Celebrating 5 Stupid, Unnecessary Years of Lacan

To a reader, every solution looks like a book

When I was in college, I had a group of friends that went from being close to me, extraordinarily close, to becoming utterly mystifying. I’d say that they were stolen by Lacan.

Let me back up. To be most accurate, the folks in this group of friends were related to me in different ways. One was my ex, though by then we were on friendly terms, and the others were like intellectual colleagues; we were bound together at first by the almost universal camaraderie that is shared by Humanities majors at a tech-focused research institution. In my memory, most of them studied philosophy, which I guess made Jacques Lacan, the controversial French psychoanalyst, an easy read.

These friends were bookishly omnivorous: when I was in school with them, I knew them to be interested in Alain Badiou, Donna Haraway, even obscure Jewish mystic texts like the Kabbalah.¹ For those less versed in philosophy and abstruse religious texts, I’ll just explain that these thinkers are not the canon; it would be rare to find a course on these writers, let alone a sizable group of other folks who wanted to obsess over them with you. But somehow, like a band of strange fish discovering each other in a quiet bend of the river, these friends found each other and never let go.

And then they found Lacan. If my friends had been a band of comradely misfits before Lacan, after him they became utterly alien in thought and manner — at least to me. I’d come to hang out with one of them in a dorm room to find them drawing diagrams on a whiteboard, complete with obscure variables like i(o), s(O) and Greek letters; I’d be trying to have my lunch with them and they’d break out in chortles over jouissance this, or jouissance that. Lacan represented for them an entirely different world of signs and signifiers, an entirely differently language.

An example of a Lacanian diagram depicting the inner workings of the psyche. Each of these variables represents something very specific, but unfortunately, I still couldn’t tell you what they are.

But if you’re worried that this will be a story about Lacan, please don’t worry: this isn’t a story about Lacan. In fact, as you can already tell, about half a decade later, I still don’t quite understand Lacan — and it isn’t for lack of trying. If anything, this is a story about how much I thought my problem was Lacan. (But it wasn’t! My problem was my mother. Hahahaha. Just kidding. There’s a psychoanalysis joke for you.)

At the time that all this was happening, I interpreted the distance of my friends as an intellectual challenge. Lacan? No problem, I thought. I was in school for Comparative Literature and I was puffed up on my own ability to read just about anything; my sophomore seminar professor had had us read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, for goodness’ sake, and I had been just fine. What, was I suddenly going to be scared of some French guy talking about the Oedipus Complex? No way.

But the truth was, Lacan wasn’t like Hegel. For me, he was even more difficult. Because these other ideas, like Hegel’s ideas, or Marx’s ideas, had been floating around at school. I had heard professors talk about them, grad students parrot them in their long, flowery monologues in seminar; as a result, I quickly picked up the main gist not just by reading, but by hearing other people talk.² But the more I heard about Lacan, the less I understood his ideas. It was like being in the presence of a puzzle you had intuitions about, only to find that each time you moved a piece, the puzzle became infinitely more complicated.

For example, jouissance is an important term in Lacan. In French — in regular, everyday French — jouissance means enjoyment. Is it a more poetic, lovely way of saying enjoyment? Sure. In Lacan, though, jouissance is a particular concept that means something like “an excess of life-force that cannot be borne.” It is an unbearable excess of something, kind of like a cousin to enjoyment but a distant cousin that lives in the forest and doesn’t speak English. I mean, to experience something unbearable, beyond the neat container of the life you have built for yourself — your routines, habits, sense of self — is this technically enjoyable? Maybe, at points. It’s probably closer, though, to a religious experience, something like horror and rapture combined. Why on earth does Lacan use the word jouissance to describe this?

So, yes, I put some blame on Lacan for his — I think — detestable habit of using words that already mean things, to mean different things. But the real source of my sadness and confusion during this time was my friends themselves, and their actions. For example, I remember vividly one of these friends saying to me, apropros of nothing, that every time I mentioned my mother, I also mentioned God within two or three sentences. He said this with a lift of his eyebrows and a meaningful look as though to say, don’t you think that’s significant?

I didn’t think, even if this were true, that it was particularly significant — but even if it were significant, what I hated the most was that my friend felt it was appropriate to relate to me this way. Whether or not it was there, I felt their scrutiny, their attempts to read the surface of my being for the structures underneath. I felt used, as though I were a novel they were reading for a sense of my “themes,” and once they understood the “themes,” they’d throw out the particularness of me — the me who wanted to go on a picnic, or a hike, or see a movie — and focus on this more concentrated, refined, accurate psychic picture of me: the me who was afraid of my mother, or in love with my father, or whatever.³

And in fact Lacanian ways of thinking do sort of encourage this, because Lacan believed that the unconscious had a kind of structure to it, similar to a language, and that this linguistic structure had to be worked with, even if the patient themself didn’t understand it consciously. The specificity of this structure, the particular unconscious associations of this word with that word (mother with God, for example) produced particular symptoms that could only be resolved through untangling this secret, unconscious language inside a person. As a result, Lacanian analysis has the extremely odd feature of being variable in length, in the sense that 5 minutes in or 3 hours in, your analyst can suddenly tell you the session is over, because if you’ve just said something particularly significant, you’re supposed to walk home and think about it right now, because you’re on the edge of a breakthrough in understanding yourself.⁴

I admit my impression of Lacan and Lacanian concepts may be a little misguided, though, because all I’m going off of is this:

Why did I pick this up, and in Pakistan, no less, when I was supposed to be exploring a new world, not picking around the edges of old flames and friendships gone wrong? Because I wasn’t over it, obviously.

d. and I had been browsing the local bookstore in Islamabad when I saw this adorable rotating tower of graphic summaries by Icon Books, and we proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes poring over which summaries we wanted to read. Melanie Klein? Hmm, maybe. Capitalism? Definitely. Fractals?! I mean, not sure how someone can summarize “fractals,” but sure, put it in the bag. And Lacan. Of course! Lacan.

It was like seeing the face of an old acquaintance in a new country — so unexpected that before you know it, before you can even remember why you aren’t quite friends anymore, you’ve invited yourself to have coffee with them. What’s more, the format of the book promised an easy read, so it seemed like the most efficient way I’d get this old thorn out of my side, a thorn I hadn’t fully realized was still there. After years of not knowing, it seemed I finally was poised on the edge of knowing. After years of being on the outside, I was soon to be in. It would all be resolved, I told myself, with a quick flip-through of this philosophy comic book. Kind of like The Avengers, but with daddy issues.

We rode home in the overbearing heat with my brain thrumming: Thank God! I’ll finally understand Lacan!

— I did not understand Lacan.

Don’t get me wrong, the book was well written. Darian Leader and Judy Groves have done a remarkably decent job of condensing very complex texts into one-page summaries with clever illustrations, and even in the parts where I didn’t quite grasp what was going on, I was able to have a laugh or two. But they couldn’t make up for an issue more fundamental: even in the places where I intellectually understood, I found the ideas kind of ridiculous.

Remember Lacan’s “detestable” habit I told you about earlier, the one where he uses words that already mean something to mean something else? Here’s another particularly egregious example from the book:

Lacan describes the process of communicating using words as fundamentally corrupting. What he means is that, once I speak something out loud to another person, the thing that I’m speaking about gets inevitably entered into a web of relationships, and these relationships take precedence over the object of my speech. So, if I ask my partner for a glass of water, it’s no longer about the water but about my relationship with him. In this way, he argues, all of language is kind of like a game of broken telephone, and as soon as we say something out loud, we’re already losing the original thing we meant to say.

So far, I’d argue this seems true enough, though it’s kind of questionable whether all language operates this way, all the time.

But then Lacan gives a name to this process, this process whereby language is corrupted by its very nature. What is it called? It’s called the phallus.

I don’t think that means what you think it means!

Now, I want to be very careful here when I say: Lacan is operating in a particular intellectual tradition, and he’s responding in particular to Freud when he writes. So he isn’t just arbitrarily calling something the phallus, he’s trying to wrestle with what this idea of phallus should even mean. Still, I don’t think that excuses him from the traditional burden of the writer/thinker, which is to use the best words we can for our audience. And if Lacan felt phallus was the best word for that, that was his prerogative, but as a reader, I still have to reckon with the work of putting myself in the head of that audience. And in this case, for me particularly, that work is considerable.

Still, I persisted: maybe, I thought to myself, once this book describes his actual clinical practice, I’ll be able to derive what he means through an actual case study.

And voila, an actual case study appeared:

The case study resolved nothing. The case study involved a man who was unable to get an erection with his mistress. He suggests that he’d like to see her having sex with another man. Before she does that, though, his mistress has a dream in which she has a phallus, and she also wants a phallus inside her. She tells him her dream in the morning. Bam! He gets an erection and they make love right then and there.

What?!

Now, I’m not trying to discredit or even push back against Lacan. Heaven knows I’d need to read his actual texts, and not a random graphic summary book created by someone else, to even have the authority to speak on that. What I want to highlight, though, is that even though I was having this experience of not really vibing with the text, I kept going. It felt so important to me to finally get Lacan, even though the more I read, the less I felt connected to his work.

Finally, after a painful week or so of thumbing through this tome, and incredulously summarizing daily to my partner J, I finished reading it. And with the very same thorn in my side, I had to admit: it wasn’t about Lacan.

I had told myself for years that what I was feeling was intellectual: that if I just understood this thinker, I’d finally feel resolved of what was bothering me. But what if it wasn’t intellectual? What if the thing I was feeling was fundamentally social in nature?

What if the real issue was: whether or not I “got” Lacan, my friends chose to sit there and not explain him to me?⁵ Perhaps they even chose, at some deep unconscious level, at some subterranean, structural, secret level, to obsessively study a thinker who was notoriously obscure, whose work was tough to understand, and who gave them the chance to feel close to one another at the expense of those they deemed as outsiders? We went to a good school, a school full of smart folks; why did they choose a thinker who expressly didn’t yield to intelligence, whose work was so controversial and sometimes bizarre that it was the intellectual equivalent of “If You Know You Know”?

What if my real problem was just… feeling left out?

I’ve since put a lot of work into understanding my own feelings in different situations, as my own sensitivity has both led me to a very interesting line of work — that of applied anthropology — and hampered me in my personal dealings at times. I wish I knew then what I know now: that to just express your feelings clearly is one of the kindest things we can do for one another. My friends didn’t do that for me, but I didn’t do that for them, either. Instead, I told myself over and over that it was an intellectual issue when really it was an emotional one. I told myself that for literally years, and I only accidentally found out — because of this charming little book — that I was wrong.

What’s more, I’d venture that bookish folks do this a lot. We’re used to being praised for our intelligence; we’re used to believing that mere thinking can open up the world. It’s easier, after all, to frame a problem in terms of reading comprehension than to admit that our feelings were hurt. But spend long enough with your thoughts and they reveal themselves for what they are. And Lacan, my crafty little diversion, slipped away from me like a water snake in a river, and I was left again with just myself: wading in a hurt I hadn’t fully processed. The water, as it turned out, as it so often turns out, was personal.

After this Lacanian period in my friend group, I grew further and further apart from them. It wasn’t sudden or explicit; no one asked me not to come to anything, no one took me aside to explain. It was more like being in a group of people who get absorbed in these little oddities in the landscape — say a collection of seashells or something, a piece of driftwood — and over time, these small diversions add up, none of them major, none of them particularly earth-shattering, until one day you look up, and you’re walking by the river alone.

As for my ex, the last time I saw him was several years ago. On a work trip to a city known for its elevation, I spent a lovely afternoon with him and his long-term girlfriend; I remember biking over using the hotel’s rental beater and being led upstairs to a one-bedroom apartment full of musty books and couches. We talked at length about our lives, and he mentioned Lacanian analysis, and then so did she, and then we walked out in the city as the sky turned very very blue. I ate a cheap hotdog as we sat in the grass, and as the night got colder and colder I watched my ex’s girlfriend gather her sweater around her like a nest. Finally it seemed it was time to go — not because everything had been said, but because we all sensed it would be impossible to say it all — and we gathered our things and we left the park and we dissolved into the night.

I still love to read. I still bury myself in books whenever I’m uncomfortable, to be honest, which is a little bit different from just “loving to read,” isn’t it?

Beyond that, I still feel motivated by this urge I developed in college, to “finally read X,” where X is some hip literary author or philosopher I’ve been meaning to understand. Critics of this kind of reading will tell you that it’s a self-indulgent form of class-signaling, because who cares whether you have a take on Sally Rooney or whomever, unless you’re in the drawing rooms (or airy gentrified loft spaces) of the nouveau riche? I don’t think that’s why I have this urge, though. I like the rooms I’m in. I don’t need to share my take on Plato as a secret password to some liberal arts speakeasy.⁶

Instead, I think that feeling oriented in the world of books is kind of a game I play with myself, an exercise in feeling oriented at all. It’s so much easier to have a take on Lacan than it is to have a take on what the hell happened to me in college, or with this ex-lover, or with my parents. Lacan is dead. And Lacan can’t hurt me. With Lacan, I might as well be alone.

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1. In fact, the one book that ever caused an argument between my ex and I was a copy of Daniel C. Matt’s The Essential Kaballah, a red paperback summary book that I picked up for free in one of those Little Free Libraries in Colorado. We were in a long-distance relationship and I was soon to leave him for my home. My ex so badly wanted this book at that particular time that when I was about to fly out, he insisted on keeping it, and I fumed the whole plane ride.

2. This, by the way, is a skill that many Humanities students have, but won’t readily talk about. To put it unkindly, it’s the ability to bullshit: to act as though you know about something you haven’t actually encountered directly. Just ask any Humanities major to tell you about a book they think they’re supposed to have read, and you’ll see this skill in action.

Just to get it off my chest, I’ll also say this: it’s why many Humanities majors make such great business consultants.

3. And to be fair to the psychoanalytic reading of the situation, I think another reason why I was so horrified by this situation is because I was used to, as a child, being treated this way by the people around me. I found thinking about myself, my feelings, and the world so fun that being automatically interpreted by other people somehow felt like arriving to a party that was winding down, the cups all stacked, the trash bags bulging, the smell of alcohol in the air. When was I going to get to actually represent myself, as myself, instead of hearing who other people thought I was?

Maybe another reason I love to write is because I can just finally explain who I am, instead of hearing other people explain myself to me.

4. Even if this is a reasonably accurate picture of how human minds work, I cannot help now but shiver at the tyranny this method requires. You’re paying someone else to stop your analysis at random times, trusting that their insight into your subterranean structures is more accurate than your own? What happened to the “safe space”? And what if they’re wrong?

5. I know to some readers, this conclusion may seem like a let-down, like “isn’t that obvious?” —The point I want to communicate is, it was not obvious to me. I spent 5 years telling myself I just needed to read Lacan because that was easier than admitting that this might have been going on.

6. Also, to be fair, I probably can’t separate the rooms I’m in from the fact that I like to talk about books. I’m just saying that if that’s the primary reason why someone wants me in the room, I’m not particularly interested in being in that room.