Jacques Lacan Pt. 3

Warning: Grisly violence, Sexual Themes, Suicidal content

Review of Hallucinations

With paranoia and schizophrenia, it’s easy to get lost on the differences between different types of delusions, and deliriums. In the case of the deluded Aimée, the patient was imagining a life that she felt was denied to her but there were others who instead ingested too much alcohol going into a delirium. On top of that, delusions themselves included content, and those contents connected to the life experience of the patient. At the 84th Assembly of the Swiss Society of Psychiatry in Prangins, Jacques Lacan reported on the discussions. Ancient methods of understanding hallucination, between sensation and perception, through “criteria of ‘materiality,’ ‘reality,’ and ‘intensity,'” could not be relied upon for “defining morbid perceptions. Henceforth, we have to study hallucination not as an isolated phenomenon or as a psychological entity, but in its relationships with the whole personality and the alterations in the latter.” The following are groups of hallucinations that begin to organize a very complicated topic about how the mind can lose grip with reality in many different ways:

Jacques Lacan Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v77uteu-jacques-lacan-pt.-1.html

Jacques Lacan Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v78b0wa-jacques-lacan-pt.-2.html 

1. Catathymic or psychogenetic hallucinations: Abrupt, violent, and destructive acts driven by intense unconscious desires/fears that breakthrough any rational filter. “These hallucinations are psychogenetic, [conditions or behaviors stemming from psychological or emotional factors rather than organic or physical causes,] not only with respect to their content, but also to their origin, in as much as the weakening of consciousness which conditions them has to do with psychic causes. Such hallucinations are encountered in [dream states] and hypnotic states, in psycho-neurotic [borderline] delusions that have some grip on reality, in teleological hallucinations [which are social hallucinations that ascribe to others an intent that is not verified], pre-suicidal, often lifesaving,” due to the hallucinations providing a special mission for the patient, spiritual beliefs, grandiose identities, or persecution states that patch up the structure of the psyche and add meaning to one’s life to avoid ending oneself.
2. Hallucinations that are catathymic, but also organic: “They are psychogenetic as to their content, but have to do, as to their origin, with a weakening of the specific consciousness of one or the other pathological processes in the nervous system: schizophrenia, epilepsy, melancholia [depression].”
3. Toxic Hallucination/Delirium: “Their content is simple, generally independent of catathymic factors and conditioned by the state of the nervous system. Their origin is the weakening consciousness resulting from [external] intoxications (alcohol, cocaine, mescaline), or [internal] (acute psychotic episodes from sudden trauma or medical issues, [eg. kidney failure], etc.). The catathymic contents observed in certain alcoholic drunkenness for example, have to do with prior schizophrenic dispositions.”
4. Organic Hallucinations: “These stem from deep weakening of consciousness that we observe in cortical, or sub-cortical anatomic lesions in [untreated syphilis], encephalitis [viral infection], senility or cranial trauma.” When the biology cannot support a hold on reality, here is the argument for those who believe in constitutional explanations.

Hallucinations involve a break with reality that can manifest differently based on genetic predisposition for a sensitivity to stress, emotional intensity, impulse control, and susceptibility to identity breakdown. Biology sets the volume and reactivity. Structure in the psyche determines the meaning and pattern of how the mind and body organize around those stresses. “Hallucination is in effect essentially belief in the object without an object, based on a perception (it’s a true hallucination) or without perception (they are the pseudo-hallucinations, xenopathic feelings [which are thoughts, feelings, or bodily movements that are believed to be controlled by someone else. It’s not just seeing a ghost; it’s the feeling that the ghost is ‘speaking’ your own thoughts.] It’s therefore impossible to explain the delusional belief without integrating [these hallucinations] into the mental state from which it proceeds.” When clinicians are confused about these types of hallucinations, they may mix affect disturbances with biological disturbances, leading to misdiagnoses. Medical emergencies, toxic chemicals, infections, and reactions to stress all have the potential as well to create a variety of hallucinations.

There are also hallucinations based on imaginary satisfactions as described by psychoanalysis, where an internal censor can be punitive towards the desire. Cultural influences enter here through memory, to control thoughts, desires, and actions to avoid punishment, and then patients begin to apply a self-punishment in anticipation to avoid real punishments. Psychic conflict organizes experience and meaning, which can secondarily dysregulate emotions and affect the body. These are how thoughts, actions, and beliefs can be inculcated in the nervous system, but also how cultural conditioning structures may not adapt to reality and the discomfort from the gap between beliefs and reality can get to the point of affecting the automatic processes of stress production, heart-rate, respiration, and digestive processes, which can then repress instinct drives and hijack their behavior. Patterns of meaning, prohibition, and desire become structurally embedded in how a person interprets experience, and under stress, these patterns can override reality-testing. A wish appears naturally, then the superego attacks it. The result is a painful, meaningful hallucination, so not random, not just ‘wish fulfillment,’ but wish + punishment fused together. Hallucinations are a structural compromise—a way for the mind to virtually fulfill a desire while simultaneously paying the “fine” to the internal censor (Superego).

Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v61mn9e-ego-psychology-anna-freud-pt.-1.html

Hallucinations are not meaningless—they are structured attempts to resolve conflict between desire and prohibition, through these self-punishing forms, which are a form of self-pain to control behavior. “The report by Dr. Henri Flournoy from Geneva limits itself to the problem in question from the psychoanalytical point of view. In the first part, he sets out the common doctrine of psychoanalysis on hallucination. The psychogenesis [of hallucination] is constituted there by the realisation of a desire, creating not a memory image, but a perception image. This creation stems from the wakeful state of a true regression in the [ability of sensation to provide accurate enough information to correct actions], a topical regression (which is a function of the [intense pressure] of the [drive instincts]); there is added to it a chronological regression, where the influence of repressed memories is marked…The painful character of numerous hallucinations is far from excluding such a genesis, if one takes care about the finality of such hallucinatory contents, of their symbolic character, and if one takes into account the self-punishing processes that are of such importance. The structure of hallucinatory psychoses would not be sufficiently characterised if one did not emphasise that the break of the ego with reality takes the form there of a [true] invasion of the ego (psychoses not of defence, but of [overwhelm]. It is a question in reality of a [genuine] regression to a primitive hallucinatory phase, of the ego, which Freud’s doctrine postulates, and which corresponds to the narcissistic stage [of self-love that loses love for the world of reality and turns away from it]. Verbal auditive hallucinations, as much by their connection with verbo-motricity [the relationship between verbal language production and movement], as by their content, reveal however a different genesis in relation to the superego.”

The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

He noticed an “essential [unbreakability] of the content and of the [kind of] symptom in psychiatry and founds on this fact the truly biological value of psychoanalysis.” Structure comes from how a child is inserted into language, relationships, and limits early in life—not from a single cause, but from how those elements lock together. Different cultures and different families will use language, rewards, limits, designate what is good or bad, in different ways. Cultures provide different individuals to imitate and role model from, so patterns of delusion, as well as the many other personality disorders, can be expressed differently based on those influences. This is the realm of the different talking therapies as compared to hard psychiatry and neurology.

The paper indirectly helped to open the pathway for how cultural critics and political types could enter into psychology. What is considered mental health, success, or the ideal of a particular culture and family, as well as the prohibitions against those ideals, they all bleed into politics, and many people who started in politics ended up exploring psychology to explain the behaviors they saw in that world, and many who started in psychology eventually included politics into the mix to correct perceived injustices that cause trauma.

Progressive Co-opting

A theme that goes throughout Lacan’s work and personal life is the importance of the super-ego, and ego-ideals, and finding peak experiences to share with others, especially in career and relationships. This was also an entry way for politics, because the super-ego has been seen, and is seen now, as the motivator of action for many people, and when ruling classes can learn how to manipulate the public for their own purposes, the ego-ideals of the population, they can gradually shift the workload and grind onto the less powerful without them even realizing, because they are so “turned on.”

For relationships, it wasn’t always just beauty but also intellectual inspiration that can turn a partner on. When you have goals in life and you find someone to support them, love appears. When they get in the way of your goals, and these goals are often connected to what authority figures want from you in order to earn a living, love eventually turns to hate. When each partner is cooperative only some of the time, there’s a temptation to find partners suitable for certain situations in your life where it works and then when it reverts back to not working, one can spend more time with another paramour that fits a different mood or phase in life. Going on vacations, outings, entertainment, great sex, and stimulating conversations, there are fallow periods in between when professional pressure, the need to earn more money to show off, and conflicting schedules get in the way. Relationships end in those valleys and new relationships appear when an ascendency is seen on the horizon.

Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

Lacan as Analysand – Éric Laurent: https://www.lacan.com/lacinkXLIII6.html

Lacan during his time as an intern in the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, he was in a relationship with a widow 15 years older than him, Marie-Therese Bergerot. “With her he discovered Plato and went on several study trips. In 1928 he took her to see the tombs of the Saadi dynasty in Morocco and scrupulously noted down the complicated genealogies. This was the first sign of a strong hankering for the East that would later take him to Egypt and Japan.” Around 1929, Lacan fell in love with Olesia Sienkiewicz who had a “mischievous wit and androgynous appearance,” who was at an end of a relationship. “Lacan soon swept Olesia up into a wild passion that took them from Paris to Madrid, from Corsica to the coast of Normandy. Though he hadn’t yet learned to drive, he already adored cars and loved making impromptu trips with his young friend, motoring at top speed around France. Together they visited the Ile-aux-Moines in Brittany and Mont-Saint-Michel between Brittany and Normandy; then they took a plane to Ajaccio and toured Corsica.”

Olesia helped type up Lacan’s thesis, in only her underwear no less. “Right from the beginning of the affair, which lasted until the autumn of 1933, Lacan shrouded himself in a typical ‘double life’ atmosphere of secrets and clandestinity. Though officially he was living in the rue de la Pompe, he went on putting his parents’ Boulogne-sur-Seine address on his visiting cards. But most of the time he slept in the hospital, where Olesia used to join him. At the same time he still carried on a relationship with Marie-Therese…It was on a November afternoon in the Faculty of Medicine that Lacan defended his thesis and obtained his medical doctorate. The examination, which lasted an hour, ran its course without incident. Lacan faced a jury directed by Henri Claude; behind the candidate sat an audience of about eighty spectators, including both Olesia and Marie-Therese. They’d never met, and neither knew the other was there.” At this time Lacan was struggling to get noticed and positively reviewed for his thesis. Not only Freud, but many other French psychoanalysts were ignoring his contributions.

Lacan agreed with Spinoza in the subjective personality of each person, but progressive influencers were reading more proofs of dialectical materialism into his writings. “But in 1933 four well-known literary figures helped to establish Lacan as the leader of a future French school of psychoanalysis capable of breaking away from the chauvinistic and conservative ideals of the older generation. He was thus thrust on to the political stage of the intellectual Far Left, a mixture of orthodox communists, dissidents, and surrealists, all in conflict among themselves over their varying commitment to Marxism. And so this ardent admirer of Maurras and of the novels of Leon Bloy, a man hitherto uninterested in political engagement, found himself being regarded as the champion of a materialistic theory of mental illness.”

As the left began noticing how Freudian unearthing of envy and resentment pointed to Marxist understandings of alienation, praise for the thesis began to materialize. “The first comment came from Paul Nizan, in an issue of L’Humanite, the communist newspaper, published on February, 1933: ‘This is a thesis presented for a medical doctorate,’ he wrote, ‘and as such may seem rather unsuitable for comment here. But it is right to draw attention to a book that, against the main streams of official science and despite the precautions imposed on the author of an academic thesis, reflects the definite and conscious influence of dialectical materialism. Dr. Lacan has not yet clarified all his theoretical positions, but he does react against the various idealisms currently corrupting all research in psychology and psychiatry. Materialism will triumph over the ignorance of the learned professors and emerge as the true method of scientific progress.’ In May 1933 it was Rene Crevel’s turn to praise Lacan’s thesis. He did so in an article in Surrealisme an service de la Revolution. Crevel, who was more involved than Nizan in the battle against official psychoanalysis, was torn between his membership in the Communist party, his own homosexuality, and his friendship for both Breton and Aragon, who were now enemies. Crevel, regarding the old school of psychoanalysis as corrupt and steeped in bourgeois idealism, saw Lacan as the spokesperson of a new spirit: his ‘materialism,’ Crevel thought, made it possible to link together the individual and social aspects of every human being. For Crevel, materialism and concrete analysis were synonymous. But he was mainly interested in the sad fate of Aimée, about whom he wrote less coldly and clinically than Lacan himself. Crevel saw her as a rebel homosexual, a hysterical embodiment of the female proletariat: ‘Aimée doesn’t loiter about or compromise. She makes straight for a wonderful convulsive state that is both appalled and appalling. But her impulses collide with a horribly uncomprehending mass. Her need for moral and intellectual sympathy has been thwarted at every turn. So she concluded she ‘had to go to the men.’ After paying this handsome tribute to his own female double, Crevel went on to assert that Freud had made the mistake of rejecting communism, the USSR, and Marxist analysis, and this was why he had failed to revolutionize the world: ‘He is tired and clings to his mementos. We can forgive him for that. But where is the young psychoanalyst who is going to take over?'”

Here you can figure out what is meant by the term bourgeois, which is often misunderstood. How many middle class people can afford to hire, feed, and house maids and butlers? Many middle class people are lower middle class and have little power over other people where as the upper middle class, who are shopkeepers, managers, and decision makers of all kinds often control the hiring and firing of employees, and are the vessels that dole out pain to the powerless. These are the bourgeois that leftists are targeting for criticisms of abuse and unfairness, and this goes all the way up to elitists like CEOs that are forced into the same term. With those bourgeois types who also championed what was to be the Great War, while so many of the working class were maimed or killed, it made sense why people would want to take their decision-making power away from them. “In June 1933, having already been hailed as the leader of a school that combined Freudianism and Marxism and as the harbinger of the coming revolution, Lacan was also saluted by Salvador Dali. In the first number of Le Minotaure, after going over some already familiar ideas, Dali went on to praise Lacan’s thesis: ‘Because of it we can for the first time arrive at a complete and homogeneous idea of the subject, quite free of the mechanistic mire in which present-day psychiatry is stuck.’ This view was shared by Jean Bernier, who wrote a well-researched article in La Critique sociale (Social criticism) setting Lacan’s work in the context of the history of psychiatry…Bernier was a writer, journalist, and sports lover belonging to the same intellectual generation as Breton and Aragon. He, like them, had gone through the horrors of the First World War and then set about confronting bourgeois society with a radical challenge. Together with Boris Souvarine, the first founder of the French Communist Party, he had come out in support of Trotsky at the thirteenth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1924. Two years later he met Colette Peignot, a woman so passionately committed to the cause of the revolution that although she had tuberculosis she went to live on a collective farm, among the poorest of poor peasants. From her passion for bolshevism she emerged a sick woman; from her love for Bernier she escaped through a suicide attempt: she tried to shoot herself, but the bullet just missed her heart. She had a stormy affair with Boris Pilniak in Leningrad. In Berlin she lived with Edward Trautner, master of scatology, sadist, and wife batterer…”

In her search for people who hated the current system, there was an element of attraction and repulsion that got her in trouble. A betrayal bond can be groomed into a child that only knows pleasure in this dark fashion, which opens them up to a repetition compulsion to recreate abuse, like in an addiction, in order to master it. One has to go in the opposite direction by breaking the addiction in order to truly master it. In Colette’s case, she moved in the wrong direction which became like a secular martyrdom as a cry for help. If these anti-heroes she was attracted to were part of an avant-garde group, that front would cover up their flaws and foibles, only to surprise Colette later about their true mental state. This eventually became normalized. Hurt people, hurt people. “These atrocities, particularly the motif of the heroine’s humiliation, are in a way a reflection of an episode in the life of their author, namely a month that Colette Peignot spent in Berlin in the company of a certain Edouard Trautner, a German doctor, who, according to Georges Bataille, made her wear dog collars; he put her on a leash on all fours and beat her with a whip like a dog. […] Once, he gave her a sandwich with his excrement buttered inside.”

Masochism can creep up on a person who devotes themselves to changing the world, and can become the work of a Sisyphus, and it’s often done with an unconscious self-hatred to fix oneself, like life has already been too spoiled to be redeemed, but if the political situation could be changed, maybe I would be changed too? “I flung myself on a bed the way one flings oneself into the sea. Sensuality seemed separate from my real being, I had invented a hell, a climate in which everything was as far away as possible from what I had been able to foresee for myself. No one in the world could ever contact me, look for me, find me. The next day, this man said to me: You worry far too much, my dear, your role is that of a product of a rotting society…a choice product, of course. Live this out to the end, you will serve the future. By hastening society’s disintegration…”

One could see Colette being such a revolutionary, because she suffered so many misfortunes and found herself in so many tragic relationships, including an early loss of a father, and the loss of the protection he could have provided, and a mother who ignored abuse. When institutions fail, like the family and religion, someone has to fix it and replace it with something else, even if there’s a risk that it could be worse. She became a non-conformist, because conformism had been so dangerous to her before, but then anything sensible in the prevailing culture would be ruled out at the same time. “Three decisive and profoundly negative experiences marked her childhood and adolescence. The first was the loss of her beloved father, who died in the Great War along with his three brothers: a loss that made the lives of those, or rather those women, who survived a perpetual mourning, which, in this milieu of pious and neurotic bourgeoisie, became the only possible way of existing. The second, linked to the first, was the presence in the family home of that modern-day Tartuffe, Abbé Pératé, who, supposedly helping Madame Peignot to improve the morals of her children, took the opportunity to sexually abuse her daughters. The third experience, like the previous one linked to the first, was the tuberculosis she contracted, probably from one of her uncles who had returned from the battlefields, who slept in Colette’s room, and died shortly afterward.”

Tartuffe by Molière: https://youtu.be/Jwskdow_Vlg?si=1BbmQ5ZI7WDu1Z1T

In the typical meeting by a chain of who knows who by degrees of separation, Lacan was to meet with French Freudo-Marxists who saw his potential for deconstructing society. The important Marxist criticism within the window of psychology was pointing out the psychological damage people undergo when they are in a weak economic situation, with low leverage and little to no ability to fight back against accusations, mistreatment, or violence. How would their mind states improve in a new utopia if they didn’t feel this chronic insecurity? “In 1932 she met Boris Souvarine, and together they started La Critique sociale, the first important communist review to position itself to the left of communism, though without following any particular faction of the opposition. Colette Peignot and Boris Souvarine gathered around them a group of writers and former members of the French Communist Party that included Raymond Queneau, Jacques Baron, Michel Leiris, and Jean Piel. Georges Bataille, who had just ended his experiment with the review Documents, joined the group in 1931 and decided to attend Georges Dumas’s presentations of patients at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. It was against this background, where Marx and Freud were studied simultaneously, that Jean Bernier joined the team. He was a close friend of Drieu la Rochelle, and it was through Olesia Sienkiewicz that he met Lacan, at the time that the latter was publishing his thesis…Unlike Nizan, Dali, and Crevel, Bernier had some criticisms to offer. Although he saw Lacan as a future master and agreed with most of his conclusions, he criticized him for the obscurity of his style, for not giving sufficient thought to Aimée’s infantile sexuality, and for paying much too little attention to therapy. Bernier was expressing a ‘leftist’ attitude to psychoanalysis and psychiatry, both of which he accused of neglecting the social dimension of psychosis and not properly denouncing the pathogenic effect on the individual of bourgeois society.”

It took Lacan four years to get a handle on these modern Hegelian, Heideggerian, Marxist interpretations of modern culture. “Pointing to the extreme poverty of French philosophy as it was then, plunged deep in Bergsonian spiritualism, academic neo-Kantianism, or a Cartesianism diverted from its original inspiration, the materialist avantgarde liked to contrast this deplorable state of affairs with the splendor of German thought. They saw this as both Hegelian and Marxist but also enriched by the new gospel of certain great contemporaries: Husserl, of course, but also Nietszche and Heidegger, who had just (in 1926) published his famous Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)…Lacan, having thus been dubbed a materialist, accepted the mirror held up to him by the avant-garde. He abandoned his ‘Spinozan’ theory of personality—while retaining Spinoza as his authority for a few other operations, renounced phenomenology as interpreted by psychiatry, and converted to a different Husserl and a Hegelian-Marxist materialism.”

These changes in Lacan allowed him to move beyond orthodox psychoanalytic views and join the cultural psychoanalysts who wanted to see what survival pressures did to the mind, as well as the social conditioning behind those pressures. “For the first time Lacan spoke of ‘theoretical revolution,’ ‘bourgeois civilization,’ ‘ideological superstructure,’ ‘needs,’ and ‘anthropology.’ In short, he had listened to the message transmitted by Nizan, Crevel, Dali, and Bernier.” As much as he was influenced by modern Marxists, he was open to different views within their camp, which were exclusionary and capable of extreme ostracism. “Lacan found himself in the midst of the debate about communism that was then exercising the French intelligentsia. So although he never sought any political commitment for himself, he did follow the battle over Freud and Marxism that raged in 1933 among the communists, the surrealists, and the friends of Boris Souvarine. One day at a lecture delivered at the Mutualite—a building in the Latin Quarter where public meetings are held—the speaker, a young philosopher called Jean Audard, was fiercely challenged by Georges Politzer, and the two men came to blows. Lacan wasn’t present, but he read Audard’s paper and thought he would like to meet him…”

In Audard’s controversial paper, On the materialist character of psychoanalysis (1933), he contrasted the two different views of Marxism and Psychoanalysis. One view from Jean Bernier was that psychoanalysis deepened the understanding of materialism by making deterministic influences that were previously unconscious, conscious, so as to widen actions taken afterwards in response to that knowledge. This would mean that current strains of Marxism were too reductionist. A. Stoliarov in contrast felt that Freud undermined the class struggle, since it’s a system of therapy within the confines of the current class system, that it was too idealist, but also reductionist, because it deemphasized the necessary understanding of economic structures on the psyche and physical elements of the body. Audard then sided with Engels description of materialism being connected with the debate between idealists who believe in an a priori soul or those who looked strictly to nature for answers. This for Audard was what Freud was doing, because he was deterministic and found psychological laws out of the monotony of unconscious material released, though Jean was very credulous about Freud being as scientific as the other hard sciences, but no bother with that, he just wanted to administer an intellectual beatdown of Stoliarov. “Thus, psychoanalysis postulates determinism in its foundation. And, since it is a psychic determinism, it cannot consider intellectual activity as anything other than ‘a reaction in relation to the surrounding material world.’ The entire dialectic of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, of repression, sublimation, and neuroses, confirms the Marxist thesis according to which thought is determined by being.”

The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

The obsession with the super-ego, ego-ideal, etc., was, and is, an endless area of study because of its ramifications for personal motivation, class struggle, and the need to always find something superior to transcend one’s current state. “The ideal and everything that is ‘superior’ in life is revealed in this light in its infantile and obscure origins. All the hierarchically dominant elements in bourgeois society are stripped of their supernatural prestige. In fact, the psychoanalytic method is the irreverent method par excellence, and it is for this reason that it continues the task of the material sciences.” Audard viewed this as a predictable threat to idealist Marxists that would be afraid to analyze their own minds and their similar cloak of piousness that the bourgeois already used as masks. “Psychoanalysis, like economic materialism, destroys the gods of humanity. Little by little, helping each other, these two methods shed light and tear away the disguises with which bourgeois society hides and censors reality. This is how Freudians and Marxists work in their respective fields to dissolve the illusions created by history, and by overthrowing the capitalist system, to dispel a source of intellectual ignorance and psychic misery, and not only of economic and social difficulties.”

In argument against Marxists, Audard defended psychoanalysis because as long as qualities could be discerned, quantities didn’t have to be completely exact as demanded by supreme materialists, since all hard scientists have not been able to find absolute quantities, let alone in nebulous concepts like the libido, or craving. Research on supports for the libido did not have to stop. Quality is the support for quantity, and quality comes from materiality. Libido has unknown origins in the absolute, but as a theory that tries to notice changes in libido, it has its uses, especially since the kind of sex genital in material appearance, from a Marxist point of view, doesn’t necessarily connect with the objects the libido eventually chooses, and how they change from object to object. That’s more internal, and of course, thinking doesn’t happen without a material brain. The measurement of libido-craving becomes a measurement of laws of behavior and the volume and intensity of feeling.

The unconscious is also not outside of time, since what it accumulates can only involve time, and because of repression, like a tank holding water, it can only release contents in the time dimension. That repression comes from the reality principle, because reality interferes with the utopian hope for maximum gratification. The baby from the beginning is weaning itself from the womb-like instant gratification to adapt to the world of effort, renunciation, and survival. That memory of wholeness haunts the desire for the entire life of the subject who only finds entropy in every endeavour. “It seems to us that psychoanalysis victoriously withstands all the criticisms leveled against it in the name of materialism. We would even dare to say, in a certain sense, that there is no complete materialism without psychoanalysis. Marxist materialism is incomplete until it is complemented by the materialism of psychoanalysis…Marxists, in effect, base much of their argument on technical progress. This technical progress, according to them, by determining the different types of economy, also determines the different contents of consciousness and the different ideologies, as well as the different forms of state. But isn’t technical progress itself the work of consciousness? If it is true that ‘the hand mill produces society with a feudal lord, the steam mill society with an industrial capitalist (Marx, 1847),’ one must ask how people were led to invent the steam mill.”

Sexuality, and craving lead humanity to sublimate those powers in creative invention, and provide the fuel for their motivation to enhance survival. “It is only Freud’s theory of invention and sublimation that allows materialism to avoid an idealist flaw in its edifice…Marxists cite the state of the economy and technology, the objective development of science, etc. They cannot explain the individual phenomenon of invention in this way. However, it is very unmaterialistic to leave this point in the shadows: could it not be that they are resorting to consciousness as the initial principle of the historical development of humanity? Reducing the evolution of consciousness to the evolution of the economy and technology is to assert that the contents of consciousness are determined by the state of science, that is, by consciousness itself. This does not allow us to definitively escape idealism. To assert, with psychoanalysis, that creations themselves, science itself, depend on factors external to consciousness, on investigative instincts of infantile origin, which in turn depend on primitively sexual complexes, is, while remaining within the human world, to offer a much more materialistic explanation. It is because Freudianism allows for such results that it seems to us, from this point of view, more materialistic than Marxism itself, which does not raise the problem of the psychological foundations of technical invention.”

The reality is that there are influences on both sides. Without desire on the part of humans, social and economic structures wouldn’t exist, but those structures created by desire can both create new desires in the population and entrap those new desires under the thumb of the owner of capital, and their overriding pursuits. Underneath all these worries about how the world should be run, there was the consideration of the burden of working for a master and how it could be lifted so that the fear of reprimand would vanish in a Marxist utopia, and this view was in direct competition with a psychoanalytic utopia where people find themselves unashamed of their desires and repression is finally lifted. These unconscious wishes and dreams of taking the fragment of modern consciousness and turning it into the wholeness of the womb, fueled the struggle on both sides.

Lacan, in The Problem of Style, criticized the limits of the contemporary science and bundled it in with bourgeois civilization. The ideological superstructure, that he identified, is a Marxist term for a whole cultural system that justifies and protects the ruling class, and is therefore capricious, and its existence arbitrary. His criticisms were that much of the contemporary bourgeois culture was accepted as a self-evident truth, or postulated, so as to measure the human and to optimize labor through that science. Mental illness was viewed through the same filter. “Interest in mental illnesses historically was born from needs of [jurisprudence]. It was natural then that psychiatrists at first would borrow the explanation for mental disorders from institutional analyses and from the convenient scheme of a quantitative deficit (insufficiency or disequilibrium) of a function of relation with the world, function and world proceeding from the same abstraction and rationalization. A whole order of facts, which answers to the clinical framework of insanity, allows itself moreover to be sufficiently resolved.”

Many mental illnesses have the stamp of the civilization having judged these patients, who are often in conflict with authority figures, so the insane content arising from these patients provided some of that evidence of a master-slave rivalry. “It is no less remarkable that the murderous reactions of these patients occur quite frequently in a nerve center of historically real social tensions.” The paranoid, when their delusions become easier to decode, offer up content that says to the prevailing culture, you made me. “We have shown the very concrete nature of such data in detailed analyses bearing upon the writings of the insane.”

In this contentious period between arguments about class consciousness and mental illness, the debate was brought to the fore with an extreme crime that exposed the superstructure ruling France.

The Papin sisters

On the evening of February 2, 1933, retired solicitor M. René Lancelin returned home to gather his wife and daughter for dinner at the in-laws, only to find the front door bolted and no response to any of his ringing and knocking. The lights were on in the attic room for the maids, but still no response, even after 2 hours. After gathering three policeman from the station they were able to enter the residence through a window at the back. Mme Lancelin and daughter Geneviéve were found battered and mutilated with eyeballs bizarrely laying on the stair-carpet. A locksmith was needed to open the maids’ room to see what was expected to be another ghastly murder scene. Instead they were surprised to find the maids Christine and Léa in their dressing gowns in bed who readily admitted to the murder, but at the same time claiming self-defense. The older Christine claimed “I’d rather have our bosses’ hides than for them to have ours.” There was a hammer in their room, a bloody knife at the murder scene, as well as a battered pewter jug used for bludgeoning. They were arrested immediately.

As the news got out, stereotypes of violent revolutionary working classes capable of anything, spread like wildfire. Sympathetic voices with a hatred for hypocritical bourgeois attitudes jumped to conclusions. So many identified with the hatred of having to be punished all their lives from childhood by their parents to only graduate to an adulthood with employers applying the same punishments. Some economic classes get more rewards and others receive more sanctions. The famous couple Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir quickly commented that “the whole frightful system had made them the madwomen, murderers, monsters that respectable people fitted up as such. The horror of this punishing machine could be equitably denounced only by some exemplary and horrifying act of retribution: The two sisters became both the instruments and the martyrs of a grim justice.”

The murders inspired fiction adaptations, like The Maids, and Parasite, where the employers are viewed as insufferable spoiled brats and tyrants that get what they deserve to the satisfaction of audiences that feel similarly trapped in their lives and have no outlet for revenge and  catharsis, which are emotions ruthlessly exploited by movies all the way to the bank.

The Maids (1975) Trailer | American Film Theatre: https://youtu.be/Um6YjfaVE-8?si=ojwggs38F_LsJOwu

Murderous Maids – Trailer: https://youtu.be/OWqj4q7h5tE?si=PuNARSw06auFc54T

Parasite – Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xH0HfJHsaY

Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html

Edgar du Perron wrote a fictional book with a Dutch colonist character in Paris talking to a white Russian emigré, who was referencing the murders while complaining about Russian propaganda and how unconvincing it was. “I’ve had enough of that concrete Apollo with his rolled up sleeves, his courageous face of a cow, and his fists that are twice as big as normal—all those stupid symbols. If that is the only Russian left, I will fall in love with the French proletariat. The best proletariat. Did you read about that wonderful murder in Le Mans last week? They had been exploited from childhood on, orphans to begin with or something like that—and at a given moment they attacked their mistresses. Twenty years of loyal services preceded all of this. And in no way were these employers more loathsome than any others. They only happened to symbolize at the moment the full twenty years of service…Imagine the girl’s heavenly exhaustion when they went to bed afterwards, in the same house, just as they had done every other evening. And they never slept so blissfully.”

The government viewed the sisters as guilty and sentenced Christine to death with Léa, being seen as the passive follower, sentenced to 10 years. “Christine’s subsequent episodes of delusion in prison (upon being separated from her sister) forced the authorities to commute her death sentence to life internment in the asylum.” Simone de Beauvoir had to take back her initial assessment of the anti-heroines. “Undeniably, the elder sister was struck with an acute paranoia, and the younger shared her delusion. We were therefore wrong in regarding their excesses as the savage unleashing of a desire for liberation; rather, they had struck more or less blindly, through terror and confusion.”

The sisters as expected had a rough upbringing. They both had an older sister Emilia. The mother eventually ended the marriage while accusing the father of molesting Emilia. The two elder daughters Emilia and Christine were placed in an orphanage and Léa went to live with an uncle. Emilia eventually joined a convent and separated from the family for good. Christine wanted to follow suit, but her mother prevented her and she ended up working as a maid. It provided an escape for her, but it was considered a difficult profession to thrive in. “[A doctor observed] in his piece on the Papin case about the extraordinarily high rates of mental disturbance and suicide among that category.”

In 1924 Léa left being a boarder and joined Christine to work with her. This was an isolating profession if one did not take advantage of a life outside to escape into a marriage. “The extraordinary intensity of the emotional bond between the two sisters, without which their crime would have been inconceivable, derived from, as it nourished, their isolation in virtually all other respects. Maids were not particularly well paid, but their food and accommodation, however meagre, were provided; Christine and Léa turned out to have amassed surprisingly substantial savings, largely because they showed no interest in any kind of social or cultural life outside each other. Cafés, theatres, cinemas, dances held no attraction for them. Their only extravagance was clothes, presumably bought to be appreciated by themselves and each other. The sexual nature of their relationship completed the exclusive binding together of their dyad, ensuring that neither need, want for, or seek friends, family, or lover outside…In October 1929 the sisters finally broke off relations with their mother. They were, at last, alone together.”

By the time they were working with the Lancelin’s, “there was virtually no verbal communication between the sisters and their employers. Mme Lancelin gave such domestic orders as were necessary, M. Lancelin and Geneviéve uttering scarcely a word to Christine and Léa. The social, economic, and above all cultural gulf between the employed and employer classes was far too immense to be bridged by fleeting pleasantries or yield meaningful conversations.” M. Lancelin understood the preference for Spartan social exchanges. “The quarrel with their mother certainly embittered the sisters, who became gloomy and taciturn. Since then, neither my wife nor I had had any conversation with them outside their work. They were polite, and since we felt that they would take exception to any comment and they did their jobs in the house impeccably, we were patient.”

Despite this patience, there were evidences of prior conflicts. “In October 1928 Mme Lancelin is alleged to have compelled Léa to pick up a piece of paper she had dropped by pinching her arm until it bled. The precise balance between psychic and quasi-familial tensions on the one hand and ‘normal’ relations between dominant and dominated classes on the other is almost impossible to establish. What is certain is that by 2 February 1933 that balance had become a lethally unstable one.”

The minor event that broke the camel’s back was when the mother and daughter returned home to a dark house, it was caused by a “blown fuse on the household iron, which Christine had collected from the repairers only the previous day. The cost of the repair had been deducted from the sisters’ wages.” In a cold recollection, Christine said that the mother was becoming aggressive. “Seeing that Mrs. Lancelin was about to attack me, I jumped at her face and gouged out her eyes with my fingers. When I say I jumped on Mrs. Lancelin, I’m mistaken; it was Mrs. Lancelin Geneviève I jumped on, and it was her eyes I gouged out. Meanwhile, my sister Léa jumped on Mrs. Lancelin and also gouged out her eyes. When we had done this, they lay down or squatted on the spot; then I rushed down to the kitchen and fetched a hammer and a kitchen knife. With these two instruments, my sister and I attacked our two mistresses. We struck them on the head with the hammer and slashed their bodies and legs with the knife. We also struck with a tin pot that was sitting on a small table on the landing. We switched instruments several times between us; I passed the hammer to my sister to strike, and she passed me the knife. We did the same thing with the tin pot. The victims started screaming, but I don’t remember them saying anything.”

Christine and Léa were incarcerated separately and protested with a hunger strike for a week. After that Christine’s behavior deteriorated. “In July she had to be put into a straitjacket to prevent her from trying to tear out her own eyes. This led to a brief reunion with Léa shortly afterwards, at which she ecstatically removed her blouse and cried: ‘Tell me yes! Tell me yes! (Certain journalistic accounts speak of her exposing her private parts and fondling her breasts, but there is no other evidence to support this.) It also seems to have been at this time that she said, when asked why she had removed Geneviéve Lancelin’s clothing: ‘I was looking for something whose possession would have made me stronger.’ There is surely no doubt that the ‘something’ Christine was seeking had strong sexual overtones, for she had said in custody that in another life she had been, or was to be, her sister’s husband. Yet the July outburst was less the consummation of that ‘marriage’ than a breach within it, for once Léa had been led away by the warders Christine abandoned her attempts to be permanently reunited with her. Her last mention of Léa’s name occurs in a letter on 19 July. It is as if the killing and its aftermath had finally destroyed the couple of which they were such an intense affirmation.”

Naturally, many in the public wanted execution but a woman hadn’t been guillotined since 1887. When Dr. Logre was interviewed, he described the sister’s mental illness of isolation and mental merging into a folie a deux, a double madness. “When a mad person causes madness in somebody close to them—which is a common event—there is always an active and a passive subject. This is exactly what happens here. Christine is active and gives the orders, Léa is passive and obedient. The experts did not take this observation into account…The Papin sisters give every appearance of having an abnormal relationship, that of lovers. They never went out. Neither was known to have any emotional adventures. When they were separated, in prison, Christine showed the most intense despair. A lover forcibly removed from his beloved mistress would not have shown greater signs of grief.”

After the verdict of death for Christine, she collapsed. She called herself a “good for nothing,” and believed she deserved to die. She also failed to recognize her sister Léa, “she is very nice, but she’s not my sister.” When Christine’s mental health deteriorated and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment, she starved herself to death. “Léa was released, with two years’ remission for good conduct, in 1943. Legally prohibited from residing in Le Mans, she went to the Loire estuary city of Nantes, some fifty miles away.” She lived with her mother and assumed a new identity as a woman named Marie. “She worked as a chambermaid and cleaning-woman, living a life of tranquil anonymity, and keeping mementoes of Christine and lace from the Lancelin house among her possessions. M. Lancelin, unable to sell his house after the dreadful event there, lived in 6 rue Bruyére with a housekeeper until his death some twenty years after the crime.”

En quête des soeurs Papin (2000): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265173/

Lacan focused on the pressure the sisters were under. Whether you use the term “vicissitudes” or pressures, there are social and economic pressures bearing down on all people and the different kinds of pressure create different results, which is why those who are ignorant of those pressures, always end up surprised. The reason why the murders were a mystery was because employers in general just want their workers to do a good job, not cost too much money and just disappear out of sight. They have little concern for their welfare. If they provide advice, it’s always with the mentality of what’s good for the employer and a clinging that stifles development in employees. “Model servants, it was said, enviable houseworkers; mystery-servants too, for if one observes that the masters seem strangely to have lacked human sympathy, we can only reply that the haughty indifference of the domestics was but a response to this attitude; ‘one doesn’t speak to the other.’ Yet this silence could not be empty, even if it was obscure in the eyes of the actors.”

The pressure also existed before their employment when the sisters’ upbringing was broached, with the accusation of an abusive father and the controlling mother. “Yet we omit an alcoholic and brutal father, who, they say, raped one of his daughters, and the premature abandonment of their education.” The connection between attacking the personal ego-ideal of Christine in the bourgeois family that she worked for, and in herself, is exemplified in her desire to get the ineffable something from Geneviéve Lancelin to make her “stronger,” but also hating herself for remaining always in a lower status. “After only five months of prison, Christine, isolated from her sister, exhibited a very violent fit of agitation, with terrifying hallucinations. In the course of another fit, she tried to tear out her eyes, in vain but not without injuring them. This time the curious fit necessitated the use of a straitjacket; she indulged in erotic exhibitions, and then symptoms of melancholy appeared: depression, refusal to eat, self-accusation, acts [of atonement] of a repugnant character, afterwards, she had several recurrences of delusional discourse.”

When one chases after an ineffable ideal, the delusion of that desire will eventually encounter enough realistic detail to cause disillusionment, and that becomes tragic if a choice is made in the process that can’t be undone. Lacan understood that these delusions ebb and flow and change from object to object without stability, but stable in the sense that it’s predictable that satisfaction cannot ever be achieved and that ideals are goal-posts that move constantly, because perfectionism is impossible. There will always be something found missing after an acquisition or promotion in status. As the pressure for revenge increases, the desire to commit a crime surpasses the understanding of its futility. There’s an intense desire to explore a change in status, even if the shortcut chosen would reduce the subject’s status even further, by becoming a criminal.

For Lacan, the removal of the eyeballs was a castration of the authority figures, a removal of their contemptuous glances that were always designed to control, and a leveling of their status: a mini revolution. They wanted to find relief from the internal stare of self-contempt of a harsh super-ego by removing the cultural source of it externally. In a way, this was a violent projection. Even if the sisters weren’t executed by this bourgeois abuse, they demanded the death penalty from their employers, for their judgmental looks. “The intellectual content of delusion appears to us, as we have said, to be a superstructure that at the same time justifies and repudiates the criminal drive. We conceive of it then as being subject to variations of this drive, as for example in the drop that results from its gratification: in the original case of the particular type of paranoia that we have described (the Aimée case), the delusion vanished when the aim of the action was accomplished. We should not wonder that things occurred likewise during the first months that followed the sisters’ crime. The correlative defects of classical descriptions and explanations have long failed to recognize the existence, however essential, of such variations, while affirming the stability of paranoiac delusions, whereas there is only constancy of structure.”

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvsvj-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-1.html

Despite the finality of the murders, Christine disavowed knowing her sister and harbored the delusion that the victims were reincarnated. “In prison Christine expressed several delusional themes. Thus we name not only the typical symptoms of delusion, such as the systematic misjudgment of reality (Christine asked how her two victims were and declared that she believed they had returned in another body), but also the more ambiguous beliefs that translate into statements like this one: ‘I think that in another life I must have been my sister’s husband.’ One can indeed recognize in these statements the very typical contents of classified delusions. Moreover, one constantly encounters a certain ambivalence in every deluded belief, from the most calmly affirmative forms of fantastic delusion (where the subject still recognizes a ‘double reality’) to interrogative forms of so-called conjectural delusions, where every assertion about reality is suspect.”

In terms of the homosexuality manifested by Christine, Lacan followed Freud with his Schreber case. Schreber was “…incapable of being the phallus that the mother lacks, he [was] left with the solution of being the woman that men lack.” In the case of Christine, failure to be a successful matriarch, leads to a search for a new identity, and “under the influence of training and the state of powerlessness…’rivals of the earlier period become the first homosexual love objects.'” Then when you add the father’s incest mentality as an influence, the mother’s limiting of the children’s education, and their isolation, like animals in a zoo with limited choices, Christine was the more active partner, but none of the sisters were active enough to find new employers, but they may have felt it would have made no difference if the class system remained contemptuous everywhere, so it made sense why Christine would have imagined herself as a destined reincarnation as her sister’s husband out of loneliness.

Case Studies: Daniel Paul Schreber – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gu84v-case-studies-daniel-paul-schreber-freud-and-beyond.html

One has the life that one has, but one is aware of the socially celebrated life that one doesn’t have and may never have, which creates self-hatred, hatred for society, and a desperate desire to bridge the gap with violence just to see if things are better on the other side, yet the rejection is even more pronounced by culture because of the obvious crime inflicted. In a way, by attacking her employers Christine was engaging in a form of infidelity by not remaining in the incestuous dyad and looking for status through the murders. There is an illusion and belief in authoritative people, who contrary to their higher status, manifest plenty of negative emotions despite being wealthier. As long as employers have expectations of the employed, any deviation from expectation can cause outrage and frustration so that consciousness remains almost as disappointed as those who have less status, outside of an easy downward comparison to feed off of. Peace of mind has to be cultivated with this awareness or only money and status will occupy the mind and drive it mad with it’s ever moving expectations and failures to provide wholeness, no matter how much is accumulated.

The isolation proved to be an enormous influence where there was no escape from the social dynamic and no rest. When the two maids gave up on the world outside, in a narcissistic fashion, of a lack of trust in society, of accumulating savings, out of self-survival and fear of not having enough, their desires and goals matched with each other while the dyad resembled an active male and passive female partnership as a path of least resistance, like women discovering dormant homosexual desires in jail, and realize that a shift in sexual identity from a small percentage of the population outside of jail, to the majority of the population enduring extended periods of hard time, some professions can mimic this dynamic. As one inmate relayed in a recent documentary on female prisoners, “it’s 740 girls, and out of 740 girls, probably only 40 ain’t gay. The rest of them, this is the gayest place on earth.” There are sub-cultures within an overall national culture that are like different topographies and landscapes altered by different social climates. Lacan would later on go into the subject of language and its influence on the psyche, which was like a scouring pad that mercilessly examined the deeper layers of conditioning, based on the kind of internal discourse, and where the attention span had been trained to look by cultural language within those limited environments.

Trevor McDonald Interviews Women behind Bars | EP 1 | True Crime Central: 28:19 https://youtu.be/5sAMsnVRBFc?si=T1Hxk0B98GyGMl22

A Clockwork Orange – Prison Charlie: https://youtu.be/PUalD41P1jY?si=B6bacj05tSqQ3S9b

Plato: Lysis: https://rumble.com/v6vs8dr-plato-lysis.html

The sexual object choices being similar to the subjects in this case study had to do with having compatible goals and the homosexual character was the path of least resistance for sexual gratification in that isolated environment. “This integration occurs, however, according to the law of least resistance through an emotional fixation quite close to the solipsistic self, a fixation meriting the term narcissistic, wherein the object choice is most similar to the subject: such is the reason for its homosexual character…The need for self-punishment, the enormous feeling of guilt can also be read in the deeds of the Papin sisters, were it only in Christine’s kneeling at the final denouement. But it seems that between them the sisters could not even cover the distance necessary to bruise themselves. True Siamese twins in spirit, they formed a world forever closed…A paired delusion is among the most ancient recognized forms of psychosis. Observations show that they are inclined to occur between near relations, father and son, mother and daughter, brothers and sisters. Their mechanism depends in certain cases on the contingent influence exercised by an active delusional subject upon a passive, feeble subject.” They were both in the same boat socially and living in the same environment where their dyad was the only solidarity they could count on.

Sister, my sister (1994): https://youtu.be/gK5BPvJwvko?si=0SpIRyI7FvxSouQ9

The Papin sisters case ultimately returns us to what Lacan would later formalize in Family Complexes: that the family is not merely a domestic unit, but the place where the foundation of the womb provided the memory imprint of a paradise that was lost at birth. The family’s role is that of weaning the child sufficiently enough so as to find healthy replacements for the pre-birth instant gratification that can never be recovered in total. Each birth is the beginning of the futile chase for wholeness as symbolized by the womb. This wholeness can only be approximated in a duration of a normal lifespan. Christine and Léa’s closed dyad revealed what can happen when weaning fails, and in their case, the sibling bond hardened into a total world, cut off from broader social mediation. Their violence can be read not simply as crime, but as the catastrophic collapse of a structure that had the potential to develop into full lives for these women.

On Narcissism – Sigmund Freud (Narcissism 1 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html

Despite this wreckage left by those too flawed to recognize their projections, in these cases, where people want to police others for their behavior, but have failed to police themselves, those reading this with a difficult life history have an opportunity. One doesn’t have to always “get them before they get me!” By making the unconscious conscious, we can begin to identify the attractions and addictions that drive us toward deterministic pain. Tracing these influences back to their sources of imitation reveals their inauthenticity, allowing us to shed unnecessary identifications and escape the cycle of repetition. Regardless of how identified one is with rebellion and revolution, if these uprisings are made up of human hierarchies populated by others, also reacting pathologically to their own wounds, as you can imagine, they have the potential to become new superstructures that greedily discipline independent attitudes, and once again penalize healthy choices connected with healthy independence. To recognize these external and internal control mechanisms as a target for a more personal rebellion, it is not just a political act, but a therapeutic one, because based on behaviors, and more forgiving, because behaviors can change, so your own transformation becomes a form of license—a quiet permission for others to find their own way to freedom.

On the Problem of Hallucinations – Jacques Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Sur_le_Probleme_des_Hallucinations.pdf

The Problem of Style + Motives of Paranoiac Crime – Jacques Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/Le_probleme_du_style.pdf