Pill Pod 228 - Lacan: Traversing the Fantasy $♢a

Full Ad-free Lacan series: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

We conclude our Lacan series with what Fink says is the desired end of Lacanian psychoanalysis. And, the ends of psychoanalysis coincide with some valuable insights for Lacan's theorizing beyond psychoanalysis. 
Works cited are Fink's Lacanian Subject (ch. 5; https://amzn.to/4qz1Fgx) and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (ch. 10; https://amzn.to/4hAIKh5).

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
It's called the lozenge. Check chuck chuck in English and
a plus song now plus song, Paul song.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Oh, I don't know, that's weird. I don't know why.
I mean, louz ange is kind of funny. I guess
because sometimes lozenges are shaped like diamonds. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I think it's that lozenges are shaped like lozenges.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Oh okay, I don't know that.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, the diamond shape. It's supposed to It's supposed to
be possibility from modo logic specifically though, like if you're
talking in if you're talking in uh whatever symbolic logic terms.
The lozenge was specifically meant for possibility, I think.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Which it doesn't mean here. I don't even know if
Lakan tried to base his notation on symbolic logic. But
they don't. They don't really have anything to do with
each other. It seems like it just makes it up.
Oh wait, hey, people are listening to us. Hello, everyone
must have hit from cord by mistake. Whoops, you got
to turn on that other in your mind, drawing to

(01:09):
a close lacon. It's a curtain shutting day, which is
all but not all celebratory for now.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Yeah, I think I've had a good, good dose of
lacan over the past several weeks months.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's been nice to to to revisit, uh self analyze.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
You're not allowed to self analyze. Did you know that
we are going to the World Series?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
We?

Speaker 4 (01:40):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Really?

Speaker 4 (01:42):
Oh excellent? What like baseball?

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Did you even know?

Speaker 4 (01:47):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:48):
No, I did.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
I didn't know either.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Even if Eric were here, he might not know, but
Eric is in uh is in the UK currently. To
anyone who has not caught up on our personal lives, shame.

Speaker 4 (02:01):
I'm across the pond.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
They gave us one baseball team and we took the pennant,
so I feel like we should announce it show some jingoism.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
I've been so checked out. I've been so checked out
from that that, like I remember, I think I saw
the news. It was like Blue Jays, like, you know,
they win, and then I was like wait, so like
and I had to like look it up. I had
to be like, wait, does this mean that they're going
to like the championship? And I was like, oh, yeah,
the World Series, right, that's the Championship. I like, I
don't know, I just I forgot all these things and

(02:31):
then and I was also supposed to play magic the
Gathering with some friends on Saturday and they and one
of them was like, yo, I can't do it. The
Blue Jays are in the World Series and they're playing
that night, so we can't play. And I was like, ah,
So mostly it's just irritation on my end that they're
that they're in the World Series.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Well, you remember when they went basketball? How fun that was?

Speaker 2 (02:52):
I think? Was I even was I here? Yeah, I
guess it was like twenty twenty one or oh yeah,
I guess I was here. I guess I was here.
But I think I just avoided downtown because I didn't
want to be around.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
No, no, no, no, no. I like it. I like
it as a religious festival. It brings together strangers, it
creates a spirit of the people all that. Of course,
we're probably not going to win at least the the
betting markets are against us, which is too bad. But
we can it's gonna be.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
It's gonna be. The traffic's going to be insane. Though.
Whenever there's a game.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Well you know what, you should watch just because the
Dodgers that's who they're playing against. They have this guy
a Japanese guy who might possibly be the greatest baseball
player of all time?

Speaker 2 (03:38):
What's the most important position of baseball? Who gets paid them?
Are pictures like star pitchers that people get paid the most,
like who I was talking about this last night.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Well, it's kind of a trick question because yes, the
pitcher is the most valuable role, but they don't get
paid the most because they don't play every game or
they can't. They can't physically play every game. So the
biggest contracts that paid the most are the biggest hitters
because they're batting like four times a game, but.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
They're the biggest hitters. I don't know anything, Like I
remember we were.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Show Shohi Otani is uh is the Los Angeles Dodgers
second highest paid player in the league.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Only do you think it's fair? Do you think it's
fair to say that of the like four major North
American leagues that baseball is like the least athletically impressive sport,
the only.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
One you can actually be like Chubby and play.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
I mean, I think there's there's real skill obviously being
a pitcher of batter like that, like throwing really like
fast is and there's strategy. I guess, like, from what
I understand, there's like this like stealing a base and
I don't know, there's like some sort of weird stuff.
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know about this.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yes, there's strategy involved.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yes, there's strategy involved in a way that like maybe
in a way that I mean, there's strategy obviously involved
in all of them. But because I guess baseball is
a bit slower, I guess football has a lot of
like downtime too.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Even though it's like, yeah, okay, okay, anyway, you should
just want it's your team. Guys, you should have watched
at least a game to what and also watch Atani play.
So Tani no, no, not a single pitcher in Major
League Baseball also bats. And the other day Otani was
the starting pitcher, pitched six innings, got ten strikeouts, no

(05:19):
no score, no score in six innings, and also hit.
I think he got four hits, three of which were
home runs. So this is the greatest game ever played
by an individual. And it's not like he's slightly better
than the other pitchers that hit, because there are no
other pitchers out of hundreds of them, there are no

(05:40):
other pitchers that hit.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Wow, they playing games consecutively, Like is that all? I
feel like? That's also another difference with baseball. It's like,
don't they sometimes even play games in the regular season,
like two on the same day.

Speaker 4 (05:52):
I think they play lots of games. Yeah, it's like.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
They never play two in a day schedule, but if
one game gets delayed, then they might play to today.
But it's like three, it could could be two in
two days.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Because they because they do. Like because isn't there like
one hundred and sixty two games a season in baseball?

Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, that's why I only watched the playoffs on TV
and maybe go to the park a couple couple of times,
get a hot dog at a beer.

Speaker 4 (06:18):
It's it's really demanding.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
It is a lot of time. But if you're not
the pitcher, you're mostly mostly standing around or sitting on
a bench.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Well, I guess that's how it equals out. The exertion
is like, well, you're playing way more games, but you
get to be a bit chubby.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
But this is this is our international our international audience,
our town, our little little little town here going to
the world serial Toronto, where all all teams of the
world are going to be represented.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Where the world constitutes all us and one Canadian.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
City exactly the whole world. But anyway, we're we're far afield.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
Yeah, yeah, we digress.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Look the problem that we have with analysis, and we've
been stating this for for several days. By the way,
if you're just hearing this as a member of the public,
this is our ninth, i think, our ninth episode on
LACON and our last.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
Thank god that dos have been that many.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, for now, but.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
If you're just joining us, go to our patron page.
We have fifteen hours of LACON content. We had to
put it behind a paywall because we got way too personal,
way too deep, yep, which means that you have to
pay for it. And it's much cheaper, much cheaper than
a single session with a Lacanian analyst that probably won't

(07:36):
be covered by insurance because insurance companies don't believe that
Lacanian analysis is.

Speaker 4 (07:41):
Real needs them studies to prove it.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
So what's the point of being Lacanian? That's what we've
been asking that in different ways, and basically, so.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
We have all these theories about the subject, about desire,
but then there's a question, well, what is analysis supposed
to accomplish, right, Like, what's the point of all this?

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Well, we also can't use it on people, because you
have to do a whole bunch of ethical ship before
you're allowed to be an analyst. So even if we
even if we internalize this all properly, it doesn't really
matter to us in practice unless you're gonna take the
root of like analyzing movies, which is I guess one
one option we've seen.

Speaker 4 (08:22):
Which which has super popular.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
We're using it to theorize.

Speaker 4 (08:27):
Perverts, guides.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
I use it to analyze us because we because we're talking,
you know, at length about this. Then at the same
time as I'm listening, this is one thing, I noticed
the three of us at different rates. I won't I
won't say whose rate is which, But we make claims
preceded by hedges, right like like in my opinion, or

(08:56):
I feel, or well I thought he was saying, or
I guess so all these things I thought, these these
are equivalent to making something fuzzy or refusing to commit
to a statement, because in this case we actually have
a tangible other. But this is where it gets interesting.

(09:16):
Instead of just being worried about being wrong, it's also
kind of rude to sound too confident. I don't know.
I don't know if you guys do this or if
I do this, But you know, you.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Feel like I hedge a lot. I must be the
biggest hedger. Am I am? I right about that?

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Or no, you're you're the You're the biggest hedger.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
I figured I knew it.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
But also it makes you sound more polite to hedge,
because you're not like assertings even when we know things.
I think that we continue to hedge in order to
be played, I know, being on other podcasts, like if
I get invited as a guest, that I am unconsciously
focused on not sounding arrogant. You know, there you go.

(09:56):
I just said it. I just said, you know.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
I feel I feel it's more uh. I feel it's
als such as more intellectually honest to be hedge to
hedge less, because.

Speaker 4 (10:05):
That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
We're taught take responsibility for your for your for your
positionality or whatever, you know, when you're like, well, from
my perspective, this is how it looks.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
We're taught to modulate claims too, like we're taught to
not to be too confident when we make claims. I know,
I mean, I know this isn't an essay, but still
like we're supposed to say, but like it can make
your claims sound weak too if you say like it
may be or it could be.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
Like you have to use those words precisely.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Well, the side benefit of saying this may be the case,
or we might interpret this thusly the but the benefit
to that is you actually can't be wrong.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
But also like part well, but part of it also
is more weasel words. Well, it's it's it's more at
least when I do I don't know. I obviously at
this point probably do a lot of it unconsciously, but
I suppose when I do it in this context, I mean,
I kind of see it as a dialogue, kind of
kind of dialectic, a dialogue with you guys and I

(11:05):
and like I'm trying to uncover the truth alongside with
you about it. And in that spirit, it's kind of
it would be it would kind of, I guess in
my mind, to defeat that spirit if I just came
in and it felt like I had all the answers, you.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Know, the spirit of open inquiry and intellectual humility.

Speaker 4 (11:22):
We explore the world of ideas.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
That's good and also, just like being open to being corrected.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
To, you're you're putting in a space, a literal space
of nonsense words that actually bear no meaning except for
the meaning of I am distancing myself from this opinion
that I'm about to say. Maybe something like that.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Fun depends on the context.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
But yeah, we're doing it for each other, or we're
doing it for the listener, or we're doing it we're
doing it for the other, which is very typical of
the neurotic to do all this thing. Yes, definitely, we're
performing our day out like unconsciously saying like one of
the ones I can't remember who said it, It might
have been me, but someone said I can't help but think.

(12:12):
And if you recall one of the previous episodes, that's
saying I think and I don't think at the same time.
You're denying yourself but I think. I said I can't
help but think, which is the Lacanian equivalent of both
saying something and denying it at the same time.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Right, I remember that?

Speaker 3 (12:32):
But wait a minute, Wait a minute. If we are
neurotic obsessives for the most part, and we don't want
the other to have to be the cause of our desire.
We want to be in control of the cause of
our own desire. And when we use these hedgy terms,
we are trying to take the other's power away, aren't

(12:56):
we We're we are hedging our claims, We're qualifying, We're
using weasel words so that the other doesn't have some
kind of claim on us that we're wrong. Aren't we
doing that? Aren't we taking? Aren't we aren't we trying
to be? Aren't we doing the obsessive neurotic thing? And
like secretly, when you're using these words, like I would say,

(13:19):
like you know, Lacan is the greatest psychoanalyst of all
time or lacon may be the greatest psychoanalyst who ever lived?
Have I said that I'm sort of taking the other's
power away a little bit there by, you know, hedging
my claim. I can't be wrong, as you said, when
I use those kinds of words.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
So isn't it isn't it that it so we're subjectifying?

Speaker 3 (13:41):
We may be we maybe yeah, we're trying. We're trying
to take possession of the object.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
That's and and in the absence of the other, we're
trying to cancel. That's that's the fundamental fantasy. As we
said of the obsessive neurotic, it involves just you know,
the the split subject in the subject position in relation
to the object A and the other is kicked out

(14:09):
of the picture, the other is canceled out. Isn't that
what the That's what the diagram is for the for
the separation that results in the neurotic obsessive type.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Before we get to the diagrams, and maybe we can
try to do without the diagrams because it's an auditory medium,
so it's I don't know, it's hard to picture. And
even if you can picture them, they're annoying. That's my opinion.
Do you want to get to the topic or continue
in this No.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
I think we probably should get to the topic.

Speaker 4 (14:43):
Well, subjectivizing is what the topic is.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Basically, that might be jumping the gun a little bit.

Speaker 4 (14:49):
Now, that's the term for traversing the fantasy.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Is yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Subjectivising the cause of yours. You're you're taking ownership of it.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, folks, that's our term today, traversing the fantasy. This
is how psychoanalysis can help you.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
If it can, it's not it seems like life happens
to you. That's how he said, right, like life happens,
and you know, we all have this particular fate. We
we all inhabit this fate, and it's not necessarily our choice,
but we have to find some kind of way to
own it. We have to find a way to put
ourselves in the subject position, to subjectivize and therefore, in

(15:36):
a weird way, become our.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Own cause, like you know, dude, dude, wait, wait, wait,
that's the punchline. You're giving away the punchline. We gotta
we gotta sell them on this.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
That was That was the That was just my introduction.
Are you talking about I was just about to bring
up Back to the future where he goes back in
time and like as becomes his own father. Tactically, that's
traversing the fantasy.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Oh you came ready with a film example. That's great, though,
to define the terms, traversing the fantasy is the name
for what you're supposed to get out of analysis if
it's working. So we've gone through so many examples, these
little case studies of people going to psychoanalysis, and I
think only Freud was the one who actually finished, who

(16:28):
actually uh completed the analysis. Every every other one seems
to be like the person took off before they.

Speaker 4 (16:36):
Were cured, no longer continued.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Cured is not the right word, by the.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Way, I just yeah, we still remain neurotic.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
That's an interesting question because you know, Freud regards neurosis
as insurmountable. Castration is insurmountable.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (16:55):
Traversing the fantasy.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
It doesn't get rid of it, well, he says, you know,
the way Think puts it is like Lacan is like
old Contrere on that point, Like he says, traversing the fantasy,
there's a possibility of moving beyond neurosis like which which
is equivalent of overcoming castration. That's what Fink says in
the In the Fink says, Lacan.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Says, he go ahead. Fink does say Lacan say, But
he also says several times this is like a temporary
accomplishment with respect to an issue, like we don't live
in one fantasy. You go to analysis to deal with
the one fantasy that's causing you the problems in your life.
But that doesn't mean that you're outside of the fantasy.

(17:42):
Relationship to Abja, which is what we'll talk about. But
traversing the fantasy is not like a one time and
now you're cured thing. It has to be with respect
to a trauma. So we all have to get the
verb tenses right and why But what is it the
future perfect tense?

Speaker 4 (18:01):
You can have had traverse reversing, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
The fantasy, but you can't traverse fantasy in general. Does
that make sense? Doesn't it exactly?

Speaker 4 (18:10):
Well?

Speaker 3 (18:10):
I was control effing my way through. I was control
effing the shit out of clinical introduction. And it says here.
According to Freud and many other analysts, psychoanalysis is only
rarely able to take the analysis sand beyond that stance.
The neurotics protest against castration, against the sacrifice made is

(18:36):
generally insurmountable, unsurpassable. Lacan, however, would beg to differ his
answer to what has been construed as the monolithic bedrock
of castration is the traversing of the fantasy made possible
by the confrontation with the analyst's desire. The analyst's intervention,
including the scansion of the session, can lead to a

(18:57):
new configuration of the analys fundamental fantasy and thus to
a new relation to the other, the other's desire and
the other's jewy sance so I mean, yeah, he's not
saying I guess he's not saying qu.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Structure doesn't really change, but you can, you can change
your attitude in a way towards it, and you can
have momentary like like pulses of realization of like traversing
the fantasy. But I think still but then like those
moments can then lead you to like relax a little bit,
to feel like, Okay, I mean, I don't want to

(19:34):
get ahead of myself, but sort of to feel like
less serious about whatever your fantasy is. Like like the
way that I took it is because a lot of people,
for example, have fantasies where they're like, well, once I
have that thing, once I have like a family and kids,
like that'll be the thing that'll you know whatever, Once
I have like that job that pays me more, right,

(19:56):
that'll fill my lacking. But then like by traversing the fantasy,
kind of realized that, well, that's not really the right
way of looking at those things. That's never going to happen.
Uh and and and it's kind of reorienting your your
relationship to that kind of fundamental fantasy about filling the
lack that that's the lack's never going to be filled basically, Yeah,

(20:19):
I guess.

Speaker 3 (20:19):
I guess there's like a belief that that would fill
the lack there, like if I just get that promotion,
or like if I just get the girl, or if
I just I don't know, go to the gym.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Whatever.

Speaker 4 (20:31):
Yeah, it'll it'll fix everything.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
You just read it too, Eric, And what you said.
It never said you're going to destroy the other, and
the other is the cause of neurosis. So the others
still there at the end.

Speaker 4 (20:43):
You're not going to put exactly back on.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Yeah, but what he what healing looks like here, maybe
you could say the others desire becomes more signify orized. Yeah,
So if it's more signify orized, then it seems less
I don't know how to say it. It seems less
like the monkeys on your back, or it seems less

(21:07):
unshakable or godlike or solid.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Right, So, yeah, you're making the other weaker. That's as
as far as you can get.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
I think, Yes, yes, that's a good way of putting it.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
It won't lead to the retrieval of the wholeness that
that the fundamental fantasy is allowing to survive. That's like
we have these fantasies of our own wholeness. I guess
that's the fantasy is the survival of wholeness after alienation

(21:38):
and separation, which are two basic stages at least the
neurotic goes through both of them, as we established, And
the fantasy is the symbolic survival of that primary real wholeness.
I mean that may have never been, but it's the symbolic,

(22:00):
like residue, remainder, reminder play on that of that wholeness.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
So I have a couple questions to animate this because
we can't afford not everyone can afford Lacanian psychoanalysis. In fact,
very few people can. And even if you can afford it,
there's not that many Lacanian analysts. So I have a question.
I have a question for fake, is going to a

(22:27):
Lacanian psycho analysis analyst the only possible way to weaken
the other in this way? Because if it is, that's
that's terrifying. But it also sounds like he is saying
there's only one way to get the other off your back,
and that's to have a really good analyst who knows

(22:47):
what you're doing, and it has to be a Lacanian.
It can't be this other whatever he calls the American
Anglo psychology.

Speaker 4 (22:56):
Psychology, ego psychology.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
He says several times, just slips it in there. This
stuff's never going to work. So are we just like
doomed without Lacan to be caught in our compulsions and
only LACAN can fix us? What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 (23:11):
I definitely think that that's wrong. I don't think that
that's true. I like I have a strong true.

Speaker 1 (23:17):
Well, first of all, do you think that that's what
Fink is implying or am I missing it?

Speaker 2 (23:23):
He might be implying it. I mean, I think psychoanalysts
can be very guilty of being very attached to their system,
like when it comes to clinical work. I think they're
like can be a little dogmatic. And I know this
anecdotally from my stepdad, who's a psychiatrist who is friends
with a lot of his colleagues who are Freudians, and
he once study to be a Freudian, but he became

(23:44):
a Rogiarian who's like more of a generalist, existentialist type
of psychologist who I think he talks about how there
are a lot of studies that show that the really
good therapists are really really good outcomes for their patients
regardless of method, and that like even though each therapist
themselves will say that it's their method that made the difference,

(24:07):
but in reality, it's just that it's it's often like
certain kinds of qualities that the therapist has. And interestingly,
like one of those qualities, at least based on this research,
is something that like very very doctrinaire analysts would be against,
which is that the therapist makes you feel seen, like
makes you feel and like that thing kind of has

(24:28):
a real impact. And it's like if you're too impersonal,
then like you know, you're not gonna get as good
a review. So I think there's other things. Now, look,
when it comes to like this structure of the psyche can,
like I guess the way that I think about it
is you can you can tell a story about how
the psyche works with a lot of different kinds of

(24:51):
conceptual apparatus. This is one of them, Okay that I
think like tells an interesting, compelling story, But I think
there's probably other ones that are plausible that you know.
I think one thing that's common among many different types
of therapy is like the significance of childhood, the significance
of parental relationships, and the significance of sort of recurring

(25:15):
patterns of like of of of desire or of yeah, wanting,
lacking pain that is often sedimented in childhood and parental relationships.
And I think that that's pretty common along all types
of therapy. Uh And and for that reason, like, as
long as a kind of therapeutic method is competently exploring

(25:38):
those things, I think you can get good outcomes now.
But of course, to get to the the specific, this
specific story about your psyche, Yeah, only Lacanian analysis can
give you, I guess this kind of story about your psyche,
which is like, but I don't. But that doesn't mean
that other methods can't also help you come to terms
with whatever painful pattern you have. And I guess in

(26:01):
the background of all this, I would also say is,
I mean, the whole point of these things is you know,
they're useful, and so far as they're troubling you on
a day to day as in so far as something
is troubling you on a day to day basis right, Like,
so there might be people who are just born or
had like really solid childhoods or something where you know,
they're still neurotics, right or whatever, they're still you know,

(26:23):
human beings in the same way. But whatever pattern that is,
whatever sort of fundamental fantasy they have, is not kind
of you know, driving them in ways that are unproductive
or painful. So, you know, I think it all comes
down to, well, are you being troubled? Are you troubled
on a day to day basis? Right? And if you are,
then it's then that's when therapy makes sense.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
I think, Yeah, I think you're right about the idea
that there are a lot of different like conceptual apparatuses
that are kind of useful and describing the psyche, and
there is a degree which it doesn't matter which one
you use for certain for certain things. I think, like,
because I've said this before, like cognitive behavioral therapy is

(27:10):
supposed to be like the holy the most studied and
the and the most effective form of therapy. But there's
also psychosynamic. There's also all the different kinds of psychodynamic
therapies which are all derived from Freud, all the different
schools that Freud spawned. And then there's existential therapy from
the existentialists. There's like and then there's many different kinds

(27:33):
of humanists.

Speaker 2 (27:34):
Yeah, yeah, it's just kind of similars.

Speaker 4 (27:37):
Yeah, they're they're related.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yeah, there's the Thalt School of psychology and whatever kinds
of therapy have come from them. Yeah, there's like all
these fundamental frameworks that are all different, and yet there
is a degree in which like if you are troubled
and you are proactive and you go out and get help,
and that like the talking cure or whatever version of
the talking cure, all the other ones have like that

(28:01):
it is going to benefit you. They're kind of like
inter therapeutic common denominators that will just help you. And
when you look at like an abnormal psych book or
something certain conditions, it'll just be like, you know, all
these different therapies are equally effective. Maybe CBT is a
bit more effective, but they all kind of work because

(28:24):
there's some common denominator.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
I would quibble maybe and say, like you know, where
I do kind of feel that maybe where my leanings
are more friendly towards psychoanalysis, is like on the importance
of exploring childhood and stuff, so I do. But of
course I mean even okay, so like even the psychoanalyst
that I'm very fond of in that show Couple Therapy,
which I know Eric, you've watched some of it. I've

(28:48):
heard her on podcasts sort of talk about this exact question,
which is very like, which is when when I say
this exact question, I mean, like what kind of therapy works?
Like are you are how much of a part it is?
An are you for psychoanalysis? Right, you're a psychoanalyst? Like
how attached are you to the method? And she did
say something like it like it depends on what you're

(29:09):
trying to accomplish that there can be other ones that
kind of point at the same thing and are also effective.
And she specifically talked about cognitive behavioral therapy, and you know,
because psychoanalysts do like to shit on it a little bit,
but she did say like she has her reservations about it,
but she said, in many circumstances, depending on what you're
trying to accomplish, it can be extremely effective. It can

(29:30):
be it can be very very effective. But it's just
like there's also like long term and short term effectiveness, right.
And I think she thinks and other people think the
cognitive behavioral therapists it's sort of like the the the
more you know, insofar as we can think of therapy
as instant gratification, it's kind of like the instant gratification
of therapy in the sense of like short term like

(29:51):
tools to help you, and then there's like longer term ones,
which is like being an analysis or doing psychodynamic or
doing something else where you really get into the need
grading explore. Well, you might get something from that in
the long term that you couldn't get from CBT about
like insights into childhood. So I you know, I do
think that like a therapy, that method that totally ignores

(30:13):
childhood and these other things I think is probably missing
out on something, even though they can still be helpful.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Yeah, and you got to think, what is all of
these strange terms that between Freud and Lacan, all this
strange terminology and all this very like heavy intellectual labor
they're doing, Like they're not like, what is it all
kind of getting at?

Speaker 1 (30:39):
Well, I mean, I'll trying to get at I'll try
to summarize that, and I feel pressure from the other
because I haven't talked in a while, so I feel like, oh,
I gotta jump in now. I think basically summarizes the
goal remains of psychoanalysis of locating psycho analysis, it seems

(31:00):
to be to diminish the other in importance, because if
the other is important to you, and it's important to everybody, well,
the neurotics, the obsessives, and hysterics, they are living their
life with the baggage, with the inhibitions created by the other, feeling,

(31:20):
feeling judged, controlled, whatever, So they're they're they're reacting and
overreacting to the other. And you don't really need all
this algebra to figure out how to be free from that.
I find it completely plausible that without using any of
these algebraic mathemes and terms, you can go to a
different kind of therapist and they'll say, you know, you're

(31:41):
kind of thinking all this in your head and you
don't have to. Yeah, so that's that's good news to
everybody listening who can afford la Canian psychoanalysis.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Or like you're doing this because you know, oh, like
you're reenacting this pattern right that happened when you were
a child, whether it's an analyst or some other type
of therapist. And I think, you know, I find that
there's useful conception like categories in other types of things,
like I remember a little while ago reading about attachment styles, right,

(32:11):
which I don't think comes from psychoanalysis, but it kind
of makes sense. It's like, you know, anxious attachment, avoid
an attachment, Like if you I don't know if either
of you even read up on that. It's kind of
useful and it is like sort of related to childhood
and it's consistent in a way, but just uses sort
of different language.

Speaker 4 (32:27):
Yeah, attachment and describe it. But it's really intuitively interesting.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Yeah. But I think but on your point Pills though,
like about kind of devaluing the power of the other.
I mean, I think that's true in all therapy styles
to an extent, at least the ones that do go
a bit deeper, because what is it trying to do, right,
They're trying to show you how Oh, you're like re

(32:51):
enacting this pattern because maybe this thing happened to you
and you're feeling it like in this like deeply significant way.
But I guess actually it's because you know, you're you
were trying to get the attention of whatever your father
or something like that, or you know you were, and
it's like and and and coming to terms with that

(33:11):
is in a way lessening the power of the other, right,
is like coming to terms with that is doing that
I think I would, you know, I guess I'm here's
me hedging. I'm spitballing a little bit here, but like
that makes sense to me that that in a way,
like that's sort of the effect of these sorts of
methods is to lessen the power, like the kind of

(33:33):
the residual mark that was left on you, and to
be like, oh, actually, you know, I don't need to
try to get my father to pay attention to me anymore. Right.
I realized I was doing that because of it, and
like I need to just take responsibility for my desires, right,
which is another thing that kind of comes up and
think is sort of owning our juissance, owning our desire

(33:59):
in a way where it's not this like weird, painful
struggle to try to like get the thing that we
didn't get before that that'll make us happy, but to
actually just be like, well, I'm just going to take
ownership of this sort of desire. And there's there's also
an interesting subtext that maybe we can talk about later
of like sort of authenticity, which is to me a

(34:21):
little bit interesting in the sense of you know what,
who are you really right? Like you know and there,
and they're like there. There can be a temptation to
read this as in like a very obsessional way. I
think of like I don't need anyone else, it's just me,
right Like that's kind of like that would be like

(34:41):
the sort of obsessional fantasy of reading this. But I
think rather than than that being the outcome, it's more
just being like, oh, I actually like do need other people? Uh,
and that's okay, and I can take responsibility for those needs, right, Like,
So it's not so much like I'm actually an individual
and like I that's just falling into the obsessional kind
of trap. I think. I think it's about being like, no,

(35:03):
like I do need other people. I do, right, I
do need I am. I am affected by them by
their desire, and that's okay. And you know, I need
to take ownership of my reliance on other people, right
and enjoy those things.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
So I agree with what you're saying about the diminishing
the power of the other and this process. Insofar as
Lakhan is formalizing Freud and putting it on a rigorous
kind of scientific basis, they're thinking of science as the
science of linguistics, and hence this very important like idea

(35:45):
of traversing the fantasy is as Pills said, it's like
what it was, a signifi rization of desire, Like it's
another separation. That's why he calls it a further separation.
Is alienation, Know where you fall into language and you're
alienated in language because we had this this thing now

(36:05):
shapes and gives form to our desires that isn't ours
and was here before us, and we'll be here after
us language. And then separation where the father lays down
the law and says you can't have her, she's mine,
or other versions of that, like you realize your mother
has desires other than you, and it creates a rift

(36:25):
between the child's desire and the mother's desire. And then
that now this third stage of traversing the fantasy, this
further separation, where that desire, that fundamental fantasy that's born
in that second stage, that separate separation becomes signify our

(36:45):
eyed right desire the name of the father. It's no
longer fixed. Desire is no longer fixed to the name
of the father. Like for little Hans it was stuck
on the horse. The horse was the name of the father.
He's afraid of the horse, and it's fixated on that,
and traversing the fantasy has a way of making introducing

(37:09):
some motility into the whole symbolic picture. Right where you
signify our eyes, it it gives it, it gives movement.
There there's play of signifiers and so yeah, so I
mean it's on this linguistic basis that Lacon I just
I don't want to downplay the scientific keness as as

(37:30):
as it's seen by followers of Lacan. And what Lacan
was doing was was whatever their difference between you know,
how physicists would define science and others and how the
Lukenyans would.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
And there you go, listener, there's we saved you thousands
of dollars. All you have to do is take that
insight to heart and your curate if you realize that
the desire of the other that's causing you all these problems.
Just there's signifiers and your unconscious that they're basically arbitrary,

(38:04):
like Eric used more words than that to say, but
if they're basically arbitrary, you don't have to take the
other so seriously as you as you are right now, Yeah, they.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Are arbitrary because because of that reality that was never
really reality. But it's that that that feeling of wholeness
that's preserved in your fantasy.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
That's a good way to put it. Actually, the other
is not whole. The other is not a presence. It's
this it's a construction.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
But the hysteric already knows that kind of.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Well the I don't. At least she's trying to prove it, right,
that's kind of her motivation.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah, because the hysterics fantasy is that is that there
is like an like that the other, that that like
the other that the others lack can be filled by you, right,
And that's also a fantasy, so.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
They the oversimplification, bad oversimplification, is that the girls got
to stop trying to complete the other compulsively, and the
boys got to stop taking the other as a threat.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
So seriously, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Okay, we we went from Victor talking about the beginning
of this and Eric jumping way to the end of this,
but I wanted to go to the middle of this
before we run out of time. So I only want
to say one matheme because it keeps coming up over
and over and over again and it's the structure of fantasy.
It's only three characters, which is dollar sign, which is

(39:38):
the split subject, dollar sign laws enge.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
In relation to diamond to lozenge. Actually, well, it's a
diamond though I mean for.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
The diamond, it's diamond maybe the the Plebeian term of
what this is. But i'm I'm I'm technical and more
correct for that sore throat dollar sign. Lozenge A a
small a which is ah in French. So the fantasy's
the middle. The fantasy is the diamond slash lozenge and

(40:10):
the laws ine sitting there, the diamond sitting there between
the split subject and the a. It's a mediator, it's
stand in. So basically we never approach ab j a
because we're always approaching to fantasy about abja and abja.
It's the lost completeness, but it doesn't belong to you.
It belongs to the other, which is why you want

(40:31):
to go get it. And we're constantly living in the fantasy. Now,
the fantasy it's in you, but it belongs to the other.
So if we're going to reduce the other, we reduce
the power that the fantasy has over us. And this
is where we get the term traversing the fantasy, which
means to recognize ab ja for what it is, recognize

(40:56):
the other's power for what it is without the fantasy
being in place. So we have a little arrow going
from dollar sign to abja. So I guess there's an
epiphany here, and the epiphany is realizing that, oh it's
it's just an incomplete signifier. Now, one way you can

(41:17):
say this, and Victor did say this. Victor said this
is to take responsibility. When you take responsibility and say
I am the cause, this precludes the other from its power.
It precludes the other from being the cause of you
and saying that the other is not the cause of
you when it in fact is. In the earlier Lakenian algebra,

(41:41):
this is more than the therapy speak version of oh,
I need to take some accountability in my life in
order to be happy. So, Victor, I'm not sure in
which sense you met it meant it, But here taking
responsibility is not the same thing as what we mean
in therapy speak, which is which is to take responsibility.

(42:04):
This is more like taking responsibility for everything so as
to deny the other. And this is this is not
meant to sound like solepsism. But the traversal of the
fantasy is to take causal responsibility for everything that has
ever happened to you, because your experience is yours. Yeah,

(42:27):
so traversing the fantasy is not like unlike saying, of
a traumatic event that is continuing to affect your behavior,
you say, I was in fact asking for it.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
No, it's not, it's not. It's not that.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
It is not unlike that. It is close to that.
I mean, to own your trauma means to say you
caused your trauma and you can't blame it on other
people anymore. You can't blame it on the other anymore.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
I think that's kind of right. But I don't know
that he means, Yeah, I don't know that he means
like taking responsibility in the in the sense that like,
it's your fault. But I think you take responsibility for
sort of how you're reacting to it, how.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
It's that's that's therapy, you don't think.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
So.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
No, the language it says here, the language it says
is to become your own object. Cause that means to
take all agency upon yourself, which means you are responsible,
but radically responsible for your experiences.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
You subjectify trauma. I think is like one of the
ways that he like.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
So that fundamental fantasy that that comes out of separation,
like the object ah comes out of separation too, it's
not real, Like it's not something that really happened.

Speaker 4 (43:47):
It's not it's something.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yeah, But events that really happened aren't real either, right,
They're no longer happening unless you're continuing to indulge them
in sense, and unless you're continuing to have them belong
to your fantasy. So we're not talking about a traumatic
your feelings about a traumatic event, because that's not what

(44:11):
is encoded in the unconscious. What's encoded in the unconscious
is the symbolic value of those events. If something bad
happened to you, whatever, whatever it is, If I if
Uncle Billy molested you, right, But if you take obja
awe from the other and you don't allow it to
belong to the other anymore, that is real traversal. That's

(44:36):
not like regular therapy speak of take responsibility for what
you can take responsibility for. It's not saying I take
responsibility for how I feel about the trauma. It's saying
I take responsibility for existing at all. It's saying you
are the object cause of your existence now and forever.

(44:56):
It's think of it like if you get PTSD, if
you're Freud, Freud with his patients, you got PTSD from
World War One. You are not causing the war, but
you are causing the PTSD by turning it over and
over again as a fantasy and believing then symbolically that
the fantasy is coming from the outside qua qua memory.

(45:18):
So traversing the fantasy is figuring out how to say,
I am causing this trauma, I am causing World War one,
I am causing my mother to beat me. That's traversing
the fantasy of the unity of the subject, because as
we've gone over the Lakenian subject, that unity is fantasy

(45:38):
as well. We're also and we also have to get
to a retroactive causality, which we'll explain more of this.
But do not think that holds as I've said it.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
It does kind of hold, but it's not that you're
actually saying like you're not changing the fact facts of
what happened.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Like like the idea is, it's paradoxical because there's the
trauma is what creates the subject, but the subject has
to go back and be its own creator.

Speaker 4 (46:05):
That's what I meant with like the the.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
Parrot, Like if if you know, back to the Future
could really happen, you know, I mean if you could
literally go back and be your own cause it would
be something like back to the future, going back in
time and like sleeping with a family member further back
down the line, which is just gross to think about.
But you know, Fink says, you know, the fundamental fantasy

(46:31):
is not so much something that exists per se prior
to analysis.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
I'm sorry, I understand that's true, but I can't. I'm
focused on this. What back to the future, he doesn't
sleep with his mother and back to the Future.

Speaker 4 (46:45):
I mean, I mean, if you had a car that
could do what it does.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
I mean, in the plot to Back to the Future,
he doesn't become his own dad. He almost kills himself
by seducing his mother away from his dad.

Speaker 3 (46:59):
Yeah, I mean, if he seduced his mother and like
became his own father, I mean that if that the.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Way for the Back to the Future example to work
was that he arranged for his father to get confidence
in order to get his mother back, which in that
way caused his own existence to continue unabated. Well, there
you go, like he retroactively caused his own life to continue,

(47:26):
which is also something that we're always doing. Right in
a symbolic level.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
The fantasy is not he says. He says, it's not.
It doesn't exist prior to analysis. It's constructed and reconstructed
during the course of analysis. It's something that that trum,
that trauma, and that fundamental fantasy and that objay as
are all in a sense, they are all like constructed

(47:53):
within analysis. I think I don't know if all of
it is, but a lot of it is is a
construct like you said, like the other being a construct too.
It's not a real trauma that you're just saying, you know,
you know, I ask for it.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, that's what I meant before, Like in my kind
of therapy speak, like in a way it is sort
of that it's like re thematizing it in a way
that is sort of taking responsibility for the feelings that
you have about it by telling kind of a different story.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Well, see here, this is where I think I think
your guys are downplaying the con a little bit because
this is more radical. You say that there's this trauma
of coming into language, and then there's real trauma like
Uncle Billy molesting you. But in the three registers, there's
no such thing as real trauma. There can't be any
such thing as real trauma, because there is the real,

(48:47):
which is not signifiable and so can't be traumatic. And
then there's the trauma, which is the attachments that you
make to events and the split of the other in
language like real trauma isn't a thing. And the therapeutic
solution here the cure, which is not a cure, but
you know what I mean. The cure is to say
that any symbolic attachment to experiences that I have are

(49:12):
caused by none other than me right now, not in
the past, because the past isn't real, memories aren't real,
and it's it's true that at the moment you are
now causing yourself to have existed. So freedom from the
other's causation is what traversing the fantasy is.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Yeah, and your psyche did your psyche did your psyche?
Did like choose like in a way, choose to respond
to it. I mean, even though that's not treat that's
the story. You're going to assume, You're going to take
responsibility for it.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
It's the operation is called putting the eye back in
the traumatic cause.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Right, and putting yourself. Putting yourself back in the cause
is what's known as retroactive causality, which is kind of
the coolest part of this bit to cause yourself to
exist is to take the second signifier or a second
signifier and to insert it into its own process as

(50:11):
the beginning of the process. And we do this anyway,
but if you're doing it with the other in mind,
that's why you keep repeating the compulsion. So the strategy
is to say I caused my own birth in a
way your reading of back to the future, except literally
doing that, it is my I am the cause of

(50:35):
my own birth retroactively.

Speaker 2 (50:38):
Yeah. The birth is the trauma, and you're taking responsibility
for it.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Yeah, and not your physical birth, but your first instance
of subject chin and your first instance of subjection or
sub subjectivisation doesn't exist apart from you. Now, who is
causing that to exist retroactively? Yeah, So you can't really,
you can't unrepress it. But by saying I exist because

(51:05):
I exist, it's kind of tautological actually in that sense,
but you change the meaning of the sentence with the
last word. I feel like I'm fucking up this explanation.
But there are these sentences, you know that where the
final the last word in the sentence changes the whole context.
I'll find it. I'll find an example. Sorry, tell me

(51:27):
about But.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
It is about it. It's about changing like the sentences
from like, for example, being like they did this to me,
or like fate made me this way. Traversal does change
the language to be like I don't know I acted right,
I suffered. I like. It is putting the eye back
into it to like, uh, you know, it's and it's

(51:48):
not about like trying to make yourself feel like guilty
or anything. It's just about like owning your own constitution, right,
the thing that made you the subject that you are right,
rather than put in the other's hands.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Yeah, it's your fault. It's your fault for existing.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah, this is which is not in the guilt sense,
and it's almost it's like the ontological sense, not the
like responsibility sense.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
In the causal sense. You caused your suffering by existing.

Speaker 3 (52:16):
Well, this is this is why there's this long section
about when when exactly does the subject appear like That's
why he's thinking about when when the subject comes about
because there's no there's no chronological moment, he says. Lakhan
never pinpoints the subject's chronological appearance on the scene. He

(52:38):
or she is always either about to arrive on the
verge of arriving or will have already arrived by some
later moment. So they're always using this perfect tense to
describe like the chronological place of the subject, right, which
connects to this paradoxical you know event number one and

(53:00):
event number two, like event number one precedes event number two,
but then in another sense, you know, event number two
is what creates event number one and gives it meaning, right,
Like that's why you know, and your explanation I think
is good. But there's there's those technical terms, right. Remember

(53:23):
with alienation, that's when the existence part comes in when
we're describing where the subject comes from. There's like alienation
is what allows the subject to exist in the sense
that existence is something that wouldn't make any sense without

(53:45):
the symbolic because you can't say something is absent, something
is not there, like existence as opposed to what in existence?
But what animals sign language? Like how do you can't say, well,
proper sign language, you can negate things but there's no negation.
Without language, there's no existence. And then separation is being, right,

(54:09):
Separation is that is what gives subjectivity its being, and
so there's those those two terms are used very specifically
existence and being and being is that second moment. I think,
I don't know if this maps on, but that that
retroactively gives the first moment. It's kind of meaning. And

(54:31):
that's why there's no chronological point. This is just the
logic of a paradox, is what it is. There's a
logical point, but there's no time in somebody's life when
they become a subject in that sense of like when
does it happen like at age three? No, Like it's
it's a process. Alienation is a process. Separation is a process,

(54:55):
and it's paradoxical.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
And the paradox is you don't exist as a subject,
but you will have had existed as a subject. There's
a certain existence that will have happened, but it hasn't
happened yet, and it's always about to happen. I think
it's one of the ways he phrases it.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
And it's important because it's so intuitively correct, like you
need two things, like in order for there to be
a cause, there has to be an effect. But if
the cause always comes before the effect, but there has
to be there is no cause until the effect arrives,
which is after the cause. But the cause has to

(55:39):
come first, right, Like it's such a weird thing to
focus on that and like try to explain it, but
we all deal with that paradox so easily without thinking
about it. Yes, of course cause comes first, effect second,
but it's if you think about it, it's a chicken
or the egg question, which one came first?

Speaker 4 (56:00):
The chicken or the egg? The cause the effect?

Speaker 3 (56:03):
You know, the existence of the subject or the being
of the subject. You know, the subject's alienation and language,
or the subjects separation from the mother. You know, the
trauma creates the subject. Is the subject create its own trauma?
You know all those paradoxical questions that we that I

(56:24):
guess our brains are just hardwired to deal with those
things so easily. But like you know, they're they're they're there,
they're available to be thought about, and the CON's doing that.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Yeah, well, I think it's also about owning, like how
your unconscious caused or made use of whatever event. Like
if we're talking about some trauma.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Oh yeah, dude, this is perfect framing because we started
on this point. You don't decide the symbolic value of
events just for whatever reason, this happens almost arbitrarily.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
Yeah, exactly, So like your unconscious has made use of
the event and has shaped the way that you're desiring,
the way that you're even jewey Sance enjoyment. Right, And
it's not being like it's not saying like, oh I
cause this abuse in the sense that like I'm responsible
for the abuse, but more like I think, which maybe
is going to sound like therapy talk to you, but
like to me, it's like, now this event that happened

(57:22):
to me belongs to me. It's part of my psychic history.
I can't live as if it was kind of outside
of me, right because the normal way that we think,
but it's like this happened to me from outside. But
it's like, no, psych my psyche, my unconscious did this,
and I have to own that. And that's why even
later when it comes to jewey Sance, he says also

(57:43):
talks about how like we also change our relationship to
jewey Sance, which right, because we might have that in
a way that's a reaction to whatever abuse or trauma
that we had. And so instead of being like, oh,
these these compulsive patterns, right, you know that like the
trauma generates the meaning of these patterns. So instead you

(58:07):
take responsibility for the juissance, which is kind of like
instead of imagining that it comes from the other, right,
that like you're that like I guess your pain, your shame,
or like the arousal for example, that you get is
given to me by something outside of me. Instead you
try to say no, like it's actually mine, right, It's

(58:28):
part of how I'm structured as a as a desiring being. Right,
So it's not like you're excusing the abusers act if
it's a case of abuse, but you're more like saying no,
this is like this, there's psychic agency that I have
about how I think about how it belongs to me,
how my unconscious is reacting in this way and is
causing enjoyment and guilt and shame or whatever. They're mine, right,

(58:53):
They're not someone outside of mes.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, that's sort of a radical freedom to internalize because
after the event is over, it's over. And if you
keep acting based on an event that happened in the
past at a certain point it becomes a decision. And
it's not a conscious decision. It's not something you can
just change on a dime. But if Lacan is right,

(59:18):
you can change the way that unconscious decisions are made.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
I must come to be where foreign forces, the other
as language, and the other as desire once dominated, I
must subjectify that otherness think says. The eye is not
already in the unconscious. It may be everywhere presupposed there,
but it has to be made to appear. It may

(59:45):
always already be there in some sense, but the essential
clinical task is to make it appear there where.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
It was.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
Right.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
So that's that that this stuff comes after, Like I
think exactly what you were saying, and the idea that,
like a fate, you know, you have a fate, a
fate one has not chosen, but which, however random or
accidental it may seem at the outset, one must nevertheless subjectify.

(01:00:17):
One must, in Freud's view, become its subject. And traversing
the fantasy, as we've been talking about, is a reversal
of that dominance where the same So it's the same
thing to subjectify otherness.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I was when I was
reading this, I was thinking about a very controversial example,
an extreme example.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Uh oh, you're not gonna we already we already got
molested by pretendent gobile.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
I mean it involves it involves rape. So so, sir
Jermaine Greer, you guys know, she's always a controversial kind
of like turfy feminist. But she she was raped when
she was thirty or something like that in a car.
I think she was coming out to her car from
a bar and there's a guy who came from an
alleyway and grabbed her and put her in her backseat
of her car and raped her. And she talks about

(01:01:13):
how she's like, the rape is not the worst thing
that's happened to me. Like she's like, it's you know,
it was bad, but like so I just was reminded
of that because I don't know if she's maybe like
an extreme example of someone and to be honest, like
the subtext of what she was saying was kind of
like I think it would be ungenerously read as her

(01:01:34):
saying like, oh, these women who have been raped need
to stop whining. But in a way, I think a
more generous reading of it was like you can't live
in like a pure kind of a kind of externalized
victim mentality sort of. And I don't know if I
agree with that. I'm just saying it's like, it's a
very controversial example that came to my mind, where she's like, look,

(01:01:56):
I think she even said somewhere like penises are way
less scary than hammers or fists or like these other
things like that are actually way more physically dangerous to
your well being, and like we can She's like, you know,
I didn't. You know, I could have gone on and
lived my life and made this rape define me right,

(01:02:19):
like like to define my trauma and my feelings. Or
I could have been like, oh yeah, like it was
a pretty bad thing that happened to me, but not
that bad comparatively. I don't know. I don't know if
that's an example, but it came. It came to my
mind when I.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
Was that's good. That's one of the things I've heard
this phrase before, like owning your trauma or something like that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:41):
Yeah, and it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Helps you to take responsibility for things that you could
have changed, Like, yeah, well, I'm going to take responsibility
for the fact that I chose to be in that
parking lot and in some cases, presumably that helps recover
from the trauma. Now, please don't mishear me, Please don't,
please don't mistake this. This has nothing to do with

(01:03:04):
victim blaming. Victim blaming would be to say if someone
else tells her, well, you shouldn't have been in that
parking lot, that's I think. That's not what the strategy is.
The strategy is to not make yourself a victim. So
please please tell me that that distinction makes sense. Like,
if there were if there were in a traumatic event,

(01:03:27):
if there were nothing that you could have done that
makes you, that renders you fundamentally powerless, and psychologically feeling
utter powerlessness is very bad. It's going to be really destructive.
So in order to take some power back, you take

(01:03:47):
responsibility for things that you may have had a choice over.
And Leacan's version of this is not okay. Well, I
acknowledge that I chose to be in the parking lot.
The cons version is I have since chosen to exist
and like not to be alive, right, but I have

(01:04:08):
since chosen to exist, thus affirmed my existence with this
traumatic event in it. Therefore, I am a causal agent,
not merely a victim of circumstance. So yeah, I see
why you brought that up. There's definitely some resonance between
the two strategies.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
I think it's useful almost to it's tricky, but I
think it's maybe useful to make a distinction between moral
responsibility and onto logical responsibility, right, because it's like how
you are, how you're constituted, how your psyche is constituted,
and owning that that's like onto logical responsibility, which but

(01:04:47):
of course it's tied up with moral responsibile and maybe
that's like the mistake because I feel like these feelings
of guilt, I mean maybe I don't know. I feel
like my mind's going to like a bunch of different places,
but one of them is like, well, maybe morality is
like a fantasy in a way that it's like because
like we have these feelings of guilt and shame that
are often predicated on some kind of judgment of the

(01:05:08):
big other, which is like a moral a moral like
adjudicator of the other. Right, and like maybe part of
that is like freeing yourself of that even right, And like.

Speaker 3 (01:05:19):
Well, con wrote a paper about the ethics of psychoanalysis,
right that psychoanalysis is an ethically ethically, like the it's
the whole theory of desire there, it's ethically rooted in
that and that idea of subjectifying otherness, like we're using
you know, the victim of terrible things to talk about it,

(01:05:45):
but it's to say it's subjectifying the otherness. And then
the next line I think says just sort of in passing,
but it's very important, I think, is that it is
for this reason, like that I must subjectify that otherness
is for this reason that we can say that the
Lacanian subject is ethically motivated. And I think I don't

(01:06:07):
know how lacan and Freud would think about, you know,
the victim culture, right, it's like to say, I don't know,
maybe they would look at that that victim culture as
as something that that psychoanalysis would be uniquely uniquely equipped
to deal with. Is that there's a trauma, and victim
culture is about blaming external forces.

Speaker 4 (01:06:29):
And that comedian you're bringing.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
Up is she's not a comedian, she's a feminist, like
a feminist scholar, a feminist writer.

Speaker 4 (01:06:38):
The feminists. Yeah, I don't know. I just pictured a
comedian for some reason, because.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
It's because it's such a ridiculous thing to say. I
guess it's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
Not a very funny bit.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
I guess I had like a right wing comedians on
my brain for some reason.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
I was like, she's like, she's like a feminist writer
who's kind of a.

Speaker 3 (01:06:56):
Terrif listening to I was listening to THEO Vaughn a
while ago, and I was I was thinking about how
I like Luisy K and then what happened to him?

Speaker 4 (01:07:03):
And then I saw he was on THEO Von A
whole other track in my brain.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
Anyway, we're talking about we're talking about eurotics today, not perverts.

Speaker 4 (01:07:13):
That's gone.

Speaker 3 (01:07:14):
The victim culture thing is something that I think Lacan
and Freud would.

Speaker 4 (01:07:18):
Say, you know, see what happens when you.

Speaker 3 (01:07:20):
Ignore the psychoanalysis and it's and it's ethical mission, all right,
would be to say, yeah, it's victim culture is about
blaming external forces and whatever whatever you think about it
in terms of what actually happens to people. You know,

(01:07:42):
subjectifying otherness doesn't doesn't have to be victim blaming either.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
The yeah, exactly, this sounds like we're just trying to
be you know, edgy, but really all that's being said
here is that the victim and ultimately hurts the victim,
not the perpetrator. Yes, So in effect, this is like
this is like taking a shot of toilet bowl cleaner

(01:08:09):
and then expecting it to hurt someone else rather than yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:08:12):
Yes, yeah, because all we hear the snippets on the
news and the media that talk about it. But it's
the people who have to live with what's happened and
what's going to happen, what will have already happened, and
all that, all that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
But without all the you know, very morbid examples you
can do that. You do this by you rewrite. I
will say this, you retroactively cause yourself no matter what,
even if it's not this original trauma, but with whatever
compulsive behavior. So I said, I said those words that

(01:08:51):
change the meaning of the sentence. Beforehand, I was working
on a few here. You can say I record a
podcast with that's the structure of the sentence, but listen
to how the scene changes so much depending on what
you put at the end of the sentence. So I
can say I record a podcast with a mic, or

(01:09:12):
I can say I record a podcast with friends, or
I record a podcast with a cold. Because I do
have kind of a cold. I record a podcast with
the audience in mind. I record a podcast with regularity,
I record a podcast with intensity. So this one last word,
what I mean to say, is the eye that's in

(01:09:34):
that sentence. It's a social eye. If it's with friends,
it's a tool using eye. If I'm talking about the microphone,
it has something to do with my physical symptoms. When
I say I have a cold, it has something to
do with my internal dialogue. If I say I'm thinking
of the audience, I record a podcast with the audience
in mind. So the eye, which is the single signifier,

(01:09:58):
changes entirely in its scene based on the ending that
is chosen. So I mean that to say, with the
Lacanian the Lacanian subject as a signifying chain, you can,
I guess, break a habit to recall our merlu Pontian episodes. Yeah,

(01:10:19):
you can rewrite what has happened to you, or you
can rewrite your fantasy. I guess we'll use the terms
of lacan. So your habit in this sense is the
fantasy where you have organized how the other is reacting
to you, whether that's strong or weak, whether it's commanding
you to do things, whether it's forcing you to take

(01:10:41):
the role of object and you don't want to whatever
the other is doing to you. You can take possession
of the other's desire in a certain sense and rewrite
the eye at the beginning of the sentence, which is
the first mirror stage whatever. And that's technically it's not
actually the mirror stage, but it's a constant mirror stage

(01:11:03):
where you will have been the subject of the sentence
at some point.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
That's good. I think that's helpful.

Speaker 3 (01:11:09):
I think that also brings up the linguistic basis of
Lacanian psychoanalysis too, because yeah, sentences unfold in time, and
so meaning is kind of retroactive in that sense too.
It's like the meaning of something doesn't emerge until the end,

(01:11:32):
especially in languages like like German, where sometimes the verb
in certain cases is put on the end of the
sentence and you kind of got to wait. You get
all the other words, and then you kind of got
to wait, and then you hear the last word, and
then you get the meaning of the whole sentence, but
only at the end.

Speaker 4 (01:11:48):
Only at the end, you.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
Don't get the whole You never get the whole meaning
of something as it's coming out.

Speaker 4 (01:11:55):
Kind of thing and it could be anything.

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
You could think it's in one way and then it
ends and the meaning emerges and it's like, WHOA, that
wasn't what I expected at all.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
I have another I have another, uh controversial example that
I'm not sure if I want to if I if
I should share it, and maybe after I say it,
I'll ask you to like edit it out. But I
did hear a story about a therapist who had a
patient but came in because this woman really revealed that

(01:12:27):
to one of her friends when she was like in
her I think she was in her like thirties or forties,
and she told her friend. She's like, oh yeah, when
I was like younger, like a like a teenager, like
I had sex with my dad the fuck uh and
like and it was kind of consensual and like it
was sort of like when I was going through puberty
and it was kind of fine. But I told my

(01:12:48):
friend this, and my friend said, I must be really
fucked up, So like I decided that I should come
see a therapist. But for him, the thing was, it's like,
I'm not My job isn't to convince who you're fucked up.
You need to show me you're fucked up right, and
ultimately he like decided, well, like, I don't really see
any evidence of you being like traumatized or messed up

(01:13:08):
by this, like so like don't let other people or
me convince you that you know you're messed up. And
obviously I don't know the details of like how All
I know is it was at least from her perspective,
consensual and like not forced and not manipulated. But you know,
so I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
I don't know you're saying this is this is not
a step dad, No.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
It was her, It was her her birth father. I
think I think.

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
That is messed up. I'll be the other to stand in.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
No, I know, and I mean it it is messed up,
but it but but I think it raises like kind
of an interesting question because it is like exactly like
you said, it's like the other who is saying like
that that's messed up. I mean it feels very messed
up to me obviously, But it was just you know,
and I guess, like, you know, the point of him
telling me that story was like, look, if she would

(01:13:57):
have gone to like nine out of ten therapists, like
she would have probably developed all kinds of issues because
the therapist would have convinced her that she's fucked up.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
Right, Yeah, I guess that speaks to that speaks to
the double inscription that that event as what is it
betraying the incest taboo? It didn't inscribe in her for
whatever reason, which is probably good for her.

Speaker 2 (01:14:22):
But still fucked up obviously obviously, like like super super
messed up. But it's one of those interesting cases where
you're just like shit, like what is you know, uh,
like what is the right thing to do? Therapeutically?

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
It does, it definitely does reinforce the distinction between like
reading Freud and Lacan, like literally when when they're talking
about alienation and separation using the child mother father terminology. Yeah,

(01:15:00):
it literalizes that in an uncomfortable way when we're often
told over and over that no, these are just I mean,
this isn't you know, real stuff, Like the edible complex isn't.

Speaker 4 (01:15:13):
Like to be read literally, but it is. But it's
not right.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
But you know, the primal Father is a real figure,
but not really. It's a mythological invention of Freud's in
order to explain something else like yeah, I don't know,
I don't know how to touch that one.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Yeah, I don't know, maybe you should cut that out. Honestly,
I'll decide later tonight.

Speaker 1 (01:15:36):
I feel like, well, what's interesting about it? I think
what you said is other people's response to it, because
other people's response to it is rightfully. My response to
it rightfully is well that that should fuck you up.
That's the kind of thing that should be fucking you up.
But along with a double inscription thing, you know, the

(01:15:59):
double inscription thing means you're you're writing your conscious memories
and your unconscious is writing its version of events, and
those two things don't really align. So even if you
don't remember something like that happening as traumatic, then you
would think that you're unconscious believes it to be traumatic,
because that's an extreme betrayal of that what that relationship

(01:16:23):
usually looks like, and what that relationship is supposed to
be and trust and all that stuff. So it's and
it does speak to the randomness of how your unconscious
certainly overreacts or over inscribes certain instances that aren't that
important as very important. Yeah, you would think, but I

(01:16:44):
guess they can happen in the reverse where things that
are like obviously insanely disgusting and vile don't get inscribed
when maybe they should.

Speaker 3 (01:16:54):
Yeah, that's good on that person for not being Yeah,
it's I mean it is subjectified.

Speaker 4 (01:17:05):
Check you know, signify or eyes to that one.

Speaker 3 (01:17:10):
Check.

Speaker 4 (01:17:10):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Anyways, the eye is not already in the unconscious.

Speaker 4 (01:17:15):
That's what you just wanted to be a little bit
edgy for us?

Speaker 2 (01:17:20):
Well, I mean I wasn't sure. I was also just
curious how you guys would react to it, and like
if we could make like an interesting connection to the text,
because it does seem like I feel like I've met
people who like have a have like a super messed
up childhood, and they're just like fine, and it's like
like I'm sure that can just happen, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:17:38):
Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 3 (01:17:39):
Two people can experience the exact same event and have
complete different reactions to it, Like you know, the like
Freud treated a lot of those shell shock patients after
the war First World War, and you know, a lot
of people experience the same sorts of things, but only
some people develop up PTST shell shock tremors, that sort

(01:18:03):
of stuff. And so he's thinking about, like, Okay, why
do these people, why are they reliving it. What's this
repetition compulsion about. And it's something about it's something about
repeating the event to insert it into anxiety and anticipation.
You're like rehearsing the trauma over and over.

Speaker 4 (01:18:26):
Yeah, And I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:18:28):
Want to say it's like mastery of it, but there's
something to do with anxiety and anticipation.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Well, my brother sometimes talks about the dandelion versus orchid
theory of raising children, where it's like it's like you
don't know which one you're going to get, right. You
might get a child who, no matter what happens to them,
they're just like a dandelione and can grow and flourish anywhere.
Or you have a child who's an orchid. It's like

(01:18:56):
they need very specific conditions to flourish properly. And it's
and you just don't know which one you're gonna get,
so you have to just be careful. I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:19:05):
Another another way to put that is like trauma in itself.
It's not a substance. It's not like a yeah, it's
not guaranteed to be found there. It's it's trauma because
it's signified as such. And we've read a bunch of
examples through the lacon like you can you can miss
hear your parent saying something about you and infer that

(01:19:27):
it's about you, and it can change your response to
the other when they didn't even say it about you, you
just misheard. Or it can be something something you know,
serious that doesn't affect you. I guess that that that
tracks you never.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
Know, you never know, you never know.

Speaker 4 (01:19:44):
Yeah, it is, really, there is.

Speaker 3 (01:19:48):
I mean, I feel like the word subjective has kind
of changed its meaning now too, But I'll just say, yeah,
there is an element of like the subjective response to
the situation. Yeah that really that really it determines how
its effect is going to on a be.

Speaker 1 (01:20:04):
We should reiterate there is no subject in lacan.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
There's just yeah, really in the traditional sense. Go back
see episode one or two of the series I'm on
where we talk about this.

Speaker 3 (01:20:14):
Con Honestly, I know, I know we're probably wrapping up,
so it's just like, I know, I need I need
help with the whole subject object thing now. It seems
like because I my head is filled with this stuff
that we've been talking about, and like what you just said,
there is no subject in LACAN and everything else too,
you know, Latour and Luhmann and all the other sort

(01:20:36):
of people who are like trying to get over the
subject object thing. And then I go out into the
world like I'm doing my teaching and we're in our
courses and we're talking about like the subject developments of
language and our responses to literature, and I'm just like,
oh my god, my brain is so scrambled from a
humanity's education that I can't even understand what people mean

(01:20:59):
when they just like, what's.

Speaker 4 (01:21:00):
Your subjective response to this book?

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
I'm just like, I just want to go read theory
now because I don't want to answer that question.

Speaker 4 (01:21:09):
I need a rough and ready way to respond to it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Well, how about this. You can take it or leave it,
But you just said it. You said what's your Someone
asks you your subjective response to this or that thing
with this song, that thing that your mom did, this
theory and your subjective response these are these are different
over time, they are different in tenor Sometimes you overreact

(01:21:35):
to things, sometimes you underreact to things. So to say,
I'm going to add up all my subjective responses and
then call these all effects of exactly the same cause
that there's one kernel core substance that's in the middle
of me called my subject. Yea, that is determining all
of these effects around it. You like, there's that that's

(01:21:56):
a stretch. There's not. Actually, there's no evidence for that
to be the case.

Speaker 3 (01:22:00):
And it's a paradoxical process where it always was but
isn't yet. So it will have been the subject. You
will have been a subject, I will the subject. I
will have been that I always already was going to be.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Well, if you just think about it in terms of
the signifying chain, right, even by the time you're you
finish a sentence that begins with I, the eye has
been modified.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
So the usual the usual response to this is to believe,
in some sort of positivist linguistics that the eye refers
to an eye that hasn't changed over the course of
the of the sentence. But lacking any evidence of that,
if you say I two times, it's a different eye
both times.

Speaker 3 (01:22:49):
Yeah, And I think you know what makes systems theory
and psychoanalysis overlap in their basic logic is that retroactive thing, right,
like a cause is be but B is also the
cause of a circular causality. You know that that again,
that like chicken or the egg thing. You know, Luman
wants to replace subject object with operation and observer, right,

(01:23:14):
which which create each other. In that again, in that
circular causality, and that and that type of logic, that
cybernetic basic cybernetic logic is also very present in Lucanian
psychoanalysis too, and he even wrote an article that heavily

(01:23:35):
referenced cybernetics.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
You might also think of those you remember the Satanic Panic.
I guess we can't remember it. We weren't conscious. But
during the Satanic Panic, they would get kids that went
through this daycare or whatever. They would get them into
a room and try to ask them what happened to them,
try to look for evidence of Satanic ritual abuse, and

(01:24:01):
the kids just made up tons of shit. Yeah, so
if this were, if this were applicable to what we're
talking about right now, then they would have made up
the memories of them being Satanic ritually abused and then
also experience trauma from the thing that they made up happening.
It's also it's called dissimulation when you have all the

(01:24:24):
symptoms of something that didn't actually even happen to you.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
Yeah, exactly, And I mean and in a way there
it's like the the traumatization is actually from probably the
probing questions that the police were asking them, right, that
were like, well didn't this.

Speaker 1 (01:24:37):
Were you naked in the middle of a pentagram? Pentagram?

Speaker 2 (01:24:43):
Right? And it's like, yeah, they all ended up making
it up like not out of nowhere, right out of interrogations,
I think, or such power.

Speaker 4 (01:24:53):
The crucible, like the witch, the witch accusations.

Speaker 2 (01:24:56):
There was like in the seventies and eighties, like this
theory of like repressed memories too, and like therapists who
specialized in that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:06):
Yeah, and then they discover memories and then they're traumatized
by the memories that they discovered.

Speaker 2 (01:25:11):
Which weren't actually true.

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
Yeah, that's a point in Lacan's favorite because that couldn't
happen if if there's some like one to one correspondence theory.

Speaker 3 (01:25:19):
Of there is there is a very specific process for reporting,
like asking kids questions if they report something to you.

Speaker 2 (01:25:27):
Because of that, I think.

Speaker 3 (01:25:28):
You have to be very careful, like you can't ask
them to repeat things like you have. There's a very
specific protocol for how to get more information out of
them so you can report it. Because again, like just
coming out of that research of children and testimony in
courtrooms and fabricated memories because kids aren't old enough to

(01:25:51):
tell the difference in some cases between fantasy and reality.

Speaker 1 (01:25:55):
They're psychotic.

Speaker 4 (01:25:56):
It could.

Speaker 3 (01:25:57):
Yeah, it costs the courts like millions and millions of
dollars a year investigating the claims of children when they're
used to give testimony, and that research has gone into
any positions that deal with young people.

Speaker 2 (01:26:13):
That's really interesting because I was watching this Netflix documentary
last week called like The Perfect Neighbor. I don't know
if either of you guys saw it, but it's maybe
one of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time.
Hard to watch the end, but the beginning of it
is hilarious because it's about a Karen, and the most
of the documentary is filmed is literally using police bodycam footage.

(01:26:34):
It's like weave together and it tells a whole coherent
story about like this woman who's always complaining about the
kids across the street, like coming on her yard and stuff,
like a real complaining Karen. But anyway, there's a part
in that where you see them asking children and it
stood out to me because I was like, oh, it's
interesting that the cop was doing that and just you
talking Eric right now, It's like, oh, that must have

(01:26:55):
been why he was doing it. And he basically said, look,
I want to make sure that what you're telling me
is the truth. So right now, like the fact that
that car or that the car is blue and today
is Wednesdays? Is that true or false? And the child's like, well,
that's true, that is what it is. Or like the
fact that there's a pink elephant outside would that be
true or not true? And the child's like, well, that
wouldn't be true. So it's like, okay, so like today

(01:27:17):
I only want you to tell me things that are true.

Speaker 3 (01:27:20):
Yeah, it's like a calibration question, and so like he
had this whole procedure where he was calibrating them to be.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
Like to make the distinction between true and untrue.

Speaker 3 (01:27:29):
Yeah, that kind of research is very important, and you're
dealing with minors.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
I was kind of impressed with by the cop there.
I was like, Oh, that's that's an interest, but maybe
by law, like they've been trained that that's what they
have to do when they talk to kids. They have
to like get a baseline of like truth.

Speaker 3 (01:27:43):
Well, yeah, like even with adults asking leading questions, like
you know, even mainstream psychological research, you know, they they
ask people, they show people all these videos of car crashes.
This is like some basic cognitive science research. Now, they
show people all these videos of car crashes.

Speaker 4 (01:28:00):
Boom boom boom.

Speaker 3 (01:28:01):
They don't tell them why, they just show them. A
week later, they bring them in and they ask some
of them, did you see what happened when those cars
hit each other? Ask some others, did you hear see
what happened when those cars smashed into each other?

Speaker 4 (01:28:13):
Did you see glass? They asked them.

Speaker 3 (01:28:15):
The ones that they said smashed into each other were
more likely to say, yes, we saw glass. The ones
that they say, did you see them hit each other
were less likely to say they saw glass.

Speaker 4 (01:28:26):
So there's just that cognitive bias thing.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
We manipulated in all kinds of ways.

Speaker 4 (01:28:33):
It happens to adults too.

Speaker 1 (01:28:35):
But presumably the bugs Bunny at Disneyland experiment, when people
could fabricate memories or verse fabricate memories of seeing bugs
Bunny at Disneyland, I.

Speaker 4 (01:28:45):
Don't know that that's the weird thing.

Speaker 3 (01:28:47):
There's so much of that weird stuff in psychology. But
psychoanalysis is not the most empirical of them.

Speaker 1 (01:28:58):
No, but how okay, how does this apply to all that?

Speaker 3 (01:29:03):
It's that that retroact, you know, like on the deepest
level of subjectivity, Like what if those rules apply to
your to to subjectivisation. I guess as well, like your identity.
The deepest features of who you are and your responses
to trauma are are shaped by those same mechanisms. We

(01:29:26):
we put them in such a pragmatic instrumental sense, like
you know, childhood testimony because of the problems with kids
differentiating between fantasy and reality cost the court millions and
millions of dollars every year, so we need a better
method of questioning them. That's not that's not about subjectivity.

(01:29:47):
That's that's just a question of you know, practicality. But
with psychoanalysis, it's something very fundamental there about about I
don't know, now I'm gonna use were Yeah, about human
existence whatever, subjectivity?

Speaker 4 (01:30:03):
Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:30:04):
Hey, that that sounds good. That sounds like we have
some concluding words we can life as it is. But
overall this ended on a much more applicable life. Applicable note,
I feel like because if we're going to reduce it.
Basically Leacan's realization that Freud's discoveries can be turned into

(01:30:27):
signifiers and arranged in such and such a way if you,
as the as the patient, can experience this significance is
the French word, but that if you can experience the
signify er ness of this drama, the staged drama fantasy
that you have going on in your head, as soon

(01:30:47):
as you can realize the arbitrariness, to use another structuralist term,
if you can realize the arbitrariness of the things that
you find so important, like whether it's whether it's objea
or whether it's the imaginary fallus, the esteem of other people.
If you're worried about being punished, no matter what thing

(01:31:07):
is causing the compulsive behavior, if you can show it
for what it is, which is an arbitrary signifier, it's
gonna have less power over you. It's gonna have less
effect over you and I. If we go on that note,
then we end with like.

Speaker 2 (01:31:23):
A positive, a hope, a hope, and I also.

Speaker 1 (01:31:27):
Mean something that's not as difficult as it seems. You know,
with all the algebra, with all the mathemes and all
this shit. You don't actually have to understand that if
you can just grasp the arbitrariness of the nature of
these inscriptions. So I'm given you. I'm given out what
I hope is the good end to therapy, which is, yeah,
the other exists. Yeah, the other is going to continue

(01:31:48):
to exist. But if it's causing you distress because you're
taking it too seriously, you don't actually have to do that.
There's actually a little bit of relief from that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:59):
And if you got money, go see a La Canyon.

Speaker 4 (01:32:02):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:32:02):
Subjectifies that other. It's just the chain of signifiers. They
don't hook onto the real Come on, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
The Lacanian analyst, this is the still conclusion. But the
Lacanian analyst think says, is supposed to take the position
of object. Ah, and it's because no other therapies do this,
that no other therapies can work.

Speaker 2 (01:32:26):
Yeah, I think that's wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
It may not be explicitly stated, but it's heavily implied
by Fink in his book on the Lacanian subject.

Speaker 2 (01:32:35):
Well you heard my stick about that. I'm skeptical about that.

Speaker 4 (01:32:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:39):
Being this desiring desirousness itself, in other words, is what
you have to try to be as a as an analyst.

Speaker 4 (01:32:50):
Like what did he call it? With Socrates?

Speaker 3 (01:32:53):
That that look just that that sort of glance that
it's just kind of meaningful, that that you just kind
of someone looks at you and you.

Speaker 4 (01:33:04):
Just get this sort of oo feeling.

Speaker 3 (01:33:07):
The agalma, that's what it was, a galma, a precious, shiny,
gleaming something which is interpreted by Lecan to be Socrates
desire itself, Socrates desiring or desirousness. Yeah, you just that's
that's sort of like what the analyst has to be,
which which is interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:33:29):
I'm guessing that I think would just think that when
other therapies work, it's probably because they're doing the Lacanian
thing without even knowing it.

Speaker 1 (01:33:39):
Yeah, that that that do be what it like. But
we all, like the Coan, we wouldn't have spent this
much time on it if we didn't. But as soon
as you start saying stuff or hearing stuff like, oh,
here are the examples of my therapy, but most of
them didn't end up working. But it's not the method's
fault and it's not my fault. It's their fault because
they stopped coming after not coming enough and coming enough

(01:34:02):
means spending three three hours a week in therapy. Yeah,
but American psychology and every other tradition descended from Freud,
except this one is wrong. Oh, and we're sitting on
this panacea. That canon principle solve everyone's problems. It's just
that no one has realized it yet except me. You
know what, when I hear When I hear stuff like that,

(01:34:23):
I'm gonna go out a limb and say, you may
be telling the truth, but I don't believe you. And
to be fair, Fink does not say that explicitly, but
it is heavily implied throughout his two best selling books.
And I feel confident making that judgment now that I've
read both of his two best selling books.

Speaker 2 (01:34:43):
Only I can solve your problems. Only Lacinian psychoanalysis can
make you feel better.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
Yeah, without the analyst as desirousness itself.

Speaker 1 (01:34:56):
I mean still, if you're going through it and you
need to go to therapy, it's probably good. And if
you're going there with a with an open mind, probably good.
But if it ends up quote unquote working this, there
has to be an element of chance. There just has
to be like, right person, right.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
Place, right time, try it on for size.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
Keep listening to our podcast and join our Patreon and
we'll sort you out. This is not medical advice.

Speaker 2 (01:35:22):
Listen to our full series on the con and you
will have traversed the fantasy.

Speaker 1 (01:35:29):
Not medical doctor.

Speaker 4 (01:35:30):
Oh I'm not a doctor.

Speaker 1 (01:35:33):
I am so am I boom.

Speaker 4 (01:35:37):
Fuck you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:35:39):
All right, take care, I possess the imaginary foulis

Speaker 2 (01:35:45):
All right,