#psychoanalysis — Public Fediverse posts

Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg

And I'm never real, 
it's just a sketch of me 
And everything I've made 
is trite and cheap 
And a waste 
Of paint, of tape, of time

I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary

Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.

Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.

Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.

This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:

“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”

This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.

What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:

“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”

Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I

Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.

Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.

I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:

“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”

It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:

“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”

In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:

“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”

What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.

I need to find time to write a discursive diagnostic piece on the nonsense that is psychology, especially psychoanalysis.

👉 https://philosophics.blog/2026/05/22/fanons-psychology/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

Reading Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks – excellent, by the way – I suggest skipping Chapter 4. It's not bad in itself, but…. I'll keep reading.

#psychology #philosophy #raceissues #psychoanalysis #pseudoscience #blacklivesmatter #history #blog #podcast #books #reading #fanon #postcolonialism #power #culture #society #perspective #dreams

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

@courtcan How was it? I'm looking into getting a copy of *Looking Awry* by Žižek.

More generally, I'm looking for like-minded folks who read/know Jacques Lacan and Lacan-adjacent writers and thinkers. 25 years ago, my French professor/mentor applied Lacanian theory to books, films, and...well, everything. I was/still am fascinated by it, and I want to expand my knowledge/grasp of it.

#Lacan #Žižek #Philosopy #Books #CriticalTheory #Psychoanalysis

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Carl Jung

#quotes #quote #quoteoftheday #quotesoftheday #Jung #CarlJung #reading #readers #chemistry #psychology #psyche #psychologie #books #nonfiction #bookish #literature #literatura #literatur #bookstodon @bookstodon #booksky #BookTalk #BookTok #Bookwyrm #book #psychoanalysis #bookstadon #readingcommunity #social #personalgrowth #contacts

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Carl Jung

#quotes #quote #quoteoftheday #quotesoftheday #Jung #CarlJung #reading #readers #chemistry #psychology #psyche #psychologie #books #nonfiction #bookish #literature #literatura #literatur #bookstodon @bookstodon #booksky #BookTalk #BookTok #Bookwyrm #book #psychoanalysis #bookstadon #readingcommunity #social #personalgrowth #contacts

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Carl Jung

#quotes #quote #quoteoftheday #quotesoftheday #Jung #CarlJung #reading #readers #chemistry #psychology #psyche #psychologie #books #nonfiction #bookish #literature #literatura #literatur #bookstodon @bookstodon #booksky #BookTalk #BookTok #Bookwyrm #book #psychoanalysis #bookstadon #readingcommunity #social #personalgrowth #contacts

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Carl Jung

#quotes #quote #quoteoftheday #quotesoftheday #Jung #CarlJung #reading #readers #chemistry #psychology #psyche #psychologie #books #nonfiction #bookish #literature #literatura #literatur #bookstodon @bookstodon #booksky #BookTalk #BookTok #Bookwyrm #book #psychoanalysis #bookstadon #readingcommunity #social #personalgrowth #contacts

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Carl Jung

#quotes #quote #quoteoftheday #quotesoftheday #Jung #CarlJung #reading #readers #chemistry #psychology #psyche #psychologie #books #nonfiction #bookish #literature #literatura #literatur #bookstodon @bookstodon #booksky #BookTalk #BookTok #Bookwyrm #book #psychoanalysis #bookstadon #readingcommunity #social #personalgrowth #contacts

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

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.

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.

#QuizOfTheDay: #Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind.

Who is known as the Father / Founder of Psychoanalysis?

A. Ivan Pavlov
B. Carl Jung
C. Sigmund Freud
D. Erik Erikson

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/quiz?qId=6274e71fb2d73f8639303038

#QuizOfTheDay: #Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind.

Who is known as the Father / Founder of Psychoanalysis?

A. Ivan Pavlov
B. Carl Jung
C. Sigmund Freud
D. Erik Erikson

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/quiz?qId=6274e71fb2d73f8639303038

#QuizOfTheDay: #Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind.

Who is known as the Father / Founder of Psychoanalysis?

A. Ivan Pavlov
B. Carl Jung
C. Sigmund Freud
D. Erik Erikson

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/quiz?qId=6274e71fb2d73f8639303038

#QuizOfTheDay: #Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind.

Who is known as the Father / Founder of Psychoanalysis?

A. Ivan Pavlov
B. Carl Jung
C. Sigmund Freud
D. Erik Erikson

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/quiz?qId=6274e71fb2d73f8639303038

#QuizOfTheDay: #Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind.

Who is known as the Father / Founder of Psychoanalysis?

A. Ivan Pavlov
B. Carl Jung
C. Sigmund Freud
D. Erik Erikson

https://knowledgezone.co.in/resources/quiz?qId=6274e71fb2d73f8639303038

"The lie is the inclusion of the symbolic in the real..." by Florencia Shanahan, Lacanian psychoanalyst. Maybe of interest: @[email protected] @[email protected] nlscongress2026.amp-nls.org/en/fake-and-... #Lacan #psychoanalysis

Truth, Otherness and Social Bo...

"The lie is the inclusion of the symbolic in the real..." by Florencia Shanahan, Lacanian psychoanalyst. Maybe of interest: @[email protected] @[email protected] nlscongress2026.amp-nls.org/en/fake-and-... #Lacan #psychoanalysis

Truth, Otherness and Social Bo...

“Meaning holds because something is barred. #AI offers a different kind of substitution: it answers and organises, giving the appearance of inexhaustible coherence. Rather than limiting jouissance, it may intensify its circuits...” #Lacan #psychoanalysis nlscongress2026.amp-nls.org/en/knowledge...

Verity and the Unbarred AI Oth...

“Meaning holds because something is barred. #AI offers a different kind of substitution: it answers and organises, giving the appearance of inexhaustible coherence. Rather than limiting jouissance, it may intensify its circuits...” #Lacan #psychoanalysis nlscongress2026.amp-nls.org/en/knowledge...

Verity and the Unbarred AI Oth...

"... one could also delineate a range of defensive strategies in response, from laissez-faire denial of any problem to begin with (this strategy concisely summarises much of the developed world’s response to climate change); the attempt to revive prohibition through ‘trad’ practices, the election of authoritarian strongmen or intensified surveillance; or individualised, neoliberal practices of self-imposed ‘rehabilitation’."

#capitalism #psychoanalysis

https://arena.org.au/getting-off-in-late-capitalism/

i just woke up to the realization that i might have finally read enough Slavoj Žižek to attempt to re-watch The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages and fully enjoy it

(for reference, this is the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk )

#philosophy #programming #SlavojŽižek #psychoanalysis

i just woke up to the realization that i might have finally read enough Slavoj Žižek to attempt to re-watch The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages and fully enjoy it

(for reference, this is the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk )

#philosophy #programming #SlavojŽižek #psychoanalysis

i just woke up to the realization that i might have finally read enough Slavoj Žižek to attempt to re-watch The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages and fully enjoy it

(for reference, this is the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk )

#philosophy #programming #SlavojŽižek #psychoanalysis

i just woke up to the realization that i might have finally read enough Slavoj Žižek to attempt to re-watch The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages and fully enjoy it

(for reference, this is the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk )

#philosophy #programming #SlavojŽižek #psychoanalysis

i just woke up to the realization that i might have finally read enough Slavoj Žižek to attempt to re-watch The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages and fully enjoy it

(for reference, this is the thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk )

#philosophy #programming #SlavojŽižek #psychoanalysis

The level at which Trump is projecting is ridiculous. #Psychoanalysis

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mitnzqck4s23

The level at which Trump is projecting is ridiculous. #Psychoanalysis

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mitnzqck4s23

The level at which Trump is projecting is ridiculous. #Psychoanalysis

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mitnzqck4s23

The level at which Trump is projecting is ridiculous. #Psychoanalysis

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mitnzqck4s23

The level at which Trump is projecting is ridiculous. #Psychoanalysis

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3mitnzqck4s23

12. When Sigmund Freud had to flee Vienna from the Nazis, he forgot to pick up two new glasses from his optician. They are now displayed in the Sigmund #Freud Museum, alongside other objects, letters and accompanying texts that situate his life and work within the history of the city #psychoanalysis

#Freud was not only a genius, he was also kind and had a great sense of humour. He was a good father and brother. Re-reading what the Nazis (and those that sided with them) did to him and over 200.000 Jews in Vienna is unforgivable and yet part of humanity that he helped us decipher. #psychoanalysis

#Freud was not only a genius, he was also kind and had a great sense of humour. He was a good father and brother. Re-reading what the Nazis (and those that sided with them) did to him and over 200.000 Jews in Vienna is unforgivable and yet part of humanity that he helped us decipher. #psychoanalysis