Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through our thoughts and emotions, not to mention the meaning of our lives. Mari Ruti is a professor of English literature, with expertise in critical theory, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, especially the work of French theorist Jacques Lacan. We talk about the psychological drive that is motivated by what Lacan calls “lack,” which is related to “desire.” We use this as a way to think about such essential human experiences as mourning, creativity, and love. (We don’t talk about love enough here on the podcast.)
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Mari Ruti received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of critical theory and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto. She is the co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons book series for Bloomsbury.
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0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And long time listeners know that we do a lot of different kinds of topics here on the podcast, but there is a heavy dose of things like Physics, Biology, Philosophy, but if you think back, the very first episode was with a psychologist, Carol Tavris. And we’ve had a couple of psychologists on since then, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Scott Barrett Kaufman, what we haven’t talked about on Mindscape is psychoanalysis. Psychology is just a general study of how people think, how they behave, and so forth, whereas psychoanalysis is the specific set of ideas, a school of thought, if you will, founded by Sigmund Freud, and it’s actually weighed down by association with a lot of Freud’s ideas, let’s just say, aren’t fully baked.
0:00:45.8 SC: Freud was not right about everything, he was dramatically wrong about some things. So, there’s this sort of caricature of psychoanalysis with things like the Oedipal Complex, that men want to sleep with their mothers, penis envy that women have, and things like that, things that haven’t held up over time. And, in fact, I think it’s safe to say that in psychology circles, there aren’t a lot of psychology professors who are in the psychoanalytic tradition these days.
0:01:12.4 SC: The psychoanalysis lives on in literary and certain philosophical corners of academia, not as a way of necessarily being a clinical practice, although there is that, but as a way of thinking about human beings and how they behave in a way to sort of understand ourselves better, and that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. And to make things worse, today’s guest, Mari Ruti, is a professor in the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is the only person in the world who I would trust to talk to you, my audience, about these topics we’re gonna be talking about today, ’cause it’s not just psychoanalysis, is the particular kinds of psychoanalysis that are influenced and thought about by French theorists, most especially Jacques Lacan, a famous French psychoanalyst and a literary critical theorist, etcetera.
0:02:04.6 SC: And these ideas, again, I’m pretty sure that most of the folks here in my audience are not, by nature, sympathetic to these kinds of ideas, isn’t that like post-modernism and all this anti-science, anti-real world stuff? So, what I ask you is to listen to the podcast that is in front of you because Mari is the best in the world at taking that set of ideas and making them clear and helping us understand which subset of that set of ideas are actually worth listening to.
0:02:37.6 SC: And you might not at the end come away buying it, that’s completely fine, I don’t ask you to buy it, the idea of Mindscape is that I don’t even buy everything the people who I have on are gonna be talking about it, I don’t buy everything that Liz Mullen or David Chalmers actually says, but I respect what these people have to say, and if I don’t understand something, I want to give it a charitable, careful listen before I make my decisions. And if you are at all interested in understanding the set of ideas better and would like to think about it carefully and know enough about it to make your own judgments, you’ve come to the right place.
0:03:15.5 SC: And actually, I’m even being too negative to say that, I think there are really good, really important ideas here that can influence how we think about ourselves in interesting ways. In the middle of this episode, I asked Mari to indulge me a little bit, and I made an extended analogy between Lacanian psychoanalysis, and entropy and in the arrow of time, and out-of-equilibrium physics, [chuckle] and it may or may not stand up to a higher scrutiny, but it’s the kind of thing I think is interesting and worth thinking about. And so, with that in mind, let’s go.
[music]
0:04:05.7 SC: Mari Ruti, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:07.9 Mari Ruti: Well, thank you for having me. It’s really an honor to be invited. I’m very grateful to have this conversation with you.
0:04:15.3 SC: Sure. I think this will be a lot of fun because it is a bit of a departure, I end up saying at the beginning of half of my podcast, this is a departure from what we usually do, so maybe it’s a little bit… Maybe I should just qualify the boundaries as wider away and they really are, but anyway. So, let’s just dive into perhaps the most… The thing that’s gonna happen to the minds of the audiences when they hear what we’re talking about, which is the word psychoanalysis, this is a fraught word in the modern age, we instantly think about 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud, patients on a couch.
0:04:50.3 SC: Freud telling them that if they’re guys, they wanna have sex with their mother, if they’re women, they have penis envy or something like that, and a lot of this has been the subject of enormous criticism over many, many years, and so much so that many people have abandoned it, but there’s a bunch of people who wanna say that there are valuable insights there when we take some of these ideas and put them into a more modern context, you’re one of those people. So, how about just starting with the general sales pitch for why we should take psychoanalysis seriously here at the first-fifth or the first-quarter of the 21st century?
0:05:25.4 MR: Okay. So, the entire time you were talking, I had to suppress my laughter because I didn’t wanna laugh over you. [laughter]
0:05:32.3 SC: Laugh away, we’re all are friends here.
0:05:35.3 MR: Everything that you say is right. I can just imagine your listeners already like rolling their eyes at the very word psychoanalysis, and I’m very used to this resistance because I teach the topic to undergraduates every year, so I get a new bunch of people every single semester who have only heard snippets about psychoanalysis and usually not the good parts. So, they know things like Freud used cocaine, and they know about penis envy and stuff like that, but they don’t really know much about it.
0:06:10.4 MR: But then I have to admit that, or I guess I should say, I’m proud of the fact that within three weeks, I will have re-inculcated them, I will have indoctrinated them to the point that my colleagues in the hallway start telling me to stop talking about some of the concepts, because apparently the students who are in my classes can’t stop talking about the psychoanalytic concepts that I have introduced them to in their other classes, which then drives my colleagues crazy.
[laughter]
0:06:37.1 MR: So, I know how to break the resistance, but I’m not sure I’m able to do this during this very podcast. But I will just start by saying that there are actually a lot of academics on the level of professors and graduate students who are combining psychoanalysis with usually with continental philosophy and contemporary theory. And in some ways, it’s difficult for us to think about a time before the current version of psychoanalysis took over the humanities, and to some extent, even the social sciences. There was a period when it was like a complete no, no, like serious academics did not take it seriously, but these days a lot of people in the humanities and even some in the social sciences do, but it’s a very specific version of psychoanalysis.
0:07:29.8 MR: So, I’m gonna mostly be drawing on a French thinker, a post-Freudian psychoanalyst and theoretician called Jacques Lacan. His last name is spelt L-A-C-A-N, in case no one has heard of him. But he’s among the, I would say, top 10 most famous French thinkers of the 20th century, which is saying a lot. You can compare him to people like Sartre or de Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault, people like that, and he was part of the revolution that happened in the American Academy in the humanities during the ’80s and ’90s when French theory kinda took the American Academy like a big wave, like a storm, and there was a lot of resistance, but also, like I said, there’s no going back to the pre-psychoanalytic moment because it did transform so many fields.
0:08:32.6 SC: Sorry. I know that you’re right in the beginning of this, but let me just, again, so we can orient the audience. And I’ve resisted this, but I think that there’s a lot of people out there who maybe don’t know about the resistance, but there’s this feeling, this caricature that that exact wave of French influence of sort of post-modernism and post-structuralism that came to the US in the ’80s and ’90s is all about just denying the existence of reality and saying there’s no such thing as truth and you can’t do anything, I think that is not where you’re coming from, but maybe point that out, or tell me that you are coming from there.
0:09:06.1 MR: Yeah. No, that’s a… Thank you so much, that’s an excellent, excellent clarification to ask for. One reason that I’m attracted to psychoanalysis specifically is that it’s the one component of that so-called post-structuralist theory that did not give up on a lot of things that I did not wanna lose, I feel like post-structuralism, say Derrida and Foucault, those people they got rid of things like truth and also, in some ways, psychological complexity and psychological life, it became all about power and signifiers, it became very, very cold, like the human being just got taken out of the equation as did any understanding of truth. And the psychoanalytic understanding of truth is very different from your understanding of it, but at least in Lacanian theory, there is such a thing and it has to do with the truth of desire, which I can talk about later, but that’s probably not the best place to start right off the bat. I do wanna talk about desire though, so we’ll get back to that. But, yeah, psychoanalysis drew me specifically because it did not take away all those things that the rest of post-structuralist theory did.
0:10:23.3 SC: Good.
0:10:23.7 MR: And it’s only really specialists who understand that there’s a distinction between someone like Lacan and someone like Jacques Derrida, a lot of people lump them together, but those of us who study the field understand that they are coming from very different places. Okay?
0:10:39.7 SC: Well, and again, yeah, that sounds perfect, thank you very much for that clarification. The other thing that people are going to be raising their hackles about is, “Don’t these people intentionally try to be impossible to understand?” [laughter] And I know that you’re whole thing, like the thing you’re famous for is making these impossible-to-understand things understandable, which is why we have you on the podcast, and not the ghost of Jacques Lacan.
0:11:05.5 MR: Yes, I do have the reputation for being the one-lucid Lacanian, the one person who can… Well, there are others, but people often email me and say, “Oh, wow, I read your book, and this is the first time I ever understand Lacan.” He’s one of the most incomprehensible, he’s probably the most incomprehensible, of all the incomprehensible thinkers in French theory. He is… Like, when I asked my graduate students to read one of his books, they will come to class and say, “I didn’t understand any of this, I literally did not understand more than 5% of his this,” and that was my own experience also when I started reading him, but over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at deciphering what he had to say, and…
0:11:58.2 MR: Okay. So, the short answer to the question that you’re asking, well, it has two components. Post-structuralism, broadly speaking, was interested in subverting the idea that meaning is transparent, so they started writing intentionally in this completely incomprehensible, aggravatingly opaque way to make people struggle with the idea that they could understand everything that they read. So, that’s one component-kind of a political ethical component. And then, that had to do with taking down Western epistemological models that were…
0:12:41.2 MR: Centered around a certain type of clarity and certain type of logical reasoning, but then when you come to Lacan himself, it also has to do with the fact that he intentionally wanted to speak the language of the unconscious, which is basically gibberish, which is why many of his lectures sound like complete gibberish, so you have to allow yourself to enter into that space of the unconscious to understand anything that he’s saying, it’s very intuitive, and if you’re trying to go at it with logic in mind, you’re not gonna get anywhere, but yeah, that’s a really good question.
0:13:16.0 SC: Okay, I’ll let you resume the psychoanalysis glossary.
0:13:20.6 MR: Okay, so I wanted to say right off the bat that I am not interested, personally I’m not interested in things like gender and sexuality and the Oedipus complex and penis envy and stuff like that, I think that those are outdated concepts. I’m also not interested in claiming that psychoanalysis is some sort of a science, [laughter] because Freud was a neurologist before he became a psychoanalyst, and I know that there’s some work in contemporary neuroscience that is drawing connections to Freudian thought in interesting ways, but I’m not an expert on those. For me, psychoanalysis is a philosophy of everyday life, it’s a mythology of human ontology, what it is that makes us who we are, what causes us to behave in the ways that we behave, so think of it as a mythological thing rather than an attempt to give you a scientific basis for anything, take it with a grain of salt. At the same time, it has incredibly, in my opinion, really insightful points to make about human beings in everyday life, and I’m just gonna mention three points really quickly…
0:14:37.3 SC: Sure.
0:14:37.3 MR: And then hopefully you can probe me with further questions. So, the things that most interest me about, Lacanian theory specifically, and also more broadly psychoanalysis, but he does have a specific take that I can also talk more about in a bit, but the three things that I take from his theories specifically…
0:15:00.4 MR: Are first of all, the fact that he understands human ontology to be based on this sense that we are lacking something, that there is this emptiness or hollowness or nothingness within our being, and as you know, people like Jean-Paul Sartre had the same idea, his famous book is called Being and Nothingness, so Lacan is not the only person to think in those terms, but he had a very good explanation for why we feel like that, why we feel like we have lost something unfathomably precious that we cannot get back. And then the idea is that because of that lack, we have desire, and because of desire, we try to seek all kinds of ways of filling that lack, including things like writing books or creative endeavours or other intellectual endeavours or whatever it is that makes human life meaningful to people.
0:16:00.2 SC: Hosting podcasts.
0:16:00.6 MR: So that’s the first…
0:16:01.4 SC: Hosting podcasts…
0:16:02.3 MR: Sorry?
0:16:03.2 SC: Hosting podcasts is what makes life meaningful I think, here in 2021. [laughter]
0:16:07.7 MR: That’s a really good… Okay, so you are… That’s your way of filling your life.
0:16:11.1 SC: Filling my life.
0:16:11.4 MR: But you also have done it in many other ways, like writing a gazillion books, as I have, so we have that in common, but that’s definitely… I know that that’s my pathology, that’s my symptom, writing books is my symptom, it’s the only way I can deal with the ontological nothingness. Okay, that was the first point. Second is that, Lacan came to the conclusion that, unlike during Freud’s time, we are no longer living in a society of repression, so Freud talked about sexual repression and how we become symptomatic when our sexuality is repressed in various ways, Lacan was like… Because he was writing in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and he was like that’s no longer the case in our society, our problem is actually the opposite, meaning that we are inundated with enjoyment, what he called enjoyment, and we have just almost too many sources of enjoyment available to us, every possible kind of porn is available to us on the Internet, so it’s not like our sexuality is repressed, rather we’re kinda overwhelmed by the abundance of possibilities for satisfaction.
0:17:17.0 MR: Okay, so that was the second point, and then the third, and I’ll say this quickly because there’s a lot here to unpack, but I think that psychoanalysis is really excellent at explaining, Lacanian psychoanalysis specifically is really excellent at explaining various components of everyday life such as desire, love, this is how I hook my students right away, I start talking about desire and love, and they’re like, “Oh, please give us more.” Trauma, loss, alienation, mourning, melancholia, depression, and also importantly, the way in which we tend to repeat hurtful patterns of behaviour even when we really don’t want to repeat them, we keep doing it anyway, we tell ourselves that we’re gonna change our way of doing things, but somehow we can’t and psychoanalysis is good at explaining that through, what Freud already theorised as the repetition compulsion. Okay, I will pause there and give you a chance to speak.
0:18:21.4 SC: Yeah, I know, I mean there’s a tremendous amount there, and I hope we’re gonna get a chance to go through all of it, but before we dive into these specifics with those points in mind, let’s say a little bit more about the general angle that we’re taking here. I like it that you said very explicitly, you’re not pretending to be a scientist. That was one of the criticisms of Freud in particular, is that he really, really, really wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist and the fellow scientists were like, “Eh, predict something that I wouldn’t even be able to predict otherwise, otherwise I’m not gonna take you too seriously.”
0:18:53.8 SC: But if you re-formulate the approach as more of a… I’m not even sure if it’s a philosophy of life, but as a set of insights that are relevant to the philosophy of life, then it seems to make more sense to me. It is and that’s… Well maybe one of the reasons why it was very popular in literature in English departments as opposed to philosophy or neuroscience departments, and it actually, for other reasons, I’ve been reading… Don’t take me too seriously here ’cause it’s not very deep reading, but I’ve been reading some early Chinese philosophy, and these people are very brilliant in the warring states period and Confucius and Zhuangzi, etcetera, but… But they’re not the sort of setting up systems of logic or political ethics, that we think of as the standard Western version of philosophy. It’s much more like living your life, and maybe part of this is just reclaiming the idea that understanding how to live your life is a very valuable endeavor.
0:19:52.2 MR: Absolutely. First of all, I should say that Lacanian theory has very deep connections to Eastern philosophy, the whole idea of being built around a void or nothingness. That’s central to a lot of Western, I mean Eastern philosophy. But yeah, I do like to think about it as a philosophy of everyday life, and when cab drivers inevitably ask me what I write or I don’t know what I teach, I tell them that I work on the meaning of life. And then they ask me, “What is the meaning of life?” And I say, “Well, the meaning of life is that there is no meaning.” [laughter]
0:20:35.6 MR: That’s usually how the conversation goes, however, I… Even though in some ways there is no meaning, there is a lot of bits of meaning to be drawn from this particular way of looking at the world. And one thing I forgot to mention in my introductory comments that I do wanna get out is that when Lacan started writing in the 1950s, and he also started giving annual lecture series, and they went on for 30 years, and initially he had a very tiny audience that was composed of such just specialists, but he very quickly developed a reputation in Paris. So in the 1960s and ’70s when Paris was really…
0:21:20.0 MR: The Parisian intellectual community was generating a lot of really interesting ideas, philosophical ideas, and in their view, psychoanalysis was part of philosophy. So during those two decades, pretty much anyone who was anyone in the Parisian intellectual scene in the Humanities, some of the social sciences, attended his lectures which became huge. And so he had an impact on a whole generation of French thinkers that came just slightly after him, he was petering out in the late ’70s and people like Derrida started writing in the late ’60s, so he influenced a whole generation of thinkers, and that influence had a lot to do with that notion of lack that I keep referring to.
0:22:09.5 SC: Do I remember correctly the anecdote that Lacan at some point came to give a lecture and then once everyone was assembled, he just stood there silently for an hour and then he left? Is that a true story?
0:22:21.5 MR: Yes, yes, absolutely. So he has a reputation for being a troublemaker, a maverick, just a crazy person. He would also do things like throw items at the audience members like books and pens and pencils and stuff like that, and towards the end of his life when he was becoming very interested in the math, and you’ll laugh at this… And I know that this is a part of Lacan that I don’t really touch except for the content, ’cause I don’t understand any of his mathematical equations, but his very late work is full of math… Mathematical equations, and when I talk to specialists who actually understand math, they claim that they don’t really make any sense, which I understand because also his written text doesn’t make any sense. [laughter]
0:23:04.6 SC: Why should the math? Yeah.
0:23:06.5 MR: But the reason I’m talking about this is that he came to New York City, I think it was New York, to give a major talk and he stood on the stage playing with knots because he was interested in knot theory and math at that point. So he didn’t say anything, he was just standing there and playing with these knots, with ropes and stuff like that, and finally his audience just kinda gave up and left. [laughter] So yeah, he was an eccentric, a brilliant eccentric.
0:23:34.1 SC: It does remind me, this is completely non-substantive and just silly, but it reminds me of the story about Derrida, who gave a talk at some point, he was in the United States, so he was speaking in English, not his first language, and he was always apologetic about his English, and for some reason, he was giving this entire talk about cows. And the whole audience is like, “Why is he talking about cows? I don’t know what cows have to do with what he’s saying,” and then he ends the talk and then it’s the question period, and he talks to the organizer or whatever, the moderator, and then he comes back to the microphone and says, “I’m informed it is pronounced ‘chaos’.”
0:24:10.3 MR: That’s perfect.
0:24:13.6 SC: No one knew.
0:24:16.6 MR: Makes perfect sense.
0:24:17.7 SC: Yes. So you have to do some exegesis, you have to do some little work here, but good. So, two more points I wanted to sort of big-picture points before we get into your… More details, one is the idea that even though you’re not claiming to be a scientist and you’re not following Freud in that way, there clearly is science that is relevant here. We learn a lot more about neuroscience than we have learned before, and the specific point that you raise that reminded me of that was the repetition-compulsion instinct or whatever it is. What do I call it? The repetition compulsion…
0:24:52.7 MR: Yeah, that’s right.
0:24:53.4 SC: Okay. That’s something that is absolutely based in neuroscience, and in fact, I had a very interesting podcast with Robin Carhart-Harris, who uses psychoactive drugs, uses LSD and other things to help treat those kinds of things, so I’m a believer that sort of both approaches are valid. If we understand these things qualitatively and can sort of come to grips with what’s going on that’s valid, and if we understand what is going on in the neurons, that’s also helpful.
0:25:24.0 MR: Yeah, that’s really great. So now I’m gonna go back to Freud, because one of his groundbreaking ideas that I think is still relevant today is that he had this idea that our bodies, our drive energies have been wired in specific pathways, and it’s possible for those pathways to become really fixed and that’s part of what he meant by symptomatic behavior, and that’s partly what he meant by the repetition compulsion, you got a hard wire to repeat… Mentally for a hard wire to repeat certain kinds of actions, but also on a physical level. I’ll use myself as an example. You know me pretty well. I’ve always been someone who has an excess of energy, Lacan calls this jouissance, it’s just a French word for pleasure, but it can be pleasure that is so intense that it’s kind of painful and so basically, Freud already had this idea that, our pathways of energy, jouissance, whatever you wanna call it, are configured in specific ways.
0:26:35.9 MR: And the whole point of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice, when people go to analysis for years and years and years, is to reconfigure those pathways, is to break the usual pathways and create new ones and that absolutely has to do with neuroscience. And I wish that I knew more about the current research that is being done in the field because I know that there is a lot that is being done that is explicitly comparing psychoanalytic findings to current neuro-scientific findings and I know that they are finding interesting overlaps. I just don’t know enough about neuroscience to be able to speak to any specifics, but I do know that the breaking of those patterns and the breaking of those pathways through your body and your psyche was at the gist of what Freud was trying to accomplish.
0:27:30.2 SC: Yeah, I know it sounds like there’s a lot of fruitful things to be thought about there. And the final big picture question or point I wanted to raise was, when you talk about the existentialist sort of angle here, and I don’t know, it’s not really nihilism or despair, but it’s a search for meaning when meaning has been lost to us, so this circles back to questions of atheism and religion and things like that, to mean is part of the need for this analysis that we now live in a world where God is dead and we need to… I’m certainly a big proponent that we need to construct not only purpose and meaning, but also morality and ethics and things like that, and this is part of that overall project, is that fair?
0:28:15.7 MR: Yeah, that’s really fair. I agree with you on everything that you just said. And I think that on some level, what at least Lacanian psychoanalysis is trying to do is to allow us to figure out how to deal with that lack within our being without resulting to some sort of a theological or otherwise, other worldly explanation or an attempt to cope with it or even cure it. It makes… Okay, so if we start from the premise that he gives us, meaning that we feel like there’s this void within our being, then you can see how religion would be an incredibly seductive ideology, the idea of often afterlife where you’re kind of rewarded for your present suffering, it’s an incredibly seductive way to deal with that lack and I think a lot of people do deal with it that way. However, what is distinctive about Lacanian analysis, and this is why he’s beloved by a lot of academics in America but he’s not really popular with a lot of American clinicians because he basically argued that the best way we can handle this sense of lack is to acknowledge that there is no cure for it, that we just have to learn how to cope with it.
0:29:41.3 MR: And the idea was that as soon as you acknowledged the impossibility of a cure, you could actually start devoting your energies to things that make your life meaningful and I mentioned writing books, you mentioned podcasts, but not everyone is an intellectual or an artist painting paintings and writing books and stuff like that, people have various ways of finding meaning in their lives that are more everyday than what we intellectuals do, but the point is that he was trying to give his patients, and also his audience members the ability to think about how to make their lives meaningful without resorting to the idea of God. That said, he was very knowledgeable about Christianity and I think was born Catholic, but he was still an atheist, so it’s a complicated relation to religion, but definitely a secular attempt to deal with this nothingness within our being. And to understand this nothingness as a spring board for everything that is meaningful about human life, including desire and love and our capacity to connect with other people, I can explain all of that in more detail if you want but it was this idea that the lack was not our enemy, it actually was the foundation of everything good about human life.
0:31:08.5 SC: So actually, that’s exactly what I do want to hear you expand on a little bit more, but if you will indulge me for a minute, I wanna propose an analogy or maybe it’s even an equivalence with physics concepts here because just that’s how I…
0:31:23.1 MR: Okay, now I’m really scared. [laughter]
0:31:23.7 SC: Yeah, that’s how I think about the world, but I’ll creep up on it by talking a little bit about Antonio Damasio who is a previous guest I had on the podcast, and he’s a neuroscientist, and so his way, his big words are homeostasis and feelings. And what he means by this is, so when I translate that into physics terms, what he means by this is this, if you have a box of gas, this is a typical physicist move, you have a box of gas, you let it reach equilibrium, it becomes to a temperature and it’ll just sit there forever. If you seal the box away from the outside world, it’s fine, it’s gonna stay in exactly that condition for all time, but we human beings or any living being, we’re not like that, we’re not equilibrium systems that we can seal off. If you seal us off, we will die, [chuckle] and at the very fundamental physiological level, we need food and we need air and we need things like that.
0:32:20.5 SC: And then so this is what Damasio was talking about, homeostasis is the attempt to more or less regulate our physiology into its proper zone, but it’s something that needs to be an active process, it won’t… You need to get fuel, you need to get the right kinds of stimulation, etcetera. And to me, the psychological version of that… Sorry, there is a psychological version of that also, and this is where feelings comes in, his word for… The reason why he cares about feelings rather than emotions is, he thinks of feelings as the more primitive impulses that your body and brain are giving you, saying something’s not quite right, let’s fix it a little bit, this deviation from homeostasis. And so like… So the physics lingo is, human beings are out-of-equilibrium systems, we have some more or less steady state, but it’s like in my analogy, it’s like you’re a surfer riding a wave. It’s not like you’re a rock on the beach, you need to continually do little adjustments to make sure you don’t fall off.
0:33:23.2 SC: And so that’s why so coming back to what you said, sorry for taking over a little bit, but that’s why I like this emphasis on the fact that we shouldn’t be seeking the once and for all cure, that’s like saying we should be seeking the state of being where we don’t eat anymore. Right? We are constantly going to be lacking something, driven to sort of fulfill some extra desire, we’re not reaching a state of perfect happiness, and that’s okay, that’s part of the process. Once you realize that human beings are out-of-equilibrium systems, so wat about that? That’s my question.
[laughter]
0:33:58.4 MR: Well, okay, once again, I agree with everything you said, if I understood it correctly, and that’s a really interesting way of thinking about the matter. So to translate this into psychoanalytic terms, when people go to analysis, it’s usually because they feel like they are off-balance, they are out of equilibrium in one way or another, and they’re seeking to figure out how to fix that. And most commonly they go in because they feel like they’re not being loved or they’re not being loved in the right way, but anyway, something is off-kilter. And so a lot of the process, the psychoanalysis, it’s not the most efficient. I was gonna say this when you talked about neuroscience, because I know that the neuro-scientific solutions and cognitive behavioral adjustments are much faster and more efficient. Psychoanalysis is very inefficient in the sense that it takes years, but the point is precisely to gradually make sure that you maintain a degree of, or at least, first of all, you introduce a degree of equilibrium into the patient’s psychic and bodily existence, and then you…
0:35:16.7 MR: I think in the process, what’s supposed to happen is that the patient, the client learns how to self-regulate, so the end of analysis is basically when you’re able to do it yourself, you don’t need the analyst’s help to reach a certain degree of equilibrium in the understanding that you’re always going to lose it, you’re never gonna be able to hold onto it permanently, like you just said. And the trick is precisely to be okay with that and to give yourself the permission to be fine with that, at the same time as you seek as much as you can, a certain degree of comfort zone or equilibrium, like I mentioned earlier, that I have this huge excess of energy and my struggle is constantly to contain it and tame it to a certain degree and go into analysis actually the Lacanian analysis helped me learn how to do that in a better way, which then did things like reduce the amount of physical pain that I was in, which was a symptom of this over-agitation. And so, yes, all of that makes perfect sense and has obvious analogies with psychoanalytic thinking.
0:36:33.6 SC: This over abundance of energy is just not the problem that I’m faced with in my life, I’m sorry that, that’s… It’s a good reminder that people are different from each other. We all have our own little issues. So good, so then I wanna hear more about these lacks, so I understand the abstract idea, there’s the danger that it’s just too general and too broad to be useful to say, “Well, there’s something you don’t have and you want it.” Okay, that’s a pretty general thing, how much more specific can we be about the kind of lacks or the origin of these lacks that are relevant to typical people trying to get through the world?
0:37:14.1 MR: Okay, okay, great question. The first thing I wanna say is that in my own work, which is different from the work, of… This is one of the differences between my work and the work of some other Lacanian’s, is that I tend to focus on two very different levels of lack. I want to distinguish between what I’m calling ontological lack, a kind of constitutive foundational lack that is supposedly universal to human beings, that’s on the one hand, and then on the other hand, there are all kinds of context-specific or circumstantial forms of lack that people or like wounding, that people suffer from various kinds of injury that may be systemic, like racism or poverty or sexism, or maybe like idiosyncratic to you, having to do with say your upbringing, your family.
0:38:08.9 MR: Maybe you had a traumatic upbringing as a child, stuff like that, and that’s a different level of lack from the ontological version that Lacan usually focuses on. So that’s kind of the preface and then I guess if you wanna… If it’s okay, I’ll dig a little deeper about how he comes to that understanding of lack as the foundation of existence, he basically… And this is just like the CliffsNotes version of the gist of Lacanian theory on human ontology. The idea is that when the infant is born into the world, it’s born into a world of signifiers, of meaning.
0:38:49.3 MR: When I say signifiers, I don’t mean just language, but also like non-verbal cues, smiling and how people hold the infant and stuff like that, but a lot of these meanings pre-exist that… I mean, almost all of them pre-exist the infant’s arrival in the world. And the one good example is gender, where sometimes parents, unless they are very forward-looking, they paint their nurseries different colors depending on whether they’re expecting a boy or a girl, they would buy different toys, depending on whether it’s a boy or a girl, so this is a really clear example of how signifiers in some ways determine the child’s being on some level even before it arrives into the world.
0:39:36.0 MR: And then the idea is that once the child starts to learn how to speak, and starts to understand language. Language is key for a hearer, language is really a key for Lacanian theory. His idea was that once the child starts to speak, it quickly comes to realise that it’s actually not the center of the world, because before language, there’s just, there’s no distinction between the world and the child, the child is sort of the entire universe, the entire world. But once there’s language, there are suddenly me and there is you, and they are others in the world, and that is what he thought was the source of the feeling that we have lost something unfathomably precious, that we have lost this sense of plenitude, of being whole.
0:40:24.6 MR: Suddenly we are no longer whole, and once that happens, the desire to fill that void kicks in and you start looking for various ways to fill that void, fill that nothingness, and as I said earlier, his idea was that the best thing you can do is to just learn to live with it rather than try to heal it. So that’s the really, really short version of why he thought that we are the way we are, and that’s different from… That immediately makes us different from other animals. I think that Lacan would have agreed that humans are animals on various levels but because of the sophisticated usage of language and signifiers that we have, he implied that we are, and I’m using wording from a fellow Lacanian, Todd McGowan who says that human beings are distorted animals and that has to do with the idea that language has somehow meddled with our biology in such a way that we are no longer in a pure biological state, but we have been distorted by the culture that we were born into and that our feeling of like, “Okay, we’re missing something, there’s a piece of me missing,” is a part of that distortion, that other animals presumably don’t experience.
0:41:56.1 SC: Part of that makes a lot of sense to me, and part of it I can’t quite sign on to, but maybe I just don’t know enough about it. This distinction between humans and other animals, there’s something to that because animals can be happy or sad, they could be frightened or whatever, they don’t get embarrassed that much, or they don’t feel social anxiety in quite the same way that we do. They don’t worry about the future in the same way that we do, and I’ve sometimes discussed it, not in terms of language, but in terms of our imaginative capacities to think about the future, which is wrapped up in the whole language thing, so I think there is something there that is very interesting and worth diving into even more. What I’m more skeptical about is the story about the baby coming into the world and being surrounded by signifiers, clearly that’s true, whether or not…
0:42:50.0 SC: Or let’s put it this way, which aspects of my current or someone else’s current psychological make-up can be traced to that occurrence in my infancy, seems to be almost impossible to know. It’s a good story, but how would I know if that were true, how would I know that there’s some other story that isn’t just as good? Is that part of the story crucial to the later insights or is it more like it’s all part of a package and we can take and leave some different parts of it?
0:43:21.0 MR: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that it is pretty foundational to Lacanian theory specifically, and I think that a lot of it is actually intuitive in the sense that a lot of people would come to analysis and complain about the fact that they feel like something is missing from their being, that they are feeling this emptiness or some sort of alienation or existential malaise or dissatisfaction, and so I think he was looking for an explanation for that because other animals don’t have existential… I don’t know, but it looks like, it seems like they don’t have existential anxiety and all of these worries about this and that, and so he was trying to figure out why, and like I said earlier, philosophers who were writing around the same time as he was writing and thinking, came to the same conclusion, that there is this kind of a feeling, a void that human beings seem to share, but they weren’t really able to explain it, and so one of the things that Lacan was trying to do through that theory of language acquisition had to do with that attempt to explain why is that we end up like that.
0:44:38.4 MR: And yeah, so like I said at the beginning, I take all of this with a grain of salt. It is a mythology to me, I acknowledge that there could be all kinds of other explanations, but it also seems feasible that once the child begins to speak, it loses something, and another way to think about this is that because of the cognitive distinction between very young children and adults, a lot of times children don’t really understand what it is that adults want from them, so Lacan talks in terms of enigmatic signifiers, the signifier that is coming at the child is enigmatic, the child can’t process exactly what it is that the other wants, the other being the parent or the caretaker, whoever, what it is they want from the child, and so that itself can lead to to a certain degree of unease or being off balance or in this equilibrium that you described earlier, but yeah, and I’m not asking anyone to believe this as some sort of a scientific fact, it’s definitely a theory, and there are other psychoanalytic thinkers like Melanie Klein, who worked with very young children and infants.
0:46:05.0 MR: They are child psychiatrist and child psychoanalysts who arrived at similar conclusions using different vocabulary from Lacanian theory, and those observations were based on actually looking at how young infants react to stimuli coming from the outside world. Again, I’m not an expert on this, but I know that infant psychoanalysts have arrived at some of the same conclusions.
0:46:38.9 SC: Interesting, yeah.
0:46:40.0 MR: But again, not a science, definitely not a science.
0:46:43.9 SC: Yeah not a science. Okay, that’s okay. Okay, good, so we have this lack, may or may not come from… Look, I completely think it’s plausible, that childhood experiences, imagination, language are somehow wrapped up in these feelings that we have of lack and so forth, and it’s good to have sort of a preliminary framework on which to hang our ideas about it, with a footnote that it’s subject to being updated, right? That’s always going to be true, but there’s this extra twist that you’re gonna put on it that says that following the advice of Beyonce, we should make lemonade out of these lemons that the world has given us, and that the lack is not just this idea that we’re driven by our lacks is not a purely negative thing, that it leads to things like creativity and expression.
0:47:34.6 MR: Yeah, and that is, I have to admit that that’s particularly my way of reading Lacan. There are other people who are much more interested in the more destructive sides of his theory, and I have kind of build my particular reputation on this tendency to go in a more affirmative and… I don’t know, sublimatory direction. So I think that you can read Lacan in different ways, and the way I have chosen to read him is that he’s basically saying that because we do have the sense of lack… And I wanna reiterate it, maybe reiterate it in one other way, so that it’s maybe more convincing to the skeptics, you can think about it as a form of wounding.
0:48:28.5 MR: You could make the argument that pretty much all children are in one way and other wounded, like no one ever feels like they are loved enough, even if they have great parents, like the best parents in the world, you can never fill the child’s need for love. So there’s always a certain type of wounding, and then some people have been much more wounded than others, so that’s one way of understanding this lack, but anyway. So the idea is that, if you take it for granted, that the lack exists, then the obvious next step would be to say, “Okay, well, what happens to human beings after that?”
0:49:03.8 MR: And Lacan came to the conclusion that from lack comes into being the desire to fill it with various activities, and there are basically two ways of filling it. And we can either go into the world and find things, like people, and of course, falling in love is one of the… We can talk about love if you want to, because that’s one of the topics I’ve written a lot about, so you can fall in love, you can find a person who seems to feel that lack… That’s really effective. That’s one of the most effective ways of doing it, which is why a lot of people seek, if you take this theory seriously, this explains why we are so drawn to the idea that there’s like a soulmate who’s gonna complete our being and all that. We can find people or objects in the world or even ideals that we hang onto as a way of dealing with this lack. The other route to dealing with it is to invent something, [chuckle] invent, do any kind of creative labor, intellectual labor or… I don’t know, be a carpenter or something, use your skills in such a way that you can kinda either forget about that lack or at least cover it over.
0:50:24.3 MR: And the idea is that a lot of us are really good at just ignoring it most of the time, we make ourselves very busy and don’t wanna think about it or don’t really have space in our lives to think about it, and something like poverty would make it very difficult to actually focus on this sort of existential type of lack, but the idea is that if we are suddenly faced with something very difficult in our lives, like if something traumatic happens to us, we often become very aware of it. So let’s say you fall terminally ill or you have a horrible break-up, or something happens to you professionally that’s just terrible.
0:51:09.7 MR: Then it’s difficult for you to avoid looking at that lack kind of in the face, and you can think all the way back to Nietzsche, who talked about staring at the abyss. So this is not a new idea. He had this notion of staring at the abyss and having the courage to do so, and so in some ways, Lacan is just kind of re-articulating this already Nietzschean idea of like, you just have to have the guts to look at the abyss in the face, rather than trying to find these ways of avoiding it. At the same time as he very much advocated the idea that there are productive, meaningful, creative ways, sublimatory ways of coping with it so that it doesn’t overwhelm you and take over your existence and put you into a paralysis.
0:51:56.5 SC: What was the Platonic dialogue that talked about the souls being separated, then you’re trying to find them again, was that the Symposium?
0:52:05.0 MR: Yes, the Symposium, and Lacan actually has a whole lecture series, a whole book on the Symposium.
[chuckle]
0:52:12.3 SC: So was Plato the first Lacanian, ’cause he emphasized this lack that we have that we’re all looking for, to find our soulmate who’s been wrested apart from us?
0:52:21.4 MR: Yeah, pretty much actually. That’s kind of the gist of one of my books, it’s called The Summons of Love, and so it’s about love, and one of the arguments I make is that basically Lacan is kind of plagiarizing Plato, and that this whole idea that Zeus divided those round beings like… An egg with a hair, and then they were separated from each other for the rest of their lives and yearned for a reunion with their missing half, and then were super happy, filled with jouissance, this exuberant happiness when they found each other. That’s basically the Lacanian story, except that he’s very skeptical of the ending. He’s very skeptical of the idea that you can find your soul mate and everything will be just gold and after that, so he doesn’t buy that part of the story but the rest of it is just directly out of Plato, yeah.
0:53:17.3 SC: So, good, so I’m on Lacan’s side in being skeptical about the ending, but as marketing advice to would be myth builders, the idea of Zeus and eggs and hairs is awesome. You gotta have that extra bit of fantastical apparatus to really catch on and become popular I think, but I do wanna get to love ’cause I’m no better than your students, who are gonna fascinate about this, but I wanna get to other things out of the way first. You touched on this fact that when we do talk about searches for ways to fill our lives, ways to address the lacks that we have, look, writers and intellectuals, tend to be the kinds of people who write about searching for meaning in life, and guess what, they always say, “Well, you should write about intellectual things.”
0:54:09.3 SC: But I wanna suggest, and I wanna hear it whether you agree or not, there’s an infinite number of ways that we can address this and some of them might be very highbrowed, some of them might not be highbrowed, you could be a fan of a sports team or you could like gossiping with your friends or just going to a McDonalds or whatever, there’s different sort of activities I can imagine that are perfectly valid that are part of this, to attach too much grandiosity to them, part of this human search for meaning.
0:54:43.8 MR: Absolutely, and that’s one of the things that I always emphasize when I teach psychoanalysis because I think the popular understanding of the Freudian understanding of sublimation has to do with very highbrowed endeavours such as writing books or painting paintings or writing songs or other kind of really culturally revered activities, and I always tell my students that that’s just the tip of the iceberg, that very few people actually deal with their existential crisis or their lack or whatever you wanna call it, in those ways, and yeah, [laughter] there are all kinds of ways in which you can fill your life, you can exercise, you can have children, they are a very, very, very good distraction from your lack. [laughter] They take up a lot of space…
0:55:34.6 SC: Yeah.
0:55:35.2 MR: Love, they’re distracting. You can watch Netflix for days at end, which I do sometimes. You can numb your feelings with alcohol or drugs or whatever, so there are more or less productive ways of… To coping with it, and I guess the idea in psychoanalysis is to get people to use avenues of filling their lives that are not pathological in the normative… Like, are not self-destructive, are not bad for you, so instead of day drinking, [laughter] doing something that is a bit more… I don’t know, I don’t wanna say productive because it sounds like psychoanalysis is trying to normalize people, and this is one of the big distinctions between other forms of psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory that I should have actually mentioned earlier, and this is why he is not so popular with American clinicians because most American clinicians are invested in making the patient more functional, making the person happier, more adaptive to social demands, whereas the goal of Lacanian analysis was to allow the patient to just come to terms with the idea that they will never feel whole and also to question everything, question norms, question social rules and restrictions, basically, and I hope that it’s okay for me to… Can I use the F word?
0:57:11.8 SC: Go ahead, we’ll just mark you as explicit, no problem.
0:57:16.5 MR: ‘Cause I’ve actually used this in writing, the most exact way to explain what Lacan was hoping to do with his patients was to teach them to say, “Fuck you,” to societal demands, he was not trying to normalise anyone, so I don’t wanna say that he would have been invested in making sure that people are not day drinking, that they’re doing something more “useful” with their lives, but nevertheless I guess I still have a little bit of an investment in the idea that there are more or less productive ways of coping with this lack or malaise or dramatization or wounding, whatever you wanna call it.
0:58:00.7 SC: Yeah, maybe you just said everything there is to say about it but I just wanna push harder on this ’cause I haven’t thought about it that much myself and I don’t have the favored answer, but on the one hand, one wants to not be overly judgy about the different ways people have of dealing with the existential horror of reality and especially one doesn’t wanna just valorize or privilege my own ways of dealing with things, so other people can have their things, but at the same time you wanna be able to say that within each individual and their situation, presumably there are in some sense better and worse ways of coping, being a fan of a sports team is probably better than just drinking to forget your problems, at least if you don’t think I’m too fanatic about it, so what is that judgment? What is that hierarchy that we’re putting it on? What is the good versus bad way of addressing our lacks?
0:58:56.9 MR: Okay, so now I’m gonna open a total can of worms.
0:59:00.2 SC: Good.
0:59:01.0 MR: You started this whole podcast by talking about truth, [laughter] which of course I would expect from you as a scientist, and my answer to this is that Lacan was very invested in this idea that there is a truth to your desire, and he was hoping that analysis, as a clinical practice would help you access this truth, which is often buried or under kinda layer upon layer upon layer of societal expectations, and so when he taught his patients or tried to teach his readers to resist societal norms, his objective was to get to something deeper about your desire.
0:59:47.2 MR: And so, the idea is that if you can locate the thing that most fulfills your desire in the hope that it’s something that is not destructive to you, like day drinking, if you can locate that one thing or a few things that are most meaningful to you, then that would be the way to organize your life. It’s a way of thinking about self-fashioning, like a need to have this idea of living your life as poetry, Lacan had the idea of figuring out what it is that you truly want, and then following the thread of that desire. Now, you can obviously… It’s like obvious that there are huge problems with this because if your desire is to be a serial killer, you’re kinda in trouble. [chuckle]
1:00:31.4 SC: I was gonna say…
1:00:32.7 MR: So you don’t really want to pursue the truth of that thread of desire, but beyond those kinds of extremes, he had this idea that if you could figure out what it is that really appeals to you. And he had actually… A term for this, he called it the objet A in French, the object A, like the cause of your desire. If you could figure out what the objet A, object A of your desire is, the kernel of your desire is, then you can perhaps live a life that feels better to you, feels more meaningful to you, not in the sense that you feel healed, but in the sense that you feel like you’re living the kind of life that you want to be living. So that is sort of the existential component, philosophical component of this.
1:01:21.7 SC: So indeed. Okay, so I get how it does come down to truth, that in some way when you’re trying to deal with your lack, there are ways to truly address it and then there are ways just to sort of mask it and hide away. And so we’re gonna count… We’re gonna value those ways that are a little bit more truthful. Is that fair?
1:01:42.2 MR: That’s very fair and this is, like I said, when we started talking about truth, I said that Lacan had a very different understanding of truth from what I assume is your understanding, because rather than looking for the universal truth with a capital T, which in some ways he actually was because he theorized the whole notion of lack as a universal human condition and all of that, but when it comes to specific people, individuals, his understanding of truth was actually really… It had to do with the singularity of your desire, the singularity of the person and, here, I wanna distinguish between identity, which is sort of socially constructed.
1:02:24.3 MR: It’s your social persona that you present to the world, and then what I in my work have called the singularity of your being, which has to do with a combination of your psychological life, but also your bodily drives and how you are in the world. And so for him, or at least in my interpretation of him, the idea was to access something about the truth of the singularity of your being, and the closer you got to that, the closer you got to some sort of a truth about yourself, but that’s completely different from truth in their scientific sense of the word, because it implies that everyone’s truth is specific to them.
1:03:12.5 SC: Well, I can imagine that… I don’t necessarily think it’s incompatible. There’s a truth about the fact that electrons and protons have equal but opposite charges, and there can separately be a truth about individual people. Individual people are going to have something that is different from person to person, but never less true about them. I think that’s completely compatible, but the slippery thing here is, it’s just… It’s not your fault or Lacan’s fault, it’s the fault of what is to nature and to be human being is that on the one hand… Yeah, what… In me right now, there are things that are true about me and maybe I can try to sort of fulfill the desires, etcetera, but those are also malleable in some sense. Part of me can change another part of me, and so it’s not completely clear which parts I should hang on to and which parts I should work to change. Right?
1:04:06.3 MR: Well, that’s really a great way to think about it, because I don’t think that this truth of being, the singularity of being that I’m talking about is meant to be a static notion. I said earlier that the goal of analysis in some ways is to get you to the point where you can “Do it yourself”, you can kinda keep analyzing yourself. So, there’s a process to your way of being in the world and your singular way of being in the world. And I’ve written a whole book, I guess most of my books actually talk about subjectivity as a process that never comes to an end.
1:04:45.2 MR: You’re always fashioning yourself, you’re always reinventing yourself. New understandings of what it is that is important to you come to existence continuously. So it’s definitely not a fixed truth, and I guess one way to think about it psycho-analytically or clinically is again, to get the client or the patient utterly sad to the point where they are okay with the fact that they are in constant process of becoming something that they don’t even yet understand themselves. You don’t know what the end point is going to be, and that’s really hard for some people. They’re looking for stability.
1:05:27.0 MR: And this is a destabilizing theory in the sense that it wants you to become comfortable… [chuckle] I guess it’s in some ways stabilizing because it wants you to become comfortable with the fact that you are not going to be a stable creature, that you are always in the process of becoming something.
1:05:44.5 SC: Which reminds me that I wanted to ask about your… Despite the fact we want to not be too hoity-toity about overly valuing intellectual writerly activities. There is a sense in which I think you say that this initial impulse of lack, of trying to fix something that we don’t have, or some desire that we have for something, can be a creative impulse, can actually be seen to be at the heart of our more creative moments, if such moments are what we seek to have.
1:06:15.3 MR: Absolutely, that for me personally, is what is most important or precious about this theory, Lacanian theory speaks to me theoretically, but it also just speaks to me very personally, I was hooked onto it for absolutely personal reasons, and it had to do with this jump from a feeling of lack and alienation to the ability to create, to write. I used to have a huge writing block, a writer’s block in grad school, you probably even remember it. We knew each other back then, and for a long time I couldn’t write and I went to analysis in order to be able to break that, and it actually did work and since then I was able to start writing and I haven’t stopped writing since so, and okay…
1:07:05.0 MR: So I’ll give you an anecdote from one of Lacan’s books because it will illustrate this really concretely, he’s actually talking about another analyst’s text, and ultimately he says this is a completely crackpot way of thinking about things but nevertheless, there’s something that we can learn from this. This other analyst that he’s talking about had a patient who had a brother-in-law who was a talented painter and had filled her walls with his paintings, and then one day he came and took away one of the paintings, so this woman was left in her apartment, with this empty spot in the wall, [chuckle] and she was in analysis, and so apparently this other analyst claims that what happened was that she went and bought some paint and started painting herself and miraculously actually was able to paint a pretty good painting.
1:08:01.5 MR: Now Lacan says, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way that this woman would have ever been able to paint a good painting from having never attempted to paint,” but the gist of it, the fact that she was compelled to go out and buy paint and attempt to replace the empty spot on the wall was something that he could get on board with, he’s like, “Okay, emptiness, we wanna fill it,” so we find… If we have the intellectual or creative capacity, we can find creative and intellectual ways of filling that void or at least coping with it better, yeah.
1:08:40.9 SC: So what’s the programmatic advice that we have to people who would like to be more creative? Like lack more or I’m not quite sure how we get…
1:08:50.9 MR: I’m just laughing at that programmatic advice, because I was so antithetical to everything Lacan stood for…
1:08:57.8 SC: I know.
1:08:57.9 MR: Because as I said, he basically spoke gibberish but okay, go ahead. [chuckle]
1:09:01.7 SC: Yeah. So, I’m a person on the street. I don’t know what my feelings about Lacan are but I get this idea that we’re driven by our lacks, so even unconscious, can I kinda attach the word unconscious to many of these things, but I’m also writing a novel, I’m working on my novel finally, and I wanna be creative, I want it to be fun and new and inventive, and is there a way to sort of use this mythology as you set up to sort of help me release my inner creative energies?
[laughter]
1:09:36.9 MR: I’m just laughing because I have just co-authored a book on this very issue with a novelist.
1:09:43.0 SC: Perfect.
1:09:43.3 MR: It’s in dialogue format. Me and the novelist, her name is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, complicated last name, Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn. So we wrote this book in dialogue format and we talk about the kind of logistics of creativity, and we’re both coming from a Lacanian perspective. She’s trained in the theory as well, even though she’s a novelist, and so the conclusion that we both came to, independently of each other, and I invited to do this project with her partly because I knew something about her writing process, and I realised that it was very similar to mine, so I was like, okay, there’s something that we can talk about here because I have written 14 books, which is a lot, I know you’ve also written a lot.
1:10:37.2 MR: But in my field 14 books is a ton, and so a lot of people ask me what is it that drives you? What is it… How is it possible that you can write all those books and I’ve realised that Kathryn had the same predicament of almost over-productivity, and so we both came to the conclusion that what needs to happen is that we somehow manage, at the opening stages of starting to write, we’re talking about writing specifically but this could also apply to other arts…
1:11:11.9 MR: At the opening stages of writing, we purposefully banish our egos to a different room or to a different mini universe, we just tell that ego to just go away, and that allows space for these physical energies and psychological energies that I’ve talked about, that I’ve labeled as jouissance that are coursing through our bodies to interact with the signifier, with the word, in such a way that the signifier is filled with a certain type of new energy, it’s filled with a creative, innovative energy that is able to create something, hopefully something new, so the kind of quintessential example is someone like James Joyce, who also wrote gibberish, and the idea is that, the Lacanian idea is that when James Joyce wrote, he was filled with this energy, this jouissance that was carrying his signifiers, carrying his words in such a way that he actually demolished usual language and was able to invent his own kind of language. Now, usually we don’t all wanna do that, we don’t all wanna write like James Joyce, and write gibberish. [laughter]
1:12:31.9 MR: But there is… I think that there’s a way in which we can release that energy in our bodies and in our psyches that allows our writing to flow and allows us to fly with our words, and that’s something that I definitely experienced, Kathryn experienced this, we kind of lose track of the… Even lose lack of our surroundings, we can lose ourselves in that for hours, and I know that people who have called this place the [1:13:00.5] ____ and stuff like that, and that feels very visceral, and so, part of the Lacanian theory around lack has to do with that ability to bring the jouissance of the body, the energy of the body, together with the signifier in such a way that something new comes into being. And you can only do that if you’re able to banish the ego that is sitting on your shoulder and telling you that you are not gonna succeed, you’re not gonna be good enough, your prose sucks, you’re just like a horrible writer, it means that…
1:13:31.3 MR: It basically means that you allow yourself to write whatever comes to you, sometimes I sit down and I write… I put my fingers on the keyboard and things just start… Sentences just appear, and I don’t even know where they come from. And of course, the first draft is a complete mess, but I have come to be able to live with the fact that it’s a complete mess, and then that allows me to just write and write and write until I have a whole book-length mess, and then I can take that mess and re-write it into a book, and then the rewriting process takes like months and months and months because it is such a mess, but eventually it turns into a pristinely-written book, but the initial kind of rush of writing has to do with just giving up control… Getting rid of the ego.
1:14:25.9 SC: So yeah, actually, that is some kind of programmatic advice there, and I hate to be the scientist, but it reminds me of at least an analogy I mentioned before, the neuroscience of psychedelics and what effects these drugs have on the brain, and one of the… One of the… The single most fascinating fact I learned about reading about these things is you would think that if you take something like LSD and then you see all these colors and whatever, that it is firing off neurons in your brain, that it’s causing these things to be fired, but in fact, it depresses certain activities in your brain, it’s just that what it’s depressing is the gatekeeper, like these sounds and light shows and whatever, and ideas were bubbling beneath the surface all the time, and there’s parts of your brain that sort of zeros them out and keep them silent and taking the psychedelics lets them flow free, so maybe that’s at least analogous to this drug-free version where we learn to let our subconscious thoughts flow a little bit more freely.
1:15:30.5 MR: Yeah, no, I think that… First of all, you are totally allowed to be a scientist because that’s who you are [laughter], in addition to being a philosopher and just a renaissance man. But yeah, that makes perfect sense. It’s precisely, I mean, you kinda nailed it, it’s about getting rid of the gatekeeper, or getting around the gatekeeper, neutralizing the gatekeeper somehow, and there was something about the clinical practice of psychoanalysis that at least for me worked, but that’s probably because I had the right kind of neurosis. I am definitely not gonna argue that psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is going to work for everyone, it works for certain types… It can work for certain types of symptomatic behavior, in Freud’s opinion, we were all neurotic in one way or another, and psychoanalysis was not able to reach certain types of neurosis or pathologies like schizophrenia for instance, or a psychotic behavior, but it was very good with hysteria, which most of us are.
1:16:33.4 MR: And so it’s gonna work for certain types of neurosis and take away the rigidified pathways that we talked about earlier, relax the ways in which energy flows in our bodies and in our psyches, and just neutralize that gatekeeper that has been instituted as the moral compass. Of course, we need that in other aspects of our lives, I don’t wanna get a rid of ethics or anything, but we don’t necessarily need it when we’re trying to write a book. So getting rid of that super ego, that would be the psychoanalytic term, getting rid of the super ego gatekeeper is exactly the kind of practical advice, but as to how you do that is a complicated question and it’s idiosyncratic to the person who is trying to…
1:17:33.3 SC: Right.
1:17:33.6 MR: Trying to accomplish that.
1:17:35.4 SC: Okay, good. I have two other topics that I just wanted to touch on, I was gonna say briefly, but it might not be brief, we don’t need to be brief, the air-time is more or less free because they’re big topics. One is, you’ve written a lot and thought a lot about mourning… Mourning with a U in it, the sense of being sad when something bad happens, and so a lot of what we’ve been talking about is sort of implicitly individualistic, like I’m working on my own shit, I can say shit now, ’cause you already said fuck, so…
[laughter]
1:18:05.8 SC: But then the external world imposes on us also… Like bad things happen, people we love and care about die or whatever, disasters happen. How does this view of our inner mental landscape help us think about those or even cope with those incidents in our lives?
1:18:24.9 MR: Okay, so that’s really a great question. I will talk on two different levels. So I said earlier that in my understanding, there are two different levels of lack or wounding or traumatization, the first being the ontological, and I kind of hesitate to call it traumatizing because I mean, if it’s the human condition, I’m not sure that we should call it trauma, but a lot of people in my field do, because it’s likely this idea that you have somehow been injured or wounded or something in you has been murdered by the signifier. ŽIžek… Slavoj ŽIžek, who has popularized Lacan, often talks about the murder of the thing, and by the thing, he means something… Almost biological… That’s a complicated concept that I can certainly talk about, but we don’t need to, but… Okay, so talking on the ontological level.
1:19:24.7 MR: When you think about the idea that there is this lack, being a void, then the conclusion, which someone like Julia Kristeva explains really beautifully is that actually to be a human being is to be a being who mourns. We are always already mourning something. We’re mourning this loss that has happened to us at a time that we can’t recall. Your right, there’s no way of actually going back to that time when this loss supposedly happened, but the idea is that we on some level mourn it all the time. And so Kristeva has described, where she says something like, “Do not look for the meaning in mourning, understand that there’s only meaning because we mourn.” So she’s making the point that we’re only able to make meaning, we are meaning making creatures because we do have this lack that we are morning and we will make meaning in order to try to fill that lack. So that’s one level, but then your question was more targeted to the other level, the second level, what I earlier called context-specific circumstantial when something really horrible happens to you.
1:20:42.6 MR: And Freud already had a very famous essay called Mourning and Melancholia, where he distinguished between what he called normal mourning like if someone dies or your lover leaves you or something bad happens to you. Of course, you’re gonna be sad, potentially for a long time, you could mourn let’s say the loss of your partner, your lover, you could mourn that loss for years, potentially, but then the idea is that under normal circumstances, eventually you will get to a point where you’re able to redirect your desire to a new person, you’re able to fall in love again and find a new relationship.
1:21:28.5 MR: But then with melancholia, which he juxtaposed to mourning, the idea is that you get stuck in your state of mourning, you’re stuck there kinda indefinitely, so it’s kind of mourning that doesn’t come to an end. And so he thought that that was the more pathological of the two. At the same time, as he kinda also said, people who are depressed, I think that the contemporary term for melancholia would be the kind of depression that doesn’t have a clear cause. We can be depressed because of a specific reason, or we can be vaguely depressed for no clear reason. So when he talks about melancholia, I think he’s talking about that type of depression. And so the idea is that you can get stuck in that type of depression that doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t leave.
1:22:21.4 MR: And so then the idea is the psychoanalytic, again, clinical idea is that when a patient comes in with that type of paralysis of mourning where you’re not able to move from your loss, the idea is to get you from a place of melancholic depression to a certain type of movement that would allow you to start the process of mourning that loss that you have experienced, and then over time come to a place where you can actually start doing something with your life so that you’re no longer stuck in that what Kristeva calls the crypt of melancholia so that you can actually get away from that trap of depression, but…
1:23:08.0 MR: And cognitive behavioral therapy, I know is one way in which people are dealing with this, obviously drugs, antidepressants is the go-to version of how to deal with this kind of depression in North America, and that’s fine. I’m not opposed to medication at all, but psychoanalysis is the other way to deal with it, it’s just a much slower way of getting there, but the idea is you go in as someone who can’t complete the process of mourning and hopefully through analysis, you come to a place where you can kind of start at the process and eventually come to an end that allows you to then live your life more freely.
1:23:56.5 SC: And maybe part of it is just the realization that if something terrible has happened to you, the sort of immediate instinctive reaction that it’s all terrible, life is worthless, I can’t go on living this one thing that was making me go is no longer there, and moving from that sort of perspective to that, “Well, I have a reaction to what happened that is that, and there’s reasons why I’m having that reaction and it’s a feature of who I am, and so let’s see about how I can adjust things to sort of deal with it in a more productive way.” Is that close?
1:24:34.6 MR: Yeah, and I think that at the gist of it is this idea that Freud called it reality testing. So when you’re in a state of melancholia or this kind of depression that doesn’t go away, you basically don’t want to acknowledge the fact that this loss has happened to you, so you kinda keep testing reality, and your test is not very accurate in the sense that it gives you back this sense that somehow you’re still linked to whatever it is that you have lost, so you often… Let’s say you’re talking about someone you loved whom you have lost, you may fantasize that person into existence, you might actually hallucinate them, see them on the street, imagine that you see them when you see someone who vaguely resembles them or something like that.
1:25:30.0 MR: But the idea is that gradually you keep testing reality. And bit by bit, reality tells you that this loss is real and that you have to deal with it. And mourning is a process of decathecting yourself from that object or that person. Cathexis is just a fancy term for being bonded to something and, or being invested in something. And so psychoanalytically when you are mourning, you’re gradually decathecting yourself from whatever it is that you have lost. And the successful process of mourning ideally gets you to a place where you can reinvest yourself, your energy, your psyche, on to a new person or a new object, or a new interest, new ideals, even a new country, whatever it is. So yeah, a gradual kind of decathecting, so that you can recathect.
[chuckle]
1:26:34.8 SC: I can see why this is gonna take a long time, the psychoanalytic version of fixing it. But it might be the healthiest way to really reorient… I guess, now I’m just way out of my depth, I’m gonna get in trouble talking about things I know nothing about, but I also am completely open to using medication when things go wrong, if it’s very, very helpful. And for some people, it’s just there’s no other way, or there’s something wrong in their balance of endorphins or whatever it is. But like we said before, even the singularity of the individual is not set in stone, it can change. And if you can sort of reorient who you are in a way to be more accepting and dealing with these terrible tragedies, that might be a more long-lasting robust way to cope with them.
1:27:29.0 MR: Yeah, that’s definitely the idea.
1:27:30.2 SC: Yeah, the idea.
1:27:32.4 MR: Again, so, I also I am not opposed to medication, and I do think that there are certain circumstances where people absolutely need medication, but the idea is that analysis, again, can get you to a point where for the rest of your life, you have the necessary skill set to deal with any subsequent tragedy or loss or whatever bad things happen to you. So that if you figure out how to deal with it once, you in some ways possess the toolbox for doing it again when something new happens to you. It doesn’t always work, in some instances, a new traumatizing experience can only deepen the wounds that you have from previous experiences, but I know from my own experience that having been traumatized and having figured out how to overcome that trauma can help you deal with new traumatization.
1:28:36.5 MR: And I’ve made this argument strongly in my writing, like a popular cultural understanding of traumatization, there’s often this idea that the traumatized person is very brittle or fragile and can be very easily re-traumatised. And I always argue that that’s not necessarily the case, that in fact the people who have been very traumatized at various points in their lives, often possess the right tools for dealing with new trauma so that they’re actually more agile and more kind of capable of coping with new forms of traumatization.
1:29:14.1 MR: And ideally psychoanalysis would give you those tools, and I’ll just very quickly cite a non-Lacanian psychoanalytic theoretician from U Chicago, Jonathan Lear, who conceptualizes this as a kind of a… The kind of rewiring of your whole system, kind of rebooting of your whole system that will kind of redefine your entire destiny. If you think about breaking the repetition compulsion, like really getting down to the level of the unconscious and creating your habitual way of dealing with things when they happen to you, you’re really talking about reconfiguring your entire destiny. Not in the sense that you are in control of everything that happens to you but, you reconfigure how you respond to what happens to you, and in so doing, you reconfigure the rest of your life. So yeah, that’s one way to think about it that I have found useful.
1:30:16.0 SC: I said we had two topics left and I was going to do the sadder one first, the more melancholy one, which was mourning, and then we’re going to move on to love, which would be the happier one, but now I’m not so sure that love is going to be the happier one. But let’s do it anyway. [laughter] Have we solved love? Plato told us this very fake story about each one of us having a soulmate and we have to find them, and then once we do, we’ll be eternally happy. That seems very different than most people’s experience. So what do we learn about love? And even you can say like, not love of art or anything like that, but love of another person. What is the insight we get from that?
1:31:00.2 MR: Okay. There’s so much that I could say about that, and I will try to keep this brief. But I feel like I should have somehow… I should have just led with this because this is, as I said, how I hook my students. So they’re bad news and good news. I think Lacan had a very complicated understanding of romantic love specifically, and that’s the kind of love I’m gonna be talking about. And there are post-Lacanian thinkers who are very famous like ŽIžek and Alain Badiou and Todd McGowan who have written a lot about love from a Lacanian perspective. And so I’ll give you the bad news first… [laughter]
1:31:44.8 MR: So the idea is that before that wounding that happens, and here we again, in the realm of mythology, the idea is that before the wounding that happens to you as a result of language acquisition, you are a kind of symbiotically, a one being with this thing that Lacan called the Thing with the capital T, he took it from German das Ding, and you can think all the way back to Kant, the thing in itself, and the Lacanian version of the Thing actually has direct resonance, is with the Kantian thing in itself, and the Heideggerian thing also.
1:32:29.8 MR: Something like fundamentally anthology, but also something that has to do with sublimity in the Kantian sense, like the sublime thing, but in this case, the sublime thing is within your being, so what’s supposedly… Then this is completely hypothetical and completely mythological, but the idea is that what happens to you is that you lose contact with this thing, and then the thing that you are… Oh that is… It’s the thing and the thing, the thing and the thing. The thing that you’re looking for for the rest of your life, the object of your desire, the Objet A, is a piece of this Thing with the capital T, and Lacan didn’t really have great things to say about this because he basically said, “This is the narcissistic scenario where you’re just looking for the piece of yourself that you fantasized that you have lost.”
1:33:26.6 MR: I left out a really big point earlier, which was that he did not think that we actually ever lost anything. When he talks about that lack that we feel, he’s very clear about the fact that we haven’t actually lost anything in reality, that is a fantasy that we retroactively create about supposedly having lost something really precious. So he’s saying okay, so when you fall in love, in this way where you’re looking for the little piece of the thing that you think that you have lost, then basically you’re just trying to fill your life in a narcissistic sense, you’re just looking for a reflection of yourself so that you can feel whole again, so he was just like no, no, no, that’s not how we should think about love but then he had this other version which contemporary theorists have distinguished from what I just talked about, they have called…
1:34:22.8 MR: What I just talked about romance, like what we understand when we don’t think about romance in the conventional sense and again, like Lacan, they think that that’s a bad kind of a narcissistic endeavour that doesn’t really get you anywhere. Ultimately you’re going to be disappointed, your partner’s gonna let you down because [laughter] of course, they’re never gonna be able to be that mirror for you for the rest of your life, you’re with a person for a year and suddenly there’s a little crack in that mirror and you start questioning that relationship and eventually you’ll fall out of love because it was never based on anything that had to do with the person, the other person, it had to do with your desire to fill your lack, so bad, bad, bad. But then the good version of love is a link to what I have characterized as jouissance, this semi-unconscious energy that is coursing through our being, and Lacan had this idea that when you come across a person who is able to activate your desire on that level, on a level that is deeper than your narcissistic quest for self-fulfillment then there’s something “real” or… Real is not a Lacanian concept too, I will rephrase.
1:35:49.2 MR: There’s something “truthful” about that desire, and one way to understand that is that, and Todd McGowan is great at explaining this, one way to understand this is that you are basically falling in love with whatever it is that the other is lacking, other ways in which the other feels dislocated or distorted, or alienated, or lacking, or not enough, or whatever, the wounded or injured or whatever, you’re basically connecting through the injury in the other, and there’s something within the Lacanian theoretical world at least, there’s something about that type of love that actually is like the real thing, but Badiou, Alain Badiou, who’s a contemporary French philosopher, theorises the so-called love event, he talks about falling in love in this particular way as an event that completely reconfigures your life so that there’s no way for you to go back to living your life the way that you used to live before you met the person that derailed you.
1:37:00.9 SC: And it’s very much a derailing kind of a moment, it’s not a happy-go-lucky kind of like oh yeah, I really like this person type of an experience, it’s like a completely derailing lightning… The lightning strikes you type of experience, and it can actually be traumatizing in some ways, but once it happens, there’s no coming back from that experience and that that person is gonna have a certain hold on you potentially for a very long time, which also means that they have the immense capacity to hurt you, if they decide to leave you or otherwise wound you. If you’re like, if you’re cathectic, bonded on that very deep level, then someone can really destroy you.
1:37:48.9 SC: And you have to be open to that happening.
1:37:51.8 MR: Yeah, so ideally if you wanna have “True or real love,” you would have to be completely open to this happening. If you are afraid of getting hurt, you can’t get the good part, so yeah. It’s a difficult dilemma for many people, which is why a lot of people stay on the level of safe romance that has been sort of socially almost pre-programmed for them. Like you know what to do, you go on a date and then you buy a certain kind of gift and then you do this and then you do that, and it’s kind of a safe model of love, and eventually, after a year and a half, you get married or at least engaged or whatever, and that’s very different from allowing yourself to be derailed by this encounter with otherness, in the sense that you can never access the interiority of another person completely, you’ll never know exactly what it is that you’re dealing with. Like yourself, the other is always in a process of evolving and mutating and becoming a different person, so you also have to keep up with who they are becoming at the same time as you are becoming something else, so it’s very complicated and not necessarily at all reassuring.
1:39:12.1 SC: I just wanna get on the record here that I’m very fond of my narcissist quest for self-fulfillment, and I don’t want you bad mouthing that, this is an important part of my life. But the other thing was… We’re going… That was just a joke. The thing that fits in very well with my experience is, I know people who have… And it’s even possible I’ve done this myself but papered over the memory of it, people who’ve failed in romance because they were too rigid in what was supposed to happen at what moment in time, like this thing we’re doing is supposed to happen on the third date, not on the fourth date, or whatever it is, and that’s clearly not the very healthy way to go about it. When we were emailing back and forth to get ready for this, you made the crack that Lacanian’s think of romance as just a capitalist plot in some way, it’s not getting at the essence of love. Right?
1:40:08.2 MR: Exactly. So again, Todd McGowan theorizes this beautifully because he’s very interested in capitalism, he has a whole chapter on love in his book, Capitalism and Desire, which is a recent book, highly accessible to non-specialists. I recommend it. But yeah, he argues very convincingly that in our culture, we have this notion of romantic love that follows very particular types of steps that are linked to capitalistic modes of generating profit. So it’s premised on things like fancy dinners and nice gifts and Valentine’s Day, bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolate, and eventually like a fancy engagement ring and then the wedding dress that costs thousands of dollars, and then the fancy wedding and all of that, and he’s just basically saying, “Yeah, this is like how capitalism has co-opted love and real love has nothing to do with this.”
1:41:18.8 MR: Real love is something that would completely derail you and would kind of… I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with having a wonderful, beautiful wedding like you had, but the idea would be that you will not necessarily need that in order to feel that the love that you have for another person is real and genuine and enduring and all of those things. So yeah, it would be a derailing experience rather than this kind of, “Let’s follow the steps” kind of thing. And for a lot of people, it can be very difficult to get away from the step type of thinking, in so far as they have been socialized into a specific way of being a person, and of course, the whole point of Lacanian thinking is to destroy how society has taught you to be a person and be open to other ways of experiencing life and love and relationships. And yourself and your lack and all of that.
1:42:17.1 SC: So if I were to try to dramatically over-simplify what you said, so you can tell me how wrong this is, but the message I’m getting is that there is a sort of mistaken or doomed way of thinking about love in this kind of platonic sense, where you have a lack. So you find someone who fills the lack, and there’s this more rewarding version of love where we both have lacks, but our lacks are complementary and work together, let’s find… The successful couple is the one who lack together.
1:42:48.8 MR: That’s a really good way of putting it, absolutely. Yeah, so even though I have… Throughout this podcast, I have valorized this notion of lack in some ways, I wanna be very clear about the fact that Lacan was very, very critical of the idea that you can use another person to sort of pluck your lack and make yourself whole he was not happy with that idea and tried to get his patience away from that, from that way of thinking, and also, as part of doing that… And this is why also another reason he’s not very popular with American clinicians, he wanted to destroy your ego, that’s a long story, but he did not like the ego, so he wanted to get away from narcissistic ways of being in the world. And I understand your defense of narcissism, I think that all of us need some of it.
1:43:39.7 MR: I certainly I’m pro-narcissism in the sense that I feel like I started my life in a place where my narcissistic understanding of myself had been completely destroyed, and then I had to rebuild it from scratch, so I’m in the camp of the people who believe that we all need a certain… A healthy degree of narcissism, but Lacan hated narcissism, so he was not keen on the idea that you use another person to fill your lack, but you’re absolutely right about the complementarity of two different singular lacks, and this is why… One reason our genuine desire is so idiosyncratic and so specific that only very few people in the world can truly fulfill our desire. In one of my books, I say something like, “When I walk into the subway car, say in Boston, the really crowded subway car. There’s rarely anyone I wanna sleep with. [chuckle] It’s hard to find a person. I really wanna sleep with. I mean I can go through thousands of people and not wanna sleep with any of them, and then one person comes along and suddenly it’s like, “Oh yeah, this person, this person will do.”
1:44:50.5 SC: They work, yeah.
1:44:51.5 MR: Yeah, there’s something… Yeah, there’s something, some complimentary, something going on and I don’t understand it myself. It’s enigmatic, and Lacan very much emphasized the fact that this Objet A, the cause of your desire is very enigmatic, you don’t necessarily know what it is in the other person that is calling upon you, or is like summoning you to do this relationship, but there is some there, it’s just that you don’t know what it is, and if you allow yourself to follow the thread of that, you might get to something that would be very genuine and very derailing and difficult, but also very genuine and growth-inducing.
1:45:30.1 SC: I always like to end the podcast on an optimistic note, and despite all expectations, I think we reached it right there, something genuine and growth-inducing and dealing with our dis-equilibria in various productive ways. So Mari Ruti, thanks so much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.
1:45:48.0 MR: Thank you Sean Carroll, [laughter] my good friend, thank you so much. This has been fun.
1:45:53.7 SC: My pleasure.
[music][/accordion-item][/accordion]
why she is so nervous hahaha, anyway that was very nice to hear both of you guys.
When I saw the topic for this episode I thought maybe Sean had gone off the rails and turned to the psudoscience dark side but I was pleasantly surprised to learn about Lachanian theory. I’m always inspired by how modern thinkers keep trying to repackage the wisdom of the ancient sages and end up with fragments that just confuse people.
Dr. Ruhti mentioned that Lacan was influenced by ancient Eastern philosophy and the parallels with Theravada Budhism are evident. His notion of “the lack” is what Goetma (Buddha) described as “suffering” although the Pali word is actually more nuanced. It everything that you want that you don’t get and everything that you get that you don’t want. It includes awareness of death. Goetma was the original quantum physicist because he identified the central characteristic of existence that leads to suffering as “impermanence” i.e. everything constantly changing. QM ultimately boils down to energy (everything) being proportional to frequency (constant change). If Goetma had known about differential equations and Hilbert spaces he would have found the wave equation before Shrodinger.
Before Buddhism was turned into a religion by the Brahmanist priests of the day it was atheistic and nihilistic. The priests understood this wouldn’t market very well so they added the notion of “karma” which meant even your death would not end your suffering since you would only be reborn again with a backlog of suffering from your previous life. This was not part of the original teaching but borrowed from Hindu philosophy which was much more popular at the time.
What Goetma offered that Lacan didn’t was a “cure” for suffering. Everything we experience from birth is processed as sensations or “feelings” as Massimo Pigliucci calls it. These sensations reinforce our learned positive and negative responses to the external world like good little Markov blankets and “condition” our autopilot behavior in ways that can add or subtract from our suffering. What makes humans different from animals is that, with meditation practice, we can learn to free ourselves from our autopilot reactions and respond to the external world with equanimity. Goetma called this “liberation” which unforturnately was hyped by the priesthood into the mysterious and unattainable “nirvana”. It helped them set up the Buddhist temples where they could do “serious” meditation while the rest of the surrounding community went about their lives of suffering and provided them free meals.
One additional point. Goetma was clear that reading books or listening to lectures on Lachanian theory could inform and inspire a person but that is only someone else’s truth, not your own. To find the cure for “the lack” you must recondition the neural network of your mind to not react to sensory input mindlessly. The frontal cortex can be trained to veto the source of suffering but it takes daily exercise to decondition the reinforcement of a lifetime. This also parallels much of Stoic philosophy as advocated by Pigliucci but the Greeks missed the part about finding the cure through meditation and just thought you had to tough it out.
Thank you so much for this discussion, it was brilliant.
I like the idea expressed that ‘true love’ isn’t based on a narcissistic need to find someone to compensate for the realization at an early age that the world doesn’t revolve around us. But is, or at least should be, based on a deep affection for another person, and a desire to make that person happy, and hopefully that person feels the same about you. I believe it’s those kind of relationships that stand the test of time, and are able to overcome hardships and disappointments, and to overlook much of the minor imperfections we all posses.
Obviously Mari Ruti isn’t narcissistic or vain (or maybe she just has a good sense of humor); Wikipedia list her date of birth as 1900, which would make her 121 years old. How many of us would let that one slip by?
Why is it that some people who seem to have everything, health, money, popularity, successful careers, etc. claim they are not happy, and nothing seems to bring them lasting pleasure or satisfaction? While others who seem to have so little are able to endure disappointments, hardships and have more or less made peace with the world, and find pleasure and happiness in the simple things in life? Does the answer lie in our genes, the environment we’re raised in, … , or is this one of those unanswerable questions?
I enjoyed this!
What do they mean by “singularity of being”? Is there something divergent, or is it just some figure of speech for “self”?
I too enjoyed the discussion. In my twenties I read the entire works of Carl Jung and clung on to him through university as a Social Science graduate, having spent part of my life in Toronto also, and being familiar with all the output on all sides up to about 2010. It was nice to have someone bring these disparate fields together with such energy and the accent was astounding!
My least favorite Mindscape yet.
Sean carroll checked his standard critical stance at the door. Quantum Loop gets a tougher scrubbing. There are so many poorly formulated theses here – he barely pushed back on our “original entrance into the symbolic order” or something like that, as children which initiates this lack, and somehow informs our entire lives – that it’s hard to even know where to begin to “test” this account of our psychological make-up. But then we are told that it is not a scientific theory, just a theory. But it is trying to explain phenomena and tell us what causes them, so what is that? A story? A myth? I’m all for pluralism and being open minded, but none of these issues were pressed. Could it be because, as was revealed, they are friends? This was a disappointing episode. I was left wondering what the point of psychoanalysis of this sort is. I guess to cope, which means to learn to live with lack…. yay! There are many, many other strategies for how to cope with living in the modern world. The guest even acknowledges that Cognitive Behavioral therapy is likely more effective… and medication… so what’s the point? Joissance? Meanwhile, the world is in crisis… Come on Sean Carroll, you can do better.
Episódio interessante!
Alguns pontos do mesmo, que discordo.
Gostei especialmente do desenvolvimento, sobre o luto.
Obrigada
When Freud was first formulating his theory, dealing with ‘hysterical’ mature wealthy women, he kept coming up with the ‘fantasy’ of dads being sexual with them. He writes in his notes, that it was so common, clearly it was just a fantasy. Karen Horney, a generation younger than Freud, (she deserves a fresh contemporary read), was the one to point that out.
We now know the prevalence of insect and child sexual buse, across all class and social structures. I find a lot of contemporary critics spend enormous energy to make sure psychoanalysis is completely dad and irrelevant. A fun read, of psychodynamic therapy, is Nancy McWilliams’ “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis” 1994. A hundred thousand Lacanians in Europe.
Compare that to a set of exactly three 20 or 50 minute session STSF (Short Term Solution Focused) therapy available in your public school in the US, and allowed by your insurance. In the US, a large majority of therapists are completely untrained and not analyzed themselves, to take you for a half year, or two years, that people that need it. Scientists, rationalists, are the most skeptical of all, as they may have private lives that are completely miserable or addictive or depressed or cruel.
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