Chapter 1 The Human Condition. And in Light of it: Psychoanalysis as Ethics
Abstract
In this chapter, we will offer some postulations of Lacanian psychoanalysis: about man as chooser, about human choice as independent from outside forces, and the derivative: the human condition of orphanhood. About the value of orphanhood as a position of having no authority to tell us how to live, and the derived freedom of choice. And some practical implications: Raising children under the fantasy of hierarchy until it’s time to confess we cannot protect them from their freedom of choice—which is to say, from themselves.
In this chapter we will offer some postulations of Lacanian psychoanalysis: about man as chooser, about human choice as independent from outside forces, and the derivative: the human condition of orphanhood (with no one to explain the right way to live)—orphanhood as the opposite of isolation, and the switch from “the correct way to live” to “the preferable way to live.”
Esther: So what is this book, Yehuda? And what is it about?
Yehuda: This book is about what people can attain for themselves, for their lives, and mental health. This book is about the possibility of living better with oneself and one’s surroundings, and of fulfilling desires. It’s possible for people to benefit from Lacanian wisdom not only through treatment. What we’re doing right now is an unconventional, controversial act.
Esther: Why?
Yehuda: The personal relationship between psychoanalyst and patient bears knowledge. A book, on the other hand, cannot be part of an interpersonal relationship, cannot be a partner in transference. The benefit of one-on-one psychoanalysis is immense. It is the kitchen where ethics are prepared, and it is user-unique. I myself owe a lot to this practice, and am not familiar with any worthy substitute. Nevertheless, I’ve often come across situations in my personal as well as my professional life, in which reading a piece of writing has changed my life. The written word can open people up to new ideas, and reading can therefore be a formative experience in spite of the lack of transference found in a clinician’s office. A fertilizing, life-changing relationship can occur between a person and a text.
Esther: Indeed.
Yehuda: Reading can create understanding, or an even deeper change. Therefore, the question is, can we write Lacanian wisdom into a book that a person can benefit from reading? This is the purpose of this book.
Esther: Let’s begin, then, from your suggestion—offering people a different way to look at their lives, another tool through which to understand themselves and steer their lives through this understanding. If this is the purpose of our work together, what should be the concept at the center of this book?
Yehuda: I don’t know what concept is at the center of this book. I do know what should be the first concept we introduce. The opening concept is “ethics.” The study of ethics revolves around the question of the right way to live. Jewish ethics claims that the right way to live involves adhering to the mitzvahs. Buddhist ethics argues that one must find freedom from suffering through freedom from the desire which causes the suffering. There are different schools of knowledge, some of them spiritual. Other schools, such as secular liberalism, psychoanalysis in general or Lacanian psychoanalysis specifically, carry no spiritual pretense. They deal with understanding the psyche, and share an ethical orientation: offering guidance to people with regards to the question of how one ought to live.
Esther: This is the place to mention that the ethical aspect is common both to “spiritual” schools—those that are connected to religious faith—and “mental” schools. Both include basic assumptions regarding the question of how one ought to live. I’m pointing this out specifically because subscribers to “mental” schools of thought are not fans of this comparison between them and subscribers to “spiritual” schools of thought. Nevertheless, in this aspect they have a lot in common.
Yehuda: Indeed, they share the ethical aspect. And yet, the answer to this question can differ widely across schools of thought, and the difference stems from the axiom of each such school regarding the structure of the mind and its principles of action. Lacanian psychoanalysis is traditionally embarrassed about the question of ethics.
Esther: Why is that?
Yehuda: On the surface, it denounces the idea of telling people how to live. There is a paradox around the question of ethics: on the one hand, the meaning of ethics is answering the question of how one ought to live. On the other hand, a central principle of psychoanalytic ethics is that each person can make their own decisions regarding their values, their desires, and the way in which to manage the relationship between the two. Therefore, the first item in this guidance must be: The decision of how to live is given to each person. Each of us must decide for ourselves.
Esther: This first principle, according to which each person decides for themselves, raises a question: Do individuals make their own decisions freely, without any limitations? Are there no outer boundaries to their choice?
Yehuda: Of course, there are limitations. They are the limitations deduced from the cards people have drawn in life. Paradoxically, one of these cards represents the measure of freedom the person believes they have, or, more generally, belief in freedom of choice. People’s reasoning and preferences have been enforced before they are born, but when they wish to change them, or, alternatively, when they wish to accept their natural inclinations—they can be more liberated. The more they realize how unfree they are, how bound to the conscious and unconscious influences that have molded their lives, how affected by the words and desires of those around them and of previous generations, the more they can choose to set themselves free, and ultimately to accept the limits of this freedom, meaning—acknowledging what can and what cannot be changed. This is the analytic process.
Esther: In this way, you place the subject alone at the center of the universe, and if I’m understanding you correctly, this is a universe without a sky. The subject, if they so wish, can choose their own sky—a faith in a greater power. But you leave this choice to them. So is this the human condition? Each of us is totally alone.
Yehuda: Not exactly.
Esther: How’s that?
Yehuda: Not alone. Because we are already laden with values, with history. And also: individuals are not distinct from their surroundings, but embedded within them. And yet, there are positions from which they alone can choose.
Esther: In other words, while I fear that an individual alone cannot stand the task of deciding for their own lives, and I rush to their aid, adding boundaries, and in extreme cases even divine boundaries, you are telling me that individuals suffer from an abundance, not a shortage of tools and advisors helping them shape their lives. Meaning, your basic assumption regarding the apparatus of human consciousness is in opposition to mine!
Yehuda: Indeed. They suffer from a surplus of identifications.
Esther: Oh dear, Yehuda. How is it that as soon as we started talking, we spiraled into a philosophical discussion? I’m saying this because you began with a postmodern statement. If man alone makes the choice, and there are no external boundaries (or, in other world, there is nothing transcendental around him) then our starting-off point involves no statements regarding absolute good or absolute evil. There is no moral starting-off point whatsoever.
Yehuda: Correct. We are born into a given reality—social, symbolic, moral. That is our apparatus. There is no exterior authority determining criteria of what we ought to want or choose. Of course, some believe that astrologers can elucidate the directives of the stars, and we are each born into a country in which the legislators’ interests have passed certain laws rather than others, but this is not psychoanalytic ethics. In psychoanalysis, we wish to reveal the desire behind the order, thus dismantling its control.
Esther: So, what you’re saying is—not to worry, there will be many people and entities “assisting” with the choice. There is an entire supermarket of spiritual and mental options—
Yehuda: No, that’s not what I meant. I’m saying we are all preloaded with values, directions, and ideals that we are born into, and which we can, to a certain extent, shed.
Esther: Born into… should we refer to these as “the superego”?
Yehuda: No. Part of what we ought to understand about life is that we can’t always liberate ourselves from these values, nor should we. The fantasy of being free of influence is something to be addressed. There is no such state of freedom from internalization.
Esther: The ambition to be free from influence is obsessive… But that isn’t what I was getting at. On the contrary: I’m referring to the experience of loneliness implied by your statements. The loneliness of a subject who must decide on their own.
Yehuda: In that case, I wouldn’t call it loneliness. Rather, orphanhood. Loneliness is a state of having no friends. Orphanhood is the state of having no parents.
Esther: Okay, yes, they must choose without help from their parents…
Yehuda: Without parents, meaning without authorities dictating their choice. Without someone choosing criteria for them.
Esther: And so, ultimately, without a superego.
Yehuda: That’s why even this book cannot make statements about right and wrong; the only statement that can be asserted is that people will decide for themselves, which already entails desire as a value.
Esther: I’ll speak a little about my impressions so far. In spite of the attempt to avoid the absolute nature of “right”,” I find a dimension of hermetic and excessive certainty in your position. Though you are representing a postmodern stance, a stance avoiding statements of a single truth, a certainty about what is “right”, you are making statements of certainty about what is “preferable.” See? There is no statement about what is right, but there is a statement about what is preferable. As for me, the difference between the right and the preferable isn’t entirely clear to me. You’re saying: there is no absolute truth, we each choose our own truth, the truth of our desire. There is definitely an unequivocal stance regarding the preferable.
Yehuda: Yes, there are things I define as preferable.
Esther: You talk about absolute freedom in the ideological sense of your proposal; because “preferable” means there is no necessity, no obvious choice, no one thing that is better than another. And that’s something I find hard to believe.
Yehuda: Then let me be more specific: a law—the signifier of “good” or “right”—is a result of somebody’s interest, and therefore does not represent absolute truth.
Esther: Let’s examine this idea through the extreme case of sociopathy, a mental disorder characterized, say, by a lack of conscience.
Yehuda: A sociopath is someone not subjected to others’ interest. He has no law. And yet far be it from me to judge him. I just need to be careful of him.
Esther: Meaning, you have no moral stance on psychopathy—it is neither good nor bad in your eyes—just as you have no moral stance regarding any other mental condition. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: it is a choice as any other.
Yehuda: Correct.
Esther: It is quite a demand of yourself, as a psychoanalyst, to be without a moral stance.
Yehuda: Yes.
Esther: It is a demand I doubt you can meet.
Yehuda: True, I often don’t.
Esther: The demand to condemn nothing, to prefer nothing over anything else.
Yehuda: I often fail.
Esther: Okay. What does that mean?
Yehuda: I have my own subjective limitations of how much I can meet my own ethics. But I still adhere to it, even if I don’t meet it.
Esther: Is this ethics a kind of absolute?
Yehuda: Yes. It’s ethics that views laws as fiction. For example, when it comes to teaching children to be lawful, I am in favor of lying to them and telling them there is such thing as the law, then, at some point, confessing the lie in order to set them free.
Esther: Yes, bringing them up to respect the law but later to have the freedom to either choose it or reject it.
Yehuda: Even when I feel revulsion regarding the sociopath or his way of life, it’s a kind of lie that infects me as well. Meaning, I feel my own revulsion, and yet I reject this revulsion. For instance: to some vegans, meat eaters are sociopaths, while some gastronomists consider vegans to be misanthropes. There is no single, righteous, objective community that determines who is in the right. When a mafia goon refuses to follow an order, are they following the law or breaking it? That depends on their frame of reference, and the choice is theirs. Is a freedom fighter in a country run by a dictator an outlaw? Depending on whose law. In their eyes, they did not appoint the judge to judge them.
Esther: So what this means, actually, is that the entire social-moral institution is founded on a fictitious entity.
Yehuda: That is the imaginary big, Other, with a capital O. And the Lacanian idea is: the Other doesn’t exist, but that is no reason to reject it, because it is essential.
Esther: So it’s useful.
Yehuda: Yes.
Esther: Meaning, you’ve reduced ideas of “right” and “good” that have existed from the dawn of humankind, to the “useful.”
Yehuda: Right. I’m descending from heaven to earth, and what exists down here is usefulness and desire. Because even faith in the law should be seen as a cause of desire. Desire was first born in individuals as an effect of the law that sets limits on indulgence. That is the formative Oedipus complex.
Esther: How does faith in the law serve desire?
Yehuda: My personal trainer orders me to do exercises that I really don’t feel like doing, but I’m paying her to tyrannize me, to achieve my goals even when I don’t feel like working for them. Meaning, I am recruiting her as a representative of the law.
Esther: So ultimately desire is also the master of the law?
Yehuda: Yes. Exactly. And even if the law is originally the parent of desire, desire can make use of it. In the family oedipal myth, it’s the law of the father who stands between the child and the mother, causing identification with the father and his desire. This identification supports desire.
Esther: I think there’s another necessary factor: there is desire, and there is law that is governed by desire.
Yehuda: And there’s excess jouissance, Lacan's term for pleasure-pain-excitement-over indulgence, meaning, desire uses the law to restrain jouissance, because jouissance doesn’t allow desire.
Esther: “Jouissance” is the psychological aspect acting “outside of the law.” Like obesity, for instance?
Yehuda: Any symptom. Obesity, addiction…
Esther: Does jouissance come at the expense of desire?
Yehuda: The law exists in order to restrain and, paradoxically, produce desire. Saying that it is intended for this purpose means attributing intention to it, which is not the case. In the case of the personal trainer, there is an intention of using the law in order to produce desire. But parents often restrain their children out of an intention to prevent indulgence, not realizing they are producing desire.
Esther: Okay.
Yehuda: “Indulgence” is a relevant concept for all addictions and symptoms. Sometimes, depression is a kind of addiction too, it can be seen as a kind of submission to indulgence.
Esther: I’d like to circle back to ethics and the question of how to live. Back in the day, when we started discussing this book, you spoke about ethics in terms of our lives with others—as parents or part of a couple. You used the term “psychoanalytic ethics.” There is Jewish ethics, Buddhist ethics, liberal ethics—and this paradigm we’re discussing here—psychoanalysis—offers its own form. Its own answer to the question of how to live.
Yehuda: This is my own personal perception: that this can be implemented as a way of life, and not only at the clinician’s office.
Esther: Meaning, there are areas of Lacanian thought that you identify as directly actualized in your own life as a person, not an analyst.
Yehuda: Yes indeed.
Esther: Can you give me an example that’s relevant to this book? Divorce, parenting, discipline…
Yehuda: I’ll offer an example from adolescence. A teenager who rebels seems, at first, to simply rebel against authority. But a deeper look reveals them to be provoking authority into action, out of a refusal to become orphaned. According to the first approach— “rebelling against authority”—the parents’ response would be to force their rules on the teenager, and the result would be the teenager continuing to reinforce authority through further provocation.
Esther: Why? If he gets hit over the head, why should he stick out his neck again?
Yehuda: Because deep down he knows it cannot hold. He knows that, in truth, there is no authority. He is exactly in the phase of realizing there is no authority, and this truth frightens him. So, he or she takes all sorts of action to make sure they won’t be abandoned or orphaned, to ensure someone will try to control them.
Esther: In that case, the deeper motivation to continue to rebel is that even though he or she has received a response—a punishment or a rebuke—they cannot accept it. They cannot accept the parental response, because she or he know it isn’t real, that there is no true power behind it.
Yehuda: It won’t take. Its effect will last a very short time before fizzling out. The sense that someone is protecting them from themselves will fizzle out. So, the teenager will search for his master through further provocation. The alternative for a parent who believes in authority is getting upset about their helplessness with the child. Helpless as opposed to what they believe they ought to be: a parental authority.
On the other hand, the parent who subscribes to the Lacanian approach would be compassionate toward the child, because this child, as they grow up, will find out the painful truth—that there is nobody to conduct their life for them. So they will tell the child: Look, I’m helpless. I’m helpless because you are your own manager. But they, the parents, won’t be depressed, won’t be too critical of themselves, won’t see themselves as failures. And the child would receive lots of love, but not the illusion that they are dismissed from making a choice. More than that: they will realize that they themselves have to choose.
Esther: So actually, in a way, you aspire—aspire, simple as that—for the moment when your child realizes that the person standing before them, their father, is their partner, rather than their ruler.
Yehuda: Not even a partner.
Esther: A partner in the sense that their father loves them and cares about them, but not someone who can decide how they should live.
Yehuda: I wouldn’t call that a partner. A partner is someone who’s signed an agreement. That’s the relationship I have with my patients.
Esther: So how shall we position you in conjunction with your child? What word shall we use?
Yehuda: I love him, I’m his parent, but not in the authoritative sense. If you want to use the word partner, then I’m his partner in solidarity with regards to the lack of authority.
Esther: It’s as if you’re extracting from the words “father” and “mother” something that is typically included in them according to most human consciousness.
Yehuda: I’m not rejecting the signifiers “father” and “mother.” They contain an irreplaceable emotional charge that would be a shame to give up, but I am enabling a sobering from the authority we attribute to them. In an age-appropriate way, of course. Another vital factor in understanding this picture: culture. In some cultures, parents’ word remains law throughout their offspring’s lives. They are the heads of the clan. Other cultures are more like ours—in adolescence parents are dismissed from their roles as representatives of the law. But I’m referring to a situation in which the parent willfully resigns from the role. Meaning: youthful rebellion is unnecessary and depends on the parent’s position in relation to the teenager. The more the parent pretends to be the law, the more rebellion they have to suffer through. The more authoritative the parent, the more they answer the child’s unconscious wish to avoid being orphaned.
Esther: Denying orphanhood; I’m repeating the sequence of relations to this central term: a teenager is a child shedding their innocence, already suspecting that their parents are not truly the law’s representatives. They are startled by this suspicion and attempt to return and verify the equation: parents=the law. That’s why they rebel. The reason they panic is because acknowledging that parents aren’t the law and cannot enforce the law leads teenagers to feel that they are, in truth, all alone, masters of their own lives, and in this sense, they are orphans. Orphaned of the law. And they don’t want to know that, so they rebel, to arouse their parents’ urge to function as lawmen.
Now I’d like to linger on this expression, orphanhood. To me, this is the main thing. You position humans as the ultimate decision makers in their lives. They make these decisions all alone.
Yehuda: Not all alone, but without protection.
Esther: They are orphans.
Yehuda: Being an orphan doesn’t mean being alone. In fact, the orphan is much more connected to people because he is free to choose the connections he wants.
Esther: Yes, that’s right, but this word “choice”, you know, brings up inevitable connotations of death that cannot be ignored.
Yehuda: It is a death. The death of authority. The parents don’t have to die for the authority to die.
Esther: When you present being an orphan in this way, it seems like a desirable position to be in, because you’re using the term to signify freedom.
Yehuda: That’s right.
Esther: So it becomes a happy idea. But I’d like to remind you that for most people, when we’re reminded of orphanhood and death, we become sullen.
Yehuda: Because there’s something sad about it.
Esther: Okay, so let’s take a look at the dialectics. Let’s look at this transaction from both sides. Yes, the sad part is sobering from the illusion of being protected.
Yehuda: Right, sobering from protection.
Esther: And in that sense, God is like a parent. A “personal providence” kind of God.
Yehuda: Correct.
Esther: Okay, so there’s no personal protection.
Yehuda: Exactly, exactly.
Esther: Got it. No personal protection. But if that’s the case, you can’t assume the world is necessarily aspiring to good. If we kill God, we necessarily give up the illusion of aspiring to good that connects people together. Am I wrong?
Yehuda: I’ll give you an example from a patient of mine whose partner infected him with HIV. He came in to treat his depression. When I asked him if anyone ever promised him that this kind of thing would never happen, he admitted that nobody ever promised him that, and his depression lifted. Meaning, he was living like a person who was meant to be protected but wasn’t, until he realized he was never meant to be protected, and so no promise had been broken. There’s a tragedy, but not a betrayal.
Esther: Did his boyfriend know he was sick when he slept with your patient? That could answer my question about assuming goodness.
Yehuda: The patient’s anger wasn’t at his partner, who may have cheated him by not disclosing the truth; it was at the world, for not delivering what he thought had been promised at a much younger age, before people can wake up from the fantasy of entitlement.
Esther: Why me, why did this happen to me, of all people.
Yehuda: Yes, yes. That relates to your question, about whether there is a human camaraderie focused on the good. He believed there was, and when he discovered there hadn’t been, he felt betrayed. I helped him figure out that this was never promised to him. Even if he had parents who wanted the best for him, that didn’t mean there is a God, or a social contract that promises goods. At least not in the sense of promise and protection.
Esther: This is a personal case and it’s a disaster, but it isn’t about a broken promise, because there never had been one. Is that what you’re saying?
Yehuda: Yes.
Esther: Meaning, there is no generalization, not even about an aspiration for good that connects humans on earth. No generalization.
Yehuda: Correct. And this enables some freedom from narcissism.
Esther: How?
Yehuda: Because in the case of narcissism, the assumption is that my parents should have made things work out for me, and when they don’t I take it personally, blaming them for failing at their job, even though if they did have trouble giving me what I needed—either because of their life circumstances or their personal limitations—there’s no point in taking it personally. In this sense, the idea of personal protection contains a narcissistic element: I am the center of the world, God sees me and protects me. The narcissistic stance—of assuming the existence of personal protection—is passive, while the orphan actively works to make his wishes come true, including the wish not to be alone.
Esther: And yet, as soon as you are left alone—like we did today—and you have freedom of choice, you are an orphan, and you can choose your own faith, meaning you can—
Yehuda: I can pay a personal trainer.
Esther: Or you can simply be good, aspire to good, even if this aspiration isn’t universal. In other words, your “religiosity,” or your moral stance, becomes unconditional and independent from big or small influences, it is not reactive but self-standing. Just as you are alone in your every decision, you make an independent choice to be good. Not because that’s how you were brought up, not because it’s the law, meaning, it’s the way things should be done, and not because that’s what everybody does, but because you want to.
Yehuda: And yet, psychoanalytic ethics assumes that if you follow your wishes, you will be doing good.
Esther: Yes, what should we do about that? I mean, where did that assumption come from?
Yehuda: From the fact that the subject—the willful entity—is a social creature.
Esther: Is that the idea of “the desire of the other?”
Yehuda: Yes. The desire is transferred from the other through language, that’s why you must be a socially embedded creature. An individual in society is like a word in a sentence. That’s why desire isn’t something you can do at the expense of your surrounding; desire that goes against its surroundings is ego, is separateness. Psychoanalytic ethics isn’t aimed at the ego. The subject, meaning, the wanter, is socially embedded.
Esther: Socially embedded because they exist by virtue of being within a society rather than existing independently?
Yehuda: Look, to fulfil the desire for a certain profession, you must be part of a context of professions and social needs.
Esther: To become a gardener, there need to be gardens and for people to care about aesthetics.
Yehuda: You must be a member of your organization. You must play a part in creating an organization that offers you a place as a subject. In that sense, you are acting for the benefit of society, so you can settle into this society. If you aren’t, you can’t have desires.
Esther: This is the Buddhist theory of dependent-origination. The theory discusses apartness as an illusion of independent existence. The illusion of separateness is referred to in Buddhism as “I” and in Lacanian Theory as “Imaginary.” Meaning, the way you wish to appear in your own eyes rather than who you truly are. In truth, you are a psychoanalyst because you have patients, and a writer because you have readers. All of your aspects are other-dependent. That’s why you can never be independent. In order to be something in this world, you require the world. You need your son in order to be his father and your wife in order to be her husband. As soon as you realize this, you agree to be dependent, agree to an interdependent relationship. Then, and only then, can you truly live, because you can be something for someone, and they can be something for you. In many ways, almost across all theories, this is precisely the opposite of narcissism. Not being a narcissist means looking in the mirror and seeing not only yourself, but everyone around you, in the reflection. See what I did there?
Yehuda: The mirror metaphor is confusing because it belongs to narcissism.
Esther: Of course, I know that. And yet, when you see yourself, you must see your father, your mother, your children, your patients, your friends, your readers, and those who wrote about the same subjects before you as well. That’s what I mean. Acknowledge the fact that you can’t do it without them and shouldn’t be able to.
Yehuda: Right. And this is where I’d say, in summation, that authority is the antithesis of connectivity, as demonstrated in Network Theory. This is something un-Lacanian that we’re introducing into the mix.
Esther: Oh, yeah?
Yehuda: Network Theory is a relatively new paradigm, a cross-discipline thought model: philosophy, physics, sociology. According to this theory, every point in the network is as powerful as the number of its connections. The more connected I am, the more powerful I am. For example, the more information sources I’m connected to, the more information I have. According to the authority approach, you are only connected to your directly superior information sources. But Network Theory argues that there are infinite connections you can benefit from. That’s why, in a sense, orphanhood is the opposite of loneliness. By agreeing to be an orphan, one can become less lonely. By letting go of the idea of a single information source, directly superior to you, you can connect to many information sources in all directions. You can switch from authoritarian connectivity to decentralized connectivity, as long as you accept responsibility for your choice.
Esther: Yes, decentralized, elastic, fertile, creative connectivity. So, good, we came up with something. I think this part is finished; you know? You see it.
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