Jacques Lacan Pt. 6
Starting with the mirror phase, Lacan begin exploring images and how they eventually formed the realm of The Imaginary.
Psychical Causality
With the foundational understanding of the mirror stage, and its imaginary stability against fragmentation, Jacques Lacan had to come up with his own theory of the psychogenesis of mental illness against, "...a doctrine of mental problems that I consider incomplete and false, a doctrine which, in psychiatry, is known as 'organicism.'" The prevailing view was that the cause of mental illness was due to a constitutional degeneration, and an organic process, but after Freud, as true as organic causes could be in some situations, biology couldn't explain the internal meanings found in the ramblings of the mad. With a cause and effect mentality, there can be a bit of a trap where personal meaning is stripped down to a soulless mechanical explanation that, "...always rests in the final analysis on molecular interaction of the part-by-part, material-substance type that classical physics is based on—that is, in a way which allows one to express this interaction as a relation between function and variable, this relation constituting its determinism."
The problem with an overly deterministic viewpoint, unless there are massive breakthroughs in understanding biology, the mechanistic interpretation, "...does not allow us to essentially distinguish aphasia from dementia, functional pain from hypochondria, hallucinosis from hallucinations, or even certain forms of agnosia (inability to recognize objects with the senses) from certain delusions...Henri Ey posits that 'integration is being.' Hence he must include in this integration not only the psychical realm, but the entire movement of the mind; he in fact incorporates everything down to existential problems into it, running the gamut from syntheses to structures and from forms to phenomena...What I read next is that, projected into a still more mental reality, the world of ideal values—that are no longer integrated, but infinitely integrating—is constituted: beliefs, ideals, vital programs, and the values of logical judgment and moral conscience. I see quite clearly here that there are, indeed, beliefs and ideals that become linked in the same psyche to vital programs, which are just as repugnant to logical judgment as they are to moral conscience, in order to produce a fascist, or more simply an imbecile or a rascal. I conclude that the integrated form of these ideals implies no psychical culmination for them and that their integrating action bears no relation to their value—and thus that there must be a mistake here too...The use of speech requires far more vigilance in human science than anywhere else, because speech engages the very being of its object there. Every uncertain attitude toward truth inevitably ends up diverting our terms from their meaning and such abuse is never innocent."
In contradistinction from Lacan's competitors, psychoanalysis had to focus from the inside out, which was phenomenology and the detailed experiences of patients, to delineate between symptoms and disorders of fragmentation. For Lacan, "...the support that thought's symbolism finds in visual perception, and that I will call, following Husserl, a foundational relationship." Quoting Descartes, Lacan introduces basic phenomenology, and how the experience of madness differs from sanity and how the content of those experiences provide more diagnostic relevance.
"But on what grounds could one deny that these hands and this entire body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to the insane, whose brains are impaired by such an unrelenting vapor of black bile that they steadfastly insist that they are kings when they are utter paupers, or that they are arrayed in purple robes when they are naked, or that they have heads made of clay, or that they are gourds, or that they are made of glass. But such people are mad, and I would appear no less mad, were I to take their behavior as an example for myself."
Being able, even in madness, to communicate an experience presumes a form of recognition of an experience. "What then is (the phenomenon of) delusional belief? I say that it is misrecognition, with everything this term brings with it by way of an essential [contradiction]. For to misrecognize presupposes recognition, as is seen in systematic misrecognition, in which case we must certainly admit that what is denied is in some way recognized...It seems clear to me that the subject does not recognize his productions as his own when he has ideas of influence or feels that an automatism is at work. This is why we all agree that a madman is a madman. But isn't the remarkable thing, rather, that he should know anything about them at all? And isn't the point to figure out what he knows about himself here without recognizing himself in it? Madness is experienced entirely within the register of meaning."
Meaning also infers emotions, such as passion and fear, that register some content as having meaning for the patient. What patients are responding to may not to conform to reality. "Indeed, no linguist or philosopher could any longer defend a theory of language as a system of signs that would double the system of realities, realities defined by the common assent of healthy minds in healthy bodies...The whole history of philosophy is inscribed in this question, from Plato's aporias of essence to Pascal's abysses of existence, and onto the radical ambiguity Heidegger points to in it, insofar as truth signifies revelation...This is why, in an anthropology that takes the register of culture in man to include, as is fitting, the register of nature, one could concretely define psychology, as opposed to 'good sense,' as the domain of nonsense, in other words, of everything that forms a knot in discourse—as is clearly indicated by the 'words' of passion."
Diagnostics improve when one embraces the "phenomenology of madness...Let us follow this path in order to study the significations of madness, as we are certainly invited to by the original forms that language takes on in it: all the verbal allusions, cabalistic relationships, homonymic play, and puns that captivated the likes of Paul Guiraud. And, I might add, by the singular accent whose resonance we must know how to hear in a word so as to detect a delusion; the transfiguration of a term in an ineffable intention; the fixation of an idea in a [word root] (which tends to degenerate into a sign here specifically); the lexical hybrids that create new words; the verbal cancer constituted by neologisms; the bogging down of syntax; the duplicity of enunciation; but also the coherence that amounts to a logic, the characteristic, running from the unity of a style to repetitive terms, that marks each form of delusion—the madman communicates with us through all of this, whether in speech or writing...But the psychoanalyst, in order not to detach analytic experience from the language of the situation that it implies, the situation of the interlocutor, comes upon the simple fact that language, prior to signifying something, signifies to someone. It is simply because the analyst is there listening that the man who speaks addresses him, and since he forces his discourse not to want to say anything, he becomes what this man wants to tell him. What the man says may, in fact, 'have no meaning,' but what he says to the analyst conceals [a hidden meaning] anyway. It is in the impulse to respond that the listener senses this; and it is by suspending this impulse to respond that the analyst understands the meaning of the discourse. He then recognizes in it an intention, one of the intentions that represent a certain tension in social relations: a demanding intention, a punitive intention, an appeasing intention, a demonstrative intention, or a purely aggressive intention. Having thus understood this intention, let us observe how language transmits it. It does so in two ways about which analysis teaches us a great deal: it is expressed, but not understood by the subject, in what his discourse relates about his lived experience, and this is true as long as the subject assumes the moral anonymity of expression (this is the form of symbolism); it is conceptualized, but denied by the subject, in what his discourse asserts about his lived experience, and this is true as long as the subject systematizes his conception (this is the form of negation). In analytic experience, intention thus turns out to be unconscious insofar as it is expressed and conscious insofar as it is repressed. And language, being approached via its function of social expression, reveals both its significant unity in intention and its [deliberate use of ambiguous language] as subjective expression, admitting something that contradicts thought or using thought to lie."
Sooner or later, the repressed has to come up as the material begins to pile up, and contradictions are solved. "In this discourse, he formulates what he suffers from and what he wants to overcome through his analysis, he confides his secret failures and his successful designs, he judges his own character and his relations with other people. He thus informs the analyst about the entirety of his behavior, and the analyst, who witnesses a moment of that behavior, finds in it a basis for its critique. After such a critique, this behavior shows the analyst that the very image that he sees emerge from the subject's current behavior is actually involved in all of his behavior. But the analyst's discoveries do not stop there, for as the subject's demands take the form of pleas, his testimony broadens through its appeals to the witness. These are pure narratives that appear 'outside the subject' that the subject now throws into the stream of his discourse: unintended events and fragments of the memories that constitute his history, and, among the most disjointed, those that surface from his childhood. But we see that among these, the analyst stumbles anew upon the very image that, by playing the game as he does, he has awakened in the subject, the trace of which he found impressed upon himself by the subject. He certainly knew that this image was of human essence, since it provokes passion and oppresses, but it hid its characteristics from his gaze, like he himself does from the patient's. He discovers these characteristics in a family portrait that includes the image of the father or of the mother, of the all-powerful adult—tender or terrible, kindly or punishing—the image of a brother, a rival sibling, a reflection of the subject himself or of one of his companions. But the very image that the subject makes present through his behavior, and that is constantly reproduced in it, is ignored by him, in both senses of the word: he does not know that this image explains what he repeats in his behavior, whether he considers it to be his own or not; and he refuses to realize the importance of this image when he evokes the memory it represents. In effect, the analyst then acts in such a way that the subject becomes aware of the unity of the image that is refracted in him into disparate effects, depending on whether he plays it out, incarnates it, or knows it. [The analyst] operates on the two registers of intellectual elucidation through interpretation and handling affect through the transference. But to establish the times at which he does so is a matter for technique, which defines them as a function of the subject's reactions; adjusting the speed at which he does so is a matter of tact, thanks to which the analyst is informed about the rhythm of these reactions."
The different delusions have one similarity in that "...one can say that the madman believes he is different than he is." This false identification is upheld by the passionate clinging to those particular imagoes, the misrecognition that an image is one's own being, with the mistake meaning that volatile emotions become tied up with the illusion. We need the ego to function in the world, but the illusion is that the complete image can be made wholly satisfying in reality. This is an over-identification, or méconnaissance (misrecognition). "The turning point here lies in the [third party] mediacy or immediacy of the identification and, to be quite explicit, in the subject's infatuation." That infatuation, or emotional attachment, resists reality and tries to superimpose notions onto it for a variety reasons, though mainly to provide comfort, but this comfort masks his true being. It's that alienation, the complex of intrusion, or mental noise that decouples one from reality. That decoupling is dangerous because instead of coming back to reality, the subject violently forces reality to confirm his virtuality. "This misrecognition can be seen in the revolt through which the madman seeks to impose the law of his heart onto what seems to him to be the mess of the world. This is a "senseless" enterprise—but not because it suggests a failure to adapt to life, which is the kind of thing people often say in our circles, whereas the slightest reflection on our experience proves the dishonorable foolishness of such a viewpoint. It is a senseless enterprise, rather, in that the subject does not recognize in this mess the very manifestation of his actual being, or that what he experiences as the law of his heart is but the inverted and virtual image of that same being. He thus doubly misrecognizes it, precisely so as to split its actuality from its virtuality. Now, he can escape this actuality only via this virtuality. His being is thus caught in a circle, unless he breaks it through some form of violence by which, in lashing out at what he takes to be the mess of the world, he ends up harming himself because of the social repercussions of his actions."
This virtual escape into a supposed "psychological liberty" must be to a place that seems better than reality, so for Lacan, the ego-ideal is implicated for the stagnation of the subject, when they hold onto what does not conform to reality, as perfect ideals do not, in the actual details where an ideal does not match reality. "Such is the general formula for madness found in Hegel—for do not imagine that I am innovating, even though I felt it necessary to present it to you in an illustrated form. I say 'general formula for madness' in the sense that it can be seen to apply specifically to any one of those phases through which the dialectical development of the human being is more or less accomplished in every destiny, and in which it is always realized as a stasis of being within an ideal identification that characterizes that particular point of a destiny...This identification, the unmediated and 'infatuated' nature of which I tried to convey a moment ago, turns out to be the relation of being to the very best in it, since this ideal represents in him his liberty."
Imitations here connect with Lacan's semblable in how the behavior mimics others and then points to imagoes connected with them, but these behaviors go beyond imitation, because developmental habit-forms move through introjection, incorporation and then to identification. "Indeed, man has relations with nature that are specified, on the one hand, by the properties of identificatory thought, and on the other hand, by the use of instruments or artificial tools. His relations with his semblable proceed along pathways that are far more direct: I am not designating language here, or the elementary social institutions that are marked with artificiality in their structure, regardless of their genesis. I am thinking, rather, of emotional communication, which is essential to social groups and manifests itself immediately enough in the fact that man exploits his semblable, recognizes himself in this semblable, and is attached to this semblable by the indelible psychical link that perpetuates the truly specific vital misery of his first years of life...I mean to evoke more immediate, global, and adapted forms that characterize, on the whole, animals' psychical relations with their natural environment and by which such psychical relations are distinguished from psychical relations in man...[Freud] demonstrated this function in discovering through analytic experience the process of identification. [This] is quite different from the process of imitation, which is distinguished by its partial and groping form of approximation; identification contrasts with imitation not simply as the global assimilation of a structure but as the virtual assimilation of development implied by that structure in a still undifferentiated state."
Children have less of a filter so their incorporations of the parents have a long lasting effect that can appear under the radar for an adult that becomes more independent of social influence. "This is why a man's character can include an identification with a parental feature that disappeared before the time of his earliest memories. What is transmitted by the psychical pathway are traits that give the individual the particular form of his human relations, in other words, his personality. The result of this process is that man's individual behavior bears the mark of a certain number of typical psychical relations in which a certain social structure is expressed, at the very least the constellation within that structure that especially dominates the first years of his childhood...These fundamental psychical relations have been revealed in analytic experience and defined by analytic theory with the term 'complexes.' It is through the pathway of the complex that the images that inform the broadest units of behavior are instated in the psyche, images with which the subject identifies one after the other in order to act out, as sole actor, the drama of their conflicts."
The libido, or craving is accepted by Lacan as casting a wide net beyond mere sexuality, but love, interest, and attachment, which in this case, is to images. "It is the metabolism of the sexual function in man that Freud designates as the basis of the infinitely varied 'sublimations' manifested in behavior...As an energetic concept, libido is merely the symbolic notation for the equivalence between the dynamisms invested by images in behavior. It is the very condition of symbolic identification and the essential entity of the rational order, without which no science could be constituted. With this notation, the efficacy of images—although it cannot yet be tied to a unit of measurement, but is already provided with a positive or negative sign—can be expressed through the equilibrium that the images establish and, in some sense, by balancing a pair of scales...The combination, for example, of the notion of [craving attachment] with a structure as concretely defined as that of the 'superego,' represents—regarding both the ideal definition of moral conscience and the functional abstraction of so-called reactions of opposition and imitation—progress that can only be compared to that provided in the physical sciences by the relationship 'weight divided by volume' when it replaced the quantitative categories heavy and light...The elements of a positive determination were thus introduced between psychical realities that a relativistic definition has allowed us to objectify. This determination is dynamic or relative to the facts regarding desire...It was possible in this way to establish a scale for the constitution of man's objects of interest, and especially for those, which are prodigiously diverse, that remain an enigma, if psychology in theory posits reality such as knowledge constitutes it: anomalies of emotion and drive, idiosyncrasies of attraction and repulsion, phobias and panic attacks, nostalgias and irrational wills; personal curiosities, selective collecting, inventions of knowledge, and job vocations...On the other hand, a classification of what one might call the 'imaginary posts' that constitute the personality was defined, posts which are distributed and in which the images mentioned above as informing development—the id, the ego, and the archaic and secondary instances of the superego—are composed according to their types."
Now that these craving attachments to images become constellated in the mind of the developing person, they can trap them into a particular set of complexes based on their upbringing. As those images fail to adhere to reality, a hostility can arise along with a mobilization of effort and resistance. Lacan then restated his views on paranoia as per past episodes, where role models of idealism, the criticism coming from the superego, and the inferences about what ego-ideals one should pursue, they become targets, not because they are necessarily bad, but because they are a real example of success that reminds one that one is not ideal, and then the aggressive urge arises to rid one of the comparison and so "...he attempts to show that it is precisely the bad (object) of his own being that the madman tries to get at in the object he strikes...Thus rather than resulting from a contingent fact—the frailties of his organism—madness is the permanent virtuality of a gap opened up in his essence...A weak organism, a deranged imagination, and conflicts beyond one's capacities do not suffice to cause madness. It may well be that a rock-solid body, powerful identifications, and the indulgence of fate, as written in the stars, lead one more surely to find madness seductive." Lacan returned to Narcissism, not merely as a form of vanity, but as the aggressive structure built into identification. If my identity depends upon an image, then any challenge to that image appears life threatening.
The Imaginary (i)
Much of psychological insights are found through reflection and are always after the fact, but impulses happen before this, or in Latin, they are a priori. The reaction that one has to one's own impulses is already an encounter with the Other and a split in the psyche. "It is well known that Freud identified the ego with the 'perception-consciousness system,' which comprises all of the systems by which an organism is adapted to the 'reality principle.' Yet, the work of M. Merleau-Ponty decisively demonstrates that any sound phenomenology—of perception, for instance—requires us to consider lived experience prior to any objectification, and even prior to any reflection that blends objectification with experience. Let me explain: the slightest visual illusion reveals that it imposes itself upon experience before a part-by-part observation of the figure corrects it—the process through which we objectify the so-called 'real' form. Even after reflection leads us to recognize within this form the a priori category of extension—whose defining property is precisely to present itself part by part—the fact remains that it is the illusion itself that provides the Gestalt action which, in this instance, constitutes the proper object of psychology. This is why no considerations about ego synthesis can excuse us from considering the phenomenon of synthesis in the subject—namely, everything the subject includes under this term, which is not exactly synthetic, nor even exempt from contradiction, as we learned from Montaigne, and learned even better when Freud designated it as the very locus of Negation. The latter is the phenomenon by which the subject reveals one of his impulses in his very denial of it and at the very moment at which he denies it. Let me emphasize that it is not a disavowal of membership that is at stake here, but a formal negation—in other words, a typical phenomenon of misrecognition, and in the inverted form I have stressed. The most common expression of this form, 'Don't think that...,' already points to the profound relationship with the other as such that I will bring out in the ego."
Because commentary is always running, this exploration of reality by the ego always involves some reprimanding by an "other" that makes a judgement over a stray impulse. That ideal is already superimposing a different personality and making one appear different from who one actually is. "Doesn't experience thus show us, upon the slightest inspection, that nothing separates the ego from its ideal forms (as per Freud) and that everything limits it on the side of the being it represents, since almost the entire life of the organism escapes it, not merely insofar as that life is most often ignored, but insofar as the ego need know nothing about it for the most part...By including under this heading one of the fundamental structures of these phenomena, I intended to indicate that, if it is not equivalent, it is at least akin to a form of relation to the world that has a very specific import: the reaction recognized by psychiatrists that has been psychologically generalized with the term 'transitivism,' believing one is someone else. Now, this reaction—which is never completely eliminated from man's world, in its most idealized forms (for example, in relations of rivalry)—first manifests itself as the matrix of the ego's [primal image]."
There's an element of internal rivalry that mirrors rivalry in the world of parent and child, culture and individual. "This reaction significantly dominates the primordial phase in which the child becomes aware of his individuality; his language translates this, as you know, into the third person prior to translating it into the first person. Charlotte Bühler, to mention only her, in observing the behavior of a child with its playmate, has recognized this transitivism in the striking form of a child being truly captured by another child's image."
To make sense of this, one has to realize that an ideal would be difficult to cultivate if one was the only human around with no others to measure our progress and respond to our ideals. There's an inherent desire that our ideals be commented on by others, while at the same time they want us to do the equivalent for them. It's a shaky foundation, because any comment that is negative, especially ones that are maliciously false, motivated by competitiveness, can cause a strong reaction and induce fragmentation on the spot. Then when you have cultures agreeing on what is ideal, and if those objects cannot be shared, a rivalry can easily erupt. It becomes an ego trap. "Man's very desire is constituted, he tells us, under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one's desire recognized. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. This is clear from his earliest needs, in that, for example, his very food must be prepared; and we find this anew in the whole development of his satisfaction, beginning with the conflict between master and slave, through the entire dialectic of labor...This dialectic, which is that of man's very being, must bring about, through a series of crises, the synthesis of his particularity and his universality, going so far as to universalize this very particularity...This means that, in the movement that leads man to an ever more adequate consciousness of himself, his freedom becomes bound up with the development of his servitude."
Once the Oedipus complex provides the vicissitudes that prime the ego for sensitivity, defensive reactions are considered normal consequences that one must follow to their conclusion. The worldview of the family and the culture are introjected into the child and they become a culture-bound limit against individual development, and so is a kind of enslavement via modeling, and habituated to the point of forgetting their original impact. Unless you're very experimental, it's hard to find out what you don't know, when your culture is not experimental enough to introduce you to something novel. "The Oedipus complex turns out, in analytic experience, to be capable not only of provoking, by its atypical impact, all the somatic effects of hysteria, but also of normally constituting the sense of reality...A function of both power and temperament at the same time—an imperative that is not blind but 'categorical'—a person who controls and arbitrates the eager tearing apart and the jealous ambivalence that were the basis for the child's first relations with its mother and its rival sibling: that is what the father represents, and this all the more so, it seems, the more he is 'withdrawn' from the first affective apprehensions...The effects of this appearance are diversely expressed in the doctrine of psychoanalysis, but they most clearly seem to be distorted by the traumatizing incidents where they were first perceived in experience. It seems to me that they can be most generally expressed as follows: The new image makes a world of persons 'coagulate' in the subject; insofar as they represent centers of autonomy, they completely change the structure of reality for him...Returning to my notion of paranoiac knowledge, I tried to conceptualize the network structure, the relations of participation, the aligned perspectives, and the palace of mirages that reign in the limbo regions of the world that the Oedipus complex causes to fade into forgetting."
Lacan bemoaned the use of the term unconscious, because as the mind was scoured for content, all the information became conscious, and then the unconscious appeared more like being unaware, versus something completely submerged into forgetfulness. After reading about Lacan's mirror stage, one is now aware that madness is a possibility internal to the very process by which human beings acquire an ego. That is why he concluded that madness is "the limit of freedom" rather than merely a disease added onto an otherwise complete human nature. "Suffice it to say that my examination of these phenomena led me to complete the catalogue of the structures, symbolism, condensation, and others that Freud had explained as those of the imaginary mode, to use my own terminology. I sincerely hope that people will soon stop using the word 'unconscious' to designate what manifests itself in consciousness."
The ego-ideal points towards narcissism and begins to shine a light on the entire goal orientation apparatus, leading to different symptoms, and in reality, chasing several ego-ideals. "Here we see the fundamental illusion to which man is a slave, much more so than to all the 'passions of the body' in the Cartesian sense: the passion of being a man. It is, I would say, the passion of the soul par excellence, narcissism, that imposes its structure on all his desires, even the loftiest ones." Like in a meditation, when content is emptied out of narcissistic pressures, what is left? "When man, seeking to empty himself of all thoughts, advances in the shadowless gleam of imaginary space, abstaining from even awaiting what will emerge from it, a dull mirror shows him a surface in which nothing is reflected...I think, therefore, that I can designate the imago as the true object of psychology, to the exact same extent that Galileo's notion of the inert mass point served as the foundation of physics." The mind is craving imagoes, imitating imagoes, wanting to be them, from one to the next, or from one Gestalt pattern, found in culture, to the next, leading to repetition and hardened habituation, calcified attachment, because they signal to us the life we think we should live and hold onto. Because we are usually not creative enough to follow desire without a model, we are stuck in a horizonal mediation, as Girard would say. It's not a transcendent mediation. If people legitimately look like they are enjoying themselves, most humans with mirror neurons will reflect that back and begin to feel some craving, which is already an initial introjection, that if not outright rejected, that can be incorporated and habituated into an identity. The imago of enjoyment, completion, and wholeness, albeit temporarily, cannot be subdivided for Lacan, because it appears as a total Gestalt, which is motivating us towards that imaginary wholeness. The Gestalt can't be fragmented the way the world is when we observe matter in a scientific way, hence the tension between the imaginary and the real, or phenomenology, and calculation, or quality vs. quantity.
The Gestalt movement is that of present self → anticipated ideal → attempt to become it → temporary realization → renewed anticipation
"It seems to me to be correlated to an unextended space—that is to say an indivisible one, the intuition of which should be clarified by the progress in the notion of Gestalt—and to a time caught between expectation and release, a time of phases and repetition...It is grounded in a form of causality that is psychic causality itself—namely, identification, which is an irreducible phenomenon; and the imago is that form, definable within the imaginary spatiotemporal complex, whose function is to bring about the identification that resolves a psychic phase—in other words, a metamorphosis of the individual's relations to their fellow being."
Glen Hansard on What Busking Teaches You: https://youtu.be/TFxmFMEd7Pk?si=KifoiLzOJ0-R98E2
The threat of unlocking how madness can be conditioned is a true threat because being able to cure it is no easy matter, and with politicians and ambitious types seeking a way towards power and control, the information above can be weaponized. Entire populations that want to live a normal life may end up derailed and live completely false lives full of insecurity, mental disorder, and unrelenting perfectionism. False psychologies already have, and into the future, they may inadvertently cause damage in the hopes of finding cures through plodding trial and error. Much of what Lacan was fighting against in traditional psychoanalysis was the good intentions practitioners had to build up the ego to make it stronger, when the foundation was already based on an illusion. Shock therapies, grotesque experiments, and failed panaceas did and still do dash the hopes of many who want to live normal lives. Patients can ping pong in distorted cultures and then end up in therapy that only increases their narcissism. This is one of the early criticisms of bad therapy that unintentionally amplifies narcissism. In the hands of ruthless political types, narcissism can be weaponized in a myriad of ways. "In concluding, I hope that this brief discourse on the imago will strike you, not as an ironic challenge, but as a genuine threat to man. For, while our ability to realize that the imago's unquantifiable distance and freedom's minute blade are decisive in madness does not yet allow us to cure it, the time is perhaps not far off when such knowledge will allow us to induce it. While nothing can guarantee that we will not get lost in a free movement toward truth, a little nudge will suffice to ensure that we change truth into madness. Then we will have moved from the domain of metaphysical causality, which one can deride, to that of scientific technique, which is no laughing matter...In the meantime, I propose to equate the various delusional structures with the therapeutic methods applied to the psychoses, as a function of the principles I have developed here: —running from the ridiculous attachment to the object demanded, to the cruel tension of hypochondriacal fixation, and on to the suicidal backdrop of the delusion of negation; and —running from the sedative value of medical explanations, to the disruptive act of inducing epilepsy, and on to the narcissistic catharsis of analysis."
Applicability for Disorders
For modern disorders, there are many causes for them, but it's good to layout some of the influences of the ego-ideal, and how it can upset individuals and arouse feelings of insecurity.
Imago role modeled
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"I identify with this kind of image of a person who savors in this way."
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Ideal
"This represents what is best in me and what I think is the good life."
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Recognition
"Others must see and confirm that I'm on the right track."
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Stabilization
"I feel real, valuable, coherent, and tension releases, while pleasure increases."
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Threat
"They don't see me this way, and stress increases."
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Narcissistic injury
"Something about my being has been denied."
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Defensive response
rage / withdrawal / envy / contempt / fantasy / craving / grandiosity / etc.
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Different attempts (symptoms) to restore the image or to create a new and better one
Here are some examples of how this may apply to the following psychological conditions:
1. Narcissistic Personality Disorder
The self is organized around an ideal image.
The person becomes psychologically dependent upon
admiration
prestige
uniqueness
superiority
Threats to the image provoke
rage
humiliation
envy
collapse.
The ego has become inseparable from an imaginary ideal.
2. Borderline Personality Disorder
Identity diffusion is central.
The person repeatedly asks
"Who am I?"
Relationships become unstable because the ideal self-image shifts with every relationship, and relationships become scaffolding for ideals to imitate, but if you change the relationships, the identities shift to imitate the new role model, even if there are contradictions. There's no stability independent of relationships, and so abandonment threats occur with any normal temporary absence.
unstable imago → unstable representation of Other → fragmentation → urgent attempt to restore unity through relationship.
3. Histrionic Personality Disorder
Recognition becomes addictive. The self exists only through being seen. Attention functions as continual confirmation of identity.
4. Body Dysmorphic Disorder
One image dominates the person's entire existence. The actual body disappears beneath an exaggeratedly magnified defect.
5. Eating Disorders
The body becomes an image rather than a lived body. Identity becomes "I am the thin one." Control over the body becomes synonymous with existence itself.
6. Delusional Disorder
One interpretation becomes absolute. No symbolic correction is possible. Everything confirms the image.
7. Paranoid Psychosis
The subject's entire world becomes organized around persecution. Others become mirrors of imagined hostility.
8. Grandiose Delusions
"I am Napoleon."
"I am Christ."
"I alone know."
The image has become reality.
9. Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder
The ego becomes fused with being perfect, correct, pure, responsible. The ideal image tyrannizes life with useless rituals and superstitions. Perfectionistic personalities are imprisoned by an impossible ideal self.
10. Impostor Syndrome
The person cannot identify with the successful image. Instead, they identify with fraudulence.
11. Shame / Avoidance Disorders
The self is experienced as a damaged image. Everything becomes organized around hiding.
12. Depression
Many depressive experiences involve the collapse of the
ideal self
future self
lovable self
13. Manic depression
Grandiosity, omnipotence, invulnerability can all represent inflation of the ego image, and boundary violations lead to guilt and depression. Excuses that relieve the guilt lead to another bout of mania, and the cycle continues.
14. Social Anxiety
The imagined gaze of others becomes overwhelming. One lives inside imagined evaluations.
15. Performance Anxiety
The person identifies with the perfect performer. Failure threatens existence.
16. Fear of Humiliation
Injury to the image rather than objective danger.
17. Addictions
Social media, gambling, pornography, status, the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) of an "ideal" lifestyle, can become attempts to repair a wounded ego image. Later on Lacan would talk about Jouissance in regards to excessive desire that is followed by pain.
lack → fragmentation → craving → object → temporary stabilization → renewed lack → chase temporary stabilization as the ultimate value
18. Modern phenomena where people increasingly become their images and lose flexibility.
Social media identity construction
Influencer culture
Celebrity worship
Cosmetic surgery obsession
Prestige anxiety
Professional identity collapse after retirement
Political identity fusion
Nationalistic identity fusion
Sports identity fusion
Ideological certainty
Status competition
Brand identification
Online outrage culture
Parasocial relationships that exist only in the mind
The awareness helps, like in meditation, to point to unnecessary stresses that culture imposes on people, but also what one imposes on oneself. The distance between "I am that," and the effort involved, towards "I have organized my life around needing this image," with a dropping of the effort, opens the over-efforting wound, and it begins to heal, even if it's unpleasant to rest in emptiness and fragmentation that was always there, and had never left. It points to tolerating uncertainty, which egos attempt to avoid at all costs. These images are so habitual that it's another waste of effort to try to remove them, but habitual effort needs EXTRA effort to keep going, and there the meditative choice would be to ask "What remains when I stop working so hard to be someone?" The point isn't to tell yourself to abandon the image, but to notice the effort required to keep it alive and discover what remains when you stop supplying the said effort.
How to get to Effortlessness | Francis Lucille on Understanding: https://youtu.be/7bwt5Iq1sGg?si=H0EP1e9IwSohqeQD
Non Duality Meditation: Effortlessness is Our True Nature - Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/xoolf5pdU_8?si=GvUGYuCKZ0Egq2mq
Effortless Deconstruction of the Sense of Lack - Francis Lucille: https://youtu.be/uUh_pVOuV1w?si=6QjdiT4t-QB3rqtW
Allow Everything to Subside Into Being - Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/71iVcLyZUXo?si=kWHWRvwdmS1mQchQ
Identification: "I am this image, so I must protect it with all of my effort."
↓
Recognition: "I have organized my efforts around this image."
↓
Observation: "Look at how much effort I expend maintaining it."
↓
Experiment: "What happens if I don't immediately repair the image?"
↓
Freedom: "I can experience cravings, withdrawal symptoms, uncertainty, incompleteness, envy, shame, or fragmentation without having to turn them into a weightlifting contest."
A great deal of psychological suffering comes from mistaking an image of who we think we should be for who we actually are—and then exhausting our resources trying to keep that image intact.
Presentation on Psychical Causality - Jacques Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/On-Psychic-Causality-bilingual.pdf
Beyond the Reality Principle - Ecrits - by Professor Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink (Translator), Heloise Fink, Russell Grigg: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393329254/
Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/
