5/1/22: In Which I Converse with Scott Alexander (& Others)

The Thirteenth Post

Hi everyone! What a crazy week, it’s given me a lot to digest, so that’s what I’ll give to you: another digest. I’ve been writing comments all over, so this is a great opportunity to get them all together, especially as I have no idea what kind of original writing I feel like doing today. This is quite a long post, and involves a lot of unedited, excerpted conversations, so feel free to skip around. I’ve inserted sub-headers to mark off the different conversations from each other.

Before I dive into the comments sections, there’s something special I want to share: a little talk I did with @nvpkp about last week’s blog post, where I read it out loud and she asked some questions and we had a nice conversation. You can find that here on the twitch site, if you want to see all the peanut gallery commentary, or you can download an audio-only version here! I may transcribe this later, but for now, you’ll have to listen.¹

Lacan x ACX 2022

1: Feb 16, 2022: In which Scott reviews Sadly, Porn: he reviewed the book! I mentioned this review previously, and I’ve written quite a bit about Sadly, Porn in the past, and it was Scott’s turn. I even excerpted a reply I already wrote there in an earlier post.

2: Apr 19, 2022: In which Scott reviews the comments on his review of Sadly, Porn. I had three comments cited: the one I excerpted earlier, one where I mention a series of Fristonian x Lacanian “Sex & Prediction Error” papers, and one from Reddit I’ll excerpt here, giving some background on Lacan’s historical context:

First of all -- Lacan wasn't really "writing" (he did write, though, and it's famously inscrutable, I think he said that it wasn't meant to be read at all), he was delivering seminars verbally. The first 10 or so are all Freud reading groups, mostly analysts. They'd choose an essay or a book for close, careful study and then speak on it. He makes reference to this in earlier seminars, like "thanks so-and-so for the great [excerpted from the text] discussion of this week's material", before moving into his own discussion. I've done some of my own close readings of Freud, more casually, and there really is a lot there: read once to follow Freud's train of logic, and then read for the gaps in the text.

Around Seminar XI / 1964, Lacan got booted from the Freudian institute, for being too heterodox. So he pivoted and gave a lecture for more general-purpose French intellectuals at the time, which is why Seminar XI is mysterious and obscure: he's talking to guys like Merleau-Ponty, top brass of the French intellectuals, and invoking Aristotle and Hegel and Heidegger, not doing close readings with a gaggle of analysts. But the results of his earlier close readings form the groundwork for his later work. He gets increasingly esoteric from that point on, IMO culminating in Seminar XX, which is kind of where the groundwork for modern notions of gender comes from (Butler was a Lacanian, although she may not admit it).

3: Apr 26, 2022: Scott Reads Fink Reading Lacan. This is what triggered the majority of the discussion, both on ACX and on Reddit. I found this period of time quite intense, as I had to pick and choose which discussions I wanted to engage in. Most important, though, were Scott’s questions. Let’s dig in, this is the meat of it.

Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex

I'm still working on understanding Lacan's infamous psychoanalytic "graph of desire", but my current hypothesis is that it's a picture of @eigenrobot

Scott’s Questions: Why Is Lacan Interesting?

Scott writes:

I think the most important thing you could add is something like -

If you don't have much to say about this, then it sounds like I got things sort of right and have a basic 101-level understanding of some Lacanian concepts. But I still don't understand - why anyone would be attracted to them? What you can do with them? I'm not even asking whether they're true at this point, more like "what kind of predictions do they make that you couldn't get from common sense" or "how do they simplify message length" or something like that? What made you read this kind of stuff and think "Yeah, something about this calls to me and I should continue pursuing this framework"?

My response:

A couple stories, from closest to furthest from the "intended audience":

• Within the psychoanalytic community: as I wrote on Reddit, Lacan sold himself as a return-to-Freud, contra object relations theorists like Klein, so analysts might choose Lacan if they found his framing made more sense + wanted a fresh, more abstract read on Freudian concepts. Klein was also kind of notorious for, not quite fabricating, but uh, projecting things wrt her case studies that may or may not have been real.

• Within academia, particularly philosophy and art criticism: Lacan's work can be compared with Ricoeur's work on Freud, in terms of providing an interpretive framework for understanding texts. The original feminist theory paper that defined the "male gaze" drew from Lacan extensively, and his star student was Guattari (they eventually became estranged, classically), who co-authored some very influential books with Deleuze, such as "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia". There is a direct lineage from Lacan to contemporary theories of gender, by way of Judith Butler, for example. I believe Lyotard was also a student of Lacan, and he was famous for basically inventing/mainstreaming "postmodernism" as a concept in philosophy. In a certain sense, this makes Lacan one of the original seeds of pomo, alongside Derrida. Lacan also is playful with a lot of classic philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, so academics with such familiarity find him fun to read rather than just frustrating.

• For me personally, a random guy: I had already been in therapy for a long time and something kind of traumatic happened that forced me to re-evaluate my own epistemic frameworks regarding my emotions and desires. The first book I found that actually helped me develop new epistemics was a text by Eric Berne, his precursor to "Games People Play". This led me to Freud (I started with Interpretation of Dreams), and then I started reading some bloggers who referenced Lacan and realized some of his ideas are insanely powerful in my own reflections and also as broad theoretical tools, such as the big Other and his formulas of sexuation (which I have been blogging about obliquely for a few months now). I also felt like he was being neglected as a useful resource in the part of the internet where I hung out, so I decided to dive in and try to figure some shit out. This took a lot longer than I expected…

In terms of why someone would pursue psychoanalytic theory in particular, Lacan himself notwithstanding, I tend to think in terms of a spectrum where on the one side, you have an entirely symptoms & pathology oriented medical psychiatry, and on the other side you have entirely non-pathological frameworks like astrology, tarot, all that woo stuff (they do actually work as tools, but purely as entropy-generating gestalts, i.e. as noise that destabilizes high level priors, akin to psychedelics but without the drugs — helps you break rigid patterns of thought). Psychoanalysis seems to fall in the middle, where there is some degree of coherent ethics and normativity, but there's a far broader degree of freedom when it comes to what is and isn't considered a pathology.

In practice, what I really wanted to do was figure out how to stop feeling ashamed of myself for having desires (read: sexual fantasies) that might not be cool to admit to most people, and that didn't actually impede my life in any way except for the fact that I had them. And psychoanalytic theory was enormously helpful toward that end, to the point where I eventually ended up being able to just tell my therapist about those fantasies (spoiler: my therapist didn't react at all, i.e. it went fine), which helped me make a new sort of peace with myself in a way that's a little hard to explain.

The new challenge is that psychoanalytic theory goes against a huge amount of contemporary psychological doctrine, so now I have different thoughts I feel I can't express in public places, but not because I'm ashamed of them. I would say that the prediction-making capacity of psychoanalytic theory is extremely lateral, in that it lets you cut across domains in novel ways, but that first requires a pretty major overhaul in terms of epistemological fundamentals. But hope is not lost: my friend Natural Hazard has been very closely approximating some Lacanian ideas by way of rationalist thought, and hopefully will make some posts about it on LessWrong soon.

I hope this answer was sufficiently thorough and makes sense -- let me know if there's any other elaboration I can do that would be helpful.

Scott replies:

Thank you, this was a helpful response. I think more detail about your own experience would be more helpful, but I can understand if you don't want to share all your fantasies and psych issues with the blog-reading public.

Is "Big Other" a stronger/different idea than the sociometer idea of "you're constantly checking your abstract social status because that's important for evo psych reasons"?

Is the sexual stuff useful insofar as it provides a nonjudgmental framework for approaching strange sexual fantasies / does the Tarot card useful entropy thing, or because you think it's literally right and "pays rent in anticipated experience".

My response:

Is "Big Other" a stronger/different idea than the sociometer idea of "you're constantly checking your abstract social status because that's important for evo psych reasons"?

Yeah, the big Other is unfortunately an extremely complicated idea. Part of the difficulty with Lacan in general is that understanding his ideas ties in a lot with the epistemic setting from which they originate. Lacan is big on speech because the analyst in a psychoanalytic setting basically only has speech to go on. So the big Other is ultimately a pattern of utterances, a specific object of speaking, which is typically "society" or "everyone" or "God" as you note, whatever the abstract object is that stands in for a totality, and is also always "external" to the speaking subject.

The difference that this makes vs the evo psych view is that the big Other isn't really a psychological mechanism per se, but something people use. So the "point" of the idea is that when someone speaks and makes reference to "society", you can be like "oh, they're talking about the big Other", which as Lacan notes, does not exist. This leads to new potential questions, like "when you say 'society', who exactly are you talking about?" and lets you cut deeply through the ways people hide their feelings through abstractions.

To me, this feels very different than the frame of evo psych, which seems to me like an explanation rather than a purely formal property (this is why Lacan was obsessed with math, btw: he saw it as a language that expresses formal structures in a highly compressed and totally non-lossy fashion).

As an example case, shame relates a lot to the Other, because shame is about feeling like you broke a "rule" (whose rules?). Spinoza's definition does a good job of showing this: "Shame is sorrow with the accompanying idea of some action which we imagine people blame." (which people?)

Is the sexual stuff useful insofar as it provides a nonjudgmental framework for approaching strange sexual fantasies / does the Tarot card useful entropy thing, or because you think it's literally right and "pays rent in anticipated experience".

I would say that reading a lot of case studies of people with extremely unusual sexualities, and also seeing my own fantasies represented in the literature, made me feel less ashamed ("I am not alone in this thing, and other people are able to say it without being judged, so maybe I can too"), enough to actually speak the fantasy in therapy, as I mentioned. The weird thing about speaking something which you feel is absolutely totally against the rules is that it has a kind of freeing effect, an elation to it, as opposed to merely thinking it. Suddenly the rules appear as a sort of illusion, kind of like how the PUAs/redpillers are always saying shit like "you can just talk to her bro."

I feel like this is one of the appeals of rationalist conversational norms in general (no wonder your patients like your demeanor!), as it's a place that I personally found helpful because I had some thoughts I was ashamed of having, but that I felt able to talk out with people rather than being bludgeoned for (yknow, SJW stuff back in 2016, the usual).

So the value in non-judgment, IMO, is less about a useful entropy and also not even necessarily about a factual correctness, as much as having a place where you can just speak it out loud (i.e. free associate, speaking without prior thought to what you're saying) and see what happens next. And as in the above example with the big Other, the reason that the Lacanian concepts exist is so the analyst can have a sense of what to do or ask next, i.e. they can see how to fit those utterances into place formally, as a piece of the structure of "you", even if they can't provide an immediate interpretation or explanation.

This is the main stuff, which some of you may have already seen (hello new readers!). I found Scott’s questions extremely fair, and I was happy to have the opportunity to directly address an interlocutor of whom I already had a model. I found some of my own arguments surprising, in retrospect, and it helped me piece together consciously more of my implicit model regarding the role and function of psychoanalytic theory.

There were also two instances where I had interesting and, at times, frustrating conversations. The first exchange took place in the ACX comments, with user Xpym, starting here. The conversation centered around epistemological questions, specifically the classic “is psychoanalysis a science?” which Lacan dealt thoroughly with in Seminar XI.

“Is Psychoanalysis a Science?”

Xypm asks, opening immediately with an inquiry about forms of knowledge:

is psychoanalysis interested in making predictions of any kind, and rigorously checking them? From what you're saying I gather that it's mainly used to construct persuasive (to the person in front of you) narratives about them, which may be therapeutically beneficial, but doesn't seem to have much to do with "truth". Of course, non-rationalists don't particularly care about "truth" per se, beyond signalling purposes.

I reply, bringing in the metaphor of “Lacanian psychoanalysis is like a mathematics” to attempt to deflect questions about “prediction-making”:

Is statistics itself interested in making predictions? Or is it a tool used to guide prediction-making in other endeavors? What I mean by "formal tools" is that it's like a collection of general thought-shapes rather than a set of "X means Y"s. Like statistics, these shapes can help you make sense of certain kinds of data (in this case, speech, rather than numbers). Just like statistics, you can use it to determine truths, or to come up with absolute bullshit.

The psychoanalytic practice can be conceived of as a "scientific domain" of its own, where the analyst needs to figure out an explanatory paradigm (using the shapes from the theory) that ultimately is able to explain (i.e. make predictions about) the analysand. They do this rigorously, gathering data from the analysand's speech over long periods of time. But what you probably mean by "rigorous" is not "thorough" but "subject to statistical research and generalization". This is a category error, because that would be like doing statistics on the mathematics of statistics itself, when actually what you'd need is higher level, more abstract math to handle the sort of generalizations involved (or, a philosophy of psychoanalysis).

Xpym responds, bringing up falsification:

where the analyst needs to figure out an explanatory paradigm (using the shapes from the theory) that ultimately is able to explain (i.e. make predictions about) the analysand.

No, this describes what I mean well enough. So, do they really do that? The uncharitable accounts of psychoanalysis that I've seen say that this is impossible, because no behavior of the analysand can falsify the paradigm, and everything would end up having been "predicted".

I attempt to explain why falsification isn’t part of the justification process, because psychoanalysis itself a science:

I'm not a practicing analyst, but as far as I can tell, the goal isn't to falsify theoretical ideas in the general sense (that would be like falsifying "statistics") but to falsify specific hypotheses that the analyst makes relating to the person in front of them. There's lots of case studies where an analyst makes an attempt at an interpretation, and discovers over time that their initial idea was wrong, or at least failed to grasp the full complexity of the situation. How they handle this determines whether they're actually moving closer to truth, or whether they're engaged in the analytic equivalent of "p-hacking" by forcing the data to fit their prior interpretation.

I will say that Freud himself, even though he tried to explicitly do "metapsychology", was definitely more interested in making straightforward interpretations which could open up swathes of the theory to falsification. This is because he was the first one to even attempt this kind of endeavor, and it evolved significantly and dramatically over his lifetime. What Lacan did was try and resolve these theoretical inconsistencies (between differing levels of abstraction) by removing those specific falsifiable referents, thus attempting to elevate psychoanalytic theory to this "mathematical" level.

Like, working off Scott's example: contemporary Lacanians would probably be unhappy with how Fink talks explicitly about fathers threatening castration, because that's the kind of thing that you can find out in a generally falsifiable way. I would call that a "psychological" rather than a "psychoanalytic" ("metapsychological") claim. Otoh, the second description of the process by which the infant learns to handle the fact of mother's unavailability is almost entirely formal and thus proper to psychoanalytic theory, in that it describes a particular shape whose only key assumptions are that (a) the infant eventually separates from the mother, which is pretty universal, and (b) that the infant feels some way about it, which is also pretty universal.

Xpym understands my point and asks about the field’s grounding:

I think I see what you're getting at. So, at the meta-level there are these tools which a practitioner can employ in a specific situation, and the overall success depends both on the quality of the tools and analyst's skills. But then, the obvious question is, how does the field judge the quality of its tools? You compare it to statistics, the tools of which are ultimately derived from the axioms of mathematics and logic. What are the axioms that psychoanalysis derives its tools from?

I reply, giving some basics on how psychoanalysis relates to neuroscience:

This is a great question, and hits at precisely the point where the metaphor starts to break down. Part of the reason why there's so many schools of psychoanalysis is that there's no single obvious method of evaluation. Each school has its own ideas about what measure is best (usually based on affiliation with various philosophical schools), but they all have one commonality: they go back to Freud. So the question becomes, what was Freud working off of?

The answer might surprise you: neuroscience and biology, particularly evolutionary theory (as well as, of course, the entire tradition of western philosophy). Freud saw himself originally as a neuroscientist, studying how brains and nervous systems work, using a fairly primitive 1800s toolkit (before he was doing psychoanalysis, he was doing cocaine "trip reports"!), but also tying in more experience-first philosophical ideas like Spinoza's ideas on emotion, Kant, and Nietzsche. Freud actually wrote an entire unpublished book of neuroscience called "Project for a Scientific Psychology" back in 1895. And equally important is Freud's familiarity with principles of evolution and biology, which he grapples with most significantly in his text "Beyond the Pleasure Principle".

It's only now, 100+ years later, through the work of Friston et al and more analytic theorists like Mark Solms, that we're finding that Freud's neuroscientific work was oftentimes correct, mainly because we lacked the tools and methods to do proper observation and verification of the sorts of claims he made + was working from. For example, this Solms paper where he dives into Freud's ideas about dreams using contemporary neuroscience: https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/articles/the-interpretation-of-dreams-and-the-neurosciences-mark-solms. Friston also makes occasional mention of Freudian ideas through his papers.

But there's still a long way to go! A metaphor I sometimes use is that if neuroscience is like assembly language, then psychoanalysis aims at being a high level language. A translation always exists between the two, but it wont necessarily be easy to wrap one's head around.

Xpym finally asks about Freud’s contemporary status:

Well, the general idea seems to be reasonable enough, but why is Freud still so pre-eminent considering that there is a century worth of neuroscientific work to base newer theories on? Or that is what's happening, and tying it to him is mainly due to status games?

I respond giving my current account of the field:

What's happening is that Freud's observations are being vindicated, but slowly, and not because of status but because he was right about a lot (and also wrong about a lot!). The reason we haven't fully solved it, is because the last century of neuroscience work hasn't been powerful enough, such that that we can draw a clear line from "forms of speech in the psychoanalytic context" to "neurological effects" and provide a proper grounding.

Neuroscience is still very much an emerging field. We could ask the same question of mathematics, given that the patterns involved in mathematics fundamentally originate in the brain's capacity to process information -- why haven't we solved neuromathematics yet? Hell, we can barely figure out why psychiatric medications work. And yet in both cases, even if we lack a complete materialist-scientific grounding, the tools are useful.

While I found this exchange somewhat strenuous, Xpym was a fair interlocutor and I felt satisfied with the conclusions I was able to reach along the way.

Psychoanalysis and Evolutionary Psychology

I had another exchange on Reddit, with /u/Lykurg480, which I found far more frustrating. The thread began with /u/far_infared making the point that:

Human behavior is a mix of "the easy stuff" (hunger, pain, memory, conditioning, anything that can be observed in insects), and "the hard stuff" (everything else). Psychoanalysis, understood in terms of its long-term trends, faddish movements, lack or excess of intellectual appeal, and the personal histories of its major figures, consists exclusively of the hard stuff. In the scientific tradition of studying the unknown forces in environments where the known forces have been excluded, I propose that what we really need to understand the psyche is a theory that explains psychoanalysis.

I replied, in an attempt to explain how psychoanalysis explains itself, introducing an analogy with compilers and programming languages:

Good news: psychoanalysis spends a lot of time explaining itself. There is a fundamental problem with certain types of knowledge, that once you start attempting to gain knowledge about the basis of knowledge itself, any frame can only be partial.

Think of it like programming languages. Ideas at the level of abstraction as psychoanalysis should be capable of explaining themselves, like how you should be able to write a compiler for a programming language in the language it's compiling. But also that ultimately choice of language is mediated by pragmatic concerns. There is and will never be one true programming language, which reveals the underlying fact that even abstract philosophical systems are motivated by being useful on some level.

The better question, then, is "what's it good for?"

(For references on analysis explaining itself, I recommend Lacan's Seminar XI, especially the parts near the end where he tries to deal with "is psychoanalysis a science?", and also reading up on counter-transference. The paper on that topic I liked was by Annie Reich, where she tries to analytically break down what it is that motivates analysts themselves to practice, and which motives are better/worse.)

And then the exchange began. /u/Lykurg480 critiques my analogy by claiming that “philosophical ideas are more on the level of algorithms than programming languages”, which misses my point, and then asks a few questions about the relationship between psychoanalysis and biology:

There is and will never be one true programming language, which reveals the underlying fact that even abstract philosophical systems are motivated by being useful on some level.

I dont think this analogy is good. Many philosophical ideas are more on the level of algorithms than programming languages, and the ones that arent are interesting mainly in that people dont always notice that they arent.

Also, since youre kind of the ambassador of Lacan to rationalism, can I ask you a few questions?

One of my big problems with psychoanalysis is that I dont see how it could fit with our knowledge from the biological. If we look at biological illness for example, there is a wide field of possible causes and locations of the pathology. "All mental illness comes from misfunctioning in the desire-system" looks suspiciously like "All physical illness comes from diet" (and indeed they seem to be popular with similar people). This is just not how organic things work. Maybe some illnesses do come from misfunctioning in the desire-system, but there should also be congenitally missing moods and irreparable effects of injury/trauma and minor phobias and sensitivities that dont mean anything deeper etc..

It also doesnt really make sense in terms of evolution. Especially the "there are no normal healty people" part. Why would you inevitably end up with some sort of self-undermining behaviour, with your environment/parents only determining which one? Of the five diagnosis/personalities the only one thats not obviously maladaptive is hysteria for women specifically, and even thats not obviously good either. It seems like it should be possible to develope in a "normal" way and not do something pointless or self-undermining. Relatedly, most movements that claim that mental illness is very common also have radical politics attached to them. I think that makes a lot of sense.

I attempt to course-correct his first criticism of my programming languages metaphor, and attempt to address his questions on biology by recapping some of this old blogpost:

Many philosophical ideas are more on the level of algorithms than programming languages

I also agree with this, I'm speaking at the level of philosophical systems rather than ideas, typically metaphysical, like idealism vs materialism. They can each justify themselves and are able to justify each other in their own frames.

One of my big problems with psychoanalysis is that I dont see how it could fit with our knowledge from the biological... It also doesnt really make sense in terms of evolution.

Freud addresses this in a paper called "Instincts and their Vicissitudes", and there's also contemporary neuropsychoanalytic papers that deal with similar topics. I've written a little on it on my blog but I'll give a brief summary.

First question before we even think about "desire" is "what is pleasure?" Freud saw pleasure as a felt decrease in overall nervous system tension, which he agreed likely evolved as a way of guiding us toward survival/reproduction. He posited several different "drives" in the paper I mentioned above, which are basically "recurring internal needs that produce tension, stemming from the human status as biological entity, requiring food, water, etc."

So a drive itself is not much but a form of pressure, like "I'm hungry". The question of desire appears when that hunger "attaches" to an object, like you remember one time feeling hungry and eating a slice of pizza, so you decide you want pizza. Now you have an aim, or drive-object, that's "pressured" due to your feeling of hunger. The question is then, how can I get a slice of pizza?

The world as we live in it has figured out the answer to this question, which is "go to the store and buy some", which presupposes a massive set of structural organizations that permit "stores" and "money" to exist. The question is harder when it comes to "sex" because you can't just go to the sex store and exchange money for it, or if you did you might leave feeling like you weren't quite satisfied, and this Lacan posits that this is because when we want "sex", it's not usually about the sex itself but about a set of social circumstances that relate back to earlier, pre-genital experiences, like being heard, being seen, etc.

So, the most weird and complicated set of implicit social rules exists around sex and its constitutional drives and subsequent desires (unless you're a hardcore Marxist, in which case you might see the money side of thing as being weirder), and most people twist themselves into knots trying to figure this out.

Working from this frame, there's really no high-level notion of "mental illness", but rather different strategies for dealing with problems around "how do I get what I want?", and the original time when you had to figure out how to get what you want, was when you were a young child. Some of these strategies are more or less effective than others, depending on your circumstances. This is key: "mental illness" presupposes that the problem is within the individual (in its metaphor with physical illness), rather than a relationship between the individual's strategies/desires and the world they live in. So, a lot of critiques of mental illness have come from the psychoanalytic field, most notably Thomas Szasz. And the fact that these are merely "strategies" which take on certain common forms is why psychoanalytic theory uses structural ideas like psychotic/perverse/neurotic rather than a "diagnostic framework" which presupposes normal/abnormal from the get-go.

Evolutionarily speaking, humans are extraordinarily malleable, and a huge amount of that malleability relates to our capacity to use symbols. This could be hypothesized as a result of humans having much longer periods of childhood and infancy than other species, whereby the child who can communicate with their mother is more able to survive than the child who can't, and also that groups of humans able to coordinate well are more likely to survive than groups with less rich forms of communication. "Culture" in this sense exists as a way of introducing the child into their broader social environment, and the problem right now is that we have sets of cultural institutions which often fail at meeting peoples' needs, fail to introduce them to sets of rules which guarantee life-long opportunities at satisfying their desires. "Neurotic" is thus "normal" and not inherently "maladaptive", in that the vast majority of humans feel bound by social rules, and most cultures had ways of handling individuals who take other strategies toward satisfaction, mainly in terms of special social roles. The problem that analysis attempts to solve is when your conception of "the rules" is the thing causing you trouble, which is especially common given the relative isolation of the nuclear family and also the lack of tradition (in which tradition means "the rules you learn as a child = the rules you live out as an adult").

Does this make sense? Let me know if still confused.

/u/Lykurg480 responds with a very important point about how “illness” is conceived in modern times, with recourse to an Aristotelian-Darwinian view of man as perfectible:

Working from this frame, there's really no high-level notion of "mental illness", but rather different strategies for dealing with problems around "how do I get what I want?"

My point doesnt hinge on a "high-level notion of "mental illness"". I just looked at the five diagnosis/personalities and it seems like theyre doing counterproductive stuff. Like, how does "Obsessives deal with their fear of sex by focusing on a single aspect of the sex partner (eg breasts, penis) and desperately trying to pretend they’re not a real full person." increase your reproductive success compared to... not doing that? Why be able to develop a fear of sex in the first place?

This is key: "mental illness" presupposes that the problem is within the individual (in its metaphor with physical illness), rather than a relationship between the individual's strategies/desires and the world they live in.

This is key: "physical illness" presupposes that the problem is within the individual (in its metaphor with ???), rather than a relationship between the individual's immune system and the viruses and bacteria in the world they live in.

Im talking about normal/abnormal and health/illness in the quasi-aristotelian/teleological sense, as a convenient shorthand. I dont think its productive to critical-theory that while were reasoning from the perspective of evolution.

"Neurotic" is thus "normal" and not inherently "maladaptive"

I would again point to the actual content of the subtypes of "neurotic". In what sort of social environment would those not be maladaptive? Yes, hysteric might help if you get bride-napped, but I dont think thats what you had in mind.

The problem that analysis attempts to solve is when your conception of "the rules" is the thing causing you trouble, which is especially common given the relative isolation of the nuclear family and also the lack of tradition (in which tradition means "the rules you learn as a child = the rules you live out as an adult").

See, now that is a sane theory ,which not coincidentally does allow for "healthy" people, but its also not something that I see in Lacan, who doesnt seem to believe in those.

I attempt to explain the key point regarding psychoanalysis and normative notions of “health”, by bringing in concepts like “gain of illness”, and attempting to link adaptivity to neurosis in various expressions:

the five diagnosis/personalities

They're not diagnoses nor personalities, they're structuring principles, and there's only three: neurotic, psychotic, and pervert, with neurotic being further divided into hysteric and obsessive, these sub-types characterized by a fundamental question ("am I dead or alive?" vs "am I a man or a woman?"). The framework isn't one of illness or of "personality types".

increase your reproductive success compared to... not doing that?

Very few people walk around thinking "how can I increase my reproductive success?" But a lot of people walking around thinking "I desire them for who they are." Part object theory comes from Freud, and it's a way to dig into specifics about what we want and why rather than getting stuck projecting problems onto the other person as a whole.

Im talking about normal/abnormal and health/illness in the quasi-aristotelian/teleological sense

Yes, and that is one major thing psychoanalysis tries to re-characterize: a teleological view of man. Aristotelians will disagree fundamentally with the framing (and Lacan spends a lot of time discussing Aristotle directly), and that's okay. They don't have to use it. Freud was basically a New Atheist and psychoanalysis refuses all teleological frames as such.

There result is a concept that comes up a lot in psychoanalytic theory, "gain of illness", which is what makes "resistance" work. Every "mental illness" comes with an aspect the subject enjoys and doesn't want to give up, which problematizes the idea of illness altogether (if I were Zizek, I would make reference to the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Phantom Thread and how it portrays gain of illness in the literal sense). This is fundamentally absent in most cases of physical illness.

In what sort of social environment would those not be maladaptive?

The "adaptive" expression of obsessive neurosis is "I (know and) pursue that which makes me feel alive", and of hysteria is "I am a woman (and I know what that means)", when taking them in the form of questions rather than "diagnoses". The maladaptive components only appear when the questions are answered in maladaptive ways.

I want to emphasize again that maintaining a singular focus on "health vs illness" and how it fits into these theories will preclude you from figuring the frame out. Diagnosis in analysis is not seen as something given to the analysand by the analyst by comparing them to an objective or teleological standard, but as a contract between the two of them as well as a tool the analyst can use, whereby the analysand raises a symptom (could be anything about themselves) that they want to change, and the analyst works with them to help them make that change happen.

The ethical implications of psychoanalysis in this sense are therefore Kantian rather than post-Aristotelian, in that the analysand is not striving for a cure but for freedom.

The exchange continues here, and I attempt to explain drive theory and trauma and their relation to evolutionary theories of sexual selection. I wont excerpt the rest because I’ve covered a lot of it in earlier posts (although if you’re interested in my attempted evopsych connections, definitely read on, although perhaps I’ll write it up more clearly in another post), and it boils down to a “nature vs nuture” debate.

In his defense, /u/Lykurg480 does a good job of expressing as close as I can find to a coherent evopsych criticism of psychoanalysis, even though I disagree with his premises relating to the connections between neuroscience and sexuality.

The End of Analysis (and of This Post)

One final tidbit, regarding the goal of analysis. On the ACX post, The Chaostician writes:

I can't help but noticing that Lacanian therapy causes Roger to go insane, while another therapist helps him to be fine afterwards.

The goal of therapy is typically to help people live normal lives, not to cause their ego to collapse in a particular way. Why would Fink want to use this as an example of Lacanian therapy?

My response:

The goal of psychoanalysis is not "to help people live normal lives", unlike typical "supportive" therapy. After Freud, most psychoanalysis has been about developing a sort of reflexive self-understanding or self-knowledge, rather than curing symptoms. This might clear it up (or it might make it more confusing): https://nosubject.com/End_of_analysis

Gonna leave it at that, because this is already a lot. Hope you found these exchanges valuable or at least interesting reading!

Oh, and, if you want my Take on the Rationalist community as a whole, at a point where I was mired in questions about psychoanalytic theory, you can find it buried it in the comments section of this very blog:

As for the rationalists, I think part of their hesitancy to deal with continental ideas goes back partly to a conception of those ideas as being "academic" (and they are *vehemently* anti-academic). To use their own framing here, a lot of the status signaling in rationalist circles is about coming up with new ideas based on the site's previous canon (this status game is ironically a mirror of academia), so "importing" ideas from old books means they'd lose out on a chance to show off by coming up with something new. Best approach tbh is to reframe ideas like dialectics in their terminology and coin new terms for whatever you end up with.

The disdain for theory also ties into their idea of "beliefs paying rent" and avoiding "floating beliefs": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences. The rationalists seem to believe, based on this, that knowledge exists fundamentally as (1) a predictive tool, for (2) pointing to specific empirical referents (i.e. a weirdo positivism). This rules out entire classes of knowledge, as well as actions that involve the play of messages across society (in the Foucaultian sense). This mindset makes itself known when they call some things "fake" and other things "real", as you surely saw in the ACX post's comment section. In practice, they don't think too hard about epistemology, and mostly wield a sort of modified common sense. This is why rationalists get pilloried as "liberals" (well, before they started getting pilloried as "right-wingers"). At least, this is what I think.

…but don’t tell anyone!

Miscellania

A few tweet threads where I poke at topics of interest, but don’t get too deep into them.

• The relation of language/signification to desire, both real and one’s perception of the Other’s desire. This is a fairly Lacanian topic that I could elaborate on, but I feel like I’d be repeating a lot of what I said about dating apps in my last two posts (1) (2).

snav @qorprate

NB: the signifier of height is so important that he'll permanently change his body for it. the problem ultimately isn't his physical stature (although inarguably being short has real effects), but the relation of language and desire.

Härkönen @yokaihainen

Everything about this story is so American to me https://t.co/QZEdz7KW0u

• On metaphysics and what constitutes it. I feel like I’d need to do significantly more reading to expand on this properly, as it’s the kind of thing addressed deeply in the classics, Kant, Aristotle, etc. This came from thinking about my “programming languages” metaphor from the above Reddit discussion.

  snav @qorprate

  meta-metaphysical point that any proper metaphysics should be able to explain itself qua knowledge (i.e. how is it possible we know this?), and also should be able to reconstruct other metaphysical positions the result is that none are "more true", they're entirely faith

  

  eurydice @eurydicelives

  tell me something metaphysical you sincerely believe

• On “business speak” and its use. This might be an interesting topic to explore on tis.so in shorter form.

  snav @qorprate

  this is supposed to be a joke but actually if you can do this easily it's like a superpower

  

  howtoprofessionallysay.akashrajpurohit.comHow to professionally sayA guide for your daily “professional” interactions

• Here’s a meme I made to settle a debate:

snav @qorprate

here to settle a debate with @nvpkp by way of a "rave party alignment chart" meme

Song of the week:

Thanks again for reading, everyone! See you next week!

1. I found the experience of recording this “quasi-podcast” very interesting. All my answers felt completely free-associative, like I was just speaking whatever immediately came into my head, without mediating thoughts like “is this correct?” or at least not big ones. To put it in other terms, it felt like my voice had somehow cohered, no longer “fractured” like I spoke about in the post I was literally reading out loud.

Perhaps this says something about the power of speech versus text, a certain special quality where one cannot avoid feeling connected to some inner locus that disappears while typing or swyping or however you choose to write words online. I feel like this speech vs text distinction has significant political implications; would Twitter trolls feel so emboldened if they had to leave voice messages instead? But these thoughts would do best elsewhere, and surely have been dealt with at length back in the 50s and 60s or maybe even earlier.