Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 159 | Mari Ruti on Lack, Love, and Psychoanalysis

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

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.) Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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. U Toronto web page Amazon.com author page Semantic scholar Wikipedia Twitter

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Club on the I-Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And longtime 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-Barritt, Scott Berry-Kalphman. What we haven't talked about on Minescape is psychoanalysis. Psychology is just the 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. You know, 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 edible 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. But 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 going to 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's the only person in the world, who I would trust to talk to you, my audience, about these topics we're going to be talking about today. Because it's not just psychoanalysis. It's the particular kinds of psychoanalysis that are influenced and thought about by French theorists, most especially Jacques Lacan, a famous French psychoanalyst and literary critical theorist, et cetera. And these ideas, you know, 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

postmodernism 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. And you might not at the end come away buying it. That's completely fine, right? I don't ask you to buy it. The idea of Minescape is that I don't even buy everything that people who I have on are going to be talking about, right? I don't buy everything that Lee Smolin 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 this 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. 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. You know, 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 in the arrow of time and out of equilibrium physics.

And it may or may not stand up to 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. Mari Rudy, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Well, thank you for having me. It's really an honor to be invited. I'm very grateful to have this conversation with you. Sure. I think it's going to be a lot of fun because it is a bit of a departure. You know, I end up saying at the beginning of half of my podcasts, 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 than

they really are. But anyway, so let's just dive into perhaps the most, the thing that's going to happen to the minds of the audiences when they hear what we're talking about, which is the word psychoanalysis, right? I mean, this is a fraught word in the modern age. We instantly think about a hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud, Freud's on a couch, Freud telling them that if they're guys, they want to 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 abandoned it, but there's a bunch of people who want to 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, I mean, how about just starting with the general sales pitch for why we should take psychoanalysis seriously here at the first fifth or first quarter of the 21st century? Okay, so the entire time you were talking, I had to suppress my laughter because I didn't all want to laugh over you. left away. We're all friends here. Everything 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, you know, Freud used cocaine and they know about penis envy and stuff like that, but they don't really know much about it. 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. 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.

So I'm going to mostly be drawing on a French thinker, a post-Froidian psychoanalyst and theoretician called Jacques Lacan. His last name is spelled L-A-C-A-N in case no one has heard of him. But he's among the, I would say, top like 10 most famous French thinkers of the 20th century, which is saying a lot. you can compare him to people like Sartre or the Pouroix, D'Aryda, 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 kind of took the American Academy

like a big wave, like a storm. And there was a lot of resistance, but also there, like I said, there's like kind of no going back to the pre-psychoanalytic moment because it did transform so many fields. Sorry, I know that you're right in the beginning of this, but let me just, 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 U.S. 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 here. 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 want to lose. I feel like post-structuralism, say Derrida and Foucault, those people, they got rid of things like truth and also like 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 kind of taken out of the equation, as did any understanding of truth. And, I mean, 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 want to 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. 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. 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?

And I know that your 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 LaChan. 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 of all of the incomprehensible thinkers in French theory.

He is, like when I, when I asked my graduate students to read one of his book, they will come to class and say, I didn't understand any of this. I literally did not understand more than 5% of 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 okay, so the short answer to the question that you're asking, it kind of has, 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 that had to do with like taking down Western epistemological models that were, you know, 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 completely gibberish. So you have to kind of 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 kind of go at it with logic in mind, you're not going to get anywhere. But yeah, that's a really good question. Okay. I'll let you resume the psychoanalysis glossary. Okay. So I wanted to say right off the bat that I am not interested, personally, I'm not, 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.

Yeah. Because, I mean, 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 kind of 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 and everyday life. and I'm just going to mention three points really quickly, and then hopefully you can prod me with further questions. So the things that most interest me about Latinian 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 theory specifically are, first of all, the fact that he understands, 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 Saatre had the same idea. I mean, his famous book is called Being and Nothingness. So LaGalle 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, why

feel like we have lost something kind of 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 endeavors or other intellectual endeavors or whatever it is that makes human life sort of meaningful to people. Hosting podcasts. Hosting podcasts. Sorry. Hosting podcasts. Sorry. Hosting podcast is what makes life meaningful, I think, here in 2021. That's a really good.

Okay. So that's your way of filling your life. Filling my life. 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 like 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. And 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, or what he called enjoyment. And we have just like almost too many sources of enjoyment available to us. Like every possible kind of porn is available to us on the Internet. So it's not like our sexuality is repressed. Rather we're kind of overwhelmed by the abundance of possibilities for satisfaction. 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. Lakania's psychoanals 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 behavior even when we really don't want to repeat them. We keep doing it anyway. We tell ourselves that we're going to change our way of doing things, but somehow we can't.

And psychoanalysis is good at explaining that through what Freud already theorized as the repetition compulsion. Okay? I will pause there and give you a test speech. Applying for jobs can be incredibly stressful, but hiring people can also be stressful. Getting the right people into your organization can make a break whatever it is you're trying to do. That's where Indeed comes in. Indeed is a job site that makes hiring incredibly simple. With Indeed, you do all your hiring in one place, attracting, hiring, even interviewing. Indeed's hiring tools help you cut through the noise to hire faster and smarter. In fact, Indeed instant match provides a list of quality candidates whose resumes are on Indeed the moment you post a sponsor job.

With Indeed assessments, you can choose from over 135 skills tests to help make sure you're finding applications from people with the skills you need. Join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. And you can get started right now with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com. slash mindscape. That's a $75 credit at Indeed.com slash mindscape. All for valid through September 30th. Terms and Conditions Apply. Go to Indeed.com slash mindscape. Yeah, no, I mean, there's a tremendous amount there, and I hope we're going to 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 mean, I like it that you said very explicitly. You're not pretending.

to be a scientist, right? That was one of the criticisms of Freud in particular is that he really, really, really, really wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist. And the fellow scientists are like, eh, predict something that I wouldn't have been able to predict otherwise. Otherwise, I'm not going to take you too seriously. But if you reformulate 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 when we're, when we're, maybe one of the reasons why it was very popular in literature and 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 because it's not very deep reading, but I've been reading some early Chinese philosophy. And, you know, these people are very brilliant and the warring states period in Confucius and Zhu, et cetera. 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. Absolutely. First of all, I should say that Lakanian theory has very deep connections to Eastern philosophy, the whole idea of being built around a void or nothing.

That's central to a lot of Western, I mean, sorry, 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 on or 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. So that's usually how the conversation goes. However, 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 want to get out is that when Lacan started writing in the 1950s, and he also started giving annual lecture series, And they went on for like 30 years. And initially he had a very tiny audience that was composed of just specialists. But he very quickly developed a reputation in Paris. So in the 1960s and 70s when Paris was really like 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 provision intellectual scene, in the humanities and 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. Like he was kind of petering out in the late 70s and people like Derrida started writing in the late 60s. So he influenced the whole generation of thinkers. And that influence had a lot to do with that notion of lack that I keep referring to. 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? Yes, yes, absolutely. So he has a reputation for being a troublemaker, a maverick, just kind of a crazy person. And 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 interesting in math, and you laugh at this. And I know that this is a part of Lacan that I don't really touch except for the content,

because 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. 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 like ropes and stuff like that. And finally his audience just kind of gave up and left. So yeah, he was an eccentric, a brilliant eccentric. It does remind me this is completely non-substative and just silly, but it reminds me of the story about Derrida, who gave a talk at some point.

It 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 given this entire talk about cows. And the whole audience is like, why is he talking about cows? Like, I don't know what cows have to do with what? he's saying. And then, you know, 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. That's perfect. No one knew. Makes perfect sense. Yes. So you have to,

you have to do some exegesis. You have to do some little work here. But good. So, yeah, two more points. I wanted to sort of, you sort of big picture points before we get into your, 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've learned a lot more about neuroscience than we have learned before. And the specific point that you raised that reminded me of that was the repetition compulsion instinct or whatever it is. What do I call it? The repetition compulsion? Yeah, that's right.

Okay. that's something that is absolutely, you know, 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. I mean, 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. Yeah, that's really great. And so now I'm going to go back to Freud because, I mean, one of his kind of groundbreaking

ideas that I think is still relevant today is that he had this idea that our bodies or 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've got a hardwire to repeat, I mean, like mentally part hardwire to repeat certain kinds of actions. But also like on a physical level, like 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 juicants. It's just a French word for like 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, you know, our pathways of energy, juicence, whatever you want to call it, are configured in specific ways. And the whole point of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice, like 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 neuroscientific findings and I know that there 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 the those kind of pathways through your body and your psyche was at the chist of what Freud was trying

to accomplish. Yeah, no, it sounds like there's a lot of fruitful things to be thought about there. Okay, 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, uh, circles back to questions of atheism and religion and things like that, right? I 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 mean, 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? Yeah, that's really fair. I mean, I agree with you on everything that you just said. And I think that on some level, what at least Lacania psychoanalysis is trying to do is to allow us to figure out how to deal with that lack within our being without resorting to some sort of a theological or otherwise sort of otherworldly explanation or an attempt to cope with it or even cure it. You know, it makes perfect. 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 an afterlife where you kind of reward it 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 fully 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. And the idea was that as soon as you acknowledge 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, I mean, not everyone is an intellectual or an artist, you know, painting, paintings and writing books and stuff like that. People have various ways of finding meaning in their lives that are sort of more every single. day than what we intellectuals do, but the point is that he was trying to give his patience 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 like a secular, secular attempt to deal with this nothingness within our being.

And to understand this nothingness as a kind of a springboard 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 kind of like this idea that the lack was not our enemy. It actually was the foundation of everything good about human life. So actually, that's exactly what I do want to hear you expound on a little bit more. But if you will indulge me for a minute, I want to propose an analogy, or maybe it's even an equivalence with physics concepts here.

Because just that's how I'm really scared. Yeah, that's how I think about the world. But I'll creep up on it by talking a little bit about Antonio Demosio, who was 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. You know, 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, comes to a temperature, and it'll just sit there forever. Like if you seal the box away from the outside world, it's fine. It's going to 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. Like if you seal us off, we will die. And at the very fundamental physiological level, we need food and we need air and we need things like that. And then so this is what DeMasio is 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. You need to get fuel. You need to get the right kinds of stimulation, et cetera.

And to me, the psychological version of that, sorry, there is a psychological version of that also. And this is where feelings comes in. He, you know, his word for feeling, the reason why he cares about feelings rather than emotions is he thinks of feelings as the sort of more primitive impulses that your body and brain are giving you to saying, something's not quite right, let's fix it a little bit, right?

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 away. It's not like you're a rock on the beach. You need to continually do little adjustments, right, to make sure you don't fall off. And so that's why, so coming back to what you've 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 what about that? That's my question. 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.

I mean, so to translate this into like 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 are seeking to figure out how to fix that. I mean, 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, psychoanalysis, it's not the most efficient. I was going to say this when you talked about neuroscience because I know that the neuroscientific solutions and like 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 eculaprium into the patient's kind of psychic and bodily existence. And then you kind of, 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 analysts' help to reach a certain degree of equilibrium. In the understanding that you're always going to lose it,

you're never going to be able to hold on to 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, like comfort zone or equilibrium. Like I mentioned earlier that I had this huge excess of energy, and my struggle is constantly to contain it and, like, kind of tame it to a certain degree. And going to analysis, actually, like, Hainan 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 like this over agitation. And so, yes, that all of that makes perfect sense and has obvious like analogies with psychonylid thinking. This overabundance of energy is just not the problem that I'm faced with in my life. I'm sorry that, you know, that's, it's a good reminder that people are different from each other. We have all of our own little issues. But so good. So then I want to hear more about these lacks. You know, so I understand the abstract idea.

I mean, 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, I mean, that's a pretty general thing. Like, how much more specific can we be about the kind of lax or the origin of these lax that are relevant to typical people trying to get through the world? Okay. Okay, great question. The first thing I want to say is that I, in my own,

own work, which is different from the work of, this is one of the differences between my work and the work of some other Lacanias is that I tend to focus on two very different levels of lack. I want to distinguish between what I'm calling ontological lack, 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 are 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, maybe you have 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 want to, if I, if it's okay, I'll take a little deeper about how he comes to that understanding of lack as the foundation

of existence. I mean, he basically, this is just like the Cliff Notes version of the chist 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. When I say signifiers, I don't mean just language, but also like nonverbal 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 one good example is gender, where sometimes parents, unless they are very, you know, forward-looking, they paint their nurseries, different colors, depending on whether they are expecting a boy or a girl. They will buy different toys, depending on whether it's 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. And then the idea is that once the child starts to learn how to speak and starts to understand

language. Language is key here. Language is really key for Lacanian theory. His idea was that once the child starts to speak, it quickly comes to realize 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's suddenly me and there's you and there are like objects in the world. And that is what he thought was the kind of the source of the feeling that we have lost something unfathomably precious, that we have lost this sense of plenitude, of being whole. Suddenly we are no longer whole. And once that happens, the desire to fill that that void kicks in and you start looking for various ways to fill that, 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 this sophisticated usage of language and signifiers that we have, he implied that we are, and I'm using wording from a fellow Lacanian Padmogowan, 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 kind of 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 like a piece of me missing is a part of that distortion that other animals presumably don't experience. We all spend a lot of time writing online, whether it's applying for a job or just sending something out to social media.

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And Mindscape listeners can try Wordtune for free at wordtune.com slash mindscape. If you're away from your computer, go to wordtune.com slash mindscape on your mobile phone, enter your email, and they'll send you a link to make it easy to get started. So get help writing your emails, reports, presentations, resumes, and blogs today. Go to W-R-D-T-U-N-E dot com slash Minescape. part of that makes a lot of sense to me and part of it uh i i can't quite sign on to but maybe i just don't know enough about it the this the this distinction between humans and other animals there's something to that because you know i mean 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 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, which is wrapped up in the whole language thing. So I think that 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. I mean, clearly that's true. Whether or not, let's put it this way, which aspects of my current or someone else's current psychological makeup can be traced to that

occurrence in my infancy seems to be to be almost impossible to know. I mean, it's a good story, but how would I know if that were true and how I know there's some other story that isn't that isn't just as good? I mean, 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? 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 kind of intuitive in the sense that a lot of people would come to an 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 like existential malaise or like dissatisfaction.

And so I think he was looking for an explanation for that because other animals don't have like 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, you know, 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. is this kind of a feeling of 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. And yeah, so I, 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 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 LeChan talks in terms of like enigmatic signify. 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 or whoever. What it is they want from the child? And so that itself can lead to a certain degree of kind of unease

or being off balance or in this elyprium that you described earlier. But, yeah, I'm not asking anyone to believe this as some sort of a scientist, fact, it's definitely a theory. And, you know, there are other psychoanalytic thinkers like Melanie Klein who worked with very young children and infants. There are like child psychiatrists 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. Interesting. But again, not a science. Definitely not a science. Okay, that's okay. But, okay, good. So we have this lack. It 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? I mean, that's always going to be true.

But there's this extra twist. that you're going to put on it that says that, you know, 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, you know, this idea that we're driven by our lax is not a purely negative thing, that it leads to things like creativity and expression. Yeah. I mean, that and that's, that is, I have to admit that that's particularly my way of reading La Cain. There are the people who are much more interested in the more destructive sides of his theory,

and I have kind of built my particular reputation on this tendency to go in a more affirmative and kind of, I don't know, sublimitory 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 this, sense of lack. And I want to 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. 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 had great parents, like the best parents in the world. You can never feel the child. the 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, like, if you take it for granted that the lack exists, then the obvious sort of next step would be to say, okay, well, what happens to human beings as a dad? And Lacan came to the conclusion that from black comes into being the desire to fill with various activities and there are basically two ways of filling it 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 um because that's one of the topics i've written a lot about um so you can 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 um seek i mean if you take this theory seriously. This explains why we're so drawn to the idea that there's like a soulmate who's going to complete our being and all that. We can find people or objects in the world or even like ideals that we hang on to as a way of like dealing with the slack. The other route to dealing with it is to invent something. Invent, you know, do any kind of creative labor,

intellectual labor or, I don't know, like be a carpenter or something. Use your skills in such a way that you can kind of either forget about that lack or at least cover it over. And the idea is that a lot of us are really good at just like ignoring it most of the time. We make ourselves very busy and don't want to 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 if we, 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 breakup or something happens to your problem. professionally that's just terrible, 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. So in some ways, Lacan is just kind of re-articulating this already Nietzsche an 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 they 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. What was the platonic dialogue that talked about the souls being separated and then you're trying to find them again? Was that the symposium? Yes, the symposium. and Lacan actually has a whole lecture series, the whole book on the symposium.

So was Plato the first Lacanian because he emphasized this lack that we have that we're all looking for to find our soulmate that's been arrested apart from us? Yeah, pretty much. Actually, that's kind of the chis of one of my books. It's called the Summons of Love.

So it's about love. And one of the arguments I make is that basically Lacan is kind of plagiarizing Plato. And this whole idea that, you know, Zeus divided those round beings like an egg with a hair, 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 we're like super happy, filled with Juisans, this exuberant happiness when they found each other. That's basically the Lakanian story, except that he's very skeptical of the end. He's very skeptical of the idea that you can find your soul made and everything will be, you know, just golden after that.

So he doesn't buy that part of the story, but the rest of it is just directly out of Plato. So good. So I'm on Lecon's side and being skeptical about the ending. But as, you know, marketing advice to would-be myth builders, the idea of Zeus and eggs and hairs is awesome. Like you've got to have that extra bit of fantastical apparatus to really catch on and become popular. think. But I do want to get to love because, you know, I'm no better than your students who are going to fascinate about this, but I want to get other things out of the way first. I mean, 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, you know, look, writers and intellectuals, when they tend to be

the kinds of people who write about searching for meaning and life. And guess what? They always say, well, you should do writerly intellectual things. But I want to suggest, and I want to hear whether you agree or not, there's an infinite number of ways that we can address this. And some of them might be very highbrow and some of them might not be highbrow. I mean, you could be a fan of a sports team or you could like gossiping with your friends or just, you know, going to McDonald's or whatever. I mean, 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. 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 high-brow endeavors, 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 crises or their lack or whatever you want to call it in those ways. And I mean, there are all kinds of ways in which you can fill your life. You can exercise, you're going to have children. They are very, very, very good distraction from your, From your lack. I mean, they take a lot of space.

Yeah. Very distracting. You can watch Netflix, you know, for days at end, which I do sometimes. You can numb your feelings with, you know, alcohol or drugs or whatever. So there are more or less productive ways of like 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 sense. Like, are not self-destructive, are not bad for you.

So instead of, like, day-trinking, doing something that is a bit more, like, I don't know. I don't want to 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 adopted social demands. Whereas the goal of Lacanian analysis was to allow the patient to just like 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 work, can I use the F word? Go ahead. We'll just mark you as explicit, no problem. Because I've actually used this in writing. The most succinct way to explain what Lacan was hoping to do with his patients was to teach them to say, fuck you to

like societal demands he was not trying to normalize anyway anyone so I don't want to say that you know he would have been invested in making sure that people are not day drinking that they're doing something more quote quote 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 like coping with this slack or mala or traumatization or wounding, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, I mean, maybe you just said everything you have to say about it, but I just want to push harder on this because I haven't thought about it that much myself. And I don't have the favorite answer. But on the one hand, one wants to not be overly judgey about the different ways people have of dealing with existential horror of reality. And especially one doesn't want to just valorize or privilege my own ways of dealing with things, so other people can have their things. But at the same time, you want to be able to say that within each individual and their situation, presumably there are, in some sense, better and worse ways of coping, right?

Being a fan of a sports team is probably better than just drinking to forget your problems, at least if you don't become too fanatic about it. So what is that judgment? What is that hierarchy that we're putting it on? I mean, what is the good versus bad way of addressing our lacks? Okay, so now I'm going to open a total can of worms. Good. You started this whole podcast by talking about truth, which of course I would expect from you as a scientist. And my answer to this is that Lecom 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 under kind of layer upon layer upon layer of societal expectations. And so when he taught his patients or tried to teach his readers to kind of resist societal norms, his objective was to get to something deeper about your desire. And so the idea is that if you can kind of locate the thing that most fulfills your desire, 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 kind of organize your life.

It's a kind of a way of thinking about self-fashioneding. Nietzsche had this idea of living your life as poetry. Lacan had the idea of like figuring out what it is that you truly want and then like following the threat of that desire. Now, you can obviously, it's like obvious that there are like huge problems with this because, I mean, if your desire is to be a serial killer, you're kind of in trouble.

I was going to say. So you don't really want to pursue the truth of that threat of desire. But, you know, kind of beyond, 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 like a term for this. He called it the object a, in French, the object A, like the cause of your desire. If you could figure out what the object A, object A of your desire is, like 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. this. So, so indeed, okay, so I get how it's a, it does come down to truth that in some way, when you're trying to deal with your lack, there, 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 going to, we're going to count, we're going to value those ways that are a little bit more truthful. Is that fair? That's very fair. And this is, like I said, when we started talking about truth, I say that 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 the capital T, which in some ways he actually was because, I mean, he theorized the whole notion of lack as a universal human condition and all of that. But when it comes to like specific people, individuals, his understanding of truth was actually really, it had to do with the singularity of your desire, the singularity of the purpose. the person. And here I want to distinguish between identity, which is sort of socially, socially constructed. 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 like 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 the scientific sense of the word, because it implies that everyone's truth is specific to them. Well, I can imagine that I don't necessarily think it's incompatible, I mean, 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. I mean, individual people are going to have something that is different from person to person, but nevertheless true about them. I think that's completely compatible. But the slippery thing here is, you know, it's just it's not your fault or the Khan's fault. It's the fault of what is to nature and to be a human being is that on the one hand, yeah, in me right now there are things that are true about me and maybe I can try to sort of fulfill the desires, et cetera,

but those are also malleable in some sense, right? Like 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? Well, that's, I mean, 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

quote unquote do it yourself. You can kind of keep analyzing yourself. And 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. You're always fashioning yourself. You're always reinventing yourself new understandings of what it is that is important to you come to existence repeatedly, like continuously. So it's definitely not a fixed truth.

And I guess one way to think about it psychoanalytically or clinically is, again, to get the client or the patient, Annalysad, 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. Like 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. And this is a destabilizing theory in the sense that it wants you to become comfortable.

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. There are some things you just can't do from the comfort of home. You can't go on a hike, you can't go see a concert. But what you can do is exercise. And with Peloton, you'll have a workout experience like no other without ever leaving home.

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Learn more at OnePeloton.com. New members can try Peloton classes free for 30 days at OnePeloton.com slash app, terms apply. That's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N-com. Which, right, which reminds me that I wanted to ask about, you know, despite the fact that we want to not be too hoity-to-dy about overly valuing intellectual, writerly sort of 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. Absolutely. I mean, that for me personally is what is most important or precious about this theory. I mean, like any theory speaks to me theoretically, but it also speaks to me very personally. I was hooked onto it for absolutely personal reasons. and it had to do with this kind of a jump from a feeling of lack and alienation to the ability to create, to write. I mean, I used to have a huge writing block, a writer's block in grad school. You probably even remember it because 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 in the sense that I was able to start writing. and I haven't stopped writing since. So, okay, so I'll give you an anecdote from one of Lacan's books because it will sort of illustrate this really concretely. He's actually talking about another analyst's text, and ultimately he says this is a completely cracked pot kind of way of thinking about things,

but, you know, 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. 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. Now, La Calle 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 kind of 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 want to fill it.

So we find if we have the intellectual or creative, capacity, we can find creative intellectual ways of filling that void or actually at least coping with it better. But I mean, so what's the programmatic advice that we have to people who would like to be more creative? Like, lack more or I mean, I'm not quite sure how we get. I'm just laughing at that programmatic advice because I was like so antithetical to everything that like kind of stood for because as I said, he basically spoke just.

But okay, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, so I'm a person on the street. I don't know what my feelings about Lecon are, but I get this idea that we're driven by our lax, even unconscious. Can I 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 want to be creative.

I want to be fun and new and inventive. And is there a way to sort of use this mythology as you've set up? to sort of help me release my intercreative energies. I'm just laughing because I have just co-authored a book on this very issue with a novelist. Perfect. It's in dialogue format. Me and the novelist, her name is Catherine Quittenbrower, a complicated last name, Quittenbrower, Catherine.

So we wrote this book in dialogue format. we talk about the kind of logistics of creativity and we're both coming from a Laganian perspective. She's strained 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 realized that it was very similar to mine. So I was like, okay, there's something that we can talk about here, because, you know, I have written 14 books, which is a lot.

I know you have also written, like, a lot. But in my field, 14 books is a ton. And so a lot of people ask me, you know, what is it that drives you? What is it? How is it possible that you can write all those books? And I realized that Catherine had the same kind of predicament of almost like over-productivity. And so we both came to the conclusion that what needs to happen is that, we somehow managed to at the opening stages of starting to write we're talking about writing

specifically but this could also apply to other arts at the opening stages of writing we purposefully kind of banish our egos to a different room or like a different like a mini universe we just tell that ego to just like go away and that allows a space for these sort of physical energies and psychological energies that I've talked about that I've labeled as juicants that are kind of 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. the kind of quintessential example is someone like James Joyce, who also wrote gibberish.

And the idea is that the Lakinian idea is that when James Choice wrote, he was filled with this energy, this reissons, that was kind of carrying his signifiers, carrying his words in such a way that he actually kind of demolished usual language and was able to invent his own kind of language. Now, usually we don't all want to do that. We don't all want to write like James Choice and write like gibberish. 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 helps, allows our writing to kind of flow and allows us to kind of fly with our words. And that's something that I definitely experienced, Catherine, Catherine experiences, we kind of lose track of even lose lack of our surroundings. We can lose ourselves in that for like hours. I mean, I know that people who have called this place like the zone or the well that you go into and stuff like that. And that feels very visceral.

And so part of the Lacanian theory around life has to do with that ability to bring the resounds 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 going to succeed, you're not going to be good enough, your prose sucks, you're just like a horrible writer. It basically means that you allow yourself to write whatever comes to you. I mean, sometimes I sit down and I put my fingers on the keyboard and things just start, like 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 rewrite 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 out into a kind of a pristine, pristinely written book. But the initial kind of rush of writing has to do with just like giving up control, getting rid of the ego. So that, 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, you know, what affects these drugs have on the brain. And one of the, one of 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, right?

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 that 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 zero 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?

Yeah, no, I think that, first of all, you are totally allowed to be a scientist because that's where you are, in addition to being a philosopher and, you know, just a Renaissance man. But yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's precisely, I mean, you kind of 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 going to argue that psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is going to work for everyone. It can work for certain types of symptomatic behavior. I mean, 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 psychotic behavior. But it was very good with hysteria, which most of us are. And so it can work for certain types of neurosis and kind of 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 kind of neutralize that gatekeeper that has been kind of instituted as the moral compass.

And of course we need that in other aspects of our lives. I don't want to get 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, you know, as to how you do that is a complicated question and it's idiosyncratic to the person who is trying to accomplish that. Okay, good. I have two other topics that I just wanted to touch on. I was going to say briefly, but it might not be brief. We don't need to be brief. The airtime 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 you in it, the sense of being sad when something bad happens. And so, I mean, 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 because you already said, fuck. So, but then the external world imposes on us also, right? 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. us think about those or even cope with those incidents in our lives. Okay, so that's really a great question.

I will talk on two different levels. I said earlier that in my understanding, there are kind of 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 linked to this idea that you have somehow been injured or wounded or something in you has been murdered by the signifier. Zhege, Slavo Zijek, who has popularized Lacan, often talks about the murder of the thing

and by the thing he means like something almost like biological. That's a complicated concept that I can suddenly talk about what we don't need to. But okay, so talking on the ontological level, when you think about the idea that there is this lack in our being,

a void, then the conclusion, which someone like Julia Christava 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 are mourning this loss that has happened to us at a time that we can't recall. You're 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 Christava has this great quote 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 are only able, to make meaning. We are meaning making creatures because we do have this lack that we are mourning and we 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 or circumstantial when like something really horrible happens to you. 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 going to 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. But then with melancholia, which he took the boast to mourning, the idea is that you get stuck in your state of mourning. You're stuck there kind of indefinitely. So it's kind of mourning that doesn't come to an end.

And so he thought that that was the more pathological as a two, at the same time as he kind of also said, you know, people who are depressed. I mean, I think the contemporary term for melancholia would be the kind of depression that doesn't have like a clear cause. We can be depressed because of a specific reason or we can be kind of vaguely depressed for no like 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 kind of get stuck in that type of. of depression that doesn't go anywhere, doesn't leave. 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 Kristava calls the crypt of melancholia so that you can actually get away from that trap of depression. And, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, I know, is one way in which people are dealing with this.

Obviously, drugs, antidepressants is like 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 the process and eventually come to an end that allows you to then to then live your life more freely.

And maybe part of it is just the realization that, you know, if something terrible has happened to you, the sort of immediate instinctive reaction that it's all terrible, life is worthless. You know, 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? Yeah. And I mean, 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 like 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 kind of keep testing reality and your test is not very accurate in the sense that it gives you. It gives you. back this sense that somehow you are 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, like see them on the street. Imagine that you see them when you see someone who vaguely resembles them or something like that.

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. Catexis is just a fancy term for being bonded to something or being invested in something. And so psychoanalytically, when you are mourning, you're gradually decontecting 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 onto a new person or new object or new interest, new ideals, even a new country, whatever it is.

So yeah, a gradual kind of decadecting so that you can reconnect. I can see why this is going to take a long time. the psychoanalytic version of fixing me. But it might be the healthiest way to, I don't know, really reorient. I mean, I guess now I'm just way out of my death and I'm going to 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. I mean, or there's something wrong in their balance of endorphins or whatever it is.

but if, but like we said before, the, even the singularity of the individual is not set in stone, right? 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. Yeah, that's definitely the idea. Yeah, the idea. Again, so I get also, I'm not a problem. 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, like, 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. I mean, it doesn't always work. I mean, in some instances, a new traumatizing experience can kind of 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. And I've made this argument strongly in my writing, you know, in 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 retramatized. 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. And ideally, psychoanalysis would give you those tools. And I'll just very quickly cite a non-Lican psychoanalytic theoretician from U.S. Chicago, Jonathan Lear, who conceptualizes this as 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 breaking your habitual way of dealing with things when they happen to you, you're really talking about reconfiguring your entire. 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. You know, I said we had two topics left and I was going to do the sadder one first, you know, 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. Have we, have we solved love? I mean, 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 I mean what is the insight we get from that okay so there's

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 there are bad news and good news I think Lecon had a very

complicated understanding of romantic love specifically. And that's the kind of love I'm going to be talking about. And there are post-Laginian thinkers who are very famous like Zijek and Alambadieu and Todd McGowan who have written a lot about a love from a Lakanian perspective. And so, okay, so I'll give you the bad news first.

So the idea is that before that kind of warning that happens, and here we are again in the realm of mythology, the idea is that before the warning that happens to you as a result of language acquisition, you are kind of symbiotically like a one being with this thing that Lacan called the thing with the capital T.

He took it from German dusting, And you can think all the way back to Kant, the thing in itself. And the Lacanian version of the thing actually has direct resonances with the Kantian thing in itself. And the Heidecarian thing also, something like fundamentally ontological, 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 supposedly happened, this is completely hypothetical and completely mythological. But so the idea is that what happens to you is that you kind of lose contact with this thing.

And then the thing that you are, oh, that is the thing and the thing, the thing, the thing that you're looking for for the rest of your life, the object of your desire, the object are, is sort of 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 fantasize that you have lost. And 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 lack in a narcissistic sense. You're just like 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 what I just talked about romance, like what we understand when we think about romance in the conventional sense. And again, like Lacan, they think that that's a bad kind of a narcissistic endeavor that doesn't really get you anywhere. ultimately you're going to be disappointed. Your partner is going to let you down because, of course, they're never going to be able to be that mirror for you for the rest of your life.

You know, you're with a person for a year and suddenly there's like 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 fail your lack. So bad, bad, bad. But then the good version of love is linked to what I have characterized as juicence,

this kind of a 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 kind of activate your desire on that level, on a level that is deeper than your narcissistic quest for self-fulfillment, then there's something, then there's something, quote-unquote, real, or the realist, like a Canadian concept. I will rephrase, there's something, quote-unquote, 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, all the 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 to the injury

in the other and there's something within the Lakanian theory, theoretical world at least, there's something about that type of love that actually is like the real thing. And Alain Badieu, Alamadieu, who's a contemporary French philosopher, theorizes 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 kind of derailed you. And it's very much a derailing, derailing kind of a moment. It's not a happy, co-lucky kind of like, I really like this person type of an experience. It's like a completely derailing, like lightning, the lightning strikes you type of experience. And it can actually be traumatizing in some ways.

But once it happens, there's kind of no coming back from that experience and that person is going to 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 get connected, bonded on that very deep level, then someone can really destroy you. And you have to be open to that happening. Yeah, so ideally, if you want to have, quote, quote, word, true or real love, you would have to be completely open to this happening. if you are afraid of getting hurt, you kind of 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 kind of like 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 utter otherness in the sense that you can never really 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 coming a different person. you also have to keep up with who they are coming at the same time as you are becoming something else. So it's very complicated and not necessarily at all reassuring. I just want to get on the record here that I'm very fond of my narcissistic quest for self-fulfillment, and I don't want you bad to help with that.

This is an important part of my life. But so I, but the other thing was more going, that was just a joke. the thing that fits in very well with my experience is I know people who have, it's even possible I've done this myself, but papered over the memory of it, people who have failed in romance because they were too rigid in what was supposed to happen at what moment in time, right? 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 a very healthy way to go about it. I mean, you made the, when we were emailing back and forth to get ready for,

this. You made the crack that Leconians think of romance as just a capitalist plot in some way. It's not really getting at the essence of love, right? 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 reasoned book. Highly accessible to non-specialists, I really 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 basically 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 really fancy engagement ring and then like 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 actually has nothing to do with this. Real love is something that would completely derail you and would kind of, I mean, 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 wouldn't 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. insofar as they have been sort of 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. So if I were to try to dramatically oversimplify 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. Like let's find the successful couple is the one who lack together. That's a really good way of putting it. Absolutely. Yeah, so even though I have like throughout this podcast, I have valorized this notion of lack in some ways. I want to be very clear about the fact that Lacan was very, very critical of the idea that you can use another person to sort of plug your lack and make yourself whole. He was not happy with that idea and try to get his patience away from that way of thinking.

and also, I mean, 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 really 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. I certainly am kind of pro-narcicism 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 healthy degree of narcissism. But I can't really hate it narcissism. So he was really 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 really truly fulfill our desire. Like in one of my books I say something like, you know, when I walk into the subway car, say in Boston, the really crowded subway car, there's rarely anyone I want to sleep with. Like it's really hard to find a person I really want to sleep with. I mean, I can go through like thousands of people and not want to sleep with any of them.

And then one person comes along and suddenly it's like, oh, yeah, this person, this person will do. They work. And there's something, yeah, there's something, some complementary, something going on. And I don't understand it myself. It's enigmatic. And Lacan very much emphasized the fact that this object, ah, 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 something there. It's just that you don't know what it is. And if you

allow yourself to follow the threat of that, you might get to something that would be very genuine and very derailing and difficult, but also very genuine and kind of growth-inducing. You know, 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 disequilibria in various productive ways. So, Mari Rootie, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you, Sean Carroll. My good friend.

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