Jacques Lacan Pt. 7

Prohibition and Desire

After we left Jacques Lacan with his awareness of the cross-purposes of his marriage, he nevertheless started a family with Malou. “Lacan wrote ‘Beyond the Reality Principle’ at Noirmoutier, where he was spending the vacation with Malou, now five months pregnant. At the age of thirty-five, about to become a father for the first time, he was greeting the triumphal advent of a second generation of psychoanalysts and commending to them a nonpsychological approach to Freud. It was a doctrinal call to arms. On the beach where he liked to go swimming he might have noticed another mass phenomenon just as significant as the Olympic junketings: factory workers enjoying their first holidays with pay, but he did no such thing. Here is the curious portrait Guillaume de Tarde drew of him in his diary in June 1936: ‘All this time Lacan is living on the plane of eternity. As an intellectual, and therefore in a lofty position, open to ideas of every kind, supremely and indisputably impartial, a master of language, by nature incapable of banality or prejudice, he looks down on ordinary events from a great height. Human beings, outmoded, doomed, defending their class interests against inexorable reality, clearly seem to him mere puppets. They present a pitiful spectacle, like the last scene of a tragedy, half touching, half comic! He reigns majestically over their anguish.’ A few months later, on January 8, 1937, Malou gave birth to a lovely little girl, called Caroline after her maternal grandmother. Lacan added a second name, Image, following a tradition by which all the Blondin family had a nickname or a diminutive. Marie Louise was ‘Malou,’ Caroline Rousseau ‘Babouine’ (in French, the feminine for baboon), Sylvain was ‘Petit père lapin’ (Mr. Bunny); and so on. But the word image also referred to the importance Lacan attached to the mirror stage theory: Caroline was conceived while he was writing his lecture for the Marienbad conference.”

The backdrop of Lacan’s life was that of family life competing for his time already allotted for his ambitions. “The experience of fatherhood made Lacan happy for about eighteen months. But coming after three years of married life it lessened none of the problems arising out of the misunderstanding on which the marriage was originally based. The man Malou had chosen, idealizing him utterly and certain he would father clever children, failed to live up to her expectations. Not only was he a womanizer and a libertine, moody and impossible to satisfy, but he was also possessed by the idea that he was a genius who would produce great works and by an immense desire to be recognized and famous. All he thought about was himself and his work…His hunger for fame and knowledge made him insatiably curious, assailing with question after question anyone whose learning he might hope to absorb. He looked at people so intently they often took him for some sort of diabolical being, possessed himself and trying to possess them. Yet there was nothing diabolical about him. The fascination he exercised on others came from the extreme swiftness with which his mind worked, combined with the extreme slowness of his bodily movements. Always deep in thought, he was at once tyrannical and attractive, inquisitorial and anxious, a show-off and a man haunted by the truth, and all these things militated against the conjugal fidelity to which Malou would have liked him to adhere…As he mixed with the intelligentsia of the avant-garde and pursued ever more abstruse philosophical researches, he was confronted with a new universe and new ways of thinking that helped him with his reinterpretation of Freud. He had felt horribly abandoned by his brother’s departure to [the Abbey] and by his parents’ failure to understand his own intellectual development, and he couldn’t bear to have to abandon people who loved him.”

Moving in the direction of the avant-garde led Lacan to want to surround himself more with people of his thinking. As typical of other psychoanalysts, personal choices brought him face to face with consequences and they would form a part of his theories about desire and its elusiveness. “…In the second half of February 1934, after he got back from his honeymoon, [Sylvia Bataille née Maklès] was in the last few weeks of her life with Georges Bataille. At the time she seemed set for a successful career as an actress. Sylvia and Bataille went to dinner in the boulevard Malesherbes; she didn’t take to Lacan at all and thought he and Malou made a terribly bourgeois and conventional couple. When they met again two years later at Bataille’s place, Lacan set his cap at Sylvia and said the only reason he had come was to see her. She slipped away. Then, around November 1938, they met by chance in the Café de Flore and fell in love; after that they were always together. At the time Lacan had another lover and was in the process of breaking off his analysis with Loewenstein…So the liaison with Sylvia began twenty-one months after Caroline was born, and just as Malou found out she was pregnant with Thibaut. ‘Caroline was everyone’s favorite,’ said Thibaut. ‘My mother’s, my father’s, and my uncle Sylvain’s. She lived for two years with my parents while they still got on together, before my father’s affair with Sylvia. That was what gave her a strong character. She got her self-confidence and assurance from the two years of happiness she had as a child.’ By falling in love with Sylvia, Lacan was moving away from a world that was no longer quite his own: the world of the great medical bourgeoisie of Paris, whose members revered wealth and success and prided themselves on being the elite of the whole country. That world had once been necessary to Lacan: through his contact with it he had been raised up from his original background. For his roots lay in the typical French petite bourgeoisie, Catholic, close to the land, provincial, and austere, devoted to Joan of Arc rather than to the elegant cosmopolitan culture beloved of the Blondin family. By choosing to mix henceforward with the avant-garde intelligentsia, Lacan was leaving a ‘Right Bank’ lifestyle for one that was less conformist, less rigid, and more bohemian…But in spite of everything Malou went on thinking their marriage could still be made to work. And although she didn’t accept Lacan’s infidelities and wished him to be quite different from what he was, she went on saying how clever he was and referring to him as a genius. How could she do otherwise? She had only fallen for him because he was a model of the elite to which she was sure she herself belonged, so diligently did she and her brother cultivate the aesthetic values belonging to the cult of self-love.”

Sylvia at first was with a man much older than her that was a poster child for psychological problems, and much of his malaise was about the human relationship to desire and its moving goalposts. When you follow the refinement of desire’s intensity levels moving towards a dangerous conclusion, boredom can turn into transgression in order return to gratification that was more easily attained when something was novel, like the early part of an intimate relationship. When novelty runs out, desire can transgress, because that is the only thing left that is fresh. “It was on the advice of Dr. Dausse, a medical friend who had collaborated with Bataille on La Critique sociale and who was concerned about Bataille’s sexual obsessions, that Bataille first met Adrien Borel and decided to go to him for analysis. Several of Bataille’s friends thought he was ‘sick’: he was a gambler, an alcoholic, and a frequenter of brothels. According to Michel Leiris, he had even risked his life playing Russian roulette…Bataille did not seek new knowledge. Rather, he sought experience, sovereign experience, which for him meant the experience of boundless freedom: freedom from language, discipline, utility, culture and identity; an impossible freedom. ‘The issue’ as Bataille wrote, was ‘not that of the attainment of a goal, but rather of escape from those traps which goals represent.'”

Presenting an example for Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille struggled with normal human fragmentation that is common to all. It started with trauma for him when he witnessed his father deteriorate from syphilis, and a guilt stricken, suicidal mother, who hated herself for leaving her husband behind German lines during the Great War. These early experiences of loneliness, emptiness, and futility made an imprint on Georges. “Joseph-Aristide Bataille died in Reims on 6 November 1915, in the company of his housekeeper, which is to say effectively alone. He even refused to see a priest. In Bataille’s mind his blind, paralysed, syphilitic and obviously suffering father died alone but not merely alone; abandoned by his wife and son in his hour of greatest need. They [only] arrived in time to bury him…Solitude and abandonment: such is the truth of life for Georges Bataille, and the truth of death. For Bataille, human beings are not thrown into the world, they are abandoned into it. And this solitude is indistinguishable from the agony of war…’My solitude is an empire in a struggle for possession: it is the forgotten star–alcohol and knowledge.’ The empire of solitude is also Pascal’s empire: that of a man whose wretchedness is rooted in his inability to be alone, and his flight into the diversions of knowledge and alcohol. Bataille’s entire life is characterized by his flight from solitude, both from the solitude of his isolation from others–his flight into their groups, communities, arms–and his flight from the solitude of the creature alone in the crowd, the ontological isolation of the insufficient being, man. Bataille’s corpus is the record of a man who understands the limits of community and that of a man who cannot be alone with himself.”

Feeling that he too had abandoned his father, he felt the same about himself. “I am a man ‘abandoned’ on the globe like my father.” His need for escape stemmed from that, and so he abandoned himself to religion, to the military, in poetry, in philosophy, and travel. As the years went by and he lost his faith, he began to notice how prohibition increased desire, because to transgress would be the only way to expand freedom. “In the proximity of opposites, Bataille discerned a capacity for infinite reversal, a passage from the ‘most unspeakable to the most elevated,’ a deliverance from the most acute agony to the highest ecstasy.”

He eventually had to back down from some of his extreme stances, partly because it looked closer to fascism, but also because transgression would lose its intensity if it achieved absolute freedom. Desire requires an optimal challenge, and complete knowledge of a subject is that of boredom. Since knowledge is imperfect, that tension could always be found where abstract ideas failed to convey true reality, or when a prohibition was defended. By “offering an inverse of Hegel’s Phenomenology: where Hegel relayed the history of consciousness, Bataille revelled in all that consciousness cannot capture, that words cannot describe.”

Where this could be healthy is when people want to invent something new or find flaws in a prevailing cultural understanding, where it goes wrong is when it turns to sadomasochism, violence and hedonism, which is what happened with some of the followers of Lacan, who split into different groups: explorers of sexuality looking for transgressive partners, alternative lifestyle gurus, revolutionaries, and those on the other hand who wanted to preserve mental peace realizing that wholeness can never be found with any object of desire. When objects of desire include other people, this kind of mentality, where tension has to be maintained, means constantly chasing people and using them as a tool for intensity. It inevitably leads to conflict.

Those who felt manipulated by the former, due to this cultural push dominating modern times, they can take solace that their brain had been hijacked by social pressure, advertising, poor models, and revolutionary types promising utopias, complete with all the brainwashing and promises of “progression.” They can let go of the shame of their past behaviors by the realization that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is morally neutral and the chase of intensity, to escape boredom and frustration, leads to ever more refined pleasures and risk-taking that can paint people into a corner with their vocations, relationships, and other strange extracurricular activities. People move into moderation and preserve peace, because of the realization of desire being never enough, and all the exhausting maintenance that goes with it, or the bizarre lifestyles the one finds oneself in when chasing the snobbery of ever finer distinctions.

The Strangest Collections Ever! | My Crazy Obsession | TLC: https://youtu.be/Txq_4x9KJcM?si=f9xlWxijX1Td_QcF

Being around people like that does increase your experience level, but relationships become volatile when intensity fades or moves to different objects. The old objects can sometimes be taken for granted and partners part ways. “All the while [during their marriage], Georges continued to indulge in his dissolute nightlife: drinking to excess, gambling, frequenting brothels. We know nothing of his erotic life with Sylvia (beyond the evidence supplied by the life of their daughter, Laurence). In 1934 when their marriage collapsed, both Georges and Sylvia admitted in their letters that they had failed one another. But this does not necessarily mean that either party failed the other’s expectations in a traditional sense (i.e. monogamy). When evaluating the life of Georges Bataille and his companions it is best to set such traditional expectations at least partially aside. Transgression requires the law, but the law need not be so rigid or rigidly enforced as traditional expectations would allow. Nor too should we underestimate the allure, imagination or independence of Bataille’s companions, Sylvia among them…Georges had never been faithful in the traditional sense of this term, but we do not really know how Sylvia responded to his actions. By 1934 she was in her mid-twenties and having some success securing roles in films through her friendships with Jacques Prévert and Pierre Braunberger, who was in love with her. Sylvia was, in short, an increasingly independent woman, who had little reason to tolerate Georges’s excesses.”

She may have been independent, but she was still tolerant enough to spend so much time with Georges during his escapades, which he wrote about in his autobiographical fiction, that included a combination of obsessions for incest and necrophilia. How involved Sylvia was with George’s extracurriculars is up to speculation. During a separation between the two, the couple managed to reconcile, and even after a permanent separation, they stayed close. “Georges’s letters to her are precise and brutally honest, but also imploring and testament to his emotional fatigue. ‘I want you to understand the degree to which I am close to you and also the degree to which what is now happening to me has not distanced me from you, on the contrary.’ At the end of August the estranged couple met in Biarritz. They talked until three in the morning, and Georges at least felt much better. He claimed his obsession with death was dissipating: ‘It’s life that I love,’ he wrote. And he implored her to return: ‘You are now the only being in the world near whom I would like to live…When I dream of you the sunlight returns to my head.’ But she did not return. She apparently accepted some degree of responsibility for the failure of their marriage, even attacking herself in her letters to Georges. He defended her: ‘Don’t say that you are a monster Sylvia, you are the most charming and pure being that I have ever met. I wish I were an entirely different man.’ Their marriage nevertheless ended in the new year, though they did not divorce until 1946. They stayed close for the rest of Bataille’s life, close enough for Bataille to spend summer vacations with Sylvia and her second husband, Bataille’s friend Jacques Lacan, at his country home.”

Lacan’s ego-ideal was moving away from bourgeois social climbing, but avant-garde circles can just turn into another ego-ideal. “Lacan and Sylvia were frequent visitors to Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles’s salon, which had become the center of artistic and fashionable life in Paris during the thirties. ‘In their private mansion in the place des Etats Unis,’ wrote Boris Kochno, ‘they often entertained a host of friends, mixing members of the aristocracy and world celebrities with budding artists of revolutionary tendencies. And among all these, Balthus, dashing and Byronic…stood apart from the general hubbub, looking on in silence at the motley spectacle. But from his impish look and ironic smile one could guess what he was thinking.’ In July 1939 Lacan met André Masson and, through Kahnweiler, bought a painting from him: Le Fil d’Ariane (Ariadne’s thread). He subsequently bought many others, including portraits of himself and Sylvia. Like Sylvain Blondin, Lacan was a great collector of master paintings: Picasso, Masson, Balthus, Zao-Wou-ki were his favorites. He also collected books and primitive art.”

What Lacan was hoping to gain from his new relationship was more in keeping with his desire to explore. “While Malou’s pride concealed a puritanism and moral rectitude that made her haughty and unyielding, Sylvia’s bohemianism reflected a cheerful temperament that made her, apparently at least, more likely to put up with the escapades of a man whose life she had chosen to share because she loved him. But her profession as an actress never prevented her from expressing her opinions frankly. Her opposition to the established order, to injustice and inequality, was always loud and clear. And through her marriage to Bataille and later love affairs, she had acquired an experience of sex such as Malou never even dreamed existed. So, as Lacan felt recognized and at home in Sylvia’s circle, in 1939 she became his special companion…[But] different as the two women were, Malou and Sylvia did have something in common: they both destroyed many letters that Lacan wrote to them, in which he talked about his ideas and his opinions on people and things.”

During the years running up to the war Lacan regularly attended spp meetings. He focused on the subject of paranoia, and then by 1936 moved onto the mirror stage. Many of his colleagues didn’t understand his work, and Marie Bonaparte, part of the Viennese wing, remained quiet about Lacan. He became controversial for using variable-length sessions that could be only a few minutes, but sometimes be the standard 1 hour. He was accused of trying to make money by increasing his case load, but Lacan did not want to strictly follow the clock and felt that important contents could be focused on and slice through defenses and ramblings that simply filled time or created an expectation that something important had to happen by the end of the hour. Lacan’s analyst, Loewenstein warned that there could be a danger that not enough associative depth would be reached.

There was a war going on in Psychoanalysis, but it was too late to prevent what was coming. The underpinnings of the psychology of the culture at the time was that of trauma from WWI, economic anxiety from the Great Depression, and a desire to believe in the promises of authoritarian leaders. After the end of WWII, trauma continued, but there was revival to setup systems of stability, especially seen in the following trend of early family formation and the baby boom. The dawn of the atomic age made clear how insane supposedly normal people could become, how easy they followed dictators, the importance of studying group psychology, especially since it seemed possible that a nuclear exchange could wipe out humanity. Psychology stood front and centre and a motivation for prevention began.

Indignity and War

By the end of the Second World War, Lacan could see the illusions people escaped to in order to avoid horrific reality. The war simply exacerbated these reactions, and for Lacan, these defenses could be transmitted generationally. Again he pointed to the importance of addressing reality as it was. “I would rather speak of the systematic misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the world by each individual, namely, those imaginary refuges that as a psychoanalyst I couldn’t fail to identify in the group, prey as it was at that time to a truly panicked dissolution of its moral status, as being the self‐same modes of defence that the individual makes use of against anxiety in neurosis, and with no less ambiguous a success, being just as paradoxically effective, and in the same way, alas, scaling a destiny which is transmitted to generations.”

When Jacques Lacan visited England after the war, he was an outsider looking in. He witnessed the depression of the English people, but also a “a tonic factor [that] emanated from it…” that allowed them to begin the recovery. Lacan felt that the effectiveness of the British war effort was the efficient use of all their population, a mobilization and “the high political education of the British people and an already expert propaganda” arm. The war provided meaning for the lives of many by “this whole incantation designed to absorb the fears and anxieties of each individual in the solidarity of a group in life and in death…” Despite the NAZI propaganda with the Olympics, the true Olympic spirit came from an organization that shared important information and strategy to all the rank and file. With “the recent moral addition of a democratisation of hierarchical relations, the anguishing value of which had been indicated by us as a factor of superiority when we returned from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—all the might of this tradition did not weigh an ounce against the superior conceptions of tactics and strategy, the products of the calculations of engineers and mongers…The British victory is of a moral order, by which I mean that the intrepidity of its people rests upon a [truthful] relation to the real…”

Lacan also credited new psychological eliminatory tests used in the Canadian military to choose groups of recruits that could provide “a certain homogeneity held to be an essential factor for its morale…” These tests, like the Penrose-Raven tests, looked at not only physical prowess for military recruits, but also intelligence as well as emotional stability. “Laggards in training, ravaged by a sense of inferiority, maladjusted and prone to delinquency—driven less by a lack of understanding than by compensatory impulses, and thus prime candidates for depressive or anxious outbursts or states of confusion triggered by the emotions or shocks of the front line, as well as natural conduits for every form of mental contagion—individuals suffering from a severe deficit must be isolated as ‘dullards,’ a term for which our friend Dr. Turquet, offers a French equivalent not in the word “arriéré” (retarded), but in “lourdaud” (oaf/slow-witted fellow). In other words, this corresponds to the colloquial term “débilard”—a word that conveys an assessment of personality rather than a specific level of mental ability…The units which had been purified of their inferior elements in this way experienced a decrease in phenomena of shock and neurosis, and the effects of a collective softening of the will, in a proportion which one could call geometrical…Major General Rees sees the application of this fundamental experiment to a social problem of our civilization—one immediately amenable to practical action—without making any concessions to the unsavory theories of eugenics; it stands in stark contrast, as is evident, to the anticipatory myth of Huxley’s Brave New World.”

Penrose, L. S., & Raven, J. C. (1936). A New Series of Perceptual Tests: Preliminary Communication. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 16, 97-104.

The Shaping of Psychiatry by War. By John Rawlings Rees: https://www.proquest.com/openview/f1cfbdbf9a082958f5588edea21e13f3/

The high education of the British for Lacan also included enough penetration by Freudian theory, including newer intuitions about group psychology, like Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory. Instead of promotions being based on how well a soldier performed in their current duties, they needed to be tested on the challenges related to their new position. In Bion and Rickman’s studies of group interactions in the military, Lacan “observed, on a collective scale, the same effect of the degradation of the virile type that I had previously attributed to the social decline of the paternal imago in a 1938 publication on the family…This is not a digression, for the issue of officer recruitment is the area where the psychiatric initiative yielded its most brilliant results in England. Early in the war, the empirical method of promoting from the ranks proved absurd—firstly because it soon became apparent that one cannot simply turn every excellent non-commissioned officer into an officer, even a mediocre one, and that once an excellent NCO failed as an officer candidate, he would return to his unit as a poor NCO. Furthermore, such a recruitment method could not meet the massive demand of a national army that had to be built from scratch. The problem was satisfactorily resolved through a system of psychological selection—a system that, remarkably, was able to achieve immediately what previously required years of schooling to accomplish…The major selection test for officers was the first and most comprehensive stage—a preliminary to any specialized training—taking place during a three-day session at a center where candidates were accommodated; the informal atmosphere of shared daily life with the jury members allowed the latter to observe them all the more effectively.”

Harrison T, Clarke D. The Northfield experiments. Br J Psychiatry. 1992 May;160:698-708

Field theory in social science: Selected theoretical papers – Kurt Lewin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226476506/

The usual tests rested on IQ (Intelligence Quotient), but “all the tests focused on detecting personality factors.” Wisdom, experience, and emotional stability isn’t measured by IQ, but in the military, a wider range of tests were needed to promote teamwork and a merit based leadership system. These tests included verbal and association challenges, like from Henry Murray’s Thematic Apperception tests, which was “focusing on the meaning the subject attributed to images that ambiguously evoked a scenario and themes of high emotional tension…Then follows a series of tests in which the subject is placed in quasi-real situations—featuring obstacles and difficulties that vary according to the examiners’ inventiveness—which reveal his fundamental attitudes when grappling with both things and people.”

As important as ego is to psychology, its impact on groups and how they fare in extreme scenarios under battle conditions, false authority had to take a back seat to reality, because in war the stakes are at the level of life and death. Folly in leadership means certain death. “I would highlight, for its theoretical significance, the ‘leaderless group’ test, which also stems from Bion’s conceptual insights. Teams of approximately ten subjects are formed, none of whom holds pre-established authority; they are presented with a task to solve collaboratively. The task involves graduated challenges that call upon constructive imagination, improvisational flair, foresight, and a sense of efficiency—for instance, the group might need to cross a river using specific equipment that requires maximum ingenuity to operate, while also planning for its retrieval after use. During the test, certain subjects will distinguish themselves through their initiative and the commanding qualities that allow them to assert their influence. However, what the observer notes is not so much the individual’s display of leadership capabilities, but rather the extent to which they can subordinate the desire for self-promotion to the common goal—the objective the team is pursuing and through which it must find its unity.”

Lacan focused on the value that psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers had on society and concluded that after the war, he saw that they were put on a more equal footing with other professions, such medicine, law, and the clergy, but there was still a worry about where these specialists would go after the war was over. In terms of group psychology, what it taught and what results they were aiming for was to develop people that worked in a group with less need to manipulate and address things with a fair minded attitude. “Two points are worth noting: on the one hand, the fair play shown by the candidates—reflecting the requirement for authenticity inherent in the use of the psychoanalytic interview as a final recourse—and the testimony most frequently gathered (even from those deemed unfit) that the experience left them feeling they had undergone a most interesting ordeal…We thus see that, in the end, we rely on a judgment regarding the subject—one whose objectivity seeks its guarantee in largely human motivations, far more than in mechanical operations.”

After the war, Lacan saw the potential of this new class of psychic hygienists. “His role is to investigate, anticipate, and intervene regarding any aspect of regulations or living conditions that affects the mental health of mobilized personnel in a given district. In this way, the factors behind certain psychic epidemics—such as mass neuroses, various forms of delinquency, desertion, and suicide—have been identified and countered, opening up the possibility of a whole new realm of social [preventative measures] for the future.”

The understanding of how psychosomatic factors were involved in mental health began to expand in its funding in the medical establishment, and then there appeared roles for individuals who were looking for their own meaningful contribution, in that the war provided enough life or death meaning so that many psychological problems went through a transvaluation that made survival the priority, though mostly for people who had minor psychological hangups. “Such a function will undoubtedly play a role in the implementation of the Beveridge Plan, which—it is worth noting—recommends allocating 5% of general hospital capacity to the treatment of neuroses, a figure exceeding anything previously envisaged for mental health prevention. Rees, in the book to which we constantly refer, envisions the peacetime role of the ‘area psychiatrist’ as covering a region of 50,000 to 75,000 inhabitants. Their purview would encompass everything within such a population’s living conditions and social relations that might be recognized as influencing its mental health. Indeed, can one still quibble over the psychogenesis of mental disorders when statistics have once again revealed the astonishing phenomenon of a wartime reduction in mental illness cases—both among civilians and in the military? This phenomenon was no less marked in England, where it occurred in defiance of the presumed effects of aerial bombardment on the civilian population. It is well known that the statistical correlations associated with this phenomenon do not allow—even upon the most unbiased examination—for it to be attributed to any incidental cause, such as alcohol restrictions, dietary changes, or even the psychological impact of foreign occupation.”

Yet there still needed to be a screening process for the military, and there were cases that were too difficult for psychoanalysis to handle. Where psychoanalysis could help would be in those situations in war where people struggled with uncertainty and there was a need to muster their courage to accept reality, or in the case of Melanie Klein’s theories, and even if comical, to help patients adjust to the depressive position. “Episodes of collective depression appeared very selectively among commando units that had undergone inadequate screening; I need only mention the young psychiatrist who, in order to join the airborne units he was to accompany to the Italian front, packed—within his limited airman’s kit—Melanie Klein’s book. It had introduced him to the concept of ‘bad objects’—introjected during the anal phase and the even earlier stage of oral sadism—a perspective that proved highly fruitful for understanding subjects whose psychological profile was already defined by their voluntary enlistment.”

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://psychreviews.org/object-relations-melanie-klein-pt-2/

So the mental health of patients markedly improved when they had meaning in their lives with enough freedom to engage in purposeful actions, but after a regimented experience in the military those same people needed to find ways to adapt to civilian life after all the trauma, but also that great worry for veterans who may become listless and unable to transfer their skills and find a vocational fit. In a world that was more free and less regimented, how can people decide for themselves what to do instead of being commanded? Underneath psychology, there is an undercurrent of economics and how it affects the morale of more healthy people needing to find gainful employment, and then those who became accustomed to brutality, and how they could reintegrate into a safer society where survival reactivity would be an overreaction in the world of commerce and family life. “Psychoanalytic perspectives were no less prominent after the war in the effort to reintegrate prisoners of war and overseas combatants into civilian life…A number of special centers were designated for this purpose; one of them—housed in the stately home of Hatfield, still the residence of the Marquis of Salisbury and preserved in its original 16th-century architecture thanks to its continuous ownership by the Cecil family—I visited on one of those radiant days that London Octobers often offer, and did so with particular generosity that year. I was allowed to wander about at my leisure, long enough to be convinced of the complete freedom enjoyed by the residents—a freedom that proved compatible with the presence of Old Master paintings in a hall the size of the Hall of Mirrors (which served as a dormitory), and no less compatible with the maintenance of order in the refectory, where, as a guest myself, I observed men and officers gathering as they pleased in the shadow of an impressive array of suits of armor.”

At this time, Lacan encountered Western forms of meditation, similar to the Alexander Technique, often used for actors, but at the same time with psychologically grounded methods to have patients confront their childhood helplessness regarding their upbringing so they could practice their more adult skills, and these practices also helped veterans of the war, much how PTSD patients have to relive their past experiences and integrate them so that the mind reduces its alarm after new skills are developed to be strong enough to handle ambiguity, challenge, and renew agency and a sense of mastery. Venting through abreaction was balanced with social skill development. But unlike psychoanalytic abreaction (where a client verbally recalls trauma while lying down), psychodrama places the client in an active, embodied state in the present moment here-and-now of sponteneity. The stage acts as a safe container where the client has agency over scenes that previously overwhelmed them. Patients were able to mirror auxiliaries playing their past roles to learn new responses and they were also allowed to enact role reversals and step into the shoes of people of their past to accept the limitations of their family, or environments where patients felt helpless. This led to early forms of group therapy where individuals could share their stories and develop a new life narrative that could be integrated during peace time. “I was able to speak with Major Doyle—to whom I first made my identity known—and his medical team; I will report only two points he made: that the fundamental problem here was the need to reduce the fantasies that had assumed a dominant role in the subjects’ psyches during their years of isolation or confinement, and that the treatment method driving the center was entirely inspired by the principles of Jacob L. Moreno’s psychodrama—a therapy originating in America that is also classified as a form of group psychotherapy with psychoanalytic roots. Suffice it to say that catharsis is achieved in the subjects—even, and indeed especially, in psychotic patients—by allowing them to abreact while playing a role assigned to them within a scenario largely left to their own improvisation.”

Like in sports psychology, there was a warming up process to get patients into a mode of embodiment where their lethargy of rumination and intellectual over-analysis was replaced by bodily momentum that created a psychological momentum to stay in the here and now and engage in creative role-playing that was ready to respond to whatever arose in the environment and deal with novel stimuli without always resorting to old maladaptive habits. The past was used as well with triggering of healthy memories to connect what was meaningful in the past to what could be meaningful in the present. In the end, a responsible citizen has to respond to what is being born in the moment: a play of responsibility.