Astral Codex Ten

Lacanian

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Lacanian

Article

Lacanian is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 20, 2022 and April 21, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “3 part series of papers relating Fristonian and Lacanian ideas”; “relating Fristonian and Lacanian ideas”; “Okay, that’s Lacanian philosophy in a nutshell!“. It most often appears alongside Freud, Lacan, Sadly, Porn.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 20, 2022
  • Last seen: April 21, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
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).
There's a new strain of neuropsychoanalysis from the last decade that you might find interesting, haven't read it but this 3 part series of papers relating Fristonian and Lacanian ideas comes highly recommended: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34727734/
Inline links: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34727734/
I loved Scott’s post on Lacan yesterday for a few reasons, but something felt a bit wrong with its frame on applicability. Seemed like it erred toward a standard rationalist mistake of “is this everywhere, or a bad model?” The gradations of hypothesis seemed more like they were over intensities or amounts, rather than situations. Instead, what seems clear to me is that it’s a great model for many [deep, fundamental] twists of the psyche, but a flatly wrong and very destructive model in many other cases. I think rationalists fear Lacanian things partlyyyy because everyone who gets into them goes insane (fair) but partly because rationalists, like much of Western culture, implicitly assume universal applicability of knowledge. Universalize the Lacanian paradigm and that way lies madness; understand the Lacanian underpinnings of some key patterns (hatred of billionaires) and the world will just be more hospitable. Very general and important principle: If you know the bounds of applicability, you’re at much less danger from an ideology.
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
I know this is a weird way to start this book review. But I kept thinking about it while reading A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by Bruce Fink. Psychoanalysis - like AI alignment - is about how newly-created entities get desires, and what happens if the desire they get isn’t the one other people wanted them to have. Fink writes:
Inline links: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Obsession, in which someone pretends that the Other doesn’t exist, they’re self-contained and don’t need anybody else, there’s no such thing as the unconscious, and nothing can possibly go wrong. Fink describes Ayn Rand characters as a “perfect” example, which I found helpful. 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. If you doubt the utility or veracity of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Fink warns us), it probably means you’re obsessive and that’s your defense mechanism.
Why did I read A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis?
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Blue: financially savvy, bad at romance, natural leader, enjoys biking …then most people will find that they have some traits of each, but that’s just a natural result of the system being made up and useless. Maybe the problem is I’m using this as a psychological type system, but it’s actually supposed to be a business book after all? The namesake principle claims that overperforming Clueless get promoted to middle management, and underperforming Sociopaths get promoted to the top. This ought to be testable. Suppose we looked at a sales firm, or an investment bank, and correlated first-year sales/profits with promotions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that overperformers get promoted to the next level up - after all, the naive ordinary model says you get promoted for good work. Surely most people who underperform their first year won’t get promoted, but the Gervais partisan could say that yes, only a few very special underperformers are real Sociopaths. So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. I would naively predict the top echelons would be made of former normal-to-over-performers, so if someone found they were in fact underperformers that would be a big update for me in favor of all of this Gervais stuff. I can’t find a dataset that would tell me this, but if any of you are very high up in big corporations, please poll your peers and let me know what they say. Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here. Finally, it just seems totally wrong to me that the highest-status and lowest-status members of groups/clubs/societies are legible, and everyone in the middle isn’t. I am thinking of some non-formal groups I belong to, and the highest- and lowest- status people are often as confusing as everyone else. The exceptions are formal organizations with presidents or whatever, but even there I couldn’t tell you who the lowest-status person is. VII. That last section might feel harsh, so I want to stress that I liked a lot of things about Gervais Principle. Gervais Principle feels like what psychoanalysis would be like if it weren’t so devoted to making itself incomprehensible. It explained its theories clearly and gave good examples of each. Even though it stuck to really traditional psychoanalytic ideas (the theory of people getting stuck at developmental stages is classic Freud - see eg anal-retentivity, oral fixation, etc) it vastly exceeded the source material in clarity, plausibility, and ability to avoid naming all of its concepts after barely-related bodily orifices. In particular, I feel like I better understand some of the ideas from Sadly, Porn. People’s desire to subject themselves to an order created by sociopaths. Everyone keeping a ledger of status transactions. Terror of acting openly, and how it breeds bureaucracy and excessive layers of management. It’s all in here. Lacan claimed there were three different personality structures: neurotic, psychotic, and pervert. Suggestive, but I can’t squeeze these into matching Rao’s triad. For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least. Likewise, Lacan says psychotics are incapable of using language normally, instead retreating to stock phrases - a suspiciously good match for Rao’s Clueless description. But Lacanian psychotics are most able to act and least dependent on other people’s approval, which is totally the opposite of Rao’s system. Clinical Introduction hints at a rare personality type who has passed beyond neurosis, and is able to have normal healthy self-motivated desires that are not just the desires of others. It doesn’t dwell on this type, because they rarely see psychoanalysts, but it sounds like a good match for Rao’s Sociopaths. That would mean we have to map all three main Lacanian types into Rao’s Clueless and Losers - but I have no idea how to do this faithfully. So I am less impressed by the typology itself than in the book’s ability to ask questions - or, more precisely, to make the reader ask questions. This is its “organizational literacy” - when confronting people or groups, you can ask things like: What narrative script is a person relying on in order to maintain their sense of specialness?
Inline links: anal-retentivity, oral fixation, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn?s=w, Clinical Introduction
Open Thread 378
April 21, 2025 · Original source
And a commenter goes further with a Lacanian argument that “the college essay causes psychological harm”.
Inline links: goes further, “the college essay causes psychological harm”