#archer — Public Fediverse posts

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of the thing in objects we encounter” (form) and the reasons for that are so manifold they can only be explored at the level of case history (content). There is a universal structure with a substance which is so particular that you can’t meaningfully generalise about it.

Given I was trained as a sociologist on Archer’s modes of reflexivity I find this answer deeply unsatisfying. There is a middle layer between form and content. These midrange concepts help us identify patterns in the universal structure in a manner which supports more dynamic and processual explanations of the content. The problem with the form/content distinction is that it just amalgamates a posited theoretical mechanism to a boatload of empirical content, disowning the role of theory in organising that content and offering real explanation.

I want a middle layer in my developing approach to psychoanalytical theory. In part because I want to put the sociological middle layer (Archer’s reptoire of concepts) i into dialogue with the psychoanalytical middle layer. I think there’s a distinctive approach to doing psychosocial explanation which would be opened up by this. Now I just need to figure out what exact is in the psychoanalytical middle layer. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of Bollas but beyond that I’m really not sure at this stage how I’m going to do this. The direction of travel feels increasingly clear though.

I shared this post with Opus 4.7 and it said something extremely astute:

Mid-level theorization is harder than either universal theory or case study because it requires holding two demands in tension: enough abstraction to be theoretically generative, enough specificity to remain answerable to particular cases. The temptation in both directions is real. Toward the universal: collapsing the middle into a master theory that explains everything in general. Toward the singular: dissolving the middle into the irreducibility of each case. Archer’s modes work because she resisted both temptations, and the modes are tied to identifiable conditions of formation and have specifiable but not deterministic consequences. Your psychoanalytic middle layer will need the same discipline, and the concepts that survive are the ones that can sustain that discipline.

I feel like I’ve been trying to say this for years. If anyone has ever heard me ramble about ‘frames of reference’ this is exactly what I was trying to say.

Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of the thing in objects we encounter” (form) and the reasons for that are so manifold they can only be explored at the level of case history (content). There is a universal structure with a substance which is so particular that you can’t meaningfully generalise about it.

Given I was trained as a sociologist on Archer’s modes of reflexivity I find this answer deeply unsatisfying. There is a middle layer between form and content. These midrange concepts help us identify patterns in the universal structure in a manner which supports more dynamic and processual explanations of the content. The problem with the form/content distinction is that it just amalgamates a posited theoretical mechanism to a boatload of empirical content, disowning the role of theory in organising that content and offering real explanation.

I want a middle layer in my developing approach to psychoanalytical theory. In part because I want to put the sociological middle layer (Archer’s reptoire of concepts) i into dialogue with the psychoanalytical middle layer. I think there’s a distinctive approach to doing psychosocial explanation which would be opened up by this. Now I just need to figure out what exact is in the psychoanalytical middle layer. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of Bollas but beyond that I’m really not sure at this stage how I’m going to do this. The direction of travel feels increasingly clear though.

I shared this post with Opus 4.7 and it said something extremely astute:

Mid-level theorization is harder than either universal theory or case study because it requires holding two demands in tension: enough abstraction to be theoretically generative, enough specificity to remain answerable to particular cases. The temptation in both directions is real. Toward the universal: collapsing the middle into a master theory that explains everything in general. Toward the singular: dissolving the middle into the irreducibility of each case. Archer’s modes work because she resisted both temptations, and the modes are tied to identifiable conditions of formation and have specifiable but not deterministic consequences. Your psychoanalytic middle layer will need the same discipline, and the concepts that survive are the ones that can sustain that discipline.

I feel like I’ve been trying to say this for years. If anyone has ever heard me ramble about ‘frames of reference’ this is exactly what I was trying to say.

Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of the thing in objects we encounter” (form) and the reasons for that are so manifold they can only be explored at the level of case history (content). There is a universal structure with a substance which is so particular that you can’t meaningfully generalise about it.

Given I was trained as a sociologist on Archer’s modes of reflexivity I find this answer deeply unsatisfying. There is a middle layer between form and content. These midrange concepts help us identify patterns in the universal structure in a manner which supports more dynamic and processual explanations of the content. The problem with the form/content distinction is that it just amalgamates a posited theoretical mechanism to a boatload of empirical content, disowning the role of theory in organising that content and offering real explanation.

I want a middle layer in my developing approach to psychoanalytical theory. In part because I want to put the sociological middle layer (Archer’s reptoire of concepts) i into dialogue with the psychoanalytical middle layer. I think there’s a distinctive approach to doing psychosocial explanation which would be opened up by this. Now I just need to figure out what exact is in the psychoanalytical middle layer. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of Bollas but beyond that I’m really not sure at this stage how I’m going to do this. The direction of travel feels increasingly clear though.

I shared this post with Opus 4.7 and it said something extremely astute:

Mid-level theorization is harder than either universal theory or case study because it requires holding two demands in tension: enough abstraction to be theoretically generative, enough specificity to remain answerable to particular cases. The temptation in both directions is real. Toward the universal: collapsing the middle into a master theory that explains everything in general. Toward the singular: dissolving the middle into the irreducibility of each case. Archer’s modes work because she resisted both temptations, and the modes are tied to identifiable conditions of formation and have specifiable but not deterministic consequences. Your psychoanalytic middle layer will need the same discipline, and the concepts that survive are the ones that can sustain that discipline.

I feel like I’ve been trying to say this for years. If anyone has ever heard me ramble about ‘frames of reference’ this is exactly what I was trying to say.

Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of the thing in objects we encounter” (form) and the reasons for that are so manifold they can only be explored at the level of case history (content). There is a universal structure with a substance which is so particular that you can’t meaningfully generalise about it.

Given I was trained as a sociologist on Archer’s modes of reflexivity I find this answer deeply unsatisfying. There is a middle layer between form and content. These midrange concepts help us identify patterns in the universal structure in a manner which supports more dynamic and processual explanations of the content. The problem with the form/content distinction is that it just amalgamates a posited theoretical mechanism to a boatload of empirical content, disowning the role of theory in organising that content and offering real explanation.

I want a middle layer in my developing approach to psychoanalytical theory. In part because I want to put the sociological middle layer (Archer’s reptoire of concepts) i into dialogue with the psychoanalytical middle layer. I think there’s a distinctive approach to doing psychosocial explanation which would be opened up by this. Now I just need to figure out what exact is in the psychoanalytical middle layer. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of Bollas but beyond that I’m really not sure at this stage how I’m going to do this. The direction of travel feels increasingly clear though.

I shared this post with Opus 4.7 and it said something extremely astute:

Mid-level theorization is harder than either universal theory or case study because it requires holding two demands in tension: enough abstraction to be theoretically generative, enough specificity to remain answerable to particular cases. The temptation in both directions is real. Toward the universal: collapsing the middle into a master theory that explains everything in general. Toward the singular: dissolving the middle into the irreducibility of each case. Archer’s modes work because she resisted both temptations, and the modes are tied to identifiable conditions of formation and have specifiable but not deterministic consequences. Your psychoanalytic middle layer will need the same discipline, and the concepts that survive are the ones that can sustain that discipline.

I feel like I’ve been trying to say this for years. If anyone has ever heard me ramble about ‘frames of reference’ this is exactly what I was trying to say.

Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “we are creatures who find the glow of the thing in objects we encounter” (form) and the reasons for that are so manifold they can only be explored at the level of case history (content). There is a universal structure with a substance which is so particular that you can’t meaningfully generalise about it.

Given I was trained as a sociologist on Archer’s modes of reflexivity I find this answer deeply unsatisfying. There is a middle layer between form and content. These midrange concepts help us identify patterns in the universal structure in a manner which supports more dynamic and processual explanations of the content. The problem with the form/content distinction is that it just amalgamates a posited theoretical mechanism to a boatload of empirical content, disowning the role of theory in organising that content and offering real explanation.

I want a middle layer in my developing approach to psychoanalytical theory. In part because I want to put the sociological middle layer (Archer’s reptoire of concepts) i into dialogue with the psychoanalytical middle layer. I think there’s a distinctive approach to doing psychosocial explanation which would be opened up by this. Now I just need to figure out what exact is in the psychoanalytical middle layer. I suspect it’s going to involve a lot of Bollas but beyond that I’m really not sure at this stage how I’m going to do this. The direction of travel feels increasingly clear though.

I shared this post with Opus 4.7 and it said something extremely astute:

Mid-level theorization is harder than either universal theory or case study because it requires holding two demands in tension: enough abstraction to be theoretically generative, enough specificity to remain answerable to particular cases. The temptation in both directions is real. Toward the universal: collapsing the middle into a master theory that explains everything in general. Toward the singular: dissolving the middle into the irreducibility of each case. Archer’s modes work because she resisted both temptations, and the modes are tied to identifiable conditions of formation and have specifiable but not deterministic consequences. Your psychoanalytic middle layer will need the same discipline, and the concepts that survive are the ones that can sustain that discipline.

I feel like I’ve been trying to say this for years. If anyone has ever heard me ramble about ‘frames of reference’ this is exactly what I was trying to say.

Crossbow Vol. 2 #Animated #Lowpoly #Realistic #Weapon #Arrow #Archer #Archery #Firstperson #Crossbow #Longbow #Fantasy #Medieval #AssetStore

https://u3dn.com/packages/crossbow-vol-2-68423

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

Why do we want what we want?

Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.

Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.

For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:

Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of

There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:

Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum

This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.

Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:

This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.

The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:

This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.

I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:

People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.

I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:

Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.

But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI

But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:

It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.

This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:

We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.

Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.

The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.

There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:

The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.

It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.

Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.

The problem arises because Lacanians would argue desire cannot be articulated. Once it is articulated it becomes a demand, losing something of the desire underlying it which by its nature resists symbolisation. This means that identifying the desire in internal conversation and/or articulating it to others misses something crucial. The way round this I think would be to accept there’s always some degree of missed understanding with ourselves, some sense in which we fail to meet ourselves even when we’re trying to do just that. In this senes the Lacanian contribution could be to provide a psychological theory of the fallibilism which critical realists assert but don’t theorise in any substantial way with regards to reflexivity.

The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.

There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:

The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.

It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.

Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.

The problem arises because Lacanians would argue desire cannot be articulated. Once it is articulated it becomes a demand, losing something of the desire underlying it which by its nature resists symbolisation. This means that identifying the desire in internal conversation and/or articulating it to others misses something crucial. The way round this I think would be to accept there’s always some degree of missed understanding with ourselves, some sense in which we fail to meet ourselves even when we’re trying to do just that. In this senes the Lacanian contribution could be to provide a psychological theory of the fallibilism which critical realists assert but don’t theorise in any substantial way with regards to reflexivity.

The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.

There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:

The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.

It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.

Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.

The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

The realist concept of concern implies that we are always orientated to the world we inhabit. That world is not just meaningful to us, it also matters to use Andrew Sayer’s terminology. The relationship we have to that world is always evaluative, emerging in terms of what is more or less important to us in a manner which reflects the concerns we develop and order as we elaborate upon our capacity for reflexivity.

There’s an interesting parallel to the Lacanian concept of desire. We always relate to reality through our desire, such that we can never respond neutrally to an inert world. Indeed that notion is itself a potent fantasy which needs to be read in terms of the difficulty of negotiating precisely this predicament. As Todd McGowan observes on loc 2366 of the Cambridge Companion to Lacan, this desire is constitutive of our visual field:

The most basic distortion that desire creates occurs through what we perceive and what we don’t. Certain objects appear more prominently than others because they appeal to our desire while the others don’t. If I’m looking at a shelf of books, I might notice Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit while not perceiving the book next to it, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. (Or perhaps if I’m a little misguided, the opposite will occur.) Desire distributes value throughout what we perceive as reality, but it does not distribute value evenly. The distinctions that we make throughout the social reality emerge from how we desire, not from the inherent worth of the objects in this reality.

It means that our experience of objects can shift as our desire shifts. What at one moment shows up to us as impossibly alluring, might at another suddenly become an inert thing we’re now mystified about our past reaction to. This is the difference between concern and desire: concern is a response to the external world, desire constitutes that world for us.

Can these two concepts be held conjointly? I suspect they can, in the sense that concern captures our evaluative capacity while obscuring the murkiness of the psychic machinery driving our affective responses, while desire misses the former much as it provides a substantial theory of the latter. To find some way of holding them both in the same frame of reference would, I think, mean seeing them as moments in a wider psychic economy through which the world shows up to us as always already meaningful and always already mattering.

The problem arises because Lacanians would argue desire cannot be articulated. Once it is articulated it becomes a demand, losing something of the desire underlying it which by its nature resists symbolisation. This means that identifying the desire in internal conversation and/or articulating it to others misses something crucial. The way round this I think would be to accept there’s always some degree of missed understanding with ourselves, some sense in which we fail to meet ourselves even when we’re trying to do just that. In this senes the Lacanian contribution could be to provide a psychological theory of the fallibilism which critical realists assert but don’t theorise in any substantial way with regards to reflexivity.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

https://www.europesays.com/no/223198/ Oljeaksjer stiger – E24 #Aksjer #archer #Business #Circio(tidlTargovax) #Economy #Næringsliv #NO #Norge #Norway #OsloBørs

https://www.europesays.com/no/222937/ Kultur, Larvik | Julie (39) vil ha menn i alle størrelser: – Jeg trenger mange, og jeg er åpen for det jeg får #archer #art #Entertainment #kultur #larvik #NO #Norge #Norway #Nyheter #story #tollerodden #Underholdning

Me at the start of #FNM and then me again just before the end of round two. #MagicTheGathering #mtg #Archer #ArcherFX

Hype for the Future 151E: City of Seymour, Texas

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/hype-for-the-future-151e-city-of-seymour-texas/

Hype for the Future 151E: City of Seymour, Texas

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/hype-for-the-future-151e-city-of-seymour-texas/

Hype for the Future 151E: City of Seymour, Texas

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/hype-for-the-future-151e-city-of-seymour-texas/

Hype for the Future 151E: City of Seymour, Texas

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/03/31/hype-for-the-future-151e-city-of-seymour-texas/

EPA waives gas regulations to address surging fuel prices

Vehicles have their gasoline tanks filled at a Costco Wholesale store o…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #Archer-Daniels-MidlandCo #BreakingNews:Markets #businessnews #Energy #environment #EpamSystemsInc #GreenPlainsInc #Houston #InvescoDBAgricultureFund #Iran #LeeZeldin #LP #MarathonPetroleumCorp #Markets #Phillips66 #S&PGlobalInc #TeucriumCornFund #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOilFund #Us #USA #ValeroEnergyCorp
https://www.newsbeep.com/451972/

[nma][AF] Tir from the RPDS
scary triceratops archer! by ZebraFeatherAH (https://sunny.garden/@ZebraFeatherAH)
#spaceRARt #scalieart #furryart #artforme #dinosaur #triceratops #archer

Not a good time to be in #FNQ
The #Archer, #Coen, #Wenlock and #Pascoe rivers will be massive tomorrow

Not a good time to be in #FNQ
The #Archer, #Coen, #Wenlock and #Pascoe rivers will be massive tomorrow

Photo of the Day 6th March 2026.

https://mancavgeek.co.uk/2026/03/06/photo-of-the-day-6th-march-2026/

Photo of the Day 6th March 2026.

https://mancavgeek.co.uk/2026/03/06/photo-of-the-day-6th-march-2026/

Photo of the Day 6th March 2026.

https://mancavgeek.co.uk/2026/03/06/photo-of-the-day-6th-march-2026/

Photo of the Day 6th March 2026.

https://mancavgeek.co.uk/2026/03/06/photo-of-the-day-6th-march-2026/

Photo of the Day 6th March 2026.

https://mancavgeek.co.uk/2026/03/06/photo-of-the-day-6th-march-2026/

Putting the “arch” in “archery” - Videovortex

https://videovortex.tv/w/idN7WY9LM4BJU2DF77ePCG

#Archery #Nerd #Archer #Bogensport #Bogenschiessen

PLP364_2: Fey Wanderer Tot #art #MastoArt #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #Photoshop #Sketch #SpeedPaint #Fantasy #Character #DungeonsandDragons #Lizardfolk #Archer #Stylized

3rd archery comp today. Another county championship - Leicestershire & Rutland. Awful score. As we were from out of county we were classed as visitors. My daughter won gold in the Ladies. I got 2nd in the gents. 50+. No medal. There was only 2 of us 😂… that’s it now for me as far as indoor competitions go. Going back to basics & focus purely on technique. Got to say I really enjoyed competing. Met some lovely people too. #Archer #RecurveArcher #ArcheryGB #ArcheryCompetition

Instruction manual addendum from Flight Simulator for the C64 by Sublogic
I am the absolute master flying the Piper Cherokee Archer in this simulator on the bare metal C64

#Photography #35mm #film #Sensor #Nikon #DSLR #SLR #NikonPhotography #monochrome #monochromatic #Sepia #fMount #technology #Piper #Cherokee #Archer

On this date, Jan. 27, in 1945, the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by U.S.-allied Soviet troops. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2026/01/26/world/world-holocaust-remembrance-day/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #commentary #worldnews #auschwitzbirkenau #unitednations #israel #sydney #australia #us #georgewashington #hebrewcongregationofsavannah #georgia #counterextremismproject #fundtoendantisemitism #extremismandhate #antisemitisms #cep #archer

Oh, the frustration of #Archery - shoot a #PB, them compete in a status event and drop 70 points (yeah, I know!) then back to the club for another PB. Made a small adjustment to the knocking point… worked wonders.

2 more scores like this and it’s IB3 for me!

#RecurveArcher #RecurveArchery #Archer #PortsmouthRound #ArcheryGB

Oh, the frustration of #Archery - shoot a #PB, them compete in a status event and drop 70 points (yeah, I know!) then back to the club for another PB. Made a small adjustment to the knocking point… worked wonders.

2 more scores like this and it’s IB3 for me!

#RecurveArcher #RecurveArchery #Archer #PortsmouthRound #ArcheryGB

Oh, the frustration of #Archery - shoot a #PB, them compete in a status event and drop 70 points (yeah, I know!) then back to the club for another PB. Made a small adjustment to the knocking point… worked wonders.

2 more scores like this and it’s IB3 for me!

#RecurveArcher #RecurveArchery #Archer #PortsmouthRound #ArcheryGB