speech, makes ill-considered purchases for the novelty business he is in charge of, sells knick-knacks which belong to his home and spends that money in an uncontrollable way.”
Treatments improved the situation only for a time. “He is deemed to be much improved, although we have not been able to obtain more precise observations. The return of an at least partial activity is such that he considers himself cured, no longer returns to the prophylactic institute and, in 1927, instead of the small business which had been abandoned in the meantime, takes charge of managing a hotel. But soon his frequent outbursts against clients, his irritability force him to abandon this new enterprise. He sells objects found in his home, becomes violent towards his wife. It is these manifestations, as well as a small attack which led to a [weakness to the right side of the body], moreover short-lived, which led his wife to have him committed to Henri-Rousselle hospital in June 1929…It is therefore seemingly to the action of the tryparsamide [arsenic drug] that we must impute the remission and the modification in the evolutive behaviour. It seems that the action of the malaria therapy, in favourable cases, is more complete; we have little hope in the conditions where it has been instituted here but we think that, practiced from the beginning, at a time of full inflammatory activity, and completed by a perseverant treatment based on pentavalent arsenicals of the tryparsamide type, it is susceptible of leading to a true cure, which could not be obtained in this case, where one can observe only a slowing of the evolution.”
During this time of clinical documentation of symptoms, Lacan was involved with side projects with the Surrealists. As an amateur poet, he communicated his interest in the variance between reality and our conceptions in Hiatus Irrationalis, influenced by Jacob Böhme who believed that the signature is more important than the sign, or the form of reality that cannot be made into a symbol as being superior to the symbol:
Things, whether sweat or sap flows within you, forms, whether you are born of the forge or of blood, your torrent is no denser than my dream; And, if I do not beat you with an unceasing desire, I cross your water, I fall toward the shore, where the weight of my thinking daemon draws me. Alone, it strikes the hard ground upon which being rises, at the blind and deaf tunnel, at the god devoid of meaning, but, as soon as every word has perished in my throat, things, whether you are born of blood or of the forge, nature,—I lose myself in the flow of an element: That which broods within me, the same one lifts you up, forms, whether sweat or sap flows within you. It is fire that makes me your immortal lover.
Böhme developed the concept of the “ground without a ground,” an eternal, groundless, and unconscious abyss that precedes creation and from which all existence, including God’s self-differentiation, emerges. This non-being turning into being occurs through a “blazing up of fire.” This understanding was to preoccupy Lacan for decades. “Böhme also takes the idea from Paracelsus that it is possible to understand [the] inner essences [as] expressed through outer appearances–a theory known as the ‘doctrine of the signatures.'”
Morbid Jealousy
The lover loves the beloved as a wolf loves a lamb ~ Plato
In an early paper on morbid jealousy, Joseph Lévi-Valensi and Jacques Lacan examined the phenomenon, and how it played out in history as well as in contemporary life, which was less a biological problem than found in his above case studies. They also tried to delineate between healthy forms and pathological ones. They used many quotes, including from the famous writer of maxims, François de la Rochefoucauld. The familiar pattern was that of a person wanting to savour something that someone else was and then the feeling of scarcity then would animate the pathological jealousy or envy. The end point of all pleasure is to be in an eternal heaven where the child is still in the womb having all needs met. Outside of the womb, satisfaction can only be partial. “The need to love, focused on an object by the imagination, becomes, thanks above all to self-love, demanding and exclusive, and this is Jealousy, because ‘in jealousy there is more self-love than love.’ The term jealousy is commonly used as a synonym for envy. Men are jealous of the fortune and social success of their companions; women are jealous of the beauty, worldly success, and attire of their friends. A brother is jealous of a brother favored by fate. Cain hates Abel because the Lord received his gifts more favorably.” Jealousy wades into the territory of envy when the disordered person without boundaries thinks that what is officially not theirs should be theirs. “According to the Vienna School, the son is jealous of the father, the mother’s lover, the daughter is jealous of the mother, the father’s mistress, ‘there is love everywhere, even where we do not suspect it’ (Pascal). Because jealousy is above all amorous. It accompanies sensual love before and especially after possession. It could even precede love. Don Juan, in The Stone Feast seeing two young lovers, falls in love with the young girl out of jealousy of the couple’s happiness. Jealousy is above all sensual.”
An important clue to paranoia is that jealousy and envy can include thoughts of suspicion or betrayal as well as a feeling of being persecuted by third parties conspiring to be a homewrecker. Many situations involve imaginary scenarios where people are playing out possibilities and making predictions that there will be violations like that of business contracts that require a preemptive strike. “Jealousy, in marriage as in common-law relationships, has specific and common factors. The specific factors are, in the first case, the precise notion of a violated contract and the risk of an adulterous child; in the second, the fear of abandonment. In both cases, jealousy does not always correspond to love; it can persist even after love has died, because self-love does not die. Jealousy is based on the extravagant notion that sexual relations create a right of possession for each partner over the other. Moreover, when a man has had carnal relations with a woman, he is said to have possessed her; it is true that the woman immediately becomes the mistress. Literature affirms this right of possession: ‘Jealousy is in some way just and reasonable since it seeks to preserve a good that belongs to us or that we believe belongs to us’ (La Rochefoucauld). ‘He who loves wants to possess the person he desires all to himself; he wants to have absolute power over both her soul and her body, wants to be loved alone and to inhabit the other, to dominate him as the highest and most admirable thing in the world’ (Nietzsche). If one of the lovers tries to throw off the yoke, love turns to hate…Literature and theater, moreover, offer nothing reassuring for lovers or spouses. It is understood that men are frivolous, fickle, and polygamous. As for women? ‘When a woman is faithful, it is because she is ugly’ (Seneca).”
When jealousy is completely absent there is also an alarm that some lovers experience. “Jealousy, when moderate, does not have too bad a reputation; Mme de Rieux finds that ‘while a jealous husband is very inconvenient, a husband who is not jealous is very humiliating.'” The biggest challenge is when there are claims, and they equally could be true or false. Without hard evidence, suspicion remains. This can happen when a third party is trying to sow discord or there are delusions based on mental illness. “Distrust of the beloved is built on interpretations, self-doubt on a state of anxiety. Interpretations and anxiety are the two foundations of jealousy, both morbid and otherwise. Interpretations and anxiety are also associated, with the interpreter becoming anxious as a result of their interpretations, the anxious being, par excellence, a pessimistic interpreter. The jealous person is, moreover, also an intuitive person, as well as an anxious person and an interpreter. ‘Jealousy feeds on doubt; it is a passion that always seeks new causes for worry and new torments, and it becomes furious as soon as it reaches certainty’ (La Rochefoucauld). Certainly, jealousy is not necessarily pathological: I have been told that lovers and spouses are not always faithful; I will add that in some, jealousy even seems to sharpen judgment. Some lovers have intuitions worthy of Sherlock Holmes…On the morbid level, anxiety and interpretations are at the forefront of delusions of jealousy, sometimes isolated, most often associated. The idea of jealousy can be encountered during the development of all psychopathic states; it is seen in confused people, senile dementia, general paralytics, early dementia, epileptics, etc., but jealousy is above all one of the attributes of anxious states, periodic psychosis, delusions of claim and interpretation, and chronic alcoholism.”
Elvis Presley – Suspicious Minds: https://youtu.be/WrMGGouem3c?si=hxEbuwpOn6hFwUmb
The Rolling Stones – It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It): https://youtu.be/JGaBlygm0UY?si=M6_kVgfdInuoakNZ
Love – Freud and Beyond: https://youtu.be/JGaBlygm0UY?si=tFurkUyy54Ytk0HT
Quiet Revolution
Ironically, by the end of Lacan’s career, with his evaluation of the objet petit a, he would practically obliterate the reason for jealousy in the first place. If he could convince his audience that the easily observed desire in all of us could never be fully satisfied by any acquisitions, relationships, or status, that a sense of lack would return no matter what, then one would refrain from painfully investing with the effort of the desperate wolf into any endeavors, an animal unaware of its own mortality and destiny to be trapped in a vicious cycle of hunger. Jealousy is then seen to be not worth it. This is precisely how Lacan wanted followers to free themselves, instead of relying on revolutions to mechanically change outside circumstances in the vain attempt to alter internal distortions of emphasis. Those internal distortions to Lacan were language viruses that had already done a thorough brainwashing long before people could assemble and associate with the intention for revolution.
Even revolutionaries who recognized Lacan’s political and philosophical influences would be disappointed in his later skepticism of a successful shake-up of the cultural hierarchy. As one protestor lamented at one of Lacan’s seminars, “it’s obvious that at the stage we’ve reached at this moment one of our main targets will be exactly those moments when people like you, are bringing to people like these, justification for their miserable lives. That’s what you do.”
Jacques Lacan giving a lecture at The Catholic University of Louvain in 1972: https://youtu.be/w1PmWy4aSaQ?si=_fvOvLPOUIxDsyyP
From then on, after Lacan’s death, revolutionaries would selectively emphasize aspects of his thought that were conducive for socialist revolution, including the need to alter definitions, neologisms, and ways to manipulate emphasis in language to instill different forms of class-consciousness in the public, or what is called political “awakening,” or “wokism.” Those more on the therapeutic side would see the irony of people hijacking a language in order to introduce their subjective version of “clarity” in the attempt to eliminate distorted thought. If desire could never be satisfied in total, could any revolution be final? If no one could use a language that inherently promises permanent satisfaction, in how nouns appear eternal, how could clarity ever be achieved other than futility? Interpreters of Lacan continue to file into these two camps, and probably other subgroups who read many insights into his works.
The problem with revolution in a world that’s ultimately unsatisfying is one may dislike one’s house and décor out of sheer boredom, but renovation blunders may turn the house into a gulag. Pursuing power also involves temptations to corruption and gatekeeping nonsense that will inevitably bar your path to status and wealth. Power positions are always rare, because of legitimate responsibility, but also increased rewards that are a sacrifice paid for by all the others who recognize those painful responsibilities are too much for them to handle. They would prefer to pay more to avoid the hassle. In corrupt sinecure positions, the competition is less about responsibility and more about who should be entitled. These are all bottlenecks that engender envy and rivalry over scarcity. Even worse, the language and symbols of culture tell you to pursue those bottlenecks, and through Girardian understandings of imitation, where we want to literally be in the position of people who seem to have it all, which fills in nicely any gaps in Hegel’s understanding that we all want unlimited positive recognition from others, while we find it expensive energetically to give it back. That positive recognition we want is aimed at people who will likely be hostile in giving it. We want others to open the door to their illusion of elevated being, thereby threatening them with replacement, and are shocked that they don’t, and we are at the same time boarding up our front doors to those knocking at our address.
They will never recover from this – Asmongold: https://youtu.be/dQ-XZBMokRs?si=1W5xRTsnGtZERIAJ
Revolutionaries believe in the biblical people that were last who will eventually become first, leading to a new cycle of the last demanding the tables to be turned once again against the newly first. Dialectics can only foresee an equality where there are no first or last. Yet, subtle differences in people between their good looks, youthfulness, health etc., individual talents and developed skills could trigger another bout of envy, especially if any dependencies are made aware, to awaken the newly made last, who are woken once again.
Life of Brian – The People’s Front of Judea: https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4?si=4pbHxZ2CBBNMkm7i
With Lacan’s insights, his meditation practice can improve the depth of mental noting to feel the complaining, frustrated desires echoing in the mind, and see how they are traps precisely because solving their complaints is only a temporary waystation before the next complaint bubbles up. It’s easier to let go. A familiar meditative equanimity can arise as the frustrated thoughts lose their power in the realization of futility. This futility is demonstrated even in a world of abundance, which typically is considered the answer for most complaints, to increase abundance. As ancient Polybius already discovered, the inner thoughts of complaint are not usually looking for equality, but instead for power, social mobility and mastery to gain respect from those who mocked us before. That independence has good elements to it, but those in dependency on that power are prone to resentment, because the powerful find it irresistible to display their contempt for the powerless, which is partly out of the sadistic pleasure of pride, and once again there’s a desire for revolution. Those who join a revolution may do so with the right intention, but once they achieve power, they make the same mistakes.
When a state has warded off many serious threats, and has come to attain undisputed supremacy and sovereignty, it is easy to see that, after a long period of settled prosperity, lifestyles become more extravagant, and rivalry over political positions and other such projects becomes fiercer than it should be. If these processes continue for very long, society will change for the worse. The causes of the deterioration will be lust for power combined with contempt for political obscurity, and personal ostentation and extravagance. It will be called a democratic revolution, however, because the time will come when the people will feel abused by some politicians’ self-seeking ambition, and will have been flattered into vain hopes by others’ lust for power. Under these circumstances, all their decisions will be motivated by anger and passion, and they will no longer be content to be subject or even equal to those in power. No, they will want everything, or almost everything, for themselves. When this happens, the new constitution will be described in the most attractive terms, as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy,’ but in fact it will be the worst of all constitutions, mob-rule. ~ Polybius
The more quiet revolution happens in what Polybius called “political obscurity,” and that’s when people begin to let go of many of their extravagances, because they were never sustainable in the first place, which reduces the need for toil in the game for status that pay for those said desires. What often imprisoned people was their addiction to financing activities with their personal purchases that predictably failed the test of providing unending satisfaction. Refusal to boycott finally changes into an ability to be discerning with expenses and activities, since money and finance control our attention spans in Lacan’s understanding of the world of appearances, a progressive reclaiming of attention steps one out of a life of a hermit as well as one who pursues status with frenzy and burnout. Even the powerful can feel the sting of boycott. The person with status that we imitate continues to have a sense of lack that they try to hide, or even worse for our sakes, we refuse to see it. Once we do see it, a moderation takes hold when our minds begin to be free of the lingual and cultural hijackers. We still desire and make contributions, but not at the expense of our sanity. In the end, no one is to be envied.
Even with Lacan’s warning of analysts being role models for analysands, and the inherent master and slave dynamics involved with idolatry, the desert of desire that he discovered still has locations with an oasis and patients can bring their canteen. Object-relations understands that surrounding ourselves with virtuous people can help us become more virtuous, through the natural power of introjection, and Ego-psychology is aware that we learn skills from the skilled and those skills help us make better contributions. Not all imitations are bad, and not all authority figures are tyrants. A master cannot do all the work themselves, and they need to impart enough skill so as to delegate some of the burden. There is always an opportunity in psychology for integration of the different schools.
Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought – Elisabeth Roudinesco: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780745623146/
Jacques Lacan’s First Presentation, “Report on Anti-alcoholic Propaganda,” 1971 – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Lacan-at-16-report-TONY.pdf
À son père—1918, Aug, 29 – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/A%CC%80-son-pe%CC%80re–fixed.pdf
Fixty of Gaze due to Hypertonia, 1926-11-04 – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/1926-11-4-FIXITE-DU-REGARD.pdf
1928-05-24 Detective Novel. From the Chronic Hallucinatory type of delusion to the Delusion of Imagination – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/1928-05-24_ROMAN_POLICIER.pdf
1928-02-02 Abasia in War Trauma – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Abasie-3-col.pdf
1929-06-20 General Paralysis with Mental Automatism Syndrome – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Paralysie-g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale-avec-syndrome.pdf
1929-12-19 Prolonged General Paralysis – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Paralysie-g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale-prolong%C3%A9e.pdf
Hiatus Irrantionalis – Jacques Lacan – Freud2Lacan, Le phare de Neuilly p37: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Le_Phare_de_Neuilly_3-4_1933.pdf
Light in Darkness – The Mystical Philosophy of Jacob Böhme – Claudia Brink, Lucinda Martin, Cecilia Muratori: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9783954984879/
Morbid Jealousy – Lévy-Valensi, Joseph, Lacan, Jacques – Freud2Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/JALOUSIE-MORBIDE-new.pdf
Hegel to Niethammer October 13, 1806: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/letters/1806-10-13.htm
Studies on Marx and Hegel – Jean Hyppolite: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780435834333/
Being and Time – Martin Heidegger: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781438432762/
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel – Alexandre Kojève: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801492037/
Surrealism and Painting – André Breton: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780064300247/
Moncayo, R. (2014). On the Aim and End of Analysis in the Lacanian School. European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1, No. 1.
The Histories – Polybius: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199534708/
All Desire is a Desire for Being – René Girard, Cynthia L. Haven: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780241543238/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/