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PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
Ian Parker
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2009

by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © Ian Parker 2009
The author asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Parker, Ian, 1956-
Psychoanalytic mythologies / Ian Parker.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84331-303-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-84331-303-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84331-327-4 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 1-84331-327-8 (e-book)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939. I. Title.
BF173.P2853 2009
150.19’5—dc22
2008045914
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
PREFACE vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES 1
Points of view 3
Making love to my ego 7
The pinball project 11
Psychopolitical cults 15
The wet group 19
Interpersonal skills 23
Learn and enjoy 27
Another language 31
English identity, Ireland and violence 35
Racing 41
Diana’s subjects 45
Personal response under attack 49
In Disney’s world 53
Looking to the future, and back 57
Windows on the mind 61
Soap trek 65
Clubbing 69
E and me 73
Garage nightmares 77
Helpless in Japan 81
Greek chairs 85
Open secrets 89
Passé 93
PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY 97

Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice – Psychoanalytic myth
as a textural system – The subsistence of the concepts – The implication –
Reading and deciphering psychoanalytic myth – Tracing what is lost in
psychoanalytic myth – Recoding bourgeois subjectivity – Psychoanalytic myth is
depoliticised speech – Psychoanalytic myth on the Left – Psychoanalytic myth on
the Right – Necessity and limits of psychoanalytic mythologies
v
Preface
These little essays on what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by

psychoanalytic sign systems were first published between 1994 and 2008. The first of
these predate the publication of my academic studies of the social construction of
contemporary psychoanalysis, and most were written before and during my training
as a psychoanalyst. These are occasional pieces, and so they address quite diverse
cultural phenomena in order to make sense of how they hook their audiences, us.
Many of the essays were published in the organs of psychological,
psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic bodies. This is because an argument needs
to be made against those who too easily assume that only their particular concepts
capture and describe fantasy and reality. I have tried, often in vain, to disturb the
strongly held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true.
What I describe in the essays is how psychoanalysis functions as something
that is only locally true. The argument applies to each of different varieties of
psychoanalysis I find at work in the phenomena I explore, and it is important to
recognise the different functions that different ideas in psychoanalysis serve,
as their proponents battle against each other and pretend that they alone have the
keys to unlock our secrets.
You will learn something about psychoanalysis as you read these pieces, but
you will also learn something about what you already know. That is, the essays
rehearse and unravel what you must already know about psychoanalysis to be able
make sense of the way these cultural phenomena circulate in Western culture so
you can share interpretations with friends and apply them to enemies. The
theoretical framework I use to make sense of how I have read these phenomena is
set out in the longer essay, ‘Psychoanalytic Myth Today’, at the end of the book.
Here I elaborate a way of reading and writing, of engaging with and taking a
distance from these seductive mythologies.
This collection is indebted to the work of Roland Barthes, whose book
Mythologies, was originally published in 1957 in France and then translated into
English in 1972. Barthes’ study of ‘Myth’ as a second-order sign system was a
groundbreaking exploration of phenomena as diverse as margarine and wrestling.
His work also led the way for the activity of code breaking in culture, so that
students of his approach could then identify the ways they had been recruited into
ideologically loaded images and patterns of language. Now more than ever,
however, psychoanalysis pretends to be the code of codes, and so we need some
specific strategies to break into it, and out of it.
vii
Acknowledgements
Versions of most of the little essays in the first section of the book have appeared
elsewhere, and so I would like to acknowledge the following publications that were
willing to give them a home before they were revised: The British Psychological
Society History and Philosophy of Psychology Section Newsletter for ‘The pinball
project’ (1999, no. 24, pp. 16–18); The British Psychological Society Psychotherapy
Section Newsletter for ‘Interpersonal skills’ (1998, no. 25, pp. 34–37); Changes for ‘Soap
trek’ (1997, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 140–142) and ‘Garage nightmares’ (1998, vol. 16, no. 4,
pp. 270–273); Gannet: Newsletter of Group Analysis North for ‘The wet group (2000,
no. 10, pp. 3–5); International Journal of Critical Psychology for ‘Personal response
under attack (2002, no. 6, pp. 168–171); Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and
Psychotherapy for ‘A psychopolitical cult’ (2008, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 23–26); Journal for
the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society for ‘English identity, Ireland and violence’
(1996, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 179–182), ‘Diana’s subjects’ (1998, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 129–131) and
‘Clubbing’ (1998, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 161–163); Making Love to My Ego Another Product
Exhibition Catalogue for ‘Points of view’ and ‘Making love to my ego’ (2006);
Narrative Inquiry for ‘Learn and enjoy’ and ‘Another language’, in ‘Psychoanalytic
narratives: Writing the self into contemporary cultural phenomena’ (2003, vol. 13,
no. 2, pp. 301–15); Psychodynamic Practice for ‘Helplessness in an Adjacent
Psychoanalytic Culture, Japan’ (2006, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 87–90) and ‘Racing’ (2006,
vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 463–466); The Psychoanalysis Newsletter for ‘Windows on the mind’
(1994, no. 15, pp. 22–24), ‘E and me’ (1995, no. 16, pp. 6–8), ‘In Disney’s world’ (1996,
no. 18, pp. 19–21) and ‘Looking to the future, and back’ (1999, no. 23, pp. 30–32).
Of the many people who participated in many of the activities described in this
book and helped me to make sense of them, I want to single out one who does
certainly disagree with the lines of argument elaborated here almost as much
and perhaps even more than me, to whom I dedicate with love this little book,
Erica Burman.
ix
Points of view
The word ‘ego’ has become part of everyday language to describe who we are.
Sometimes the word evokes a little shiver of recognition, that it comes from the
writings of Sigmund Freud, but often those hints at psychoanalysis – sexual
repression, objects of desire, the unconscious, and so on – are wiped away so that
the ‘ego’ can appear to us as something more innocent than it really is. When the
word appeared in English as a psychoanalytic term (alongside the ‘superego’ and
the ‘id’) it was actually designed by the translators of Freud to function as a more
scientific designation of the everyday German terminology employed by Freud
when he spoke of the ‘Ich’, which was our old friend, the ‘I’.
When psychoanalysts describe the bizarre ways that ‘I’ functions – piecing itself
together out of images of significant others, splitting itself into bits that are held
close or spat out, gluing the whole of our being to it and insisting that others are
understood within its frame – it is actually more disturbing to keep in mind that
this is what we build our everyday reality upon. This, already, is the stuff of
fantasy, this ‘I’. The unconscious material that swells around its edges, and which
we like to keep at a distance when we see it represented by those schooled in
psychoanalytic theory, is already washing around inside our thoughts, colouring
our perceptions of every object around us.
Freud struggled to find a model for the mind, but eventually found one and
discussed it in 1925 in his paper ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’. The
‘mystic writing pad’ is the device we still find in toyshops; a cardboard frame with
a cellophane screen onto which we create a picture by pressing the plastic stylus
through the cellophane to connect the second layer of greaseproof paper against
the wax slab at the back. One can think of the wax slab as being like the unconscious,
and the fleeting images that appear when the outside world intrudes by way of the
stylus could be consciousness. The temptation is then to imagine that when we
pull the slide across the screen the image will disappear forever, as if when you
leave a cinema, the images can be evacuated and then conveniently replaced with
perceptions of the real world on the journey home.
As Freud pointed out, however, the impressions made by the stylus remain on
the wax; pull away the protective screen and the paper behind it and you will see
the indentations, ripples of the history of the wax made from marks upon marks
that press it into a bumpy mess. And a consequence of this uneven surface is that
whenever a line is drawn on the cellophane, the history of past impressions
is present in the gaps; in these imperfections of consciousness there is, every
3
time, the unconscious. The ‘ego’, then, is no safe space outside the effects of the
unconscious, and all of the fantastic things that happen in the unconscious also
riddle my understanding of who ‘I’ am.
This ‘ego’ – something we are invited to attend to when we boost our ‘self-
esteem’ – is the most appealing aspect of ourselves, of course, and we understand
it better than anyone else. We might even imagine that it could be made entirely
transparent to ourselves, if not to others; that heightened awareness of what is
most precious about our self-identity could only be a good thing. But this ‘ego’ –
this ‘I’ that is jealously defended against anything that would disturb it or question
its right to be captain of the soul – is also a dangerous obstacle.
One has only to think of how well the racist ‘understands’ those that the racist
‘I’ hates so much to know that what the ego incorporates into itself and finds
acceptable is often the worst of distortions, even if they are distortions necessary
for that person to hold their reality in place. The obsessive attention that sexual
puritans pay to the filth that threatens them also draws attention to the way that
the lure of self-knowledge the ego encourages us to enjoy is misleading if not
dangerous. Little wonder that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan returned to
Freud, returned to the founding moment of the ego, to show how it emerges in an
‘imaginary’ mirror-relation to the other. This is the only way we can become who
we are, by patching together images of others in that fundamental process analysts
call ‘identification’. The ego closes in on itself as a mirror within mirrors, all the
better to shut out the unconscious; for Lacan, the ego was that strange thing that
is ‘the seat of illusions’, itself one of the symptoms of the pathology that makes us
human and that psychoanalysis unravels as we learn to speak about ourselves
outside its grip.
One English translation of the formula Freud came up with, in 1933, was
that the aim of psychoanalysis should be to strengthen the ego; in this formula,
‘Where id was, there ego shall be’; and so the ‘id’ that runs riot in the unconscious
should be displaced and a rational civilised ‘I’ would have dominion. The famous
quotation from Freud continues, ‘It is the work of culture – not unlike the draining
of the Zuider Zee’; and then it seems all the more crystal clear that this ‘I’ must
progressively expand across the whole domain of the speaking subject. This surely
would lead to the rule of the ego in each separate individual and the triumph
of the worldview of the ego in the wider culture. Diagnoses of our times in the
West as a ‘culture of narcissism’ in which we pander to our ego and try to fill it
up when it feels empty, lead us more than ever to ask something different from
psychoanalysis.
The German phrase – ‘Wo Es war soll Ich Werden’ (rendered in the standard
translation as ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’) – admits of a different reading
when we bear in mind that we are speaking of the ‘I’ and an ‘it’ that is also just as
much a part of ourselves; now the aim of psychoanalysis is to locate ourselves as
4
POINTS OF VIEW
speaking beings across that which divides consciousness from the unconscious, to
expand our sense of who we are. An immediate alternative translation direct from
Freud’s German phrase would be, ‘Where it was, there I should come to be’, and
Lacan’s reading of this is that we will at last constitute an ‘I’ in our speech that also
comes from that ‘it’ we usually keep at bay. The unconscious is, for Lacan, the
‘transindividual reality of the subject’, so it would be a travesty of psychoanalysis
to keep ourselves contained in our ego.
The times an ‘analysand’ – the patient in psychoanalysis – speaks the truth are
often simultaneously so disturbing and so liberating because unconscious truth
can find no other language to carry and channel the truth than that everyday
language that is usually possessed by the ego. Language is a medium through
which we communicate to each other, but from the moment we first learn to
speak, the ego is the master in the house of the self and shapes the way we use our
language (and so the way we understand ourselves as we use language to speak
about the ego). And in psychoanalysis – the ‘talking cure’ – we attempt the
impossible, which is to follow the ‘fundamental technical rule’ of free association
so that the unconscious might speak, that it might be possible for a moment for
the truth to at least be half-said and for us to hear ourselves speak it to another,
the analyst.
However, by following free-associative chains of reasoning as we speak about
the psychoanalytic mythologies that give meaning to our lives, we can also start to
trace the logic not only of the reasoning, but also of the mythologies themselves.
We always have to do this from a particular point of view – your ego, my ego –
but the trick is to keep track of the way that the point of view is itself always
included in what we are describing, the way that the point of view is constituted
and pandered to, so that it feels so substantial at one moment and empty at the
next, so that it is divided between what we imagine to be our conscious awareness
and the depths of our unconscious. The stuff of what we imagine to be our
unconscious is around us in psychoanalytic myth, and by finding it there, we can
start to release ourselves from the illusions that glue ourselves to it.
5
Making love to my ego
Art, whether in a gallery or recruited into advertising, provides another medium

of representation through which we might be confronted, and confront ourselves,
with the truth, even if we may never be able to put it into words. The shock of
recognition, the uncanny sense that an image is familiar to us even if we cannot
remember seeing it before, the experience of a sensation that we cannot even
account for to ourselves, is something an artwork can produce. This art practice,
so pervasive now in various sign systems designed to sell us something, sometimes
sidesteps the ego, and something of the unconscious is made present; but then we
need to ask ourselves, when we are in the presence of such images, whether we will
put those impressions at a safe distance – assume that it is the unconscious of the
artist that erupts in the work – or own up to what lies, and for a moment speaks
the truth, within us as we view it.
So, what would it mean to turn around and think reflexively about ourselves so
that we include the image we actually have of ourselves in the myriad of idealised
images of ourselves in commodity culture, in a culture suffused with psychoanalysis?
What would happen if we deliberately bought into the idealised images of self that
surround us and agreed to ‘make love to our ego’? A first response to this could be
that we would then be wallowing in the culture of narcissism, taking as our object
this seat of illusions and feeding it. And then we are also implicated as voyeurs
watching self-indulgent displays of love turned in on itself, and further implicated
as lovers of the images of the ego they find here and there, everywhere. The voyeurs
are watching themselves when they pretend that they stand apart from things they
find so enjoyable.
Against this first response, we must ask what ironic modes of representation
do to the processes of identification that form the ego in the first place. The
identification we find in the images of self-love that surround us and that attempt
to recruit us to be one of the beautiful people adorned by this or that fashion item
is a form of ‘overidentification’ that deconstructs the identities they represent
from within, subverting what we take for granted and showing us a way out of the
prison of the ego (though not all the way out, of course, for that way madness lies).
And then, where are we left as a spectator enjoying the show? To answer this
question we need to follow Freud further still.
Freud argued, in another paper from 1925 titled ‘Negation’ (in the ‘Standard
Edition’ of his translated work), that one way to access the unconscious of
analysands is to ask them, when they have told us about a dream, event or memory,
7
what was furthest from their mind; ‘What is the most incredible thing you think
of that has no possible connection with what you are describing?’ What is most
unthinkable, of course, is what comes to mind as we search for something to say
that we would most like to distance ourselves from, and this is something of
the unconscious that inhabits us and determines what we fantasise about. That
negation in the psychoanalytic treatment also repeats, in some respects, the first
negation – primal repression – that creates the division between the consciousness
and unconscious.
That division constitutes an inside (what you are thinking as you view images
of the ideal self in advertising, for example) and an outside (the images that you
encounter and the way you may describe them to others), and it constitutes the
object of desire that is then forever lost and which we search for in reality. We
construct an image of that object lost in the process of repression, and seek, Freud
says, to ‘refind it’, as if it were once really there and was enjoyed by us.
This is the little object that operates as our cause, pulling us toward it and
around which we circle, something that fascinates and that drives us to keep
trying to track it and pin it down. When we are in love, for example, we cannot
say exactly what it is about those we love. Could it be the smiles, the way they
stand, the catch in their breath as they start to speak? For each of us that object is
distinct and hidden at such a depth we cannot even define what it is; its origins lie
in early experience and in unconscious fantasy about what that early experience
was. Perhaps, when we are able to pin down what precise characteristics are in our
partners, we are no longer in love with them at all, for those characteristics are no
longer in the place of the object for us.
One of the insidious and destructive aspects of the commodification of love in
consumer culture, in the ‘culture of narcissism’ that overvalues the ego, is that
images of what is supposed to be loveable are layered upon our own specific
desires so that we confuse those images with what we deep down search for.
We may describe what our object of desire is – the special little object that
appeared when we constituted ourselves as ‘ego’ in the first process of negation
and that then drives us – but we are really just repeating the desires of others,
borrowing the object that is the necessary complement of our ‘I’ from advertising
sign systems.
Artists always construct something that is both of their own ego, and also, at
the same time, something of the object that they find most alluring, and that they
seek to refind in the process of creating something closest to themselves that they
imagine they love. And so, for us as spectators, we are faced with something very
peculiar. Perhaps we are faced with something that is most enigmatic and
provocative when it is an object that not only appeared for this particular artist,
but also resonates with our own little object that we lost and seek to find.
8
MAKING LOVE TO MY EGO
Lacan suggested that the psychoanalytic process works when the analyst
becomes the ‘semblance’ of the object, and analysands are thus driven to make sense
of what that object is for them as they speak under transference (as they repeat
past significant relationships in the analysis). A work of art of any kind that is this
kind of object as we view it is thus, at its most enigmatic, also in the position of
this object.
It is usually assumed that the viewer in an art gallery is in a position to ‘analyse’
the works of art, to divine what unconscious processes might be taking place in
the artist. No such luck, and no more so when such images wash through us in the
street. Speculate as we might, we will not be able to guess what was going on for
those who produce images of us, however much they tell us what they were
thinking or what their motivations were for producing these objects. Instead, in a
culture saturated by psychoanalytic mythology these objects are in the position of
the analyst, provoking us to ask questions about what they signify. Not all
artworks spattered across advertising hoardings and spewing out of the television
will function in this way for all of the viewers, which is why ‘I’ should not attempt
to tell you what each of them might evoke. But there will be one or two that will
function for you in this way, and then you are in something like psychoanalysis;
you will start by trying to make love to your ego but will end up with your ego
being consumed by love and dissolved into the object.
That analytic space we aim to create when we know how to read psychoanalytic
mythology may also enable some critical interrogation about how you have come
to be who you are, and how we have come to be the kind of subjects in this culture
that get so much satisfaction from making love to our egos. When you know that
is happening you may then be able to find another way of describing what is
happening, a paradoxical process of releasing yourself from these images by virtue
of the very fact that you have experienced what it would be to surrender to them.
9
The pinball project
On a Saturday night in Leeds, I learnt something about pinball and psychoanalysis.

By psychoanalysis, I don’t mean dreaming and joking and slipping as revealing
what is unconscious or the way that what happens in families affects how boys and
girls develop, but rather some of the basic descriptions of thinking that were
elaborated by Freud even before he used the term ‘psychoanalysis’ and that
continued to underlie his accounts of how and why repression and free association
work. There is plenty of pop-psychoanalysis around us now, but you will still not
find much there, in popular culture, about quantities of excitation in the
neurological apparatus. Descriptions of narcissism and sibling rivalry don’t
require us to think about neurology, but that is where Freud started speculating in
his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (the title provide by the editors upon the
manuscript’s first publication in 1950), and if a lot of psychoanalysis was already
there in that project, we need to understand how those representations of mind
endured and how they are still here, still with us now.
Unlike the other more fantastic contents of psychoanalytic discourse that
fascinate so many people in the media, the formal structure of the mind that Freud
scribbled during a train journey in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess – in a
manuscript that was not published until after his death – seems like dull stuff. In his
‘project’, the quantities of excitation he called ‘Q’ flow through a model of the mind
that operates on the ‘constancy principle’ or a ‘neuronic inertia’, and this apparatus
must reduce tension by ridding itself of excitation. All that can actually be hoped for,
however, is that the tension level be kept as low as possible, for there is always
excitation from inside and outside the body. Certain circuits that have been well
used by Q run across ‘contact barriers’, and so some pathways let Q through more
easily than others. These pathways, which permit the quicker discharge of energy,
constitute the ‘memory’ of the apparatus. This means that satisfactory discharge is
intimately bound up with structures of thinking. What we feel – as blockage,
frustration, release and satisfaction – is a function of how we think.
How could it possibly be that certain principles of mental functioning and the
flow of energy from one part of the mind to another could come to feel so right
to so many of us in Western culture? Surely not by simply talking about things in
those ways. What is needed for the talk to work, and to feel as if it must work, is a
network of practices that people participate in, so that once they have become
part of something psychoanalytic, they start to think something psychoanalytic,
to think as if they are something psychoanalytic. Pinball is part of that network.
11
It is a tiny part, but this is how it does the job. Pinball is part of the machinery of
psychoanalytic culture that recruits people into a particular mode of leisure that
is also a form of work and that turns certain qualities into quantities. In these
respects, of course, the pinball machine is just one of the many mechanisms in
capitalist culture that calibrate and regulate pleasure when they seem to simply
offer a place for playful free expression away from wage labour. The machine is
‘intelligent’ in a certain kind of way, and so it functions as a model for what
intelligent thinking might be like. It displays how one might accumulate energy to
a threshold and then discharge it, and its example must at least be understood and
respected when we play with it. So, it is there among us as a machine-like thinking
apparatus. And there is more in the way it works to bring it closer to Freud’s
model of mind in the project.
It was a shock to realise that what the ball did, as it hurtled up to the right and
then bounced around off the buffers and down between the flippers, was not
random. I’d put money in these machines plenty of times, but the game changes
when you’re playing with experts and you can learn some key tricks. The way you
pull the plunger and let the ball go and the way you wait for the ball to slide down
onto the flipper before you send it up again into the top of the machine, for
example, are aspects of skilled anticipation and reaction. That skill must match
the particular character of the machine, for the different constructions of the
pinball apparatus and the effects of the thousands of sessions before you play
must be assessed and tested. This particular machine in the Leeds bar was called
‘Maverick’, and based on poker games in wild west films, and so the ball waited for
a while behind packs of cards before jumping out, or moved around the inside of
a paddle steamer before sliding down metal rails and back into play.
There are different kinds of energy tracing the ball’s circuit. Anyone with a little
money to spare can pull back the plunger and let the spring-release drive the ball
up to the top, but a calculated measure of pull – the storing of a certain quantum
of force – is needed to get that bit of metal to arrive at position one or two or
three, and each position attracts different numbers of points. Possible points
awarded here vary from play to play, though, and these are signalled up on the
main screen and by flashing lights at the side. You need to think fast and pull just
right to get it moving up to the correct position. The calculation of energy
distribution, then, is from a point of rest to a deliberate controlled increase and
then to the trajectory of bound energy as it rolls quickly through the machine and
back to home. The pinball machine is a buzzing mass of energy that always
returns to a steady state. The tilt mechanism also performs the same kind of
function, putting the brakes on when a certain kind of interference threatens to
disrupt level, controllable operations. If there is an irruption of unmanageable
quantities, usually from outside the apparatus, then the machine releases energy
12
THE PINBALL PROJECT
into the flashing lights around the display, and the ball is then unable to trigger or
register any other specific information.
It is almost as if things return to zero before the pull of the plunger for the next
ball. What remains, however, is a representation of the steel missile’s journey and
the tabulation of the accumulated points on the scoreboard. Here is the memory
of the machine marked in millions of points, with the huge numbers themselves
signifying something of the quantity of work that has been captured and measured.
The machine’s ‘memory’ is also inscribed in the passage of the ball around the
circuit on many other occasions, though, and Freud’s apparatus is instantiated in
the pinball both in the way that the expert player is able to observe which
directions on the apparently smooth surface of the central area under the glass the
ball is likely to spin off in, and in the way that different open and concealed
pathways up around the back corners and sides of the machine will be likely to
attract various bonus points or penalties. You can watch the ball triggering and
accumulating energy from inside the apparatus through the glass protective
shield, and as you lean your palms on the sides and rest your fingers on the flipper
triggers, you can feel thresholds of energy being summated and transformed into
scores. Unlike video games machines, where the joystick is usually the only entry
point to the screen display, the pinball is able to draw players into a physical
process – and video versions of pinball are also disappointing for this reason. It is
as if a process of thinking is being displayed, and as if we are entering it and
participating in it as it registers packages of energy and discharges them until
play is over.
Pinball machines can recruit solitary players, but others usually also gather
around, and so the kinds of energy that circulate around the machine feed into the
game from many different directions. Not only do players actively kick themselves
against the machine as they hurl the ball into the mechanism and wait for it to
crash down against the rubber near the flippers, but the audience is also recruited
as an active participant. The consciousness system operates here in two ways:
First, through the translation of the quantities of excitation into a representation
of the score and a calculation as to whether more plays are warranted. Second,
through the presence of those standing around who translate the actions of the
machine into intelligible play and thus constitute an apparatus that functions as a
player-audience-machine group.
In this way, Freud’s project becomes realised over and again, not only in the
pinball apparatus, but also between players and observers. The more skilled they
are at playing, the more they simultaneously fashion themselves into psychoanalytic
subjects. The earliest forms of psychoanalytic representation thus endure through
a historical period, sedimented in certain forms of technology and providing the
conditions of possibility for thinking about thinking.
13
Psychopolitical cults
The term ‘psychopolitics’ has a sinister edge to it now, but it was not always so. The
term has undergone significant shifts of meaning. In studies of fascism in the
1930s to the New Left rebellions of the 1960s, it referred to the attempt to connect
subjectivity – our personal experience of who we are in the world – with political
change. Progressive use of the term ranged from psychoanalytic accounts of the
way relations to authority become embedded in individuals – ‘internalised’ – such
that people feel isolated and unable to change, to feminist insistence that politics
is to be found inside our intimate relationships as well as in the struggle against
economic exploitation.
With the fading of revolt in the 1970s and the later apparent victory of
capitalism in the 1990s, more was learnt about the involvement of the security
forces in psychological propaganda during the Cold War and against the Left.
Now psychopolitics came to refer to the fear of brainwashing and the destruction
of individual autonomy, but the horrible twist to these revelations was that
psychological theories as to why the world was a miserable and destructive place
became even more powerful. The increasing influence of psychological discourse
– stories about what the mind is like and how it is possible to master it – has meant
that psychopolitics is something that people are in awe of, even afraid of.
The accusation that this or that group is a ‘cult’ is infused with this new discourse,
and psychopolitics, in the sinister meaning of the term, is used to mobilise our fear
of groups and collective action. Now, instead of explaining why we are isolated
and made to experience our oppression as individual – left to each of us to tackle
on our own – the psychopolitical explanations of cult behaviour are designed to
make us suspicious of anything other than individual experience. The ground
rules for this psychopolitics of collective action and of organised groups that seem
to threaten our precious individuality mean that anyone who refuses to believe
that the label ‘cult’ is useful must themselves be labelled as cultish.
This is a good example of how everyday commonsense comes to feel so right
when it is not, and this intense fear of cults, and especially cults that aim to change
the world, is exactly the kind of fear that the old progressive psychopolitics tried to
understand. Someone who does not believe in the devil is still capable of making a
judgement about right and wrong, and someone who does not believe in ‘cults’ may
have other very good explanations as to why some groups are or are not destructive.
In the early 1990s, I went to New York to meet with the ‘social therapists’ led by
Fred Newman. They combined some kind of radical politics with some kind of
15
radical therapy, and I already knew that this explosive combination of Marxism
and psychology had led some of their opponents to label social therapy as a
‘cult’. But why was it so explosive? Precisely because they were linking Marxism –
dangerous enough when it was put into practice outside the academic institutions
where it had been confined since the 1970s – and psychology. But they were doing
something very different with psychology than psychologists do, and the fact they
did not really seem to take it seriously as a collection of facts about behaviour and
the mind enraged many academics and practitioners. The psychology, fear and awe
of psychology coded as dangerous ‘psychopolitics’ seemed to overshadow
all of the critical debate about their work. Ex-members and political opponents
were more obsessed with Fred than other members of this supposedly cultish
organisation or their ideas about social therapy (of which there are various forms).
I gathered a lot of material – journals and leaflets by and about the various
social therapy front organisations, of which there were many – and wrote a long
critical article called ‘“Right” said Fred “I’m too sexy for bourgeois group therapy”’.
The allusion was to a British band called Right Said Fred that had a chart hit with
‘I’m too sexy’. Lois Holzman – one of the leaders of the group – wrote a reply
‘Wrong said Fred’, and our friendship cooled somewhat, I think. But the sense of
misunderstanding and betrayal eventually stabilised into an uneasy arms-length
distance relationship with social therapy that was most probably helped by us
being on different sides of the Atlantic. I did not mean my article to serve as a test,
to see if they could withstand criticism, and it did take a while to puzzle over what
they were up to, puzzling that continues today.
This puzzling could be easily ended by grabbing onto the label ‘cult’, for
that in itself would also explain why they do not really seem to behave like a
cult. Psychopolitics today is like a kind of conspiracy theory that is directed at
oppositional groups rather than at the powerful, and it works its way into images
of groups that people do not like by making us feel that if they don’t seem like
a cult, then that must be because they are even more devilishly cultish than we
first thought.
I know, for example, that saying how nice those folks are won’t cut much ice
with people who don’t like them, and I know that telling you how Fred is at the
centre of what social therapists do in their performance work and in their politics
will only confirm what you think you know already, that he is obviously the cult
leader. In fact, this perhaps hopeless attempt to persuade you that I am not just
another gullible fool who has been taken in by this gang is bound to fail, and so
I write this in a rather defensive and cautious way (even as I try not to be). To say
I was ‘defensive’ is itself to borrow a term from psychoanalytic psychotherapy that
now has wide currency among the Left and liberal chattering classes. As I write
this account, I am reminded about how defensive and cautious I was when I first
met them, as if at any moment they were going to whip my brain out and wash it
16
PSYCHOPOLITICAL CULTS
thoroughly in some East Side Manhattan magic potion. All the social therapy
group talk about ‘transference’ (in which past relationships are replayed onto the
figure of the therapist) fed my sense that I should keep up my defences when near
to them. Their psychoanalytic reference points provoked in me some psychoanalytic
responses, deep-lived and even with this armoury, a little fearful.
It is worth reading the stories circulating on the Internet, and with prize of
place on Websites devoted to exposing social therapy, of people who have left
Fred. The paradox that appears time and again is that these people seem to have
learnt a lesson about collective action from social therapy, but then, I think, drawn
the wrong conclusions. At the one moment they have absorbed some of the
progressive ideas about psychopolitics that are still alive in this group and at
the next they have made sense of those ideas in the frame of present-day discourse
about ‘cults’, a discourse that will explain nothing and merely serves as
ammunition against their old comrades. The narrative in the complaints often
goes like this: I was in a bad state with lots of personal problems; I met the social
therapists who said the problems were in the world; I got drawn into political
activity that they said was therapeutic; I gave years of my life and got burnt out;
I realised that this was a cult that manipulated people; I got out to save myself from
being manipulated; I now campaign with others against the group to expose them.
You can hear this kind of narrative from many people who have once been
involved in other radical political movements, and if they change their minds
(when they decide that they cannot change the world), they then bitterly resent
the resources they put into it. They feel they were duped, and they feel better if
they can now put some energy into warning others against getting involved; and
(so you can see how easy it is to psychologise political choices) we could then say
that their activity now serves as a guarantee to themselves that, whereas they were
once in the grip of a cult, they are now really free. But should we not treat this talk
about ‘cults’ as something that also grips us all? We have a choice, it seems to me.
We can either notice how a set of terms is used to pathologise politics, in which
case notions like ‘cult’, ‘brainwashing’, ‘internalisation’ and ‘defensiveness’ are
treated as buzzwords that indicate that someone has bought into and is endorsing
a particular version of psychology (a version of psychological commonsense that
is infused with quasi-psychoanalytic notions that we might at other times treat
with suspicion). That would give us some room for manoeuvre, and it would
enable us to have a debate about different political strategies (even, heaven forbid,
including members of the organisations labelled as cults). Or we can line up with
those who tell horror stories about themselves or others as if they were mindless
victims who could never have really had any opinions different to what we take to
be ‘commonsense’ unless there were deep and dangerous ‘psychological’ reasons,
reasons to explain mistaken ideas away. Every few years there is a new wave
of allegations and panic about ‘Fred and Co.’ and, every time, the panic draws
17
sections of the left into alliances with those who seek to use psychology against
politics, and then, of course, this kind of alliance ends up using psychology as a
form of politics to discredit all of the Left.
The ground rules of debate in psychological culture individualise our
experiences, our responses to political debate and especially our membership in
political organisations. Those who care enough about a political cause to join a
group are almost immediately pathologised and treated with suspicion. Actually,
the social therapists have had some very interesting things to say about this process,
taking the link between ‘transference’ and power seriously for example; but while
they have used some psychoanalytic ideas they have also refused to sign up to
psychoanalysis or to any particular kind of ‘psychology’ as such. The irony is that
while these ideas are wiped out of the debate, the ones who are actually drawing
on psychology do so by surreptitiously attributing it to the ‘cult’ they attack. What
if we could refuse to sign up to psychology, too? Perhaps we would then really be
able to take the political role of psychology as a form of psychoanalytic reasoning
in popular culture more seriously and find something better to do with it than
passively accept that we are victims of some peculiar cult mentality.
18
The wet group
I used to go to a slow-open group about once a week. The number of group

members varied. I realised how important the others were one Sunday afternoon
when I was the first one there, and for a while I stood and waited and watched the
smooth undisturbed water, so clear that I could see through it and imagine that I
was about to dive into a huge blue room. For a moment it was as if the very
emptiness and silence had made the water disappear, as if only the activity of
other people could make it visible and real enough for me to be able to drop into
it and find my way across to the other side. On quiet days, the one or two other
people who are there engaged in strange disconnected elements of activity, make
stark echoes against the glass roof, but the splashing, which makes the water real,
still serves to accentuate the bareness of the place. Then we studiously avoid each
other and deliberately display the way we swim as being a solitary enclosed
activity that needs let no one else into our space. It is only when the numbers get
up to about nine or ten that the swimming pool really turns into a wet group.
This wet group could be a small group, sometimes turning into what might
be termed a ‘median’ group (that is, what group analysts call a medium-sized
group) – but usually no more than this for me when I have my contact lenses in.
This time, lens-less, I left my glasses with my clothes one day and all the noisy
people blurred into an indistinct mass, more like a large group. Not only did I lose
reference points for where I was among them, but I started to feel much more
hostile. Who were these people and what were they doing and what were they
going to do next? The pool is an enclosed space that people enter self-selected by
ability and wish to swim, and we do this under the gaze of an attendant with
whom we exchange no more than nods of recognition when we enter and thanks
when we leave.
I had a dream about the pool. The water was not held in place by a tiled
surround, but was a freestanding block of blue space in a larger room. I was
gliding through it, and although I could feel myself pushing through the water,
I could breathe. Here it was a space to move in, as if it were also an imaginary
space to think, and the real world were far away outside. I swam down to one of
the corners and slid out into the larger room and looked back into the pool.
I woke up, and felt relaxed and refreshed.
The pool is a kind of ‘matrix’ (a favourite motif of group analytic psychotherapy
devised by Michael Foulkes to describe the mesh of interactions constructed and
navigated by groups) and here in this group the presence of other swimmers
19
materially affects how you can move, and where. We have to learn how to
coordinate our swimming so that we push away from one end just as someone
else arrives, for example, so we move around each other as we meet in the same
lane, and so we are able to adjust our position in the pool to be able to get into a
steady rhythm. And we are engaged in joint action, connected and affected by
each other’s movements. The water pushes against each swimmer in ripples,
currents and eddies that are produced by the drifting, floating or thrashing of
others, and this is all the more palpable when someone races past fast. A wave
from someone doing backstroke may crash into us and send us off balance, or we
could be drawn into the slipstream of a powerful swimmer on their forty-third
length. We think we are independent individual swimmers, but we complain
about those who are blithely unaware of others.
About the dream: Two thoughts occurred to me as I looked back into the pool
before I woke up. The first was that it was strange to be able to watch the water
from down at this angle, and when I awoke the image reminded me of looking
through a glass window from a basement bar into the pool at Butlins holiday
camp where I had learnt to swim as a child. It did strike me that I use the space of
swimming to be able to think about connections between memories and ideas,
and in pools there is also an opportunity for a strange intuitive kind of learning
about things as they float through our minds.
Over the years I have been able to recognise the difference between regular
swimmers and people who turn up intermittently, and new people who may just
be there for one session. Some regulars are worrisome. There is a man who often
seems so absorbed in the task of swimming, gasping in such a struggle from one
end to the other, that it seems like it’ll kill him. There is a little group who
congregate in the left corner of the shallow end on Friday evenings, who move
gently into the pool and back again to chat. There was the brute in green trunks
who ploughed up and down the right-hand side of the pool. I moved over to the
other side. But there he was again, and now he was on the left after making a
diagonal down the pool and throwing other people’s routes into chaos. Who was he?
New people don’t know the culture of the group, or perhaps they don’t know
that indeed there is a culture at all. Perhaps they stand around at about the five-
foot depth, or try to swim across from side to side, or perhaps they have races with
their friends. It is easier for new people who are outside the matrix to swim
around the culture of the group if they are with someone else, and having races is
one way to pair off and isolate themselves from the practised rule-governed
activity of the rest of the members. Couples in the pool can also seclude
themselves from other swimmers if they cling to the side together, but they find it
easier to do this if they move to the shallow end and out of the main body of the
pool. There are reminders on the poster next to where the attendant sits that it
is against the rules to engage in petting, but this only serves to make explicit an
20
THE WET GROUP
unwritten rule in the wet group about the kinds of contact that are permitted
between people who know each other and the kinds of relationship that are
expected between each person and the group as a whole.
Returning to the dream of swimming in the empty space in the middle of
the room for a moment, the second thought before I woke up was that I wanted
someone else to experience that sensation of swimming as if in empty space, to
share it for me to be able to enjoy it. I am aware that when I go swimming with
my partner, which is invariably the case because I do not like to go on my own, we
might comment on the behaviour of some of the other badly behaved characters
in the pool afterwards, but our interaction in the pool amounts to barely more
than a glance, or a sigh of annoyance if that day it is too full. Learning to be in this
group has seemed to include learning that each member should be present in such
a way that they are somewhere between being an individual swimmer and being
part of the pool community; separate objects in the pool, in relation to all the
others. The experience of being in the wet group is uncannily similar to being in
the matrix of a Foulkesian therapy group.
Perhaps the structured setting that a swimming pool provides does enable
strangers to meet and develop ways of being together that are similar to the
organization of time and interaction in other small groups. It could be that there
are simply parallels between the wet group and the small group, and that would
be interesting enough. Alternatively, the settings could be sufficiently alike for the
same kinds of dynamics of identification and individuation to occur, in which
case we could learn something about the development and degeneration of these
different groups. A third possibility, or layer of interpretation, is that small groups
and swimming pools are each an expression of a certain common organisation of
space in this culture in which strangers are brought together and are expected
to learn to like each other in the process. There is a general expectation that
we should benefit from mental or physical exercise in those kinds of setting.
The space does not itself produce a psychoanalytic culture, but it does provide
a resonant amplifying chamber through which psychoanalytic processes wash.
This wet space recreates, for those already attuned to that kind of thing, a
matrix structured like the unconscious. There does, in any case, seem to be
something therapeutic about swimming. It often feels as if the body is thinking
and moving alongside the mind for a change, and without the degree of conscious
rational control that usually weighs down upon us in waking, walking, sitting,
everyday life.
21
Interpersonal skills
Psychologists are usually very skilled at separating out what happens inside other
people and what they themselves think and feel. This is not easy. When they carry
out laboratory experiments they get tangled up in many rhetorical tricks, turns of
phrase that refer to the others as the ‘subjects’ when those others are being treated
as if they were objects. And in this kind of situation the experimenter, who is really
the subject of the narrative – ‘I asked such and such people to perform this task in
these different conditions’ – disappears altogether. Although the experimenters
did it and write about what they did, they are not allowed to write in the first
person. Psychology students learn quickly that there is no place for the ‘I’, for
personal experience or reflection on their position in experimental reports, and
they are often penalised for making themselves present in essays or any other kind
of writing in psychology journals.
Psychologists are usually skilled at avoiding themselves then, but what happens
when we try to train them up, to help them to become skilled in acknowledging
their position? When the psychology degree was being rewritten at Manchester
Polytechnic in the late 1980s, and interpersonal skills workshops were being
introduced in the first and second years of the course, it seemed to be an ideal
opportunity to change the way psychologists were taught to operate in relation to
others. Psychology is supposed to be a science that discovers things about its
objects, not about the investigator. Really, though, it is but a pretend science, and
many psychologists deep down know that very well. This meant that there was a
lot of resistance to the introduction of these interpersonal skills workshops. What
would the ‘learning outcomes’ be? How would they be assessed? Would the marks
contribute to the overall weighting of the degree? Each manifestation of horror
on the part of the hardline experimentalists at the idea that students should
personally reflect on what they learnt served to increase my feeling that here was
something worthwhile.
To encourage students to put themselves in the picture must, I thought, be a
progressive intervention, something that would unsettle the strict divide between
abstract expert knowledge and personal experience, between the narrative of big
science and the little stories people tell about themselves, between the masculinised
control of variables in behaviour and a more feminist reflexive engagement with
consciousness and the unconscious. This is not to say that this work deliberately
led us into the realm of psychodynamics. If anything, the intention was the opposite.
Interpersonal skills workshops are concerned primarily with behavioural skills, and
23
reflection on what is happening is determinedly cognitivist in character – that is,

it is focussed on awareness, and on reviewing and rehearsing what one does in
relation to another (‘cognitive’ skills). But it was exactly here that a paradox started
to appear, where the structure of relationships in interpersonal skills workshops
were leading us from the psychological frying pan into psychoanalytic fire, and so
back into a version of psychology again.
Because psychology is so preoccupied with its precarious position as a science,
it channels a good deal of energy into suppressing any interest students might have
in psychoanalysis when they start a course. This is not to say that psychodynamic
ideas are completely wiped out, for these ideas are so potent in Western culture that
whenever we invite a psychologist to reflect on what they are doing – to reappear
as a subject in their activities – they reappear as psychoanalytic subjects. Although
psychology also tends to treat ideas as if they were independent of social practice,
ideas and subjects (here, psychoanalytic ideas and psychoanalytic subjects) are
formed in specific social practices. Interpersonal skills workshops were such
practices, structured settings where psychodynamic notions were brought to life. I
was careful not to employ psychoanalytic discourse within the workshops, unlike
one colleague who took over later and who would berate unwilling participants for
being ‘defensive’. It is the interpersonal skills group structure that is crucial here,
rather than the deliberate or unwitting introduction of psychodynamic notions.
The interpersonal skills group is structured around a practical contradiction
between the way that ‘skilled’ behaviour is conceived of as taking place in
‘interaction’ with others on the one hand, and the way it promises to increase group
members’ sense of controlling their own actions on the other. The way this
contradiction is ‘solved’ is through the agency of the workshop facilitator, and I very
quickly experienced the group as being highly dependent on me to manage the time
and unroll the agenda for the session. Now, you could argue that if the workshop
had been less structured, it would have allowed the students to take control and set
their own tasks. The problem is that this would have turned the whole feel of the
workshop into something more immediately like an experiential, or even an analytic
group. This is precisely one of the things we were trying to avoid. What is interesting
here, I think, is how a sense of psychoanalytic subjectivity emerged from those very
strategies we used to avoid it, as we tried to structure the group as if it were merely
skills-focussed.
Attention was focussed on me as a supposed ‘critical agency’ in the group, as the
‘facilitator’ elaborating different ideal and idealised sets of strategies and rules for
rational action. This meant that the desired leading idea of cognitive control and
skilled behaviour could only be accomplished by each group member taking that
‘critical agency’ as their ideal. We were thus producing the fantasy that participants
should monitor their own internal processes and that this would be facilitated by
them monitoring my behaviour as closely as they perceived that I was monitoring
24
INTERPERSONAL SKILLS
theirs. They also had to engage in exercises with other members of the group – the
‘interpersonal’ bit of the equation – in which they played out and swapped roles
such that each moved through the positions of the others.
Already, we had something uncannily close to Freud’s formula for identification
with the leader and other members in his description of group psychology. Rather
than this being an underlying hidden structure, however, we were all deliberately
enacting and practising it. In the process, of course, we also had the production of
something close to transference – the experiential reenactment of past relationships
in the present – but again the very avoidance of this phenomenon served to
instantiate it all the more powerfully. Reflection on the process by any group
member was constrained by a model that assumes that rational monitoring of the
feelings evoked in the group is paramount and that this rational monitoring can
be best effected by modelling oneself on the leader.
I found myself getting drawn into something that the students themselves
initially resisted, but then became increasingly enthusiastic about. After a year or
two, we were able to document the ‘success’ of the workshops through letters from
former students in which they finally acknowledged that, daft though it seemed at
the time, the interpersonal skills training had actually been one of the most
enjoyable and valuable parts of the course. Even in the lifetime of a group, a fantasy
started to emerge, produced and circulated as a kind of collective myth in the
members’ attempts to make sense of what the point of the exercises were, in which
‘interpersonal skill’ was fetishised as thoroughly as any other mechanism in
psychology. The most successful groups – those that developed an active enough
core of enthusiasts – came to operate on a kind of rationalist illusion that expanded
into a worldview, a commonsensical theory of society in which conflict between
individuals and between groups could be resolved by skilled behaviour.
Unlike other teaching, where I could argue that this or that psychological
phenomenon was culture-bound, the groups rapidly evolved forms of illusion in
which what they were doing would become a touchstone for solving social
problems. What we lost was any way of reflecting on how this kind of training is
culturally constructed and the way it produces fantasies about rationality and
irrationality, about civilized rule-governed behaviour and untutored feeling. What
we also ended up with was a cognitive conception of thinking that buttressed
supposedly scientific analyses of correct behaviour. The workshops thus became
arenas in which other psychological notions that some of us were trying so hard to
question elsewhere in the course were ratified, and ratified all the more effectively
because participants were positioned such that they felt and felt they knew that
these notions were true.
People enthusiastic about interpersonal skills training are not always starting
in psychology, addressing the lack in psychology and inspired to bring personal
experience back in, but I suspect that the way things were played out in Manchester
25
have similar consequences in other institutional settings. In this case, what started
off as a challenge to psychology’s neglect of experience became a forum for
psychology’s surveillance of experience so that it could be all the more tightly
executed. As the group members dutifully performed their parts in the exercises,
they adopted an image of themselves as responsible, self-regulating, and even
more liable to display and confess their faults when they failed to live up to
imaginary standards of interpersonally skilled behaviour. And they were then
even more ready to pathologise others who failed, failed to conform to an ideal
around which revolved psychoanalytic forms of reasoning about the self.
26
Learn and enjoy
What is the relationship between learning and enjoyment? A schoolroom at

Crunchem Hall in the film Matilda displays a sign warning ‘If you are having fun
you are not learning’. In contrast, one of the slogans of the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is ‘Share and enjoy’. Does
that mean we’ve got something to look forward to? Or is the place of enjoyment
becoming more complex as our subjective experience of pleasure at learning is
drawn into the equation as a necessary function of what it is to attain knowledge?
Perhaps we are being recruited into a kind of psychoanalytically structured regime
of truth in which we are subject to a senseless superegoic imperative to enjoy.
I enjoy learning, but I wonder if I am now obeying a command to learn and then
feeling increasingly anxious that my students should enjoy their work.
Education is changing fast, and it sometimes seems as if the transformation
in our relation to knowledge under capitalism is speeding up. This transformation
is twofold. First, there is a bureaucratization of education institutions. This is
proceeding apace in secondary education under ‘New Labour’ in Britain with
the enforcement of Standard Attainment Tests (SATs). Not only does this
bureaucratization mean that as much energy is put into assessment and record-
keeping as into instruction, with an increased administrative load on teachers, but
the competition between schools that SATs-based league tables produces is also
reflected in the strategies that individual schools and school students adopt. We
have also noticed an instrumentalization of education on the part of students in
British higher education since the Thatcher years, in which, for example, they
choose modules that will lead to jobs as opposed to those that they might find
intrinsically interesting, enjoyable. Correct speech, the kind that will lead to
accredited education targets, is at issue here. Students and teachers have become
increasingly aware of the importance of correct speech, of patterning what we say
about what we do and what we think into an approved educational narrative.
A manifestation of this concern in Britain was the Teaching Quality Assessment
(TQA) in higher education, where every movement of the student and teacher
must be captured, classified and represented on forms. The exercise effectively
sabotages the very process it is supposed to guarantee – partly because of the
drain on time available to talk to students and partly because questions and
responses have to be distorted to fit parameters that admit of easy comparison
across different subject areas. The logical end point of this kind of assessment,
which reduces ‘quality’ to numerical form, lies in the use of multiple-choice
27
assessments, devices becoming more popular, in UK psychology at least, and

creeping up from first-year courses into other years at an alarming rate.
This first aspect of the transformation – a narrative of monitoring – contradicts
the second aspect, which is the narrative call for a greater degree of student-
centred learning. In primary and secondary education, the rhetoric of devolved
responsibility through the ‘local management of schools’ is of a piece with an
imperative to self-government. At the same time, Britain’s National Curriculum
gives a peculiar structure to the ‘law’ to which this rhetoric of devolution of
responsibility, this ‘correct speech’, must conform. And again, it does seem as if
correct speech that follows the letter of the law is crucial here. So-called ‘innovative
teaching and learning strategies’ in higher education, for instance, are put on
the agenda for the TQA in desperate attempts to give the visiting panels the
impression that a desire to learn is being summoned from the students themselves.
The context – committee burnout and over-documentation – militates against
this, and self-directed student activity becomes another arena for the cynicism
that riddles much of our experience of learning now. In one case in Manchester,
for example, stressed teaching staff (in another campus of the university) refer to
such activity as ‘FOFO sessions’ (code for ‘Fuck Off and Find Out’) that give them
a break from a heavy teaching and assessment load. This is hidden, coded,
incorrect speech.
This production of official ‘correct’ speech and covert ‘incorrect’ speech would
be more comprehensible and manageable if it were linear and unitary. But it is
not. It is not linear, for every tilt toward ‘progress’ and improvement in this
narrative is countermanded by a hope that we might retrieve some ‘genuine’
forms of learning. At the same time as there is a rhetoric of modernization and
the ‘new’ in public life, there is also an attempt to return to something idealized as
true education, a regression that would work in such a way as to circumvent
something nasty (as regression always does); in this case to avoid the perils of rote
learning. A few years ago, the Greek Education Minister tried to reform the
education system by going back to basics with the catchcry, ‘Speak like Plato, think
like Plato’. A corresponding rhetorical move is evident in the anxieties of those
who complain about children being subjected to kinds of speech, forms of
discourse, which they fear to be the diametric opposite of ancient Greek. Many
then worry that we must avoid the prospect that children might speak like the
Teletubbies, think like the Teletubbies.
The process of transformation is also not unitary. The contradiction between
the two aspects of the transformation (bureaucratic regulation and the call for
student-centred learning) strictly demarcates learning that must be tolerated in
order to gain the right kind of course credits from learning in a way that entails
having fun. One of my students who chose a psychoanalysis module – generally
perceived as one of the useless courses – described that choice as his ‘treat’, and as
28
LEARN AND ENJOY
a place where he felt he was genuinely learning something. He compared this to

his experience in one of the ‘useful’ modules, psychological testing, where he felt
as if he knew less at the end of the course than at the beginning. OK, this was
gratifying, but it expresses something of the shape of the problem. There is a
feeling that something is lost when learning is not tied to enjoyment. To conform
to the letter of the law does not mean that we are engaging in anything that is
meaningful, perhaps the opposite. An episode of the British satirical television
programme The Day Today had the presenter-provocateur quiz a member of the
public about whether they thought people should obey the letter of the law. When
they agreed that they should obey the letter of the law, they were asked which one,
which letter. In education it does sometimes feel as if faculty-monitored and
externally validated courses must be turned into something senseless to be taken
seriously by those who make their careers out of monitoring and validating what
is taught and learnt.
But those of us who are teachers and researchers in higher education are also
entangled in this superegoic imperative of the law and regulation of speech and
enjoyment as much as those ‘other’ bureaucrats above us, and we relay the demand
for enjoyment to our students. One of the effects of this dialectically interrelated,
mutually constitutive separation into two different narratives is that our perception
of our place in institutions of learning is of contradictory transformations that
cannot be pieced together. And so our experience of our position is split.
Different forms of capitalist culture incite and require different forms of
psychoanalytic subjectivity. The latest mutation in culture – which some describe,
I think mistakenly, as ‘postmodern’ – does seem to be expressed in forms of
learning governed by ‘law’ organized around the superego as ‘speech’, so that we
are subject to a series of senseless demands. These demands to regulate and
tabulate learning outcomes then pervade our experience of learning itself. When
Lacan argues that the law is reduced to a kind of ‘You must’, to a point where the
speech that conveys it becomes senseless, he anticipates something of the
predicament that we find ourselves in as teachers. This doesn’t mean that Lacan is
‘right’, and this isn’t the point; but he expresses something of the relationship
between knowledge and experience now. Lacan wasn’t ‘postmodern’ either, but in
some sectors of culture, he is relevant because something very like Lacanian
narrative is embedded in them. As I went through US customs, a process that
requires some degree of close examination, I was subjected to the senseless
superegoic command at the end, ‘Enjoy’.
Think of education as induction into a system, a system of knowledge organized
in such a way that it seems logically rule-governed, and that is underpinned by a
moral imperative that we should attain knowledge. As we position our students
within this kind of structure, and grant them recognition as thoughtful, committed
participants, we also convey a message about what learning is. Critical reflection
29
on our experience of education reveals that this metaphorical narrative of

induction into the law and the imperative to enjoy is not only a means to help us
understand what is going on, but is embedded in the very operation of our
institutions. Psychoanalysis helps us understand this story. But psychoanalytic
modes of experience are also demanded by it. It means that as we participate we
also ‘learn’ something about ourselves as we make ourselves into the kind of
subjects who can make sense of what is going on. We might even learn to ‘enjoy’ it.
30
Another language
Many people in Britain face the task of speaking something other than English
with a great deal of trepidation. Unlike the majority of the world’s population,
which speaks more than one language as a matter of course, we find the experience
bewildering. And that bewilderment is part of the helplessness that characterises
a position all too familiar to all of us; as we stumble over unfamiliar words
and phrases we are once again infantilised, put in the position of the infans,
one ‘without speech’. Stereotypical accounts of Japanese children in the English
imagination, that they are silent in class and only speak when they have fully
mastered a new language, function as a further reminder that regression to the
level of the child who cannot help but display its inability will be the fate meted
out to us as we learn another language, here and now.
Psychoanalysis might be useful to make sense of this, and varieties of
psychoanalysis that have emphasised the role of language in the development of
the unconscious should have something worthwhile to say.
There are five ways it does:
First, another language is another symbolic system. To be in another language
is to be in a symbolic space, but space that feels buoyant enough to hold us as we
float through it. When we are flattered enough by native speakers that our accent
is perfect and that we are perfectly comprehensible to them, there can be moments
of ecstatic, omnipotent illusory freedom. This way of being stretches, exaggerates
the experience of learning and being in language generally. But what do you
lose when you learn another language? The words you choose are only almost
right or just too imprecise. We notice, as we grasp for a representation of
something we want to convey to others, that language is misleading, that it does
things and re-presents the world and experience in ways that must always
necessarily misrepresent it. We notice, as we try to bring something to life in words
that feel too clumsy, heavy and dead, that the word is the murder of the thing.
When we return from a place that speaks another language to us and through
us, and we have swum through it for a while, choking and then breathing it
because our first language will not work, we stumble a little when back in English
because now these words are, just for a moment, unfamiliar to us. But we also at
that moment have a jubilant sense of mastery over our image of what the other
language was like.
Second, another language is a mediated communication with others. To speak
to another in their language is to participate in two processes. It is both to attempt
31
to convey a message through a murky medium which seems to have a life

of its own, and to engage in the activity of communication in which another is
reaching across to you and pulling you into something that you only imperfectly
understand. Speech usually feels as if it is an immediate direct act of connection
and relay of sense to another, but speaking in another language shows us how
mediated and indirect it really is. A nightmare, it would seem, but this for real:
I stood and spoke a sentence in the clattering cafeteria of a hotel on the coast of
Montenegro, the unlikely setting for the opening session of a conference, and
then I waited while it was translated into Serbian. While I waited, I watched
an audience that became increasingly restive. Each space between my sentences
gave me another opportunity to watch people sigh with irritation. Some muttered
as their neighbours shushed them and some left, and some – my friends – leant
forward in encouragement. The pained look on their faces made it clear to me that
the words I sent were different from the ones that eventually arrived, or perhaps I
didn’t even know now what the words I sent meant. Each sentence on the page was
pulled up and out and made its way interminably slowly via the interpreter into
the hall. Time congealed into something as sticky as my sweat.
Third, another language is a system of signifiers on which we often hang
helpless. We are able to notice that the symbolic is a structured meshwork that is
usually firm enough to hold us in our place or let us swing through it as if we were
above the world, outside language.
Immersion in another language is immersion in another world, and entry into
it can be like diving into something strange. A nice memory: After a long flight I
arrived in San José, Costa Rica, and hovered for a moment before the doors to the
reception area of the airport. Noise washed in as each passenger pushed past me
and disappeared through the doors. Once through the doors, I struggled into a
crowd, eventually spotting someone holding up a newsletter I had sent over. We
embraced as if I had been drowning and now was saved. A bad memory: A year
later, I arrived in Mexico City, and when I struggled through the airport, I found
no one there. I had no address or telephone number, and now I was alone. I went
to the information point and they sent a call out with my name. Eventually a
young woman arrived. She had been sent to meet me at the arrival gate, and
showed me the exercise book she had been holding up with my name written on
the page of graph paper in tiny letters. My place there wasn’t big enough for me
to recognise myself. It was a signifier alright, but not one I was able to catch hold
of in such an unfamiliar place.
A typical experience: I am sitting waiting to speak at a conference. I am
introduced to another person. I recognise my name in the words but nothing else.
I am moved from one place to another, metaphorically, symbolically, by these
networks of words that I do not understand. But what I do understand, for a
moment, is that I am a subject who is represented by signifiers. I hear them
32
ANOTHER LANGUAGE
flowing around me and doing things to me, and they are connected, linked
in chains of meaning. And they represent me to other signifiers, and only
incidentally to myself, but the way they signify to me is evidently different from
the way they are being used by the others.
Fourth, another language evokes psychopathology in a peculiar way. We
adopt a certain psychopathological position when we relate to those we cannot
understand in another language, for our pretence to understand the other drives
us into an obsessional-neurotic way of being. My partner is infuriated when I
listen, nodding in comprehension, to road directions given to me by a helpful
passer-by in Spanish. She knows that when she asks me what they said, I will, on
most occasions, have to admit that I have no idea. Obsessional neurosis as Freud
described it tends to be associated with masculinity, so we are all provoked to
attempt to ‘master’ what we do not understand, and to refuse a culturally
stereotypical feminine position of dependency. We are reluctant to let ourselves be
at the mercy of a symbolic system, for it threatens to make us or break us as men,
whether we are men or women. The man or woman who refuses to understand or
play the language game is then put in their place as a hysteric, positioned as a
woman who may then resort to finding other ways to speak, ways of speaking with
their body perhaps. Mastery of language for some – usually men – and
feminisation of the silent for many.
Fifth and finally, another language is something that makes sense only
retroactively, after we know what it means. The struggle to piece together what is
going on in another language highlights an aspect of meaning that is usually
invisible to us, that sense is conferred on phrases retrospectively. A word we catch
at a punctuation point, at the end of a sentence perhaps, throws meaningless noise
into relief, but at the very moment that we grasp it, especially if that point is in the
middle of a sentence, we are pulled away from that anchorage as we try, and fail,
to make it work for the words we hear afterwards. Our understanding is always
‘afterwards’, and we might say ‘afterwords’.
Re-reading and re-writing of psychoanalysis thus draws attention to the way
language works as a symbolic system which seems to provide a communicational
bridge to others, but which renders us helpless and susceptible to forms of
pathology, positioning us retroactively and enabling us to make sense of things
after the event. But why does psychoanalysis make sense, and what is it about
Lacan’s particular descriptions of the subject in language that seem so right when
we face another language now, and when we turn back to face our own language?
One of my children commented that he was glad he spoke English, because it is
one of the easiest languages to learn. Most people in the world do move from one
language to another, and probably find their own languages easier than all the
others, but as a globalized dominant form of English crushes local forms of speech,
we who speak English as our first language find other languages stranger and
33
stranger and there is then the paradox that the globalization of English actually
makes communication more difficult. Phenomena like mass tourism from the
English-speaking world and more subtitled films in art house cinemas give an
illusion of communication at the very moment that they render communication
impossible. And these factors condition how words structure our own position in
relation to language. What we experience language to be is itself structured so that
our relation to language can be understood psychoanalytically. It is structured so
that Lacanian descriptions of symbolic space, mediated communication, signifiers
representing us to other signifiers, psychopathology in language and the retroactive
nature of sense-making now also starts to make sense.
Attempts to find an alternative to the colonial character of language, which
would also be at the same time an alternative to learning all the other languages,
have driven English speakers to seek ‘universal languages’ like Esperanto. However,
such universal languages always reflect our assumptions about what language
should be like and they rest on the mistaken assumption that language is simply
about the moving of meaning from one person to another. Each attempt to define
clearly what the meanings should be has missed what actually happens when we
speak. And speaking another language brings us closer to the confusion that is the
necessary stuff of what we call communication.
And the Lacanian notions that have been mobilised here to make sense of what
happens to us monoglots, are themselves an expression of the globalization of
English. Even Lacanian psychoanalysts’ fascination with ‘mathemes’ as algebraic
elements that would ensure that psychoanalysis is perfectly transmissible is yet
another symptom of the fantasy that another way of speaking that would not
subject us to another language would be possible. Globalization – including
the globalization of English – makes Lacanian discourse possible, in the sense that
globalization creates the conditions for psychoanalytic reflections on language to
strike us as right. In the process, the globalization of English plays its own part in the
globalization of psychoanalysis itself, and makes available to us a psychoanalytic
subjectivity when we speak its language.
34
English identity, Ireland and violence
The largest Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb so far on the English
mainland exploded in Manchester on 15 June 1996. It destroyed most of the main
shopping mall in the city centre. There was a forty-minute warning, but the area
was not fully cleared and many people were injured. This time nobody was killed,
unlike the Canary Wharf bombing in London earlier in the year that signalled the
end of the recent ceasefire. Manchester has a large Irish community, and that day
there was an Irish festival in nearby Bolton. The Irish came over last century to
build the infrastructure for England’s industrial success, with labourers working
on the waterways which run from Liverpool through to the Manchester Ship
canal. In some senses, then, Manchester was an obvious economic target, with the
Provisionals taking back what Ireland had built with a demand that the six
counties in the North of their country be returned, united in one thirty-two
county republic.
English identity is bound up with Ireland, and the complex cultural processes
that reconstitute this identity with each attempt and failure to make reparation
are ripe for psychoanalytic study. But as well as needing to fix on appropriate
psychoanalytic frameworks to make sense of this mess, we also need to locate
those frameworks themselves in the culture that spawned them, in the mess
itself. Psychoanalysis in its English mode – sometimes misnamed the ‘British
tradition’ – describes something of the defensive processes of ‘splitting’ (the sharp
division between objects of love and hate), ‘projection’ (the convenient placing
of internal disturbing stuff outside, into others), ‘introjection’ (the taking into
the self of material from outside) and ‘projective identification’ (making some
other live out what has been painful to the self). But if this is to work as a
description of England’s war, we need to attend to the forms that psychoanalysis
takes in English culture in such a way as to also provide a reflection on these
processes as embedded in a material relation to Ireland. Psychoanalysis applied to
society always needs to include some account of the conditions of possibility for
psychoanalysis in that society.
Psychoanalysis in England was formally constituted in 1913 as the London
Psychoanalytic Society (with nine members) by Ernest Jones, a Welshman and
only gentile in Freud’s inner circle and who had returned from Toronto (to which
he had moved following his dismissal from his post in a London hospital after
accusations that he interfered with children in his care). Although there are minor
centres in Edinburgh and Oxford, all psychoanalytic training now is still conducted
35
through the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) at its Institute in London as

a careful replenishment of the cadre, with only about twelve candidates starting
each year. The BPAS and friends walked out of the UK Council for Psychotherapy
(UKCP) registration body for psychotherapists to form its own outfit (now called
the British Psychoanalytic Council), this after demanding that the UKCP should
be a two-tier body with psychoanalysts in the top tier. And since, there has been a
sustained letter-writing campaign to newspapers from these past masters at
splitting their own profession, protesting that the Lacanian training group in
London (Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research) should not be allowed to
claim that they train psychoanalysts (for which they should know better, for apart
from anything else that Lacan fellow was undoubtedly French).
Psychoanalysts in England know something about sectarianism then, and the
BPAS has been riven by institutionally sanctioned divisions in training since the
1940s. Following the arrival of Melanie Klein in 1926 and then Anna Freud with
her father in 1939, a series of bitter rivalries culminated in the ‘Controversial
Discussions’ of 1943–44. These discussions were periodically interrupted by air-
raid warnings and refuge in the shelters, and were settled by the formation of
an ‘A group’ (Klein’s followers) and ‘B group’ (Anna Freud’s) in the BPAS. The
‘Independent group’ was formed shortly afterwards, partly as a result of defections
from Klein’s camp. Kleinian group work, inspired largely by Wilfred Bion, who
had joined the Directorate of Army Psychiatry in 1941, was meanwhile being
developed to maintain morale in the forces and continued the study of ‘enemy
mentality’ after the war in the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (founded in
‘Operation Phoenix’ with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation).
Nothing much about Ireland here it would seem, though there was certainly
enough about other kinds of otherness during the Controversial Discussions, with
some annoyance among English analysts at the sudden influx of Jewish colleagues
and their squabbling. Melanie Klein in particular, who was initially encouraged by
Jones to come to England, attracted and repelled the English analysts who were
drawn by her descriptions of the infant at perpetual war and torn by splitting,
projection, introjection and projective identification, and who then retreated to
more comfortable images of the drive for ‘object relatedness’ and ‘transitional’
spheres of development. That there is nothing explicit here about Ireland does not
mean that violence against Ireland did not still provide a xenophobic backdrop
through the war and after. Signs on houses for rent warning ‘No Irish, No
Coloured, No Dogs’ still appeared through the 1950s. And one of the peculiar
characteristics of English identity marked against Ireland is that it defines itself
against its other as an absence as much as an overt object of contempt or fear. Even
since 1969 when the British troops were sent to Ulster and the ‘troubles’ started,
there has been a symptomatic silence. (Even New Left Review, the main journal of
36
ENGLISH IDENTITY, IRELAND AND VIOLENCE
Marxist intellectuals published in London, rarely included articles about Ireland

in its pages.)
Ireland is England’s oldest colony, subject to over eight centuries of occupation.
Invasion of this pagan land started in 1169, inspired by success in the Crusades and in
the context of pogroms against other non-Christians (including the death of 150 Jews
at York in 1190). The nineteenth century saw the famine in which one-and-a-half
million people died, and the twentieth century saw partition and then Ulster (six of
its nine counties) used as a testing ground for counter-insurgency training by the
British Army. England has learned a lot about violence from being in Ireland. The
English have marked themselves as civilized against the Irish, but also with a jealous
attention to creative capabilities over the water. From Elizabethan characterisations
of the ‘barbarians’ to Charles Kingsley’s horror at the ‘white chimpanzees’ to the thick
paddy jokes every English child tells at school, there is a context of derogation which
coexists uneasily with a hazy awareness that Joyce, Shaw and Wilde, for example, were
Irish. Ireland is always there in the English imagination, and if the modern nation is
a community defined by the development of the novel, then the English are
constituted by the Irish literary tradition as well as using that tradition to set the
limits of their collective mental space against Irish culture.
The English have to split their thinking about Ireland into the stupid murderous
priest-besotted Irish and those that are creative, humorous and full of blarney.
The Irish tell tall tales, which is amusing, and they tell lies, which is frightening.
This ‘paranoid-schizoid splitting’ (as Kleinians like to say) also locates the process
in Ireland. They, the Irish, split themselves into sectarian religious communities,
it seems, and each community is split between their public representatives and
‘men of violence’. Their women are in the peace movement crying out for us all to
be against violence and, at the same time, they are wilful shields for the gangs
throwing Molotov cocktails at ‘our’ troops. One of the advantages of an enduring
hidden violence somewhere else and yet so close by is that the violence of the
English can be projected there. One of the disadvantages is that the rage that the
sources of violence might be somewhere inside England, in the Irish who live
among us, is all the greater. The representations of the Irish at war with themselves
(Catholics against Protestants for obscure reasons we could never divine) and at
war with us (against the British Army which was surely there to protect them from
killing each other) can be tracked, then, using Kleinian concepts. These are objects
riven by hateful splitting, and our newspapers represent them splitting us, as
cheerleaders for the IRA seeking to destroy and tear out the guts of the British
economy. The ‘Good Friday’ peace agreement and the Provisionals’ participation
with Loyalists to the British Crown in government has been respite from violence,
but poses a puzzle to the English about what the Irish really want. Even while
Islamic fundamentalism is now the most immediate threat and object of suspicion,
37
the insurgent Irish still provide the template through which the inexplicable
violence by those others who hate the English is often understood.
Kleinian vocabulary is a peculiarly potent armoury for opening up and
redescribing things about English identity and Irish violence, but we need to take
care here that we do not fall into the trap of thinking that this redescription is
scooping out something deeper and more essential that really underlies the
relationship between England and Ireland. It is, rather, that the Kleinian version
of psychoanalysis has taken and fitted so well in England precisely because those
processes of splitting, projection, introjection and projective identification had
been materially constituted centuries before psychoanalysis arrived. (That Klein
fits comfortably with other cultural settings or that other varieties of psychoanalysis
fit here and there, is a quite separate issue that also deserves attention.)
The south of Ireland, after all, really is ‘split’ from the north, and English
identity inhabits a geography which is fragmented by the labels ‘United Kingdom’,
‘British Isles’, ‘Britain’ and ‘England’, each of which specify different ways of
cutting up maps. Violence in England is deliberately ‘projected’ into the north of
Ireland (that which England calls ‘Northern Ireland’). Every weapon used against
the civilian population of England in strikes or other protests has been tried and
tested on the streets of Ireland. The British Army may have its own mock town
inside the Rock of Gibraltar where it can play out war game scenarios of urban
violence, but Ulster provided a place where military violence can be observed and
assessed for real. England has ‘introjected’ an Irish population as a necessary part
of the process of colonization, and it must now seek to contain and silence it,
through the Prevention of Terrorism Act, along with anyone else who might
break the silence. We should also note the physical incarceration of a high
proportion of first- and second-generation Irish in mental hospitals, together
with a correspondingly high mortality and suicide rate. These rates are higher
than that for the native population or any other ethnic minority in England.
There was a Troops Out Movement, and although its attempts to oppose
British imperialism were made more difficult by the bombing (as is the activity of
anyone who speaks about Ireland), there are still republican elements split from
the Provisional IRA who reason that the British Army will only get out when the
English are too sick of the situation to stay. The line goes that the withdrawal of
the troops will never be on the basis of solidarity but in despair at the futility of
holding on in the North. Following the 1996 bomb there were even calls in
Manchester for Irish businesses to be boycotted. It would seem that the only
escape from the kind of anxiety that accompanies paranoid-schizoid splitting is
into the depressive anxiety that we meet as we try to make reparation for the harm
we have done.
Again, this is an aspect of the particular political process that England and
Ireland are tangled in, and a psychodynamic description is then able to represent
38
ENGLISH IDENTITY, IRELAND AND VIOLENCE
what is already happening. This context of England at war and its horror when
violence in Ireland appears at home in its own cities can be illuminated using the
kind of Kleinian psychoanalytic work that has developed here. It can be
illuminated in this way precisely because that psychoanalytic work is a product of
this context of cultural identity and violence too.
39
Racing
I was in a small workgroup, the kind of group that in Lacanian jargon is known
as a ‘cartel’, and our focus was upon what a group, what a ‘cartel’ was for Lacan.
One of the texts we read was Lacan’s only theoretical account of groups in which
he describes the predicament of three prisoners, each of whom has to puzzle over
whether the warden has placed a white or black disc on their backs. The prisoners
have to reason out how they have been marked from what they see other two
prisoners wearing, and how they see the other two respond to the disc they cannot
see on their own back. Someone in our little group argued that there might be
some connection between the concluding moment when each prisoner declares ‘I
am white’ and the ‘othering’ of blacks that constitutes everyday racism in Western
culture. No, surely not. That connection would be tendentious, but then again…
A woman at Manchester Piccadilly station was handing out life insurance
advertisements; I dodged briskly around and behind her and through to the
platforms, but not too quick to notice the movement of her arm, which had been
thrusting leaflets at the passengers passing on the other side, waver for a moment
as an orthodox Jewish man went by. Whom did she choose to give leaflets to as
people hurried past her, and what logic took over when a category of person she
may not have expected came onto the scene? Could she escape a choice in this
case, and did she? Perhaps an overzealous attempt to force a leaflet into the hand
of the Jew would invite the accusation that she thought this particular addressee
would be especially interested in financial matters, but on the other hand, perhaps
the implication of a refusal to offer a leaflet could equally be interpreted as anti-
Semitic. And perhaps it was neither or both, or somewhere in between the two.
Being between these two possibilities, caught hovering at a moment of indecision,
is often, for those who inhabit psychoanalytic culture, supposed to reveal some
ambivalence (and perhaps even ambivalence fuelled by the attraction of each
of the worst options and the satisfaction that each promises). But before we
bring this sensitivity to ambivalence into play, there are already enough popular
accounts of the nature of prejudice circulating now, popular accounts from which
psychoanalytic explanations can then easily find sustenance.
There is an opposition often used to explain morally bad judgement that is
organised around the motif of speed. One might say that a prejudiced judgement
is one that is made too fast, and that it could have been mitigated by thoughtful
reflection upon evidence and consequences. In this view, it seems that reflection
will save us from leaping too soon, from making a too-hasty prejudiced response
41
to some circumstances (whether these are in the form of information or events).

When this account is mobilised, it serves to reinforce two other popular notions
about the roots of good old English racism – one that is usually a little more
progressive than the other (though not necessarily so, and not much more so).
The more obviously reactionary notion is that racism is some kind of deep
atavistic or wired-in response in favour of ‘our own’ community (a response
resting in turn upon an inbuilt knowledge about what constitutes a recognisable
community); the more obviously liberal take on this argument – the ostensibly
more progressive notion – would be that our immediate thoughtless reactions are
the result of bad education, of racism implanted in us early on.
There are then grounds for the suspicion that prejudice might be hidden,
concealed or dissimulated by politically correct modes of speech, but that it is
necessary to find ways of going beneath the too-careful considered, crafted
responses that people give to questions about whether they are racist or not; it is
necessary if you really want to discover the racism that lies under or (more to the
point here) before more poisonous judgements. Hesitation will cover things over,
and haste may reveal all. For example, my local newspaper reported on its front
page that the police authorities plan to deal with racism among new recruits by
detecting their racist thoughts, and the enthusiastic story that followed was about
what could be found by a good lie detector; the story combined metaphors of
depth (what they are deep-down thinking) with speed (what they might be too
slow to cover up). But this opposition between too-speedy response and calculation
is still too static. It is, we are now inclined to think, merely a snapshot of a more
dynamic process, a process that is then assumed to be psychodynamic, sometimes
we might feel it to be intersubjectively psychoanalytic – something going on
between us and others who are different to us – or to be the result of obstacles in
the way of the intersubjective communication we would like to experience with all
our others.
This is precisely the logic of hesitation and certainty that Lacan described just
after the Second World War in his group-psychoanalytic account of how we quickly
notice who we are in relation to others, and make use of that categorisation of self
and other in an intersubjective dialectic that takes us through three temporal
moments: a first ‘instant of the glance’ in which we grasp the situation, a second
lingering ‘time for comprehending’ when we try to make sense of our place within
it and what we must do with it, and a third ‘moment of concluding’ in which it is
necessary to move fast in a rush for what might be freedom. Lacan is describing a
temporal logic in which we race to define ourselves in and against the desire of
others. It seems to me that he is also noticing something that was becoming
embedded in West European culture as it defines itself against outsiders and
attempts to constitute itself as a self-sufficient community; that is, he condensed
something of the logic of segregation and our experiential grasp of where we
42
RACING
come to stand in it. Lacan’s account provides a peculiar and culturally potent
dynamic twist to static models of prejudice, and it underlines how speed and
hesitation become implicated in everyday racism, become part of the time of our
judgement of others.
We pulled into a parking space next to some tight-shuttered shops one dark
early evening in Pretoria. The lighting was bad and filtered through heavy
overgrown trees around the block and across the road to the restaurant, our
destination. In a nearby garage, an open fire threw further fluttering layers of
shadow around us, and some young black men in T-shirts and baseball caps
starting whistling back and forth from either side as we locked the car. High
intermittent exchanges of whistles were communicating something, and for a
moment I thought they were whistling to us. Or – in what felt to be a longer
moment as I slowly, more slowly now, closed the car door – they could have been
whistling about us (and that could have been worrying, or at least at that time it
seemed like it was so). Could we have got back into the car and driven somewhere
else without conveying our anxieties to others around us (and between ourselves)?
Maybe our slow progress toward the restaurant already betrayed our caution. Or
did we move a little too fast away from the car to eat, displaying even then that we
wanted to show that we were not beset by racist fears? But perhaps the moment in
between those two possible ways out already contained – filled by the nearly
invisible oscillation between the two options – something of each possible outcome.
We like to think that we are not racist, of course, and it is reassuring for us to
find further evidence that we are not at all, really, deep down riddled with
prejudice. There are, however, times we can see a moment yawning into an
awareness of what the time of judgement opens up, as something dangerous to be
forestalled. It is better when this discomforting awareness is in others. A friend
from Germany taught for some years in Britain, in a university where there has
been open conflict between management and the teaching staff. She spoke out at
a meeting addressed by the Vice Chancellor about poor treatment of part-time
lecturers. In his reply he commented that he had noticed that she had a foreign
accent and then suggested that she could, of course, choose either to stay working
here or return to her own country. The brief taut silence that followed his reply
was broken by him as he quickly said, ‘I don’t mean what you think I meant.’
Sometimes it seems that it is actually better to wait than to rush into action, to
wait without closure. On a train from London late at night, an elderly Asian man
lay slumped in a seat in a half-empty end carriage. Then he began singing, softly
at first and slowly rising in volume. Maybe he was drunk, or mad. I tried to see if
he was with someone else, because he was eventually shouting and slapping his
hands on the table as if he were directly addressing someone there. I was
wondering if the language could be Arabic, perhaps a religious chant, when some
white men in their early twenties hurtled down the corridor. From their shouting
43
to each other, I guessed that they were trying to find the buffet car, but they
reached the end of the train, turned back and came to a halt by the singing man.
They peered down at him, staggering for a moment with the rhythm of the train.
Across the aisle from me another young white man with a can of beer, who had
also been looking back along the carriage, paused. We watched. The white men
shouted, ‘si’l vous plaît’ in strong London accents and then, louder, ‘si’l vous plaît!’
We watched and waited, and then they went. The Asian man got up and staggered
along to the end of the carriage, sat down and started singing again.
44
Diana’s subjects
Millions of people felt themselves being swept along by a tide of emotion following
Diana’s death – as if this were a collective process of shock, grief and mourning as
much as an individual response, and as if those intertwined individual and
collective feelings were always there, waiting to be released at a moment like this.
They were not. But we live in a culture which is psychologically structured so that
events of this kind evoke certain kinds of feelings about who we are and what our
relationship with others is like, and then we feel them with such intensity that we
imagine that they must be very deep, and necessarily true.
Rather than reveal some deep underlying psychological nature, however, they
express the ways in which we have come to function as psychological beings –
and, in particular, the way we absorb and display themes of unconscious emotions
as subjects of a psychoanalytic culture. The week between the death and the
funeral saw people represent themselves as psychoanalytic selves, and so it is
worth reflecting on how this has been accomplished, so that we do not make the
mistake of then reading these events as simply confirming psychoanalysis as
universally true. We might then also understand better what is really going on.
One of the powerful psychoanalytic motifs of that fraught week was of a rising
crescendo of feeling, and a sense that people were experiencing something
overwhelming and barely comprehensible. Some of the descriptions of emotion
in the gathering crowds, in newspapers and on television could have been written
by Freud to illustrate his account of mass psychology and the analysis of the ego.
Media descriptions of the crowds talked of their subjects’ ‘disbelief ’ that it was
possible that Diana was really dead, and the difficulty they would have in coming
to terms with ‘the great loss’. Coming and ‘gathering together’ was a way of showing
that they were ‘a nation united in sorrow’. How can we make sense of this? One of
the ways psychoanalysis functions in this culture is by encouraging us to imagine
that our most intense feelings are the ‘deepest’, and then to imagine that the reason
they are deepest must be because they are welling up from our fundamental
universal human psychological nature. When we read that this is the experience of
‘the people’ or ‘the nation’, or see masses of people laying flowers or standing
outside Buckingham Palace this seems to explain, but actually merely serves to
confirm, why those emotions feel so overwhelming, so out of our control. Why else
could it be, save that this something deeper is also something collective?
A second powerful motif is that of ‘love’, as an emotion that was always
there but which is now able to find its way into consciousness. We were told
45
by one BBC commentator on the morning of the funeral, for example, that Diana
‘didn’t understand that there would be this depth of affection for her’. Journalists
struggled to guess what might be going on inside people’s heads, as in the case
of the description of the young man signing the book of condolence, and the
same commentator asked, ‘What deep thoughts were coming out of his mind, out
of his soul?’ Deeply significant occasions like this are where appeals to things
coming out of the depths of the soul are mobilised. In many cases, these deep
things are interpreted by their subjects as feelings of love. As the funeral cortege
passed them on the Saturday of the burial, members of the crowd shouted out,
‘We love you Diana’.
Why should we experience our mixed emotions toward Diana as flowing from
the depths of our individual souls, when all we know about her has come second-
hand? We need to remember that collective cultural phenomena are not directly
expressed in the newspapers and television, but that there is a good deal of
representational work going on. Most of us never met Diana and we rely on media
representations of her gifts and failings. It is patently not the case that ‘we’ all loved
Diana all of the time. Opinions were ‘deeply’ divided after the Martin Bashir
‘Princess of Hearts’ television interview, but now it is as if past indifference or
hostility to her must be replaced by genuine unalloyed love.
There were traces of this now forgotten – as if repressed – hostility in the hurried
special editions of tabloids on the day she died. In The Mirror on Sunday, for example,
the beatification of Diana and the representation of Dodi Al Fayed as loving Prince
Charming – an image which has quickly been eclipsed by the increasing focus on the
Princess – in the first six pages jarred with old copy in the rest of the paper where
there was the usual blend of scorn and spiteful gossip about the pair. By Monday, all
the newspapers were fairly consistently admiring of Diana.
There is a further paradox in the way newspapers were careful to avoid puns
and wordplays, as if this would not only be disrespectful but also inappropriate
because their task now is to represent only what really is the case, as if they could
be the faithful viewing screens of the funeral arrangements and the loyal tribunes
of the people’s emotion. Now it is unimaginable that a newspaper would have a
headline, as one Greek paper did, ‘Lady D(ead)’. This should alert us all the more
to the construction of these events.
Nevertheless, we now have to account for why we did feel certain things toward
her before she died, and why we now feel something completely different.
Psychoanalytic notions of repression and cathartic release of feelings, and of
hostility as the defensive screen for real love, are a perfect solution to this kind of
puzzle. If we look at the narratives in newspapers and television, and then
rehearsed again in the film The Queen, about stages of grief and the pleas for
the Royals to share their own feelings in public displays of mourning, we can
understand why those notions seem to work. The press became increasingly
46
DIANA’S SUBJECTS
obsessed during the week with how the silence of the Royal Family was to be
accounted for. Why did they not participate in the outpouring of emotion? Was
it because we all have our own ways of grieving? Eventually the Queen’s early
return to London, and the short live broadcast about how ‘remarkable’ Diana, was
supplied the confessional conclusion to this narrative, and the Queen, too, became
one of Diana’s subjects.
A third motif – once again fuelled by implicit psychoanalytic images of each
individual having their own truth and their own relationship to significant others –
is that we should each feel addressed and touched as special.
While visits by the lesser Royals would usually draw few curious admirers, now
the Queen and Charles and, more so ‘the young Princes’ William and Harry, seem
charged with a powerful magnetic force. This not only positions them as crucial,
idealised figures around which masses of people want to cluster, but also invests
them with the ability to address people directly as if each member of the crowd
might be a recipient of their love.
The image of the crowd milling around The Mall, sighing as the Royal
Standard over the Palace might or might not have been lowered to half mast when
it was wrapped by the wind around the flagpole, and grasping for a Royal touch
when Andrew and Edward arrived, evoked medieval scenes of an undifferentiated
mass petitioning of the only real subjects, the Royal leaders of the collective. It is
exactly that sense of loss of identity in the crowd that Freud tries to explain.
Yet, at the same time, what drives every member of the crowd is the hope that
each is special in the eyes of the admired love object and that each may be chosen.
When the Queen and the Princes arrived to look at the flowers on Friday before the
funeral, the unbearable and suppressed excitement of the crowd was audible around
the camera and microphone in one of the television reports. As the Royals came
closer, viewers could hear a woman gasp over and over again ‘Oh God’, and then a
male voice telling her to ‘shut up’. The presenter of a commentary clip by clerics on
the Queen’s speech on Granada television told us that they had the Bishop of
Chester in the studio because Diana was also the Countess of Chester. The reporter,
on the morning of the funeral on BBC radio, told us that feelings were particularly
acute in Cardiff because she was the Princess of Wales. Everywhere there was a
special reason for why Diana was present in each place to each person.
While Diana’s death does at first seem to confirm her intrinsic special
‘remarkable’ place in the nation’s heart, a closer examination of the way her life
and death has been represented to us – and between us to each other as we work
over the media images – also reveals how anyone can be factored into our emotional
lives now, so that experiences of the loss of complete strangers can be as powerful
as the loss of close family. It is important to reflect on how and why this has come
to be so, and how and why psychoanalysis is part of the process rather than simply
the explanation of it.
47
It is indeed as if many people felt lifted off their feet by powerful affective
currents and dragged into deeper emotional waters, as if they felt they may
have drowned if they could not account for how they felt. Then psychoanalytic
explanations are appealing. But they work because they are already there as a
crucial part of the cultural setting for these experiences. It is tempting, then, to
struggle back to a place where we can anchor ourselves and scorn all this as mass
delusion. Delusion it is, but no less real for that. And rather than dismiss it, we
need to know how it is structured so that it comes to be real for those millions of
Diana’s subjects who feel overwhelmed by grief and love, and who become, at that
same moment, confirmed as psychoanalytic subjects.
48
Personal response under attack
Can more psychology help us to understand something more of the 9/11 terrorist
‘attack on democracy’? Or is psychology already too much around us, leading us
in the wrong direction as we try to make sense of these ‘strange times’? Psychology
generally invites us to think about what people are thinking and why they do what
they do, people as torn from social context; but psychological ways of thinking are
also in the language we use when we articulate different ways of accounting for
what is going on in the world. Some psychological theories are more tempting
than others. A case in point is psychoanalysis, even when, and perhaps especially
when, it seems to account for group psychology at times of war.
The search for a personal response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon
attacks is one of the easiest things to do in this culture, easier even than the
search for the one person responsible; but both kinds of search are driven by an
underlying assumption that the most important causes and effects of such an
event are to be found deep inside individuals. And some kind of psychology is
always already at hand here to help us target what we feel and open it up for
others to see. More difficult is an understanding of the material conditions which
structure that search and make it seem as if the individual is source and
destination of what has been going on since 11 September.
From where I am sitting here in Britain, for example, the kinds of psychological
tools that come ready to hand – to describe personal responses to the dilemma of
fight or flight, of how to forge alliances to combat terrorism and how to find
some reference point to guide us – might be easily found in the kinds of group
analysis developed by Bion and his colleagues during the Second World War to
rebuild army morale. But look a little more carefully at how our ‘personal’ and
‘psychological’ responses are structured and you start to see that those tools are so
deeply embedded in the culture that they make it near impossible to find anything
other than an individual check-in point or destination.
And the way these processes actually work gives lie to the idea that a group
response is a genuinely collective alternative to what we feel welling up inside our
individual selves. The way groups are constituted in this culture means that what
will appear at the beginning and end of a social process will be a thoroughly
individualised psychological subject.
Fight or flight, for instance, may look like a personal response to the attacks, but
to see it like this is to lose sight of where it really comes from. There has already been
a fairly successful sealing off of different ethnic communities in Britain by the
49
media, the police and the main party politicians. ‘Fight or flight’ as a motif to
describe images of Islam in Britain is now quite pertinent, with press hysteria over
the numbers of asylum seekers ‘flooding’ in through the channel tunnel (a favourite
focus of concern for every little Englander) homing in recently on refugees from
Afghanistan. No matter that those waiting in Calais to come to Britain have fled
from persecution by the Taliban, when they get here, will be attacked in the press
and on the streets by racists. Towns in the north of Britain have seen their Asian
communities virtually under siege, and the attacks on mosques in the wake of
September 11 are only a continuation of the everyday racism that makes life for
Britain’s Muslims indeed a life of fight or flight.
And the forging of special relationships to combat an external reference point
is nothing new. American readers will be surprised to learn, as will those in other
countries perhaps, that the British public believe that the search-and-destroy
mission against Bin Laden and Co was jointly led by Tony Blair and George W Bush.
It was at the moment when the second of the two trade towers was hit that we just
knew that a terrorist mastermind was behind the attacks, and now it is when an
alliance of two world leaders is forged in a pairing that will save democracy that
we think we are really going to see some action. But already, long ago, British
readers were told that Blair gave much valuable advice to Clinton over when and
where to bomb Milosevic and Saddam (and that most of the most smart bombs
were British). The fantasy that the combined forces of one strong local leader and
the leader of the most powerful nation state in the world is itself necessary to keep
in place current economic and political alliances.
And now, it is no surprise that we knew so fast who the real culprit was for
these attacks. We have always been told, of course, that the most deadly attacks on
the free world are conducted by madmen, and each madman comes in turn to do
his deadly work. And although the search for that single enemy is simple enough,
it doesn’t stop the puzzling about what is going on inside him that makes him
want to hurt us. The spectacular headline during the Gulf War, when the oil
installations were bombed (by American planes, it now turns out), leading to an
environmental catastrophe – ‘Saddam Attacks Earth’ – is symptomatic, we might
say, of the image of a deadly malevolent mind directing the destruction of all of
the rest of us. The speculation about the effects of the suicide of both Milosevic’s
parents on him as a child as the possible root cause of his hostility to everyone else
is equally symptomatic. And now Bin Laden is masterminding a ‘network’, and he
erupts as the individual determining point of violence, no longer simply a
multimillionaire head of a friendly building corporation that could once be
invited to build CIA facilities during the righteous struggle with the Taliban
against the then government of Afghanistan.
We respond as individuals because we have been positioned as individual
viewers of these events from day one. Look at how we saw what we saw on the
50
PERSONAL RESPONSE UNDER ATTACK
day of the attacks and since. Something of the nature of the technological
structuring of our vision renders what we are faced with as something powerfully
individualised. When someone popped their head around my office door and told
me that strange things, like planes dropping from the sky, were happening in
America, I started searching and clicking on BBC news sites to try to find out what
was going on. Notice that the Internet as a site for information is organised in
such a way that access and control necessarily lies with an individual sitting in
front of a screen.
An unpleasant email appeared by the end of September, which also invited an
individual sitting alone at a computer terminal to puzzle about the individual
motivations of another who might have discovered this secret (or now, it transpires,
to have fabricated it). Here one person opens a message from another that tells
them that if they take the flight number, Q33NY, of one of the planes that crashed
into the towers and turn it into Wingdings font they will find something very
bizarre. Try it. It is. Not only does the linear sequence of this writing require us to
run our eyes from left to right, not only does it lead us from the image of a plane
through towers and death to a Star of David, but it also elicits an activity that can
only be carried out by us at the terminal, by us, one by one.
One by one is how psychology likes to see this played out, and one by one is
how we already feel it to be. Against this, there are, of course, responses that make
the struggle against our enclosed identities as individuals part of the struggle
against state terrorism, responses which connect the activities of the antiwar
movement in Britain with US Americans who see the real threat to democracy as
coming from Bush and his successors and imperialist designs on secure oil routes
through central Asia. There are responses that treat the coupling of leaders from
Europe and America with the contempt it deserves and that look to broader
alliances with the opposition movements that will not opt for one leader against
another, or one leader linked to the other. And there are responses which see fight
or flight as part of the fabric of existence for minority communities in the West,
and which refuse to make of them an enemy within, to be fought when they have
sought asylum with us, political and economic asylum from precisely the likes of
Bin Laden.
These are not primarily ‘personal’ responses, though they necessarily include a
personal commitment as part of a political analysis. And that political analysis has
to include an analysis of how it is that psychoanalysis functions so easily, too
easily, as part of the popular psychology around us, in our groups and in us as
individuals.
51
In Disney’s world
In Disneyland near Paris one summer, I felt saturated with someone else’s fantasies,
someone else’s objects. Some of the fantasies were also my own, but I recognised
images from childhood only as if they had been refracted through a distorting lens
that another person operated. Some were those of my sons, then aged twelve and
sixteen, who were able to play in a cynical distance from the images, to both enjoy
and parody what lay around them. Many of the fantasy objects, however, belonged
to the Disney Corporation who managed to maintain a no less cynical distance
from its customers as it extracted large amounts of money for personalised
souvenirs, memories made and retailed for us to retell. We survived inside
Disney’s world from eight in the morning, with extra earlier entry for hotel
customers, to eleven at night, when we staggered back after the music and
fireworks finale.
Fantasy enjoys a divided double existence inside and outside the modern mind.
It is something that feels personal and idiosyncratic, and it also circulates around
us in representations that are shared by many others. Perhaps it was always so,
to an extent, with the internal and internalized private fantasies about death
and survival for each medieval citizen, for example, being matched by collective
public fantasies about mortality and heaven. But the degree to which fantasy is
systematically gathered and marketed, researched and turned into systems of
commodities, is qualitatively greater now. Descriptions of the postmodern condition
of contemporary culture are rather overblown, but there are enough of those
descriptions around now to fuse and operate themselves as powerful sets of
commodified fantasies about the possibility of escaping the grim realities of old
modernity. Would that it were so. Those commodified fantasies circulate across a
collectively experienced sea of signs in society first, and are only then absorbed by
individuals who make them into things they think are their own.
Disney has been one of the most efficient collectors and purveyors of fantasy
objects in the postmodern world, and its success lies not only in cartoon feature
films and in the representation of nature as if it were, at root, like a cartoon, but
also in the construction of places in the real world where these things ‘really’ exist,
where we can move through them and touch them, where they really touch us.
I have photos of the boys grinning rather awkwardly as they are clutched by Goofy
standing between them, and we all know it is not real while we feel uneasy that
what we thought was unreal could materialise among us.
53
Internal objects should be the product of our internal world, but what
appears to be projected out from our unconscious fantasy (‘phantasy’ for some
psychoanalysts who prefer this archaic spelling to emphasise that it is
unconscious) into this fabricated fantasy space was actually always already there.
Those objects that meet us at the gates have already saturated us in childhood as
we watched Disney films and inhabited Disney time. It is not only that our
internal objects have been colonised by the idealised shards of the US imaginary,
but also that those objects have been ready-prepared for us. So I am told, for
example, by relatives admiring the photos, that the great thing about Walt Disney
is that he captures the ‘essentials’ of animal behaviour, clearing away all the grime,
nastiness and violence. When I first travelled by train in the US, I saw telegraph
poles that looked as I thought they ‘really’ should be and heard the toot of the
train’s horn as I remembered it always really should sound. Disney did the work
of creating for me images of trains and travel and nature that now feel so deep and
right and true.
Two mental processes are performed for us in this world so thoroughly that we
believe we have performed them ourselves. The first is purification; so that out of
the mess of the world we have clean, clear objects that help us think about and
recognise the essentials when we see them. Such processing of the junk in the
world is a métier of the Disney corporation, and if there are any dirty bits sticking
on the sidewalk of Main Street, we know they will be tidied up after the parade.
The second is containment, so that boundaries we usually maintain around
ourselves and groups of people dear to us are now constituted as a function of the
world in self-enclosed themes. When you pay to enter, you move into a world
where the distinction between the exterior and interior of the mind is replaced by
a distinction between inside and outside that world itself. The all-in price also
encourages the abandonment of reality-thinking, anxieties about the relation
between cost and benefit, and, instead, lulls us into the warm embrace of a regime
of pleasure populated by animatronic objects. This smooth process is both
confirmed and disrupted, though, by some symptoms, things emblematic of the
process and things which make manifest this craziness in ways stark enough to
make us reflect on what might be going on.
Symptom one, escape. We rode the railroad that follows the park perimeter,
and just after we left Fantasyland Station we saw Jiminy Cricket with a couple of
regular-dressed folk hurrying down one of the exit roads at the back. The three of
us had the same kind of thought as we pointed him out and shouted to each other
to look quick, Jiminy is escaping. We remembered this later in the day, when we
were getting a little fed up ourselves, and speculated together as to how far he had
got. When we saw helicopters circling the park, we knew it was because his
getaway had been noticed and search parties were out, probably, we thought, with
dogs. These weren’t the only times we imagined escaping ourselves, and we did
54
IN DISNEY’S WORLD
manage to break out for an hour shut-eye in Hotel Cheyenne around teatime, but
still with Disney stamp-marks on our wrists and still shut in to the theme site.
Theme parks are instances of total institutions, of course, in which identities
are stripped down and rebuilt; less coercive than prisons but more effective
in a shorter time, reaching down below consciousness and plugging into inner
fantasyland. These institutions mobilise the very constellation of objects that
should provide a source of resistance to bleak reality. Because the walls between
inside and outside have been dissolved, fantasies of resistance and escape can be
as surreal motifs as those of the theme world.
Symptom two, control. On the way home we bought a Roger the Dodger Beano
comic special issue, where Roger has a long and complicated daydream (only that,
we discover at the end) about winning the Lottery. We enjoyed this as a dream for
us that played out something of what we had just been through. Roger buys a
thinly disguised Disneyland Paris, and re-imagineers it around Beano themes. All
the other characters from the comic come and play in it, but eventually rebel
against his omnipotent control. One of the ironies of this scenario is that Roger
himself can only fabricate a fantasyland out of the imaginary objects that
populate the comic, and so his resistance to control and his attempt to control
others is constituted within a symbolic space that he could never escape.
One way of resisting Disney is to recognise it as a gigantic, grandiose,
narcissistic dream. Disney products are laced through with narcissism – ranging
from the Wicked Queen in the 1937 Snow White desperately trying to close the gap
between ego and ego-ideal as she demands that mirror-mirror tells her she is the
fairest of them all, to Jiminy in the 1940 Pinocchio telling us that when you wish
upon a star, it makes no difference who you are, your dreams come true. The
corporation reproduces narcissistic fantasy for the audience, and if they can’t
evoke it they’ll build it, as in the Disney housing estate in the US for 40,000 people
who can live in little neat houses with white picket fences provided they are always
clean and polite, or as in their theme parks where we can live for a day or two.
When we thought Jiminy was breaking loose, we were dimly aware of this control
function of the park, but when we were out ourselves, we were still caught in the
fantasy that it might be possible to make a world and have others live in it,
materially and imaginatively.
The three of us also suffered between us much frustration, provocation and
teasing, as we each attempted to seize control during the course of the day. We also
did our fair bit of spoiling as we tried to find out which bits were really real in this
seamless world and what would stick and jar against it. Reading Disney in this way
is also an attempt to find again some critical distance against the commodification
of fantasy, its fantasies as our fantasies. One way of gaining control is to buy into
this system of objects as we fall into flashback states of bliss in Disney shops at
home. Another way is to redescribe how that world grips us, and the positions it
55
sets up for us as active or passive consumers. To do that, however, we also have to

understand how the psychoanalytic phenomena we use to strike a distance from
Disney are also reproduced in it and through it, their mental processes that seem
as if they are ours. We feel the array of objects Disney’s world has created and the
fantasies of control it contains, and so we imagine, through it, what it might be to
escape it.
56
Looking to the future, and back
Why should we believe that our future is already written in our past?
Psychoanalysis tells us that patterns and shocks picked up early on in our lives are
repeated and woven into what will be. But psychoanalysis is not powerful because
it has discovered this relationship between past and future, but because it weaves
itself into experiences of the relationship that are structured into Western culture.
We are encouraged to discover how important the past is to who we are and where
we are going, then, not simply because psychoanalysis tells us so, but because we
learn this many times over when we try to imagine the future. Or, rather, when
our futures are imagined for us. Then more parts of a psychoanalytic narrative
start to make sense.
Each particular future is tied to a particular present. As representations of the
future have accumulated in science and science fiction over the last century, we
have been able to see all the more clearly how each attempt to stretch our imagination
forward is glued to present times. Remember those models of molecules at school
constructed out of red and yellow spheres on black wire, and the way they now
look like 1950s prints, and how like the patterns on the linoleum they were.
Remember the rockets to the moon, where the pilots sat in tubular frame chairs
clicking switches like real pilots of the time. It is also possible to see how limited
visions of the future are when we see them through the lens of a slightly different
culture. One example is Futuroscope in central France, which manages to bring
together versions of the future in such a tacky combination that it helps us to see
how this is the case. As you take the bus up Avenue des Temps Modernes toward
the cluster of leaning mirror-walled cube buildings which make up the
Futuroscope Parc site sitting next to the Poitiers Mammouth hypermarket, you
cannot but be aware of something that is still in the process of being built, but
which had its origins in what we thought, ten years before, the future might be like.
The environment and ambience is suffused with science fiction motifs even
before you enter the Parc itself. We three – me and the boys – walked slowly in the
heat, laden with big backpacks, around acres of the rubbled landscape trying to
find the right hotel and then the reception and then the offices which issued the
keys. We were already astronauts. In the distance, we could see small groups of
people moving from building to building on the same lonely quest for maps and
some way of orienting themselves. But administrative chaos here was not busy
and noisy, but serene and silent. As it will be, perhaps; as it is in present-day
representations of space stations tracking their way in noiseless orbit around
57
lifeless planets. An eerie emptiness made us feel like we were walking round the
hospital buildings in the film Coma. We were unwitting spectators, wondering
how to find our way round this strange world. We watched La Gyrotour rising and
falling, carrying people up and down for views of the Parc, observers and observed.
In fact, most of the rides in the Parc were about viewing the future, and about
the machinery of vision as a key accomplishment of the future, as something that
we already almost had within our grasp. Unlike the most boring old museums
which educate the visitor through panels of text which explain what the exhibits
are and what they signify, the Parc’s mode of representation had primarily to do
with the organisation of sight. Many of the rides were versions of an IMAX screen,
wrapped into the inside of a dome in the Imax Solido or running under the feet
of spectators in Le Tapis Magique.
In this way, we learnt over and again that what is most essential and significant
about the past and about our journey from the past to the distant future is directly
visible rather than textual. Rather in the manner of the psychoanalytic story of a
child seeing things which will connect directly with the unconscious level of thing-
presentations and be the crucial determining elements of their psychic life, so
Futuroscope functioned at the level of the visual field in its representations of the
past and future, and it left language aside as the medium of the present.
Conversation on our journeys to and from the Parc to the hypermarket (for
cheaper food and drink) had a common theme, and it was only when we were
back on the train home that I realised how peculiar and apposite the theme was.
The theme was how to define ‘irony’. Adam (then age thirteen) had asked what
irony was, and so his brother Ben and I contrived elaborate examples of ironic
states of affairs. What if we were running to get to Mammouth before it closed,
and the staff there heard us shouting and thought we were running to escape from
a rampaging mammoth that was getting very close, so they closed just before we
arrived. Would that be ironic? Could be. We fine-tuned these kind of situations to
make the unintended consequences of actions turn out to be the opposite of what
was desired, and there was often a moral lesson, which was that we might
conceivably have known what twist of circumstances was going to frustrate us if
only we had reflected on what we were doing, if we not been so hasty, and so on.
Perhaps it was ironic that many of the rides were about archaeological discoveries
in the Amazon or about the early history of French film and television rather than
about the future as such. What we were absorbing was the structure of a way of
looking and experiencing present technology as an anticipation of the future rather
than being presented directly with tomorrow’s world. Even the journey to Mars
narrated by Leonard Nimoy – which we had already seen once before at the Bradford
IMAX in the UK – was a narrative mainly about what had already been achieved.
The restaurant complex where we had to use our food vouchers was called
‘Rollers’ and was themed around the US in the 1950s. The first main building after
58
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE, AND BACK
we entered the Parc contained paintings of rural scenes with vintage cars and olde
worlde gift shoppe counters with honey cakes and pâtés from the département
of Vienne.
Another irony contains within it the structure of consumerised future-work.
I was surprised that the vivid dreams I had that night in Hotel Futuroscope were
not at all about the future, but that they were located in the past, and I don’t mean
my childhood here, so much as various imaginary stereotypical scenarios in foggy
cobblestone streets that were rendered as the past with such evident artifice that
as I awoke, I thought of holodeck simulations of Sherlock Holmes’ London on the
Starship Enterprise. The elements of pastiche were clues that led me back to
mentally replay some of the rides the previous day, which actually were about the
past as the place that anticipated where we are now and where we are going. The
representations of the future in Futuroscope are set in narratives of adventure
journeys which always start way back, all the better to help us direct our gaze in a
particular direction, to times ahead.
The future of the earth itself is profoundly conditioned by traumatic geological
events, and the impact of meteors the size of small planets have left marks on the
surface and beneath the sea. And so the earth has been battered into a shape and
kind of orbit which will itself condition the way it will receive and react to further
such collisions. In this sense, it is more like a vast ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ (the
endlessly erasable toy discussed by Freud) than a tabula rasa, and we walk on a
world where some fairly powerful enduring parameters for the future have already
been set. At the deepest, most widespread level, then, patterns and shocks from the
past will now bear us into the future.
Perhaps a final irony is that Futuroscope reflects on none of this, and perhaps
this is because the connection between the past, present and future must strike us
psychoanalytic subjects as both determined and as mysterious. Representations of
the future thread their way along a psychoanalytic narrative in Western culture, but
they can only do so implicitly, something we experience as something unconscious.
59
Windows on the mind
I was tempted by an Apple, but went for a cheaper and more powerful machine.
It has Windows, and something happened to my internal life as I settled to my new
existence as mouse potato.
New forms of technology recreate subjectivity in different ways. One can easily
imagine, for example, the impact of early industrial machines on the self-image of
Europeans in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is often said that
Freudian psychoanalysis is rooted in that impact, and in hydraulic metaphors
in which the libido seeks outlet, is repressed, and then erupts in displaced or
sublimated ways. Once this image of the mental apparatus was given free reign in
Western culture, other images and technologies had to contend with it as a
relatively enduring template for the self that we absorb and fashion as our own.
What is Windows as a computer environment but an incarnation and mutation
of the unconscious and object relations? I started dreaming vividly, or, at least,
started remembering vivid dreams (and maybe that itself is the issue, the
symptomatic issue) after being plunged into Windows in a new PC at home.
I already had some experience of working with Windows at work, though this was
quite desultory and only sufficient to make me familiar with the format; enough
that I would not be completely lost, not enough that I should be comfortable in
the terrain.
Two dreams on successive nights preceded a busy therapy session in which I, as
patient, was able to explore some of the fantasies that had glued me to my new
technology. The fact that this was then psychoanalytic psychotherapy (in Anna
Freudian mode) has a bearing, of course, upon the interpretations of the material.
In the first dream, I was racing to get back to work or school, or both. At one
point, I was aware that I had about four minutes to race the remaining mile or so
in time for registration. I had looked at my watch, and it said 1.56. I escaped a
scuffle on the top of a bus, slid down the stairs, ran through the streets, under a
road barrier, jumped on a pickup truck, and hijacked it to try to get back by the
deadline. As I fled around and through the various obstacles, I also knew that
I was clicking my way at speed through the layers of boxes on a Windows
programme. But this was not outside the screen so much as pushing through the
exit points, closing each screen in turn, and turning fast this way and that to move
through to the final window, to touch base.
It should be said, I guess, that this period was also the lead-up to the beginning
of the academic year, and some anxiety about arriving on time and experiencing
61
that as if a student rather than as tutor, is usual for me. What struck me as I woke
up was how tangled in the Windows environment I was, and what notion of
representation was playing itself out in fantasy and then in waking thought as a
result of working with, within that programme over the previous week.
The second dream continued something of this preoccupation. Its most apparent
theme, its manifest content, was systemic family therapy. I was a practitioner of
family therapy with one other person, and our patient was on his own, something
I did not find odd at the time. One of my relatives, who has complicated family
arrangements, was with me, too, and I was explaining to her the principles of the
systemic approach. She thought this was nonsense, and I realised that I could not
explain it to her because we were both in the very system we were trying to
comprehend. The problem reappeared in various scenarios through the night,
with the patient, and then as I tried to clear up some dirty bathwater, and again
I felt that I could not describe what I was doing because I was in the middle of it.
A memory floated in from the previous day as I woke up from this dream,
which connected it more directly to Windows. As I was clicking through the
options, finding my way around, I had opened a box that was a calendar. I had
laughed out loud at the thought that I could spend time putting details of things
I should be doing in a computer programme in the very time that I needed to
spend doing them. Now, this problem of the organization of time and the way in
which reflection on time spends time is not peculiar to Windows, but I suspect
that a number of aspects of Windows as a working environment is also a culture
for particular forms of subjectivity, and that this is worth exploring further.
Consider the transience of Windows as forms that disappear when you turn the
computer off, and the sense of the different icons as floating in space at different
distances, the files as entities from different times. I want to reach into the screen
and physically grasp hold of them, and imagine them to be like lumps of jelly. The
set-up is ethereal and uncertain. A power surge may evaporate the whole
environment at any moment. It may not be there again when I switch the machine
on after a night’s break. There are different ways of coping with this. One is to join
with others in a shared electronic universe; the other is to avoid any contact with
that mass delusion. Millions of people navigate Windows together on the Internet,
and it would of course be possible to link into this wider network. The advantage
of this would be that a World Wide Web crash is unlikely, for the system, like society,
is maintained as a virtual entity through the operation of many individuals. The risk
is that viruses might flood into my programmes (and it is not unknown for ‘black
holes’ in our institution’s intranet to swallow clusters of files). So, the other option
is to keep my system safe and separate from the others. The risk in this is that if
this crashes, everything goes. Everything crashes into nothing.
The Window icons as an array of files in virtual space now function for me as
a form of externalised unconscious (or something like the unconscious, which
62
WINDOWS ON THE MIND
then becomes part of the felt experience, second nature of the individual user).
The icons and files are there, present, yet it is their absence that conditions interaction
with the present file. I know that these memories, of files past and present, are
around me, and I can access them, I think, though I still have an edge of anxiety that
I could forget where they are, and that they might float around inside the computer’s
memory, or somewhere else entirely, and that I might never see them again.
The idea that text objects invested with so much creative time and energy could
simply dissolve brought me face-to-face with loss. Perhaps I should have experienced
the blank screen that shone at me one morning when I booted up, when it appeared
that every file was missing, as like the loss of loved ones. But it was the other way
around, for only later, when in therapy, when I recalled dead relatives who had
never been mourned, did I then feel the same sickness that the blank screen
provoked. Objects lost like files lost, and unlike the Locoscript programme I was
familiar with from my little Amstrad, not even in what that programme interface
called ‘limbo’.
I know my task here when things go awry is to retrieve material that floats in
the background, under the surface in the computer’s read-only or random access
memory, or to dredge it up from the Net when I am online at work. I then know
better what it would be like in psychoanalysis to make present to consciousness
what has been lost or pushed away. Where it, the Net was, there I should be, but
this work of techno-culture still implicates the subject in the programme, and
gives but the illusion of deliberate distanced control.
The double promise of Windows is that one could travel down through the
layers to the bottom, to ‘It’, and that one can master each surface array as if one
were really in the conflict-free sphere of integrated ‘I’. The disappointment is that
the bottom is ‘DOS’ (remember that?), meaningless as such, and that the surface
is governed by a series of rules that are not amenable to complete control. Perhaps
the underlying anxiety is that a mastery of the system’s internal objects comes only
with the loss of critical distance. I feel that when I bought this package,
I bought into another version of myself, the ‘prosthetic’ version of the self Freud
saw as necessarily fashioned by civilisation. And, like all versions of the self now,
it implicates subjectivity in something wider, something structured by the
parameters of contemporary scientific practice, which then houses one
particularly unruly sitting tenant, psychoanalysis.
63
Soap trek
At the Star Trek exhibition in the Science Museum in London, I stood in front of
Jean-Luc Picard’s desk, the desk from his ready room next to the bridge. I was
seized by an uncanny double feeling that I can only call ‘elated loss’; an excitement
at being so close to something that I had never touched but knew so well, and a
sick despair at having something taken away that I had never really had. And,
barely a week later, with the final episode ‘All Good Things’, Picard’s 178 episode-run
of The Next Generation (ST:TNG) came to an end.
Psychoanalysis knows about excitement and loss, of course, but it tends to look
for those things first inside the individual and what had happened to them in
childhood, and it only then describes those feelings played out through the medium
of culture. But we might understand something more about these kinds of feelings,
as well as what part psychoanalytic processes play, if we look at the way popular
culture structures how we think about relationships and the narratives we follow
when we participate in it.
You have to know how to participate in order to follow the narrative. When you
watch Star Trek, for example, you know you are not really experiencing an
inexplicable and unpredictable chain of events, and there is a paradoxical rule
governing it so that we know that although this is about the future, by the time we
watch, it is about things that have already happened. Star Trek is about watching
and recognising something that will already have been the case when we experience
it. It not only lays out a future, it also produces a past. This is not only because it
is scripted and recorded. You are drawn into an exciting episode on the three-fold
premise that this is going to happen (for it is about the future), it is occurring now
(as you watch in the present), and that you have already lost it (since it was
recorded and circulated ages ago).
It’s all been over in the US for some time, of course, and it has long been
possible to buy episodes from ST:TNG on DVD so you can know what will
happen to the crew at the end of their journey. The construction and anticipation
of loss is built into this process of screening and marketing. If you have trekker
friends, then they may or may not have told you that Q pops up in the final story
and you see an old-aged Picard and company, but in any case, you knew they
knew. Not only is this about the future, then, which is something you will
eventually meet yourself, but this is a future that has already been experienced by
many people who are around you now, and so you know you will not be able to
avoid it. Star Trek draws us into a narrative of inescapable loss.
65
The telling of the story before the story is something that often happens now
in soaps, with television listings magazines providing plot synopses for the week’s
upcoming episodes. ST:TNG, Deep Space Nine (DS9) and Voyager are the most
extreme cases of ‘soapness’ because of the way the episodes are screened first in the
US, then on satellite and cable, and only then on terrestrial networks. Like other
soaps, this televisual reality can be confused with what is going on outside the
screen. Characters in the soaps that are set in ‘real time’ will occasionally refer to
dramatic political events or disasters, and that helps to anchor Albert Square (for
viewers of East Enders) or Ambridge (for listeners to The Archers) in a more
tangible geographical matrix, the one we move around in when we are not
watching. Members of the audience sometimes send the characters birthday cards,
or look forward to their weddings as if they were part of their own family. And the
narratives of soaps get tangled up in, and help to frame the way we understand the
activities of public figures, particularly the Royal family in the UK. Here, the soaps
function in a direct way to produce representations of cultural phenomena and
political events. In the case of Star Trek, the series had already been recruited to
the public understanding of US space science when the first space shuttle was
named ‘Enterprise’. Bitter theological disputes have also broken out there over
competing translations of the Bible into Klingon.
Watching Star Trek is also about holding onto something and not believing it
could ever change. Perhaps this is one of the factors in the establishment of the
huge fan clubs and fanzines around the series. There is a paradox here too, for at
the same time as there is a single trekker identity (and we should note that this is
a fairly well theorised self-representation of identity for fans, evidenced in their
differentiation from more trivial nerdy ‘Trekkies’), there are multiple identities
available. If the United Federation of Planets consists of a wider range of ethnic
types than could be dreamt of on earth – albeit conversing, through the Universal
Translator, in English, it seems to us, much of the time – the trekker community
comprises a richer variety of sexual identities than could have been dreamt of at
Paramount. In some cases, this is through a character serving as a point of
identification for an existing community, as in the case of Q for the gay group, the
‘Gaylaxians’. In other cases, the fan culture permits the proliferation of new
identities, as in the case of the comic strip slash zines produced (mainly by women
fans) in the US which represent many varieties of sexual coupling between Kirk
and Spock and other characters.
Star Trek also functions in a soap-like way in its self-referential weaving of the
autobiographies of the different characters, so that we learn as we go along, for
example, that Beverly Crusher is Scottish, that Data has an evil twin brother called
Lore, or that Deanna Troi’s sister drowned when she was a child. We learn to
assemble the lives of the crew as if we had their pictures on our own mantelpiece.
How spotty Wesley was, and how we wished he would get a place at Starfleet
66
sOAP TREK
Academy soon, and how young Riker looks to us now in those photos of him
without a beard those many years ago. However, unlike our representations of
relatives and friends, who we might in idle moments imagine pairing with each
other in bizarre combinations, these characters, under licence from memory loss,
alien possession or cyborg alter egos, have ofttimes slept with one another, and in
the process, kept alive the erotic charge that helps hold them together as a group the
rest of the time. It’s as if all the possibilities can be played out with all the certainty
that nothing fundamentally will change as a result. The Star Trek narrative structure
does the work of creating objects who will feel dear to us, making them seem
permanent and then taking them away. Psychoanalysis might describe this all very
well, but we need to look at how that narrative structure constitutes love and loss
for us as psychodynamic phenomena, phenomena that we then feel as if they were
always in us.
It is a shock when some irreparable tragedy does strike. When we saw Tasha Yar
die, we could not, at some level, believe that this was possible. Surely this must be
a dream, an other-species hallucination or a parallel universe plot device, and she
would reappear from that hateful slimy gooey entity as good as new. Her
reappearance in later episodes as a Romulan only served to remind us of what we
had lost. When we lived another life with Jean-Luc on Ressika, after he was drawn
into a mind-crystal representation of life on that long dead planet where he had
the wife and children he always lacked as a starship captain, it really touched us.
When he returned to consciousness on the bridge, he now knew something of life
on that planet, had memories of another complete life, and had lost it all (which
was the cost of experiencing it), being left only with the flute he had learned to
play when he was there. Friends told me that they, too, were in tears at the end of
that episode.
You can see the Ressikan flute in the captain’s quarters on the CD-ROM
Interactive Technical Manual. You can move around the Enterprise, find the
restrooms at the side of the bridge opposite the turbo-lift, learn about dilithium
crystals and the warp core in main engineering, or look out at the stars from Ten
Forward. But you’re on your own, and one of the disappointing things about this
CD-ROM is that the ship seems such an empty place. This is because ST:TNG is
about the development of relationships. DS9, its immediate successor (which was
screened by the BBC in parallel, sometimes with linked narratives, even though
they are set in different times), is rather more preoccupied with these more soapy
relationship themes because the space station is stuck above the surface of Bajor
next to the wormhole and cannot race around having adventures in different
places. As with other soaps, we have been with these characters a long time, and
suffered many painful things with them. But unlike other soaps, we have always
known that it wouldn’t carry on forever, that there were seven seasons to these
lives we shared with them and that they were all already gone.
67
It was standing in front of Picard’s desk that made me realise that this life on the
USS Enterprise had already disappeared, and was hurtling into the past. The series
produces that uncanny sense of losing what was never really there and a strong
attachment to people who are quite unreal. When we recognise these things, then,
we also need to understand where those things were formed and how we then feel
them so deep, as so close to them inside us and then as taken away from us.
68
Clubbing
The club is a place that condenses everyday life and opens up its contradictions.
Here we find distortions of reality in this enclosed space and the production of a
different reality. There is concealment and display, but what is concealed is
produced as effectively as what is deliberately played out. This is the scene. We are
dancing in ‘Sankeys Soap’ in Manchester. We are drinking water. These places are
friendlier and safer than the alcohol clubs in north Manchester where people
stagger into each other before being sick in the toilets, where meeting someone’s
eye could mean getting beaten up, where people are uncoordinated and angry. We
are coordinated but not regimented. We aren’t marching, but we move together fast.
The club is a place of simultaneous anonymity and individualisation. At one and
the same moment, it functions as a city site where masses of people are brought
together who do not know one another. We go to clubs with friends and we move
apart through the course of the evening and encounter each other again from time
to time. We may dance in a group, but we cannot speak, and communication is
broken and then we become bodies among other bodies. Like much life in the city,
there are clusters of distinguishable, recognisable faces amidst a crowd of people
who are strangers. Here there is also contact. Some guy pushes past another and
their bodies glance against each other. One is rebounding and shouting, and the
other shouts back. They mimic each other shouting for a minute or two, but if this
is a conversation it is one without words, and the facial expressions and gestures are
each echoing the laughter of the other.
This is a place of Speed, and calm. Someone comments that the Speed they take
to keep them up with the beat is bitter, more granular, than last time. Not a smooth
white powder, but crystalline, displaying the signs of something manufactured,
carrying the traces of technology. Someone suggests that it contains glucose, and
someone complains that it seems ‘artificial’, as if there was a more natural unrefined,
prerefined version. Now the rhythm is faster and you move into it with more energy
and a sense of exhaustion and exhilaration that carries you through at the end of a
week into more intense physical work than you imagined possible. But this rhythm
is repetitive and also contains within it a hypnotic effect where time seems to slow
down, and the absence and presence of others is noticed but barely significant.
We are surrounded by machines. There is a pinball machine in the corner
upstairs. But that is low-tech. Perhaps that is why it is there. The rest is higher tech
than that. This night is called ‘Bugged Out!’, and the shiny metallic computer-
graphic letters allude to electronic bugs as well as getting off your head. The walls
69
are black, and that is what we wear too, mainly, to disappear into it more than
dress to appear against it. But not everyone disappears. These events are as
personalized as they are technologized. ‘Bugged Out!’ could be anywhere. It is a
particular regime of beat defined by the characteristic mix of styles. Breakbeats
administered by the guy at the turntables, pushing the next record around
backward to catch and interlace with the rhythm of the last track. We are organized
into the tracks, our bodies repetitively tracing the beat and trying to catch it
ourselves as it is interrupted and doubled, as we anticipate it and slide in alongside
it, as it develops into more intense jungle. This is progress through technology.
We are in a place which contains us for a limited period of time, but where this
time has no necessary beginning and end. It’ll be cheaper to get in if you arrive
before eleven, but once you are in, it is as if time stops. There are no clocks on the
wall, and when you look at your watch, you’ll be surprised, for by then it’ll be well
into the morning. You should be asleep, but you’re dancing, and you’re pulled into
a beat that makes it seem like you’re dreaming. You see people you know, but they
don’t speak, and your perception of them now is at the level of images rather than
words. Their faces appear and disappear, and they’re lit in unusual ways, glowing
and fading, as if they weren’t real at all, but there in the ways we remember friends
from the past as they drift or flash through our minds. These people are apparitions
rather than interlocutors. We are floating into a kind of connected space in which
the normal boundaries between bodies are reconfigured, where the atmosphere is
humid to the point of saturation and we give and take fluids, where the air is dense
with smoke and we breathe it deeply. We are in a crowd where we feel the presence
of others and move between and against them, but we are a crowd without an
object, focused at moments across the room and, at moments, upon our own
movements. When we meet another’s eyes, the rise and fall of our heads in signs
of reassurance and recognition are within the time of the music, as if we are
moved by something else that is both outside and inside us. As we enter it, we
already experience an intense and fantastically fast rush as we feel ourselves pulled
into a sound system that will overwhelm the other senses and blot out speech, and
the sound races into us. Near the speakers, you can feel this sound pushing its way
through your body, and your chest will vibrate.
Two things happen. One thing is that the music is so loud that it is as if the
sound carries you through it, as if the movements of your body are organized by
the sound. And everyone around you is also organized, but although they are
moving with it and within it, they are not synchronized. They are moving as if
they are mechanized, but the coordination of their movements with each other,
and sometimes with you, is ordered according to a logic that does not seem strictly
predictable. Perhaps it is the interrelationship between the simultaneous sense of
speed and slowness, something frantic in the movements and a concentrated calm
in the faces and the occasional touches and exchanges, as when someone gently
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CLUBBING
takes my wrist and turns it over to see the time. So the texture of the music
becomes the texture of experience, and your movements and perceptions of others
are fluid and dreamlike and organised as if they were collections and sequences of
images. And while this thing is happening, while there is one realm of image
experience woven into the music, there is something else.
The other thing is that sounds are sampled and integrated into the music so
that you identify them just before you lose them, so that they become recognisable
as fragments of a life outside the music and before this night just before they
disappear. Sometimes this is just because there is an element of a song that you
know, a musical phrase that has been borrowed from somewhere else, and just
there for the moment you remember it. But often it is because there is a fragment
of speech, and the repetitive sampling and jumbling is of something that operates,
for an instant, as a representation of something at the same time as it is being
resignified so that it loses its everyday sense. So now, perhaps, you hear the
injunction to ‘abandon desire’ in one of the tracks as real words with a definable
meaning and then they become unreal, surreal, part of the regime of desire that
you abandon yourself to as they become absorbed into the music. The club
becomes simultaneously a place of sexualisation and desexualisation.
So there is the production of a double space for the subject in the single space
of the club, a subject organised by a realm of images and a subject who is reminded
of their place in a realm of words. It is as if there really is a separate unconscious
and conscious, and as if the two were intertwined. And at the same time the
subject is both inside and outside the music. This is already now a psychoanalytic
subject, a lived effect of this materially organized space, and you are it. But
another double effect takes this subject and transforms it. On the one hand, you
feel yourself collectivised in a series of mirrored relations between self and others.
You are among bodies very like yourself moving like you. You model each other,
and you learn to dance and interpret shifts in the beat by watching how the others
are performing themselves for you and how the others watch you. Your only
communication is most of the time through repetitive movements, which function
as acknowledgements. On the other hand, you are individualised as you follow
different trajectories through the evening, moving upstairs and to a different
room, taking time out and sitting and watching, walking down to the bar, moving
into a register of communication to buy something, perhaps, and finding your
way back to reoccupy a space. So, within the double space for a subject who is
finding their way through images and words, through the unconscious and
conscious, there is an interior and exterior. But this interior and exterior realm is
complex, and the point is that it is psychoanalytically complex. For here there is a
space for a subject who replicates the others, as if they were absorbed in a
narcissistic illusion, and there are also subjects representing themselves to
themselves as subjects, as if they were rational egos.
71
A psychoanalytic reading of cultural phenomena finds in every little thing an

expression of the contradictory mesh of objectivity and subjectivity that comprises
the seemingly seamless totality of capitalist society. That is, every little thing is
woven into the culture with an essence that seems to exist independently, but is an
ensemble of social relations. This contradictory essence can be opened up and the
contradictions traced out to the culture that makes it possible, which gives it life.
This life appears when we speak psychoanalytically and it can appear when we are
simply dancing, and then psychoanalysis is, at some deeper level, music to our ears.
72
E and me
Desires to be connected with everyone else, to feel the barriers between self and
others disappear and to enjoy a complete interconnection of experience, are powerful
collective forces in this culture. One of the paradoxes and impossibilities of this
wished for state of harmonic engagement is that the individual absorbs the wish
from the collective; the individual only becomes who they are, and able to articulate
the wish by virtue of their place in a wider symbolic matrix. Many varieties of
psychoanalysis participate in that paradox by locating the wish to return in the
individual, rather than in the collective, and finding narcissistic impulses to
‘return’ in the child within. Like notions of heritage in late modernity, however,
this ‘return’ is constructed for us, and it constructs a place for us that never was.
One way of ‘returning’, appropriately enough, is through ‘Ecstasy’, a drug in
tablet form best taken while dancing. Go to a club, perhaps ‘Paradise’, and smuggle
a dose past the bouncers in your sock. Perhaps you would buy one inside. In my
case, an angel bought me one for my birthday. Dope slows you down, unlike
Speed, and although it helps you dance for a long time, you are still pretty much
in control. One thing I had noticed about the club called ‘Home’, however, had
been how friendly all the hot and strobe-lit bodies had been. They were on ‘E’, and
shared their bottles of water around. Unlike other alcohol clubs though, this
loosening of inhibitions (if that is what it was) was not aggressive or threatening.
It was as if they were connected. Well, I thought, we shall see.
If you drink beer, it lessens the effect, so I finished my pint, and I danced. Nice,
but I had not started yet. I fumbled in my sock, popped the tablet into my mouth
and moved off to the centre of the flashing basement. People smiled, we laughed,
and we touched. The beat was very fast, and there is a typical repeated multi-track
major chord on a piano in a lot of house music that is overlaid with an extremely
high chanting voice. But this was still in the first half hour, so this was not E. Maybe
I did not need it. It takes effect after about half an hour, so I then started to feel
more relaxed, and energetic. An hour in, and I heated up. I bought a half-litre bottle
of water from the bar for some exorbitant amount, and drank it down. In some
clubs, they turn off the taps in the toilets. You must drink. A rush of furnace-hot
blush rose from my shoulders and hit my head. I stopped dancing. A mistake.
One of the problems with notions of connection and interconnectedness is
that they set up all the more powerful positions of exclusion for those who are out.
As I leant on a pillar for support, and the people on the dance floor seemed to drift
away, I felt I did not fit with it. I thought, in this last resistance to the effect of the
73
drug, I thought I should not have taken a whole tablet because I am of smaller
frame, because I am too old, because something in my neurophysiology reacts
badly to this, because this may be a bad batch, because now I have to wait for this
to finish. I did not have to wait though, because as I slid down the pillar to the
floor, time disappeared. This is not to say that I lost consciousness, or that the
unconscious took over, but that as I sat against the wall in puddles of condensation
and sweat, the music felt slow and the night went fast.
My partner crouched over me, and when I touched my lips, she went and filled
the water bottle. As I told her then, and as she told me then, she was looking after
me. I think I learnt something about regression that evening; that regression is not
a simple return to early infantile feelings, but may be something of a special state
which is as much constituted by what our culture ‘knows’ about children as it is
by personal fantasies of helplessness. I was child-like, but I was not, in the popular
sense of the term – a sense that psychoanalysis too often reproduces – back to
being the child I once was. I felt comforted and safe, completely incompetent and
happy. Child-like anxieties only appeared over the following days as I came back
to the adult world.
As I returned, I oscillated between floating in lazy carelessness and struggling
to grasp a sense of myself. I did not deliberately adopt strategies for coping, but
vivid dreaming helped. As I drifted in and out of sleep through Sunday, I was
counting and rearranging letters. Four letters – E D S I (and I not sure now in
what order to write them) – appeared in lines, and I knew that I had to put them
together side-by-side (yes, one of the possible combinations is ‘side’). At times
I was on the edge of panic as I succeeded in linking three letters, and realised that
one still floated free. It was only when I shook myself out of sleep that I escaped
that. I am reminded now of bizarre objects, and the linking work that goes on as
one tries to make knowledge, and I also think of little letters of desire that
underpin the individual body’s place in a system of knowledge and culture.
I also dreamt of crouching down to comfort one of my nephews, a little boy
four years old. It was a family scene, and the cause of his distress was his sense of
not understanding, and not being able to say that he did not understand. As
I stroked his hair, I felt like crying too, but at the hopeless task of reassuring him
that it would be alright to say that he was frightened because he did not
understand. I knew, of course, that I could not convey this message to him
directly, for that would make the problem worse. I remember being told a joke
when I was young. It is the first ‘real’ joke I remember, and the joke is, among
other things, that I just could not get it. ‘Why does nobody go hungry at the
seaside?’ I was asked, as I stood in the kitchen. The answer is ‘because of all the
sandwiches there’. I could not pull apart the words, and when I was given them
separately, I felt all the more anxious at the image of ‘sand witches’ on the beach.
I did not understand.
74
E AND ME
One of the ‘side effects’ of psychiatric medication is a dry mouth, and an

unquenchable thirst. Patients who lunge for water get labelled for exhibiting
erratic behaviour, and it is too easy for mad doctors to find a mental malfunction
instead of direct physical need. I needed to drink water for a week, and my speech
was slower as the words stuck on their way out. I caught myself touching my lips,
as I had done on Saturday night, and often it was, when I noticed this gesture, that
I knew I must drink again. One of the problems that I had in the full flow of the drug
was an inability to link this need for fluid with a demand that could be articulated.
Gradually, as the week progressed, I learned to make the link again; something like
desire, as the mediator in the gap I was beginning again to feel, was returning.
Desire came back, and connected need to the demands that might fulfil them.
It was not, after all, down in the hidden depths or the past, and it could not be
‘released’ with a drug. Desire bound up with a sense of interconnection to others
does not so much have its source in pre-social narcissistic bliss, but in the
participation of the subject in a symbolic social world. While much psychoanalysis
romanticises the individual unconscious as the place of creativity and truth, and
the popular appeal of Ecstasy – religious, sexual or house – is an appeal to the
individual to discover something inside, it seems now that it is rather that it lay
outside, and I came back to it after a search which was going in the wrong
direction. The closest to connection is in the dancing. When the dancing stops, the
self collapses inward and away from others.
This is part of the paradox that conditions the relationship between what the
individual wants and the collective that provides the fantasy that it is the singular
desire of the individual to ‘return’ to it. Another young boy died in a club later that
week. He had taken one-and-a-half tablets, and his body had overheated. He was
shaking, and he could not speak. Where do you go to escape if you live in a world
that constructs desire as something that could not possibly lie in the world, but
must be sought in another place? Not therapy surely, for that too often plays in the
same rhetoric of solace through retreat. A line in one of Madonna’s songs sounds
like ‘Let’s get unconscious on E’. This might be deliberate, though the printed lyric
reads ‘Let’s get unconscious honey’, and maybe from now on I will stick to sweets.
Nonsensical postscript: El Turronero told me all this, and then I realised that he
was me, Turri.
75
Garage nightmares
‘This is the deal.’ ‘The deal?’ ‘The deal is this.’ I’m being offered something special
in a garage, but since they have my car already and it has clunks and clicks it didn’t
have before I took it in to be serviced last week, I’m trapped. Dialogue in garages
between mechanic and customer looks like ‘ideal speech’ (images of transparent
open direct and genuine communication that are described by the German social
theorist Jurgen Habermas), but I feel like I’m in a David Mamet play (tales of
layers of contricks; think of the films The Water Engine or The Spanish Prisoner,
for example). Suddenly I’m lacking something serious, and the person who makes
this clear to me is the only one who can put it right. The guy behind the counter
is telling me that he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he let me take the car on
the road unsafe. He seems to believe it. He looks at me, reaches for his pen and
draws another diagram of ‘tracking levers’ and ‘rear bushes’. Of course, he’s not
sure if this bit is causing the problem, and he can’t guarantee that a new one will
stop the noise. He reminds me that I don’t want to take my car away from them
with noises it didn’t have before and that I really don’t want to spend my
hard-earned money on the car and have things end up worse. I agree. This is part
of the deal. I agree with him when he tells me I don’t want to pay more, of course
I want him to sleep at night, and now he’s going to replace that part down there,
near the smudgy biro picture of the axle, free of charge. They’ll pick up the car,
free. They’ll replace the part. But of course it’s when I feel that I’m winning, and
I brought all my assertiveness skills with me this morning and practised every one,
that I suspect that something is going wrong.
The process of consuming garage services has a special quality that draws you
into a specific kind of transferential relationship. First you make the demand.
Garages advertise, but you really have to want to take your car. And you’re not
simply buying something to make it better. The car must be opened up, examined,
and it must go through its paces so it can speak to the mechanic. The noises it
made while you were driving must emerge again and be heard by an expert ear.
Someone special listens, who then detects what underlying pathological structure
is present and what needs to be done to correct it. When you are driving the car
around in everyday life, you can reassure yourself that the squeaks and rattles lie
on a continuum that all cars display, but then when a friend asks you if you can
hear something and tells you, perhaps, that it might be the transmission, say, you
and your car are locked into a condition that is qualitatively different. So, when
you choose your garage and make a demand for repair, you are asking for an
77
interpretation of that particular structure. It has become dangerous, it is causing

more damage, it might get out of control; what is it?
The mechanic knows that you have chosen them. They know that your
demand for repair is driven by a certain level of desperation. Maybe you have been
to this garage before, and so maybe they already know the history of the car. Even
so, with some caution you offer the suggestion that it might be the transmission
and you also remark, of course, that it was, after all, someone else’s suggestion.
‘Transmission’ is a rather too-technical term, and you know that it is your task to
speak of clunks and clicks – speak the experience of the noise and the sensation of
driving directly as you feel it – and it is the mechanic’s task to translate these
everyday accounts into a specialist vocabulary. Even when they draw you a
diagram – and my favourite garage used to bring out a sooty broken version of the
relevant part out of an old wooden box so I could gaze at it as they explained what
I was going to pay for – you must repeat the names of the parts with a certain
hesitation. So you speak their language, just.
But now maybe it is a new garage, invested with a surplus desire that they might
give you what you have come to lack – and lack all the more because of what the
other garages have done and failed to do. People who have built up a special
trusting relationship with a mechanic are so lucky, for a time. But how quickly
that trust can be broken, and how quickly the story of the good garage you happily
relate to anxious car-owner colleagues turns into a story of mercenary betrayal
and bad workmanship. Maybe you thought the mechanic was your friend. So
maybe it is a new garage, and this is where the transferential garage nightmare really
starts. Now your demand to the mechanic has hidden in it a history of disappointed
encounters with other garages. They know that. They might provoke it when they
ask you, as they shake their head and suck their teeth in disbelief at something in
the engine, ‘Who repaired this last time?’ Maybe they are asking you this
reluctantly, against an attempt to maintain some professional solidarity with
colleagues in other garages. This is a tricky step for you both to take, for they don’t
want to draw you into the position of the complaining customer who’s always done
wrong by, and you want to be someone who can show loyalty. They are going to care
for your car. You are hoping that they will be the ones that will put it right, the
ones you can really trust. At the same time that you know you are walking into this
house of games, you also know that this encounter will only bring you what you
want if you both play the language game of confidence and trust. Tell them what
you have done to your car and who you left it with in the past.
The real garage nightmare is the movement across an endless chain of mechanics,
hoping always that the next garage will be the one who will understand and put your
car to rights. Each movement along the chain of mechanics, which is driven by the
hope that the next one will be perfect, takes you further away from that imaginary
first garage, the one which checked the car from the factory before it first set out on
78
GARAGE NIGHTMARES
the road. It’s like they are next to each other as you move from one to another, like a
metonymical movement from part to part so one comes to stand for another, almost.
You don’t often allow yourself the thought that even that first garage may have set
up a career for your car of inevitable and fruitless repairs. Surely your car was once
without fault? And so the next garage will be the one able to comprehend the
history of failed repairs and the accumulated damage wrought on the car by each
other previous trusted and abandoned garage, garages you now deeply distrust,
garages you avoid, garages you glare at in reproach as you drive past.
Either way, you make yourself dependent and vulnerable. It is almost like you
are turning over a part of yourself to the garage when you hand over your car.
Perhaps you wait in the garage between loud daytime television and a grubby coffee
machine, waiting for the nightmare to end, or you try getting round the world on
foot or by public transport. Time slows down because things take longer, or it
stretches out because the waiting seems interminable. The organization of the day
breaks down, and now ordinary clock time is replaced by something which you
must assume is logical time; it sure isn’t your kind of time but one determined by
the rhythm of the mechanic’s day and the demands made by other customers.
Of course your car really needs to be repaired, but you are drawn into another
level of relationship to what you need and what you need of others when you
make the demand for repair, and you are drawn into a qualitatively quite different
level of impossible fantasy relationships as you are drawn into the metonymical
chain of garages who might one day meet your desire. It’s not so much Habermas
and his hope for open, transparent communication that’s relevant here, but it seems
like Habermas plus Mamet equals Freud, the illusion of ideal speech plus paranoiac
layers of deception equals being driven by the unconscious. The relationship between
need, demand and desire in the garage nightmare is structurally psychoanalytic (so
take this as an account of how psychoanalysis might work or, better, the conditions
of possibility for it to make sense). So, the deal is this. You want to trust someone
with your car, but you are ready to be taken for a ride. Is that the deal?
79
Helpless in Japan
Japanese culture is often invoked as an exemplary case by those concerned with

the anthropology of the emotions, for we can observe in that culture one striking
instance of the different forms that feelings take in different language systems and
how certain feelings are brought to life when they are named as such. The
argument is that people in places that are so distant and different from ‘us’ display
and experience a range of emotions that will seem to Westerners very strange, far
from what we assume to be normal. Far from pathologising another culture,
though, an attention to the particularity of these feelings may also serve as a moral
lesson to us about the limits of our own language.
Psychoanalysis itself would then have to take on a quite different character as a
‘talking cure’ if the talking is about feelings that presuppose a quite different
relationship between child and parent and then, by implication, between patient
and analyst. The Japanese word ‘amae’, for example, names a kind of emotion
that the English term ‘dependence’ only imperfectly captures, for it cannot be
pinned down so neatly by us in our language. Many studies of amae evoke
aspects of a comforting nestling in the care of others in early life and the way a
degree of indulgent helplessness would be anticipated, enjoyed and resisted
later on when someone may go into analysis. Some Japanese psychoanalysts will
indeed expect that some degree of ‘amaeruing’ to the analyst will take place as a
necessary part of the transference, and a patient’s inhibitions in showing that
dependency may well be interpreted in order that the analysis will progress
beyond it.
There is a danger that when we identify the characteristics of a culture and the
kind of therapeutic approaches appropriate to it, we thereby homogenise it,
making it seem as if every member of that culture is the same and as if there is one
authentic way to be part of it. This danger applies to those of us looking in from
the outside and to those insiders who want to persuade us how different they are.
And then, in a process that is complementary to a moral lesson to Westerners
about the particular texture of Japanese emotion, the patient may be subjected to
a moral lesson about what it means to be genuinely Japanese. In this danger lies
one of the stakes of cross-cultural psychoanalysis, and the oft-rehearsed suspicion
on the part of Western analysts, for example, that what goes on in Japan may not
really be psychoanalysis at all. And for me to inquire about an emotion I do not
fully understand, implicates me in the difficult relationship between my own
psychoanalytic culture and another one, Japanese psychoanalytic culture.
81
Two Japanese analysts, a husband and wife some years my elder, recounted a
version of the moral tale about the importance of amae one evening in Tokyo, and
it wasn’t very long before I, too, was entangled in networks of this emotion, the
performative effects of words about it. Their generosity in treating me and my
partner to a meal in an expensive restaurant was complemented by their
willingness to playfully indulge us as we asked stupid questions about Japanese
culture. Now we were the visitors, being told about another visitor from England
many years ago, who finally was able to learn how to be Japanese. One thing he
learnt, perhaps the most important thing, was how to put himself in the hands of
his hosts. Instead of asserting himself and pretending that he was able to cope on
his own, our predecessor came to understand that his relationship with his
colleagues around him in Japan was to be one of utter dependence. This helpless
and trusting dependence on others is part of the interdependence that
characterises traditional Japanese culture, but I was reminded that, in the context
of a visitor in a strange land, it was one of the aspects of experience that is referred
to as ‘amae’.
One example of the role of amae was then pointed out to me in an uncomfortable
(for me) reflexive commentary on how we had started our meal together and
embarked on this conversation (a first reflexive twist which was to be folded
further around me before the evening was over). A Japanese person would never
(as I had) ask his hosts in a restaurant what they would recommend, for that still
presupposed an untoward element of independent wilful choice about what
they would eventually decide to eat. I recalled that I had also said that I was in
their hands as to what to choose from the menu, but kept quiet because I felt that
to have protested at their interpretation and (as I felt) moral imputation would
have only served to exemplify the independence of spirit that I was being
cautioned against. Although they had actually only ordered the dishes on the
menu that we had expressed an interest in, what I was already experiencing, I must
admit, was more a resistance to amae than amae as such (and along the way
learning more about my own Western structure of subjectivity than the intricacies
of another culture).
You have to say, they continued, ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘I’m tired’ or something
else to indicate how helpless you are. But what they were also inviting me into was
a performance of exactly what they wanted me to understand about how to be in
Japan, and what they incited in me was the very individuality and autonomy
proscribed by their account. Finally, with everyone a little tired, the evening drew
to a close and to arrangements to get to a meeting with one of them the following
day. These were arrangements that involved travel and changes to different lines
on the subway, and it was here that I revealed how little I had absorbed of my
lesson in emotional etiquette. The Tokyo subway map does, it is true, look like a
surreal mass of multi-coloured Ramen noodles, but I did already know how to
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HELPLESS IN JAPAN
transfer from the Hibiya line at Akihabara to the JR Sobu line toward Shinjuku in
order to get from Minowa station to Sendagaya (so you get the idea, that I wanted
to feel in control). ‘Yes’, I said, ‘It’s OK, I can manage it OK’. One of the analysts
said in a stage whisper to his wife, in playfully wistful tones that mingled admonition
with shades of disappointment, ‘he doesn’t want to amaeru’.
Indignation welled up in me, and I did not know for sure whether I could make
sense of what I felt either as guilt (in my culpable offence against what they had
advised) or as shame (in my failure to act as they expected me to). This was
compounded with embarrassment at their kindness and cultural literacy
compared with my resentment and inability to navigate this new terrain. Caught
somewhere between the two emotions I already knew much better than the one
they had been trying to describe to me, I could not disentangle myself from that
strange double bind by commenting further on how I had been caught; for that
would have been to display a degree of control over the situation that would also
have confirmed once again how I did not want to amaeru. What was most
powerful about the phenomenon for me, was that I was positioned not only as a
member of another culture (of the West, in which guilt would be the appropriate
response to my infraction of a rule), and not only as if for a moment I were a
member of that culture (of Japan, in which shame would perhaps be the more
appropriate response to my humiliating lapse), but somewhere between the two.
That is, the emotion ‘amae’ had been constituted both as the topic of the
conversation and as the very stuff of it, reflexively mobilised in order to make it
real, and to make me feel it as something that was normal, normalising (and
something that would render those who do not conform to it as pathological in
some way).
It is possible that I would not have experienced something of the shape of this
very different emotion as part of the fabric of Japanese psychoanalytic culture –
even if struggling against it more than tumbling into it – if I had not already been
set up, set myself up, to respectfully engage with that culture from within Western
psychoanalytic culture. What I did learn was that commentary upon an emotion
can, given the right context, quite quickly mobilise complex responses in those
who want to be inside a culture and those who are on the outside.
A footnote about gender: In the toilet together after we left the restaurant, my
host said, as he stood at an adjacent urinal, that he felt very embarrassed when
he first visited Britain long ago because the urinals there were too high for him to
reach easily. I said that one of the things I liked about Japan was that, because
I was shorter than the average person in Britain, it was nice to be somewhere
with things on a smaller scale for a change. I understood our exchange to be one
that revealed something of each of our different kinds of dependence and as an
exchange that maybe itself also functioned as a performance of interdependence.
After I had suffered a narcissistic insult to my own Western masculinity, this was
83
one good way of asserting a common bond between us (and you may not be
surprised that my female partner’s experience of the whole evening was rather
different from mine). The next day at the end of the meeting he asked me if I knew
the way to the subway station, and of course, I replied, ‘No, I’m completely
helpless here.’
84
Greek chairs
I am looking up at the underside of a Greek chair. Interlocking fibres that form

the seat are held in place by three strong cords running from front to back; there
are wire supports diagonally linking the chair legs, and the lower front strut now
almost touches my forehead. My head and shoulders are on the floor, and the rest
of my body is curved up and back over my head so that my feet can rest on the
chair seat. This is what I know as hellasana (more accurately, halasana), a
shoulder-stand modified to work with props to support different shapes and
states of body. But it could be worse. Iyengar yoga, unlike more energetic forms
like ashtanga yoga, uses blocks and straps and mats rolled up so that anyone can
adopt versions of the ‘asanas’, poses in which we stretch muscles we never knew we
had before. And, here in north-west Crete, we have found extraordinary new uses
for chairs; we sit sideways, pulling ourselves against the backs, lean back and grasp
the sides of the seats, and we even rest upside down with our legs stretched up and
heads hanging between two Greek chairs.
Yoga would seem at first glance to be one of the quintessentially spiritual-
therapeutic components of New Age subcultures, promising inner growth in the
context of meditative postures and a harmonic relation with one’s newly discovered
self. In a Western world that imagines that it has lost connection with its own nature,
what could be more natural than looking to the East and to practices that seem to
heal the rift between mind and body? But here, in Manchester-style Iyengar, is a little
world that sets itself against such types of self-improvement and, just where you
would least expect it, is a pocket of resistance against anything psychoanalytic as a
mode of description for who one is or how one might find oneself.
This does not mean that we could not interpret some of the things that go on
here, and stretch psychoanalytic categories to make sense of how people relate to
each other. At the beginning of the morning sessions, for example, we pressed our
hands together, namaste pose, and gave thanks to the sage Patanjali and to the
Iyengar family for developing the form of yoga we were to practice that day. As we
took up one pose, we were informed that we should aim for it to be ‘effortless
effort’, as Prashant Iyengar likes to say at classes in Pune in India. One of the
trainee teachers attending the course in Crete asked if she could take notes, and
was told that sequences of poses were things she would learn in the process of
doing them herself. It would be possible, then, to detect particular relations to
authority and modes of identification, but what should be noted is that nowhere
85
in this Iyengar form of yoga are such things reflexively commented on such that
a therapeutic mode of being is advertised to the students on the courses.
It was possible to see lines quite clearly drawn between Iyengar and New Age
practices last year when a rival yoga group had a table next to that of our group,
the only other table in the taverna where we do our thing. We all knew that all
manner of stuff about crystals, magic circles and meditation was taught alongside
a version of yoga by the leaders of the other group, self-styled shamans. And we
were having none of it; ours was the no-nonsense, keep-yourself-fit class; and we
kept ourselves to ourselves. As I lie here gazing up at the bottom of the chair,
listening to the sea wash up on the pebbled beach across from the taverna and
waiting for the next move, invariably ‘havanotherasana’, I know that nothing
much more is required of me, except that I move and stretch my body and
perhaps breath deeply – nothing much deeper than that. I did once go to one
expensive class at Point Reyes Station (a gentrified old-hippy kind of place in
north California), and that was much more reverent to the spiritual side of the
practice. There, it could sit quite easily (sukhasana) alongside other New Age
therapies hosted by the centre; the quasi-therapeutic aspect was already signalled
by the evocative chanting and bell-jingling music that accompanied it (an effect
ruined somewhat by the teacher’s dog wandering around and licking us while we
held a pose).
My first yoga experience was in India, and the teacher there did urge us to relax
our eyebrows and imagine the cosmic energy entering our bodies as we engaged
in deep breathing at the end of the class, breathing known as pranayama. I went
out of desperation, after all but crippling myself washing the kitchen floor too
vigorously the day before I left for my holiday, and a slow, careful stretch in class
every morning relieved the pain in my back. There were some podgy middle-class
Indian women in the class, too, the following year, visitors to the hotel curious to
know what this ‘yoga’ was about, and so the gap between secular and religious
worlds was apparent in a different way over in this other place.
Then I was hooked, almost. The problem was finding a class at home. One at a
primary school up the road was in the cafeteria, and so we rolled around in remains
of mashed potato. No. Another was very fast, and this is where I learnt what
ashtanga would entail (including a dislocated rib for one of the participants,
I learnt later). Not that. I stuck to the third for a few weeks, but the teacher
chattered on about her friends and relations and the delights of upcoming all-day
yoga picnics and this sent me up the wall. No deep New Age therapeutic talk about
discovering your inner self to be sure, but something that amounted to prattleyama
rather than relaxed breathing.
Iyengar yoga in the UK has a major centre in Manchester, and developed there
after its founder, Mr B. K. S. Iyengar visited the city some years back; a group of
women who had stumbled on the approach pretty well by accident after attending
86
GREEK CHAIRS
keep-fit classes, set up an institute for Iyengar yoga. The classes in the institute
centre out on the east edge of Manchester could not be further from India, yet
teachers and trainees still travel to Pune to take instruction from the Iyengars
(where Mr Iyengar has a reputation for being particularly bad-tempered to
English visitors); large black-and-white photos of Iyengar in improbable poses
adorn the walls of the centre’s main hall. Sometimes classes will commence with
a cassette tape player broadcasting invocative chants (and the muffled recording
from Pune comes complete with sounds of auto-rickshaws hooting from the busy
streets in the background). However, while this adds to the atmosphere, there is
not much of the mystic east here. Even the use of Sanskrit names for poses is quickly
followed by a more accessible description – ‘now tadasana, standing pose’ – and the
teachers sometimes have little stick figures scribbled on their order sheets, or even
have the last relaxing lie-down (savasana) marked quite simply as ‘time for a chill’.
These are strong, mostly working-class Lancashire women who have incorporated
yoga into a way of life that has little time for self-indulgent pandering to the self as if
some part of the self needed protecting and nurturing so it could find its way to speak
through life’s pain. This is not even personally therapeutic as such, let alone
psychoanalytic, and instead of an attention to ‘boundaries’ in the classes (the kind
of thing that we might expect if this yoga was a kind of therapeutic practice), the
watchwords are hard work and good example; ‘come on lad, legs a little straighter’.
That was me there, straightening my legs, and I did try a bit harder. I try still.
There have been attempts in India to distance yoga from spirituality and connect
it more closely with science; there have even been studies of beneficial effects on
rats’ brains after they had been put upside down for a while. This is care of the
body that seals itself off from care of the self, and seals itself off from anything
remotely psychoanalytic. And now there is clattering coming from the taverna
kitchen; I am getting a little bored looking at this chair, now a little hungry, and
looking forward to chilling out in savasana for a while before sitting down to a big
Greek breakfast.
87
Open secrets
Salford Masonic Hall has a notice board – it is in the entrance hallway, facing the
men’s toilets, at the back of the building, through the car park – on which visitors
can learn how many freemasons there are in East Lancashire. Gone are the old
days of secret networks and conspiratorial fraternities that guaranteed the success
of many small businesses as capitalism developed; now the message to the public
is one of transparency and goodwill in post-industrial cities like Manchester. And
more secrets will be revealed on Tuesday evenings, for this is where the Manchester
Circle of Magicians gets together to perform tricks and then show how they are done.
This circle was formed after splitting from the Order of the Magi and, unlike
most other groups of magicians in the UK – the most prestigious being the Magic
Circle – it does not require people to audition to join; instead, prospective
members, it says on the website, ‘will simply be asked if they are seriously interested
in magic’. The Manchester circle fights for its status – to be recognised as having
members who are ‘real magicians’ – and has carved out a respectable space in the
myriad of organisations that practice and protect magic. There are sometimes
references to ‘jealous idiots’ who claim that there are no ‘real’ magicians who are
members, and the key dividing line is between ‘the lay man’ outside and members
who can recognise that there is a magic effect, and then ‘he is no lay person and
entitled to find out how things work’. The newsletter editor, for example, says that
he has ‘nothing against explaining secrets to genuine interested parties’; on the
other hand, he says, it is ‘the exposure to the public I detest’.
To break from the Magic Circle and its satellites around the country to set up
shop as a more accessible group is a controversial, once unthinkable, move; and it
is rather similar to psychoanalysts daring to organise separately from and
challenge the authority of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. And the
battle to be considered a ‘real magician’ is as intense as the attempts by outliers to
claim the label ‘psychoanalyst’. But there the similarity ends, for the secrets
revealed at these meetings in the Masonic hall have a quite different character to
those that operate in psychotherapy. Against the psychoanalytic conception of a
‘secret’ – something embedded in the unconscious, something of which the
individual concerned may not even be aware, something which they may never
actually unearth as they speak about its effects on their relationships with others –
these secrets are tricks to be played and then ‘shewn’.
Distinctive spellings as well as a specific vocabulary is also used to mark
membership of the ‘magical fraternity’; apart from ‘shewn’ for shown, an ‘effect’
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that is rigged up is not really ‘fake’ (as something would be if it were ‘gaffed’) but
‘feke’ (or ‘feked’); a cloth, scarf or piece of silk is a ‘foulard’ and handkerchiefs are
‘silks’. The bits and pieces – cards, sponge balls, rabbits or pigeons – hidden
around one’s person are ‘loads’, and there is much discussion of different ways of
‘passing’ an item without detection from one place to another, and mind-reading
tricks are referred to as ‘mentalism’. Advice is given on how to manage a ‘lay’
audience, including techniques of ‘forcing’ (ensuring, in a ‘force’, that a certain
card – a ‘force card’ will be chosen, for example), with particular suggestions on
how to deal with children. The emphasis is on education and ‘passing on
knowledge’; the list of events with visiting speakers, for example, is called the
‘syllabus’. We are told time and again to remember that this is not ‘magic’ after all,
just a set of tricks. One visitor showed us how to bend spoons, and chuckled as he
told us that it all boiled down to ‘prestidigitation’, which means, he said, ‘while
they’re not looking’.
The organisation of psychoanalysis and magic in the UK does have one other
aspect in common, however, which is class. The proliferation of psychoanalytic
trainings here has entailed a slight shift in the social class composition of the field,
opened up a little from the world of Bloomsbury-style upper- and higher-
professional chattering classes (with the sheer cost in fees and requisite number of
sessions per week both being factors here). The recent, more inclusive definition of
‘magician’ has a class aspect that is small, but still quite as significant. This is apparent
even in the location and composition of the meetings, in which Freemasonry is still
overwhelmingly middle-class and is still, notwithstanding its claims to be open, a
world of ever-hidden mysteries to those involved, and in which the magical fraternity
are poor and lesser cousins renting rooms. Here, the circle publicity says, there are
‘no rules’, ‘no cliques’, ‘no snobs’, ‘no politics’ and ‘no ego trips’.
The organisers often point out how cheap the events are, and they are right. At
one summer meeting, the speaker commented on how many people there were
there – it was a good turnout that night – and asked why they were not all on their
summer holidays, only to quickly answer his own question; that it was obviously
because they couldn’t afford to go away. A contributor to the newsletter pointed
out that he was not permitted to charge fees for his bookings because of government
benefit agency rules (unlike, he said, the rules that allow our politicians to travel first
class), and there are often scathing references to wealthy people (who ‘have a strange
taste in entertainment’), ‘posh people’ and those living off family money. The ethos
here is spelt out quite clearly in one newsletter as the moral to a tale of a member
performing in an expensive club and dealing with a rich heckler, ‘you are
everybody’s equal’. If you just want to have ‘friendly fun’ in the ‘fabulous, luxury
meeting rooms’ at the hall and ‘try out tricks in front of a friendly, supportive
audience’, then this is for you. Furthermore, ‘if your wife or girlfriend is also
seriously interested in magic, then they, too, will be most welcome’.
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OPEN SECRETS
The meetings attract well over a hundred men, mostly in their fifties or over,
and sometimes many more, and a few women (some of whom help out behind the
entrance desk or at video and DVD library tables). I’ve heard the line several times
that ‘ladies don’t like magic’ or, especially, that they don’t like card tricks. While a
bit of gentle banter might be useful to loosen up an audience or participant
onstage, care should be taken not to put one’s arm around a lady during a routine
because ‘her husband or boyfriend will get annoyed’. It does not pay to be
‘suggestive’, and ‘it gives us all a bad name’. These ‘real magicians’ are concerned
with the bad press that magic gets, and demystification is now part of the game.
There has been discussion in the newsletter over the years about ‘ethics’; that
is, giving due acknowledgement for different tricks. Simply ‘pinching tricks’ is
very much looked down on, and praise for a performer will include noting that he
‘always gives credit for the inspiration and moves’. Those who lead the field are
‘mentors’, but it is necessary to give an act one’s own ‘style’. This style will, of
course, include way a magician performs the tricks, but a successful routine is
largely defined by a patter, the talk which distracts attention from ‘passing’ and
‘forcing’ and other techniques of prestidigitation. However, we are now far away
from psychoanalysis, for this language is not designed to bury and misrepresent
what may once have been visible and which is now too painful to be spoken about;
instead, the talk is a mere diversion before, hey presto, we see something brought
to light. Here, ‘unlike the lay man’, ‘you’ll be enlightened on methods, subtleties,
gaffs, props and moves’.
It is strange for me, wandering in from a mainly middle-class therapeutic
world in which secrets are often assumed to be so powerful that they could never
really be fully told (a world in which the victim and perpetrator roles are
uncannily mapped onto femininity and masculinity), to find a place where there
is such attention to clarity and equality. Against the preoccupation with secrets
and a haunted suspicion with both ‘interest’ and ‘fun’ in the dominant culture,
here is a place that is resolutely non-psychoanalytic. It is possible to see that while
psychoanalysis might yet be used to unravel the psychic investments of these men
in performing their magic tricks, psychoanalytic assumptions about things on the
surface and things of depth do not yet structure how they reflect and account for
what they do. Such spaces outside psychoanalytic culture are crucial if we are to
keep some distance from it and be able to unravel its own secret, the hold it has
on many of us.
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Passé
Most stories about psychoanalysis are about others, how we might interpret what
they have made of it. Not in this case. One of the intriguing elements of Lacanian
psychoanalysis is the idea that an analysand may give account of the progress and
end of their analysis through the institution of ‘the pass’. In this way, something
secret is told and such testimony might, Lacan once hoped, serve to validate and
provide more knowledge about the psychoanalytic process. The most important
secret, though, is precisely that psychoanalysis is always already public, a public
event between two people perhaps, or a secret that is shared between many who
may not want to say that they recognise the nature of this secret. Or they may
secretly hold to another view of the public account they profess to be the correct one.
I realised that I had reached an end to my analysis, and could account for it, one
morning when I was sitting on the toilet. I was expelling something. I had eaten
Cheerios for breakfast (and a stupid Lacanian joke about the importance of serial
repetition has it that ‘the cereal is serious’). Time to move on. What I had ‘discovered’
is that psychoanalysis does not have to be true for it to work, and the way
psychoanalysis has worked for me is precisely to rediscover that psychoanalysis does
not have to be true for it to work. I have only now arrived at this thought, not
discovered it at all. I was for too long anxious that I might discover something else,
and I anticipated that discovery, anticipated it for too many years in the sense of
ensuring that such a thing would not come to pass. Only when I was able to stop
anticipating this was I able to produce something that felt like a discovery. And then
I did actually discover many things, including this. My relation to this changes as
I find myself inside what I speak about rather than outside it, but also with the
relation between outside and inside transformed so that I am inside that relation
rather than outside it (and so on). So, I have reproduced this thought about the
nature of psychoanalysis, but also recognised it as something familiar to me rather
than as something unfamiliar, something foreign that I was attached to as an idea at
the same time as I felt doubtful about it.
Of course, I have always known that psychoanalysis is not true, but I did not
know how fitting it was for me until I was able to work my way into its untruth
instead of keeping it at a distance. It has never been enough for me to say that
psychoanalysis is a discourse that one can put on or take off like a piece of
clothing. Discourse is something one cannot refuse to speak, and psychoanalytic
discourse, when it appears, does not just disappear when we say no to it. But I did
not know how to find myself inside this discourse and to find this discourse inside
93
me, and find our nature – this discourse and I – as bearers of something strange,
of the nature of subjectivity in Western culture.
I entered psychoanalysis fearing the worst: That I may change my mind, which
might mean that what I thought ran deep in me would turn out to be too superficial
to take seriously; that I might be brainwashed, which might mean that what
I thought was false would reveal itself as an underlying truth; that I may go mad,
which might mean that the tension between psychoanalysis simultaneously as
truth and falsity would be impossible to bear. The middle of the analysis was as
boring and repetitive as I can be on my worst days, and I guess I wanted to make
of those the dullest of times for myself and at least one other.
I spent some time trying to work out how an end of analysis, for me, could be
understood in terms of ‘subjective destitution’, ‘traversing the fantasy’ or ‘identifying
with the symptom’ (to cite but three Lacanian formulations of the end of analysis).
And then, I am still doubtful, and the doubt that structures who I have become is
concerned precisely with the difference between truth and lies. If, whatever I must
do, I must never tell lies, as those I loved told me, then every truth I tell which has
the metaphorical density of fiction would appear to me like a horrible lie. My
symptom, then, is my attraction to things I do not at all believe in and my efforts
to denounce them from within, with the effort of denouncing them tying me in
the process all the more closely to them. Such things could be relationships that
will be so impossible that I cannot help sabotaging them and thus finding myself
all the more tightly enmeshed in what I love to be false. Such things can be belief
systems that are so ridiculous and requiring of critique, that I enjoy spending
endless hours inside them teasing out their inconsistency. But I also know that my
attraction to those I love might also become a place where I feel truest to myself,
and my attraction to systems of belief, like psychoanalysis, can also be a language
for myself.
At the end of analysis, what I give up, as an object that I hold so very dear, is
some indefinable truth that will define who I am, that I will not tell to anyone
including myself. (I write in the present tense, for this is an impossible gesture
toward giving something up that is not over, if it ever could be.) The closer I come
to that object the more anxious I feel. But it is only by giving it up that I can
almost, but not quite, see it for what it is. Instead of viewing it from the peculiar
position that makes of it something fascinating for me, it now appears as something
rather stupid. And what is stupid about it is not what it is, but the allure that makes
it into an it.
It is only through coming to speak through psychoanalysis as a system of lies
that I am able to tell something closest to the truth. It was only giving up hoping
and fearing that psychoanalysis would access the truth that I would be able to tell
it in a way that was closest to its nature as a lie. And it is like this, without the array
of characters in a family that will help you flesh out this story with a recognisable
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PASSÉ
content, that you are faced, as I am now, with something of the formal structure
of what those characters give to me in nonsensical signifiers of cynicism and
fraud, signifiers that only operate through their potent contrast with mythical
honesty and transparency.
I have given up trying to be true to an other, or a big Other of the symbolic
field, who will determine for me what truth I must speak in order for me to believe
that I am speaking the truth. If this fails to correspond to your idea of a correct
analysis, then I leave that with you to puzzle about. If my account does not then
correspond to what you think an analysis should have produced in me, then that
is a question for you, and a problem with quite a different shape to it than the one
I traced my way around for so many years.
Now I am marking time, and looking forward to the moments when this thought
will reappear as if it were a lost object, with the essential falsity of the ground upon
which it will appear no longer giving lie to what it is to me, but giving it substance
as something true. Like all obsessionals, I hesitate, procrastinate and perform one
hundred rituals that lead me round a maze of my own making. But now I know
better something of the shape of that maze, and I am not waiting to get out of it.
Its walls are my shape rather than merely defences against something unbearable
outside and inside. Perhaps it is because those walls were always crafted around
reading and writing, in a childhood circumscribed by books, that I should search
for a written language that might trace that shape. If psychoanalysis works through
speech, it does so precisely because it is structured like a language.
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PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
Psychoanalytic Myth Today
What is psychoanalytic myth, today? The answer to this question is not simple, for in
speaking of psychoanalysis we are necessarily drawn into a series of representations
that concern us, each of us. And psychoanalytic myth structures and reproduces itself
through a variety of media in such a way as to pull us into it even when we do not
speak about it explicitly, or, we might say, ‘consciously’. We first need to draw into the
open the thought that psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice.
Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice

Of course, it is a type of speech,1 but this representational practice operates through
the symbolic forms that make our speech possible so as to induct us also, at the
very same moment we speak, into the position of a reader. We become, as we speak
within psychoanalytic myth, a reader not only of the unconscious lives of others,
but of our own speech as it seems to reveal to us something of the secrets that
inhabit our own inner lives. This mode of reading, including reading what lies in
our own speech, is, at one level, conscious, a consciousness encouraged and
facilitated by a psychoanalytic vocabulary that has circulated throughout the world
at an incredible rate in the last century.
Psychoanalysis is now widely available as a system of conceptual devices to
open up the hidden meanings of advertising, for example, and so we have come
alive to some of the images of the self that are sold to us by those who design and
maintain the symbolic architecture we must navigate in order to make sense to
others and to ourselves. That such design often deliberately incorporates
psychoanalytic imagery makes the process of interpretation both satisfying
and vacuous, but this does not stop us from attempting to fill the emptiness with
content, content that we assume to be outside consciousness, in another place.
1 Of course, this essay is indebted to, and elaborates half a century later, the descriptions
of myth to be found in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (first published in France in 1957 and
translated into English in 1972). I follow the format of the concluding essay of Barthes’
book, but the reader should note that the more personal mode of address adopted in my
little pieces that precede this essay makes them more akin to his later 1970 collection,
Empire of Signs (translated into English in 1982). Already, then, we see a shift in his way of
engaging with cultural phenomena, and that shift to a way of speaking about myth that is
congruent with and suspicious of psychoanalysis is taken further here.
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So, while we are invited to imagine that we can, at one level, employ psychoanalysis
to unpick the messages that are sent to us as we read the constellations of signs that
give a deeper texture to cultural artefacts, we are simultaneously drawn into
another implicit level of engagement with signs over which we sense that we have
no control; that deeper level is – to give it a name – the unconscious.
But why could we not insist that the process by which signs are accumulated
and chained in a way that ties us into certain presuppositions about who we must
be to understand them and communicate to others, why could we not insist that
this is a process of ‘signification’, and conclude that the illusion that signs work by
‘representing’ something else should be torn away? The motif of ‘representation’
does already harbour the idea not only that there is a real world outside the signs
(that which is represented by them), but also that there is a more surreal world
underneath, inside those who speak, or secreted into representations that
might betray what is really going on. It would then seem that dispensing with
‘representation’ would also, as a consequence, enable us to take our distance from
psychoanalytic forms of reasoning.
One paradox of the so-called structuralist and post-structuralist turn to
‘signification’ as an ostensibly depthless epistemological and ontological
alternative to representation was that, while it provoked suspicion of the claim
that there was a world outside the text (a suspicion often driven by those on the
Left but with its harvest reaped by the Right), it required the assumption that sign
systems operated in a manner unbidden and necessarily mysterious to us. So that,
as we brought our reason to bear on those sign systems in our readings of them,
we all the more conjured into existence a domain in which they commingled that
was outside reason, was unconscious to us.
Simply sidestepping ‘representation’ will not suffice, and, instead, we need to
take the representational aspect of signification seriously, for it is precisely as a
form of representation that psychoanalysis gathers its power. Psychoanalysis is an
interpretative practice concerned with the nature of representations, their role in
consciousness and the unconscious and their character as avatars, as substantial as
the words we speak or as the things we feel. As myth, psychoanalysis must succeed
in luring us in to modes of speaking, listening, reading and writing which evoke
something else to which we then choose to attend or which we attempt to avoid.
This pervasive myth also nestles in and sustains an opposition between formal
properties of representation and supposed contents, as if one aspect of its
symbolic material contained the other. The popular psychoanalytic image of the
unconscious mind as containing a series of disturbing or objectionable ideas
together with an interpretive armoury pertaining to oedipal conflicts and defence
mechanisms used to understand such things, reproduces a certain relation
between form and content. It is the peculiar relationship between form – patterns of
childrearing, personality types and categories of pathology – and content – dream
100
imagery, joke material and Freudian slips – that we need to trace as we work our
way through this kind of myth. There are, indeed, forms of relating in which we
think we are constrained and inhibited and there are contents swirling around
that we want to divine, but there is a particular texture to psychoanalytic myth
that we need to feel our way through in order to find our way out.
Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice that gives pattern to forms
of relating as well as to the organisation of space, and it is housed as much in
actual material architecture as in what it is too convenient and comforting to see
as mere symbolic froth. It is a practice that produces representations that we are
then keen to rediscover in written and visual media, and it calls upon us to find it
everywhere else, including in the experience we have that there is something
somewhere else. The texture of psychoanalytic myth is therefore a quality of its
existence that we encounter as we trace our way around a world that structures
what we try to make sense of as our divided ‘experience’.
When we attempt to communicate this experience of the texture of
psychoanalytic myth to others, we then reproduce that texture, texture woven of not
wholly graspable contents that we would like to convey and of not wholly
transparent understanding at its destination. This is, in part, because psychoanalysis
in psychoanalytic myth is itself already a model of communication. It subsists in the
contours of everyday theories of communication and exceeds them as it promises
the transmission of ideas from one person to another, and from every kind of text
to a reader, but it then also subverts that expectation. Something invariably lurks
beyond the manifest content and the immediately apparent nature of the
communication, so that other messages can be sent with the communication and
about the communication, and about the nature of communication itself.
Psychoanalytic myth as a representational practice gives a peculiar and uncertain
position to those who read it and then want to speak about it to others, and this by
virtue of its texture. The semiological characteristics of this myth must then be
augmented by conceptual and methodological approaches that trace its texture.
Psychoanalytic myth as a textural system

For psychoanalytic myth, as the representational practice that also calls into being
a particular kind of reader who is subject, they think, we think, to the
unconscious, there are also privileged sites of interpretation. These sites operate as
necessary if unwelcome and sometimes refused anchoring points around which
the representational practice coheres and which provide, at some moments, an
account as to how this practice may have originated.
There is first, as a general condition for these interpretative sites to function,
a necessary separation between two domains that are taken to be irreducible,
one to the other. These domains and the separation between them rearticulate,
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in a logic characteristic of the texture of psychoanalytic myth, the ostensible

division between the world of words (consciousness) and a world of experience
(unconsciousness). The domain of the public sphere and its correlative arenas of
work,‘leisure time’ (which ideally coexists in healthy balance with work) and political
activity (as if defined by the dominant players around organised representative
forms) is conventionally now marked off from the domain of privatised experience
in which the most intimate arenas are the family home, sexual fantasy and personal
misery (or hope of escape).
The very seepage between the two domains – public and private – serves to
mark them out as properly distinct spheres, for that seepage is itself portrayed and
experienced as the invasion or transgression of ideal taken-for-granted categories.
So, the home that may now become a place of work – in forms of home-working
that are now more legitimate than prostitution – is reconfigured as a material space
in which labour power is sold, but in which it is then necessary to mark off another
space, which will serve as place of refuge from work. Or, the public domain that is
saturated with images of sexual fantasy and promise of pleasure beyond limit –
imaginative play commodified and circulated to those who consume it in the realm
of explicit exchange value – is reconfigured so that distinct niche markets and
customised goods may pretend to provide items tailored to the specific needs of
each individual. The sign systems that organise these different domains therefore
have a two-fold quality as each sign combines what is known in semiological argot
as the signifier (the mental inscription by which we mark it) and signified (the
concept to which the mental inscription seems to refer).2 This two-fold quality is
to be seen (and felt, and thus it is, again, textural rather than immediately evident
and easily describable) in the way that the signs ‘denote’ certain objects, practices
and relationships and in the way they ‘connote’ certain idealised preconceptions
about what correctly pertains to each domain.
For example, the separation between masculinity and femininity is structured
by way of the explicit rules which determine where a real man is to be found and
what he should be doing and where women acting in a way appropriate to their
designated gender should be; that is, the signs that serve to demarcate males from
females work by denoting the type of human beings counted in each category. You
will note here that there is always a series or chain of denotative signs that serve
2 The nature of the sign was outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure (in his Course in General
Linguistics, published after his death from reconstructed lecture notes in 1916, for whom the
signifier was a ‘sound image’ and the signified the ‘concept’ associated with it, and
semiology as a ‘science of signs’ was then extended by Barthes who, in Mythologies, treated
this sign as the ‘signifier’ of a second-order sign system (‘myth’). We will adopt and twist
this framework for our own purposes, and in such a way as to conceptualise how
psychoanalytic myth operates as a distinctive element of this second-order sign system.
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to hold such objects in place, and in such practices of segregation there is

a denotative mapping of the different signs for ‘males’, ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’ as
there is for the mapping of ‘females’, ‘women’ and ‘femininity’; the apparent
equivalence between the terms in each separate series often has an ideological
aspect, and this aspect is, as we shall see, operative in psychoanalytic myth.
At the same time, the separation is underpinned by a series of ‘connotative’
relations that are characteristic of the operation of myth more generally. This means
that the world of work and the kind of activity that is demanded of those who want
to take up managerial roles in it is still cast as stereotypically masculine, and for
a ‘female’ to rise through the ranks, she will have to cast herself as a particular kind
of ‘woman’ who places presuppositions about ‘femininity’ in question. Similarly, the
private sphere is one in which it is possible to be a ‘house-husband’ as well as
a ‘house-wife’, but the connotations that attach to these signs convey something of the
normative or aberrant status of the occupant in a domain that is still stereotypically
feminine. The distinction between private and public spheres is thus freighted with
connotative material, the very stuff of myth as a second-order sign system.
Even though one of the key historical founding moments of psychoanalysis
was when Freud recognised that ‘hysteria’ was not a function of femininity –
femininity as the expression of the peculiar anatomy of the female body – and that
this neurotic condition could just as well afflict men, the prevailing mythological
structure of representations of men and women still meant that a ‘male’ suffering
hysterical symptoms necessarily threw into question their masculinity. Likewise,
the psychoanalytic category of ‘narcissism’ was seen by Freud as being more
common among women, and men displaying such a form of pathology were
drawn , by way of systems of connotation, closer to the feminine; if not completely
across the divide, then at least into the abnormal limbo-land of homosexuality (a
category held in place by a cluster of connotations that pretended, for many years,
to be reducible to a signifier that simply denoted a bare concept).
Now, it is into the separation between the two domains of public and private,
a separation that is held in place by the semiological system of myth as such, that
psychoanalytic myth insinuates itself. Two privileged sites of interpretation are
thereby constituted as practices of therapeutic intervention begin to develop and
as psychoanalysis comes to seize the centre-ground. Psychoanalysis and then
psychoanalytic myth each insist on the separation of public and private, and this
is even though, or even because, there is intense debate over the value of such
a separation.
On the one side, the public sphere guards itself against the contaminating
influences of personal distress, and, alongside the physical confinement of those
who are too obviously incapable (we are told) of engaging in public rationally
ordered activity, there is a concern that irrational, neurotic aspects of human
experience be confined to the personal domain (often with the connotative coding
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of this confinement also serving to exclude women from the public sphere). This is
a line of separation that is still enforced by those who want to keep political debate,
for example, free from the deleterious effects of emotional incontinence, and this
taboo placed on the personal within the sphere of politics serves all the more to
encapsulate and silence certain kinds of experience (which is precisely why
feminism, for example, contested this separation and confinement).
On the other side, the private sphere seeds certain kinds of practice that guard
against the influence of the public domain, and therapeutic work becomes one
such arena in which psychoanalytic theories of how the treatment should proceed
also warn against the breaching of its own boundaries. As psychoanalysis gathers
force, proscriptions against discussion of politics in the consulting room are
combined with a number of other technical rules that also, in the process, rewrite
the history of psychoanalysis. The early provision of free treatment in Vienna, for
example, is obscured by the requirement that the analysand must pay, and the idea
that therapeutic progress is dependent on such investment. Public involvement of
psychoanalysts in political debate, usually in the early years of the last century
somewhere on the Left, is wiped out by the stipulation that the ‘neutrality’ of the
analyst should be guaranteed by their absence in any other arena where they may
be known, known outside the analytic relationship defined by ‘transference’.
The first privileged site of interpretation, then, is the clinic as the place in
which past experience is re-enacted (that is, in the transference), and this becomes
the model for an activity of interpretation that serves to position those who
provide such interpretations in the public sphere as if they were analysands. In
this way, what is assumed to be reenacted in the clinic is once again reenacted
outside it (with the additional sense that this activity of interpretation almost, but
not quite, achieves the accuracy of a proper psychoanalytic interpretation). The
second privileged site of interpretation, for which the existence of the clinic is the
first condition, is that there is the figure of the psychoanalyst with a degree of
knowledge and experience to interpret, but there is included in that figure
something more.
This figure becomes a model of interpretation that serves to position those
who provide such interpretations in the public sphere as if they were (and here we
add the necessary qualifier of this function) less than psychoanalysts (and so,
again, with the additional sense that this activity of interpretation almost, but not
quite, achieves the accuracy of a proper psychoanalytic interpretation). The
borrowing of psychoanalytic discourse from its proper arena thus serves to
reiterate deference to that arena, to reinstate the practice of psychoanalysis as such
as another place where real analysis happens. This also serves to reiterate the
nature of psychoanalytic myth as a representative practice, for there is always the
allusion to, the connotation of, another place (rather in the same way as ‘another
place’, the unconscious, is evoked in much everyday psychoanalytic speech).
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It is possible, then, to repeat and annotate the figure provided by Barthes in

Mythologies, and this spatial arrangement now includes, alongside the doubling of
the categories of signifier, signified and sign at the two levels of language and
myth, some of the elements that are distributed through this pattern to turn it
into psychoanalytic myth.
i) signifier ii) signified

[Freudian] [analysand, analyst]
site
iii) sign
[implcit term ‘psychoanalysis’]
1. Signifier 2. Signified
language [term ‘psychoanalysis’] [the treatment]
3. Sign
[psychoanalysis]
MYTH I SIGNIFIER II SIGNIFIED
[meta-term psychoanalysis] [domain of interpretation]
III SIGN
[psychoanalysis, idealised,
disconnected from treatment]
The texture of this representative myth is therefore replayed in such a way as to

produce implicit terms in which the signifier ‘psychoanalysis’ comes to host yet
another sign, a necessary supplementary aspect of itself which has as its signifier
the original and implied core of psychoanalysis as Freudian and the apparatus of
the clinic and figure of the analyst as its implicit signified. The clinic and the analyst
are thus called into being as sites of interpretation, privileged sites that serve to
anchor psychoanalytic myth, anchoring, but in a place forever for those outside the
clinic, deferred, unavailable to empirical inspection. We should then attend to the
way in which the reiterative functions of psychoanalytic myth conjure up a series
of further significations (which it pretends to represent) that appear to stretch
further down – deep, deeper into the unconscious – and further back, into the
past, into the origins of psychoanalysis (as well as the origins of pathology in a past
contained in the personal experience of those subject to psychoanalysis).
The subsistence of the concepts

The signifier of psychoanalytic myth is ambiguous and evocative; it points to a series
of practices that it claims to represent (the clinic and the analyst as sites of
interpretation) and to a series of concepts that it claims to rediscover in everyday life.
To refer to the signifier of psychoanalytic myth in the singular might be read as
implying that there is but one signifier,‘psychoanalysis’, that serves to index and evoke
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relevant concepts at different levels of language, myth and supposed sites of privileged
interpretation. There are actually a multitude of signifiers that operate with a
psychoanalytic valence, that have become chained to psychoanalysis and which serve
as relays back to a psychoanalytic conception of the subject who speaks, interprets and
hears herself speak as a being that is also interpretable. There are disciplinary
designations that are popularly confused and elided with the psychoanalyst
(psychotherapist, psychologist, psychiatrist), various items from psychoanalytic
vocabulary (id, ego, super-ego, and so on) and many allusions to a depth of individual
subjects, their emotion and the cathartic effects of speaking about emotional pain.
We refer to this single signifier for analytic purposes (that is, for the analysis of
psychoanalytic myth), but whatever signifier operates as stand-in for ‘psychoanalysis’
as such serves to locate the subject who encounters it as a subject who has a particular
relationship to language and to others they attempt to communicate with. The one
signifier gathers together the texture of psychoanalytic myth for them, but it is one
of the features of this myth that its texture operates across a series of practices
rather than being located in any one text. This point can be illustrated with
reference to a well-known image that seems so far away from psychoanalysis, but
which could well, if it circulated today, be a signifying complex that gathered its
power of appeal from psychoanalytic myth.
An image of the young black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of
Paris Match mobilised a multitude of signs in the 1950s, but such an image is today
already incorporated into chains of signifiers that then call for a psychoanalytic
sensibility on the part of the reader and, crucially, a sensitivity to the responses that
the reader might have to the image as they reflect upon pain in the world. The
youthful face of this soldier signals and mobilises an interpretation that includes a
number of issues; it evokes the child-soldiers of Africa and their aberrant violence,
destruction of what should have been their right to a carefree childhood as part of
a healthy developmental process; it evokes the protection of childhood from adult
abuse, from traumatic intervention and the intrusion of the sexual interests of
those who are charged with the care of the child; it also evokes a history of racist
imagery in which gradations of civilisation distributed white and black at different
levels of rationality and irrationality, of adulthood and childhood.3
3 Images of children, their paths to healthy adulthood and their vulnerability are the
correlative and necessary underside of contemporary developmental psychology, which
cannot be understood unless there is an analysis of the forms of subjectivity called into play
when that psychology is invoked. Studies by Erica Burman at the intersection of
psychology and cultural analysis in Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (published in
2007) and Developments: Child, Image, Nation (published in 2008) explore these questions,
and include discussion of the role of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic imagery in our
understanding of childhood today.
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Psychoanalysis is an explosive signifier in the semiotics of ‘race’, and this

problematic aspect of its history spreads, with psychoanalysis, into popular culture;
it ranges from Freud’s predilection to describe his patients as his ‘negroes’, to the
anthropological studies of other cultures that pretend to also describe earlier stages
of childhood development, and to current psychiatric practice, which is still more
likely to offer white patients the option of a ‘talking cure’. Psychoanalysis also has a
problematic history in relation to women, tangled with images of hysteria, ‘penis
envy’, and more recently in the social imaginary, a preoccupation with women and
children – claims by those hostile to the impact of feminism in therapy, that
therapists might implant ‘false memories’ about childhood abuse – have produced
new categories of the vulnerable, subject to harm (and, ironically for those making
the claims, inflating all the more therapeutic currency as an explanation of how we
suffer). Freud’s comment that feminine sexuality is a ‘dark continent’ (with that
phrase marked out in English in his original text) owes more to existing chains of
signification between femininity, irrationality and blackness than to particular
technical theoretical arguments, and those chains of signification now include
psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic myth feeds back into a host of signifiers with connotations that
produce a new texture for the subjects reading and writing inside them, inside the
signifying system. The psychoanalysis in this myth does not exist inside the image
but subsists across the relationships that are formed between texts and which are
accumulated in the texture of contemporary life that is organised, for example,
around psychoanalytic conceptions of childhood and colonialism.
Of the many signifiers that signal the presence of psychoanalytic myth between
and around, enframing any particular text that seems innocent of psychoanalytic
categories, that of ‘affect’ has come to play a significant role in transforming the
relationships between individuals and social phenomena and a range of moral
judgements of those who do or do not reveal something of their feelings to others.
In the 2008 US Democratic primaries, there was a turning point during the
New Hampshire poll when Hillary Clinton broke momentarily to show a little
emotion, even, it was rumoured in the first news reports, some tears as she replied
to a question from a small group of women in a Portsmouth coffee shop. The
intimacy of the setting called forth, at last for some, an intimacy of response,
and it showed, the woman who asked the question is reported to have said, that
she ‘still has a person inside of her’. This moment also, of course, showed that this
woman has a woman inside of her, and it almost gave her an edge over Barack
Obama, a black man who has already showed passion, but who, for reasons of
masculinity and race it would seem, already has a different relation to ‘affect’ and
what he is expected to show of it.
If there is not yet a feminisation of politics, there is at least an expectation that
human beings reveal something of themselves, and once they do (or, this is the
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trick, do not) conform to the expectation that they configure themselves as subjects
of psychoanalytic myth; in this myth it is healthy to hold within the body some
emotion, but also to express feeling to others. It was the basis of the therapeutic
contract that each subject knowingly or unwittingly signed up for when they first
undertook psychoanalysis and were absorbed into the transference, and now it is
the condition for participating in confessional television shows, displaying good
rapport with customers in the service sector and winning approval from voters
who will judge what is a good human being, a particular kind of human being
deemed appropriate to represent them, to represent their feelings, if not their ideas.
Again, it is in the texture of these different practices that we find a representation
of the self inhabited by an unconscious that hosts psychoanalytic myth, and this
texture is its defining quality. The myth subsists in its relation between texts and in
the relation between the reader and the texts, a reader who must already be schooled
in the myth for it to work and for the texts to work for them.
The implication
In semiology, ‘there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth’,4 and
while various rhetorical forms from psychoanalysis may be useful to describe how
myth deforms meaning and thus introduces an ideological effect into signification,
these rhetorical forms have usually been used for explanatory and pedagogical
purposes. However, the popularity of psychoanalysis as a ‘meta-language’, intended
to operate as such, or not, by those who deployed it in structuralist and post-
structuralist traditions in cultural studies and literary criticism, has itself been, we
might say, ‘symptomatic’ of the emergence of psychoanalytic myth. Here, the idea
that psychoanalysis should operate as a meta-language – an interpretative frame
that stands outside other forms of language and makes sense of what is really being
said in those other forms – is sometimes, explicitly or not, reluctantly or not,
smuggled into commentaries on language, sometimes as expression of concern
displayed over the effects of good and bad language.
The ambiguous nature of language, its messiness, stickiness, means that it is not
only a channel of communication, but always something more, something more
4 Barthes makes this argument in Mythologies, but he then already appeals to

psychoanalysis, and what the reader will know of psychoanalysis, to explain how myth
distorts meaning in order for it to function as what he terms ‘interpellant speech’. Here we
reverse the argument, to claim that the reconstitution of the unconscious in the subject
who reads myth provides the basis for psychoanalytic myth (and for the individual subject
to imagine that they had an unconscious in the first place). So, if myth is, as Barthes says,
‘speech, stolen and restored’, we must now show how what is stolen is restored in another
place, the unconscious, from which the speaking subject is still alienated.
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than the simple transmission of information from one head to another. The sense
that words, images and places evoke a confusing contradictory tangle of meanings,
meanings that flood in when we permit ourselves to engage in something like ‘free
association’ (in which you say whatever comes into your head, however irrelevant,
ridiculous or unpleasant), shows again and again, more and more in a world where
it is said that there is so much information that it is now a confusing place to live,
that signifiers are always ‘overdetermined’. Overdetermination of meaning opens a
Pandora’s Box of psychoanalytic myth, and, whatever the contents, it is the sense
that there are many contents waiting for us, waiting to be interpreted, that gives a
new texture to the world of language. Even psychoanalysis as a meta-language
cannot master this overdetermination of signification, and even at the moment it
is invoked, it fails.
When it is identified as such, psychoanalysis as a meta-language then becomes
subject to question, vulnerable to the accusation that experts are telling us what
we really think; then the privileged sites of interpretation are no longer merely
evoked within the connotative second-level operations of sign systems, but it is as
if they become visible as places and figures that seem to be directly referred to.
At that moment, when there is an apparent retreat to first-level operations of
denotation, even to the point where sceptics might demand to know more about
this signified as if it were actually a referent of the sign, it looks as though the
game is up. Psychoanalysis then appears to fall out of the frame and is reduced to
being just one more contender among a number of different interpretative
strategies, something that may itself be interpreted away.
This is all very well, but psychoanalytic myth has another card up its sleeve, for
there is a third level of signification in this myth that should not be confused with
the semblance of a meta-language. In addition to denotation and connotation,
which are both necessary prerequisites for signification in general and the
operation of myth in particular, there is a level of implication. When one speaks,
there is a necessary, if sometimes disclaimed, inclusion of the speaker; this or that
description or argument is always from a position (and not, as some speakers hope,
from the vantage point of a meta-language, they might escape this implication but
always find themselves somewhere). The effect of language on the speaker may not
always be as profound as its impact on the world – in the naming of a ship, the
sealing of a marriage or the dealing of a death penalty, say – but a neutral objective
position from which interpretations of the world are offered, is still a position.
This is a problem psychoanalysts have long debated, concern that an
interpretation of transference, for example, will always be heard by the analysand
as coming from within the transference itself rather than from another position
outside language that is able to give an accurate representation of the relationship
between analysand and analyst, and even the concern that it will be voiced (and
then heard) by the analyst as something in which they are enmeshed rather than
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as from a disinterested observer. This is where the concern with transference –

what the analysand replays in relation to the analyst – turns into a concern with
countertransference, and, significantly, there in the reflexive agonising about
where the interpretations are coming from, the psychoanalyst often tries to delve
into a level of ‘feelings’ that lie beneath ‘language’ to make sense of what they are
doing and what their analysand might be doing to them at an unconscious level
of communication.
The therapeutic encounter between analyst and analysand invites, incites the
search for what lies behind any particular representation, and we take representation
seriously in psychoanalytic myth precisely because it is the representational quality
of the texture of the myth that drives the search into another place outside speech.
The therapeutic aspects of psychoanalytic clinical practice have provoked much
soul-searching in the psychoanalytic world; questions as to whether psychoanalysis
is reducible to psychotherapy, whether it provides the template for all other forms
of psychotherapy, or whether it is distinct from psychotherapy (albeit with
psychotherapeutic effects). These debates are rather beside the point when we study
psychoanalytic myth, for the confusion between, and elision of, analysis and therapy
among those outside the psychoanalytic world – that is, ‘outsiders’ to the privileged
supposed sites of interpretation – draws our attention to the way the therapeutic
frame seeds psychoanalysis in the popular imagination.
Therapeutic modes of relating to others and managing affect provide a texture
to everyday life that permits psychoanalytic myth to circulate and flourish, and
therapeutic skill provides a point of imaginary access to, and relay of, a kind of
knowledge from the real sites of interpretation. This therapeutic skill includes
attentive listening and reading (an engagement with the affective texture of
language), self-reflexive monitoring (clarification of occluded levels of response),
and so an inclusion of one’s own subjectivity in what one hears (including what one
hears oneself say). Psychoanalytic myth is not an abstract system of signs that
provides a clearly delimited worldview but a representational practice with a
therapeutic texture that requires a certain level of engagement; denotation
(in which elements of psychoanalytic vocabulary pretend to refer to actual
things), connotation (in which a series of associations convey that language is
overdetermined) and implication (in which the individual subject has a particular
relation to signs and a relation to affect).
Reading and deciphering psychoanalytic myth

How is a psychoanalytic myth received? Or, how is it possible to register its
presence and account for its effects? The task of immersing oneself in a system of
messages in which one is addressed, and also distancing oneself from that system
in such a way as to transmit understanding to others without evangelising about it,
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has theological proportions. If hermeneutic interpretation was originally directed

at scripture in order to reveal the word of God, then psychoanalytic interpretation
is now directed at our own words in order to reveal our own truth concealed within
them. That is to say, ‘psychoanalytic interpretation’ operating outside the clinic in
the domain of myth is assumed to operate in this way and must do so insofar as it
remains enframed by a therapeutic version of spiritual depth.
Reading and deciphering thus call for a standpoint, in relation to the clinic and
the activity of psychoanalysts, in relation to psychoanalysis as such, and in relation
to the question of the existence of psychoanalysis. Rejections of God – atheist railing
against religious claims, attempts to avoid the spiritual quest for meaning – all too
often remain locked into immortal combat with what they aim to displace. Activity
dedicated to opposing religious systems often ends up being defined by these
systems, caught in a mirror image of what is refused, and then the displacement of
God can fold into a replacement of religious by secular forms still underpinned by
theological assumptions about the nature of interpretation and truth. And now,
faced with psychoanalytic myth that is entrenching itself alongside, and sometimes
against, religious orthodoxies, there is again the lure into it that also remains hidden
in the attempts to deny it. What is at issue here are not merely the defensive
strategies of psychoanalysis to pathologise those who want to avoid psychoanalytic
interpretation – their defence, motivation, resistance – but the very way in which
one becomes subject to a system of belief that one is suspicious of.
Just as religious striving is the yearning of the alienated for meaning, so
therapeutic reflection takes place in certain conditions of possibility and, with
psychoanalytic interpretation, makes possible the articulation of an
understanding of those conditions. Just as an understanding of the theological
impulse must be grounded in an analysis of the conditions which provoke it and
give it force, so the most rigorous critique of psychoanalysis must also
conceptualise how it has historically arisen and what it speaks of, how it
condenses, distorts and expresses attempts to grasp alienated conditions of life
under capitalism. Psychoanalytic clinical practice, we have to say as agnostics,
may, under these conditions, really work for subjects configured as divided
between what they are immediately conscious of and what is separated from them
as a mysterious unbidden truth that speaks to them at times from a place they call
the unconscious.
Psychoanalytic myth actually both exalts and scorns those who engage in such
a present-day spiritual quest for their truth, truth that is also the truth of the
conditions in which they have become subjects. This myth is far from being a
simple advertisement for self-understanding in the privileged sites of
interpretation though, for the texture of this myth is one of affective troubling,
introspection and uncertainty. At the very moment that psychoanalytic myth
provokes us to discover more about its forms of representation, what it represents
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as another level beneath signs, it revels in the message that God is dead and the
consolation offered by therapy is cold comfort in the netherworld of the drives.
So, to speak personally about psychoanalytic myth is an opening gambit in which
we take seriously the theological operations of the myth and embrace our task to
confess something of how it affects us, how it calls upon us at the level of affect, its
texture of affect. I speak about psychoanalytic myth in confessional mode so as to
create resonances among others who are also reading it, and to explore not only
what it means, but what it feels like to mean what it means, to live in the texture of
it. This confessional mode does, to an extent, both conform to and break from most
forms of religious practice under capitalism. It speaks of an experience of being
called, but traces the mechanisms by which that calling happens as something that
may be common to others rather than claiming to being confronted directly by the
mysterious voice of God who addresses me alone. And, this confessional mode does
also, to an extent, conform to and break from most forms of therapeutic practice in
making public, and at the same questioning, the moments of revelation that have
occurred within that practice about the nature of the self.
The activity of working around and through the texture of psychoanalytic
myth can be formalised through the production of ‘discursive complexes’, and these
discursive complexes are viewed as operating with a double aspect. On the one
side, they have symbolic form in clusters of concepts that may be recognisable by
a psychoanalyst or by anyone versed in psychoanalytic vocabulary. To name them
as such is therefore to bring to conscious awareness the implicit rules by which the
signs have been combined so that, for example, participation as a robust
individual in an interpersonally difficult organisation that is organised around
certain modes of attack and attempts to undermine its members is to show ‘ego-
strength’. Personal responses to such an organisation defines the individual in
question as one for whom psychoanalytic categories of personality formation may
make sense, but the description of clusters of practices in the organisation will
show us how those personal responses are called forth. A discursive complex may
thus be seen to operate in the organisation, and more generally in organisational
culture under advanced capitalism, such that interpretations of personal
responses will serve to detect the sources of affect inside the individual concerned.
The other side of the discursive complex is the affective organisation that does
then come to lie inside, as if inside, the individual. Just as psychoanalytic myth
does not reside inside any one particular text, but subsists in the relations between
them, in the texture of contemporary life as we negotiate different symbolic spaces
(whether those be spoken, written or spatial symbolic spaces), so a discursive
complex is not grounded in a particular individual, but may be lived in the forms
of affect that take place in that individual when they are subject to psychoanalytic
myth. The ‘confession’ that is then elaborated in a public account of how
psychoanalytic myth is at work in a particular organisational practice or cultural
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phenomenon speaks of it from the inside in such a way as to show that its sources
do not lie inside the self at all.5
Tracing what is lost in psychoanalytic myth

Psychoanalytic myth is elusive, rather like the affective forces that are organised by
it as if they underlie it, that exist at another level when we read it, so we cannot
but find ourselves included as individual subjects with responses to what is
represented within it. The language we use to speak about what we feel, to
communicate to others also enmeshed within its contradictory, overdetermined
network of signs, is also a language that betrays us. It betrays us when it reveals
something more beyond what we say, and it betrays us when it sabotages our
attempts to clarify what we really mean.
The elusiveness of psychoanalytic myth – that it is in no particular place to be
pinned down, described and transmitted in pure form – is rendered even more so,
more intangible by the fact that it cannot be grasped in its entirety. In this, it shares
general qualities with language as a whole, for the complete system of a language
can be represented in a dictionary – broken into little bits – but cannot be grasped
as a whole by any one speaker. The dictionary cannot be strung into one
meaningful narrative to be comprehended and relayed to others (for the dictionary
has no clear plotline, even if it does explain every word as it goes along). Still less
can a complete symbolic sign system of a culture be captured, as if there was, to
begin with, such a thing as a system that could be said to be ‘complete’.
General sign systems include spoken and written language, but also encompass
architectural, bodily and cinematic elements (to name but three spheres of semiotic
activity), and, at each moment, there is a complex recombination of signifiers. The
introduction of new elements draws attention to the fact that the system was never
complete, and the hope that it would exhaustively represent the concepts it
pretended to denote is perpetually undone by the connotative conjuring of new
links, new spaces and new concepts that appear to appear to fill those spaces.
In addition, the process of implication, by which the reader is made to read
themselves as they read others and to puzzle about the relationship between signs
and the affective forces swirling around them, introduces a never-ending series of
5 This account extends Michel Foucault’s account of ‘confession’ as the template for
psychoanalytic practice in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (first published in
1976), and embeds confession as a kind of ‘auto-ethnographic’ strategy within an analysis
of psychoanalytic culture as comprising ‘discursive complexes’ that relay distinct versions
of psychoanalysis to the subjects who participate in them. (A detailed explication of the
shape of different ‘discursive complexes’ and analytic examples can be found in my
Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society.)
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supplements to what psychoanalytic myth can enable us to speak about within

ourselves. We have already noted that psychoanalysis is not a meta-language, and
neither is it a complete vocabulary, for every practitioner and every clinical ‘case’
elaborates new connections and the condition of possibility for new concepts that
will operate within it. Psychoanalytic myth therefore poses a problem for those
who seek to describe it and convey its shape to others. This is why we say that it is
possible to work our way around it, through its texture as a practice of
representation, but that it is not possible either to pin it down in one place or to
grasp it as an overall system whose presence is then to be detected, as if it were
‘represented’, in any one place.
Instead, we say that it can be traced. To trace psychoanalytic myth is to find our
way around cultural phenomena and to show how the tracing that we produce has
the texture of psychoanalysis. This may be formalised by demonstrating, rather in
the manner of literary-critical readings of texts, how the tracing serves also to
delimit complexes of meaning (those that we have already defined as psychoanalytic
‘discursive complexes’). As we home in on a particular phenomenon, then, we are
not reducing the theoretical scope of analysis or progressively stripping out more
and more of the context. On the contrary, as we go in closer, we find more of the
culture, we find it condensed there. The demarcation of a psychoanalytic discursive
complex thus turns psychoanalysis against itself.
Psychoanalysis assumes a dialectical double existence when we are trying to
unravel the production of experience within cultural phenomena today. First,
psychoanalysis can help us to home in on the individual as a cultural site. An
examination of subjectivity can appear to proceed through a narrowing of the
focus, but this microscope is also a projector, and we may thereby display the lived
contradictions of capitalism. Second, psychoanalysis itself is played out in forms
of subjectivity which require repression and an unconscious, alienated and
regulated domain of impulses for life under capitalism to be possible. This is
why, as we engage in this microscopic examination of personal life, we find
psychoanalysis again and again as part of the structure of subjectivity.
In this sense, our ethnographic studies of ourselves within a culture, a reflexive
and confessional activity that turns ethnography into ‘auto-ethnography’, are
actually pitted against the hermeneutic tradition in ethnography. We do not
pretend to discover the underlying meaning of the practices we describe, for the
accounts given of affect by participants are treated as constructions elaborated
from within a representational practice. We do not even attempt to discover those
underlying meanings within ourselves as knowing participants, for our own
accounts must be read in such a way as to show how the notion that there is some
underlying meaning is constructed.
If anything, the tracing of psychoanalytic myth in a practice requires us to
steer clear of the discovery of meaning – still less the attribution of meaning to the
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unconscious motivations of any participant, including ourselves – and to display

how the incomplete system of nonsensical signifiers is organised so that it produces
a texture of affect and makes us want to reproduce it.6 So if psychoanalytic myth is
a necessarily incomplete system and we must take care to avoid the supposition
smuggled into it that there is a centre to be found to it (a centre that we are invited
to find as an unconscious core within ourselves), how do we conceptualise its
alienating effects? Where does the process of tracing that which has been robbed
from us by psychoanalytic myth lead, if we are not to try and recover what has been
alienated from us as we try to understand ourselves within it?
Recoding bourgeois subjectivity

Psychoanalytic myth lends itself to history in two ways: by its entwinement with
capitalism, through which it expresses and intensifies alienation; and by way of its
narrative of individual development, through which alienation is embedded and
ratified.
The double effect of alienation is that there is a separation of the individualised
abstract subject from their socially realised creative labour on the one side, and,
on the other, the production of a personal mythology in which it seems as if there
is something substantial in the self that could be recovered if alienation were to be
overcome. Sociological studies of alienation, complemented by psychological
studies (which, of course, together repeat the artificial separation of social from
individual spheres of activity), tend to define alienation as a phenomenon that
can be measured and experienced. If the individual subject reports that they are
‘happy’ – a happiness that has become the aim of much psychiatric, psychological,
psychotherapeutic and even some psychoanalytic practice – then there should be
no alienation.
This supposed happiness takes to its logical end point a consumerism in which
that which has been lost is no longer even sought inside the self, but is, rather,
assumed to be actually existing outside in commodities which will complete the
happiness of the self when they are owned by the individual. New forms of
‘fractional life’, in which ownership is partial or temporary (by way of timeshare
apartments or pre-sale designer items), operate within a relay of partial objects in
6 This account chimes with, and is influenced by, the account of psychoanalytic
knowledge-production outlined by Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn in their delightfully
titled book Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology.
That book usefully counteracts the reduction of psychoanalysis to a therapeutic
understanding of the production, transmission and reception of meaning, and it also
connects with some of the cultural-political interventions that turn psychoanalysis against
itself, including those that draw on the tradition of Suprematism.
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which the distinctive forms of alienation that accompany such happiness have forced
practising psychoanalysts to take note of what are known as ‘contemporary symptoms’
(addiction, bingeing, self-harm), in which emptiness folds in upon emptiness.
The idea that there is something, some thing, that we are alienated from, and
that it could be returned to us or re-found to make us complete, is some comfort
in such conditions and this idea is fed by psychoanalytic myth. The activity of
interpretation opens up a lure for the individual subject haunted by their sense of
emptiness, a trap that we must be careful to avoid. This trap reappears when we
are tracing psychoanalytic myth and we imagine that we are ‘decoding’ it. The
claim that we can decode the signs that bear us is already caught in certain
assumptions about the nature of meaning and what is concealed by it, what we
need to do to pick the locks in order to bring something out into the open. The
motif of decoding also pulls us further into the therapeutic frame which provides
a seedbed of psychoanalytic myth, and, in particular, into the belief that by
avoiding bad speech we can find a way to regain our moral health. Contemporary
therapeutic practice provides a model for, and is an expression of, a form of
political practice in which verbal hygiene is accomplished by correct speech.7
The implicit specification of what kind of human being we should be and how
we should find it (spontaneous relational transparent selves opening ourselves to
the mysteries of others) is a warning about how therapeutic political correctness
can come to operate not merely as a critique of sexism and racism (for example)
in language, but also then lead us into a normative model of the self in which
infraction of its rules will be viewed as a sign of pathology. Not all psychoanalytic
myth is therapeutic, and some uses of psychoanalysis in the public sphere are
themselves viewed as illegitimate applications of Freudian theory precisely
because they break a key rule of this myth, which is that there should be some
kind of reflexive inclusion of the speaking subject in what is spoken about. In this
sense, psychoanalytic myth outside the therapeutic frame is an exception that
proves the rule; that is, it serves to reiterate that rule. The activity of ‘decoding’ is
thus latently psychoanalytic.
Instead, the tracing of the representational claims that psychoanalytic myth
implicitly makes about subjectivity – the place of the unconscious, the defended
self and affect – requires that we engage in recoding. This recoding works in
7 Classic semiological studies of ideological forms, such as Judith Williamson’s Decoding

Advertisements, did make explicit use of psychoanalysis alongside Barthes’ work as a code
to unlock dominant cultural codes, but my concern here is with how the use of this
psychoanalytic code comes to lock ourselves within that, as if it were itself a liberating
alternative worldview. There is a risk that the ‘decoding’ of myth becomes reduced to one
of the practices of what Deborah Cameron terms, and signals in the title of her book on
this topic, Verbal Hygiene.
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three ways, each of which is required for it to work so as to address the problematic
of alienation.
First, it entails a rearticulation of the signifiers so that the texture of the myth
is opened up and it is possible for others to see how this texture works. Such
a rearticulation attends to the way the texture folds in on itself and creates gaps and
places in which affect is given a particular shape; the gaps are felt to be inside the
individual subject who reads (listens, views, navigates) or writes (speaks, expresses,
performs), and the most significant place is experienced to be the unconscious, in
which felt affect is only the most immediate manifestation of something deeper,
latent, true. Recoding thus reformats what has been found so that it can be made
available to others as something that has also been transformed, that opens up new
spaces in which it is possible to look at the psychoanalytic material from some
critical, and self-critical, distance.
Second, recoding therefore entails a shift not merely in forms of language, but
in our relation to that language. The critical space that is produced in the process
of reading, and the relaying of that reading to others, lays the basis for a new
relation between the ostensibly self-contained individual taken to be the centre of
perception, cognition on the one hand, and experience and collective activities of
interpretation, meaning-making and social change on the other. Without that
transformation of the relation between the individual subject and language,
recoding becomes no more than an empty academic exercise, and such recoding
is no more radical than the everyday ‘decoding’ activity that confirms the smug
satisfaction of cultured bourgeois subjectivity.
Third, recoding locates that critical space in relation to other critical spaces
outside psychoanalytic myth. This does not mean that we fill in that space with
material from the outside, with alternative conceptions of historical and personal
development, or that we simply aim to replace psychoanalytic myth with other
accounts of the self. Instead, what we have learnt about the texture of subjectivity
under capitalism – and these are the stakes of an analysis of psychoanalytic myth –
enables us to read in a different way some of the distortions that occur in political
frameworks that have been subjected to psychologisation. We can then attend, for
example, to the way that the ‘motif ’ of alienation turns Marxism from being the
elaboration of knowledge of the reality of exploitation in capitalist society from the
standpoint of the proletariat into a ‘critique’ that can be absorbed into academic
sociology or psychology.
Psychoanalytic myth is depoliticised speech

Through psychoanalytic myth, ideology provides not only a picture of what the
world is like and what it should be (as it is now, or more of the same), but also
a reflexive stipulation of what the self is and what it should be (as it is now, or
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more of the same). This is by virtue of the production of a certain form of

subjectivity – an individual abstracted from social relations who searches inside
themselves for the meaning of their life – under capitalism. Psychoanalysis is not
an accidental byproduct of capitalist forms of industrialisation (which are the
only forms we know today), but an integral component of capitalist society. The
question as to why the particular form of alienated subjectivity that emerged with
the development of capitalism has the name ‘psychoanalysis’ and was formulated
by Freud rather than anyone else, is an open one.
We can trace the history of the terms that are fused to describe an analysis of the
psyche, and the weight of these terms and their connotations are embedded in
a history of the West, its fabricated origins in Greece, where there is already
a separation of Psyche from Eros. Then we can trace the relationship between the
West and the rest of the world through which there has been the export of models
of subjectivity and the expectation that good colonial subjects will indicate that
they are civilised by conforming to those models. We can also map the specific
relationships between different cultural groups to show how an ideology, the ideas
of the ruling class of certain self-defined nations that industrialised first, functions
as a warrant for the rights of the ruling class, and how those groups that are
marginalised do not yet, or are not able yet, to buy into that ideology. Then it is
possible to see how Jews as a pathologised exception to the industrialisation and
professionalisation of mental health settings are able to elaborate an account, from
the outside, of how forms of experience are divided between inside and outside.
Such questions about the precise terminology and cultural composition of
psychoanalysis pertain to the West, and still have some bearing on how clinical
practice and myth are globalised, but apart from that, it is possible to describe the
conditions in which something that we now call ‘psychoanalytic myth’ becomes
an indispensable part of capitalist society. Nineteenth-century industrialisation in
Europe required that the new workforce be gathered together in factories, and
even if these workers or their immediate forebears had not been wrenched from
the land and from an intimate temporal relationship with nature, abstracted life
conditions induced at the very least a hearkening back to what, they sensed, was
lost. Those forced to sell their labour power in competition with others in order
to survive, and to submit to the rule of a clock-time with parameters set by others,
attempted to look outward, collectively and historically, to account for how such
self-destructive processes emerged and how they could be ended.
The early socialist movements did often appeal to romantic, and even nationalist,
imagery in order to heal the human fabric that had been so cruelly torn by a form
of property ownership that must include the ownership, by a few, of the labour-time
of many other human beings. But competition, played out at the level of the
individual set against their former comrades, required new forms of management
which then reinforced the psychologisation of society, a psychologisation that has
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intensified through the twentieth-century and is now a powerful global force with
the deregulation and privatisation of welfare services under neo-liberalism.8
Psychoanalytic myth also has to compete with other forms of psychologised
knowledge about the nature of individuals. Although psychoanalytic discursive
complexes of trauma, intellectualisation and transference, for example, are potent
figures, there are other specifications for the self that also comprise therapeutic
discourse. It would be possible to develop an analysis of the way cognitive models
circulate through culture and carry with them certain notions about anxiety and
rational self-management, for example. Here, it may be more apposite to refer to
the patterns of discourse as clustering around ‘discursive templates’.
It is possible to detect discursive templates of ‘interference’, in which there is an
assumption that the mind operates as a parallel-processing mechanism in which
certain thoughts stray from their proper place and cause trouble with rational
thinking about the self; references to the ‘debugging’ of relationships, for example,
employ metaphors of viral infection, requiring us to buy into the idea that if it
were possible to isolate and screen out inappropriate sequences, then thinking
might proceed more smoothly. Another template of this kind is that of
‘disruption’, in which we are reminded that if we shut away emotions, there is
a risk that those emotions may come to the surface and disrupt clear thought.
Turning to behavioural notions, it may there be more relevant to refer to the
relevant clusters of narratives about the self as ‘discursive repertoires’, and those
who use this aspect of psychology in everyday life are concerned with the ways in
which distress is configured in discourse in such a way that it is assumed that there
is a behavioural problem for which a behavioural solution will be found. Unlike
the psychoanalytic and cognitive discursive forms, which also draw upon a deep-
rooted cultural humanist assumption that we are beings of depth and that some
reference to internal affective or reasoning processes must be made to understand
distress, these behavioural narratives challenge humanism, and so they are not so
readily reproduced in their pure state. Often, they must be mixed in with other
notions if they are not to appear obstructively antitherapeutic.
One potent behavioural discursive repertoire would seem to be that of
‘reinforcement’, in which there is also reference to the gratification that the
8 The role of the discipline of psychology in this historical process of psychologisation is

discussed in detail in my Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation, and this
book also reviews the way forms of psychoanalysis adapted themselves to behaviourist and
cognitivist trends in the discipline. Psychology and psychological culture have become
increasingly powerful with the development of capitalism, and psychoanalysis and
psychoanalytic myth have played a contradictory role – endorsing and questioning
psychologisation – and in this there are some grounds for hope that there is at least some
resistance to the norms of behaviour required by capitalism and its helpmeet, psychology.
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therapeutic subject gains from being in a self-destructive relationship or situation.

Popular representations of a patient’s ‘secondary gain’ from an illness are
informed by this kind of narrative, though there is often the implication that they
are also engaged in some deliberate manipulation of the situation (and there is
a connection here also with psychoanalytic descriptions of the analysand’s ‘flight
into health’ at some point in the treatment). When the patient is thoroughly
institutionalized, however, the discursive repertoire of reinforcement is then able
to account for the level of collusion that is involved and to explain it without
necessarily resorting to attributions of self-deception.
Alternatively, and staying with behavioural forms of ideological practice, the
notion that someone is locked into a pattern of relationships or into an oppressive
and self-oppressive institutional network, and that nothing can be done to
help them unless they are removed, is structured by a repertoire of ‘social
determination’. While the social determination of behaviour is a rhetorical device
which is sometimes used to explain why nothing can be done to help – because
the causes are sedimented too firmly into the history of the individual – it also
operates therapeutically when there are calls for people to break from a pattern
and thereby release themselves from something that had locked them into a place
that they could later recognise they did not at all want to be in.
Against cognitive and behavioural pretenders to seize the centre-ground of
self-talk, psychoanalytic myth provides a further ideological twist in that the
psychoanalytic subject always already configures itself as if it is ideological (which
is also why a certain notion of ideology appeared in the early days of capitalism,
precisely at the moment when psychoanalysis appeared). This also gives to
ideology itself, a conveniently layered mystifying ‘defensive’ quality so that in the
world of ideology it is as if there is a truth (perhaps concealed by conspiracies of
which even the conspirators are not consciously aware) beneath the false
appearances, which are then conceptualised as operating as forms of false
consciousness understood as psychological states rather than social practices and
self-representations to which it is necessary to conform in order not be thought
bad or mad (or, in psychoanalytic parlance, ‘perverse’ or ‘psychotic’).
Psychoanalytic myth thus offers itself as a critique of ideology, but it
reconfirms itself as a form of ideology when psychologised subjects buy into it as
a worldview. It depoliticises those who employ it as a form of speech as one of its
most important operations, operating to confirm a terrain of political activity that
is comfortable with capitalism.
Psychoanalytic myth on the Left

And psychoanalytic myth is not only a trap, in which those who want to use
psychoanalysis to escape bourgeois ideology end up being all the more deeply
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inscribed in it; Left-wing psychoanalytic myth is essential. It is essentialising,

yes – reducing social relations to the peculiar nature of each individual’s trajectory
through life, explaining political phenomena by way of pathological personality
structures, confirming powerlessness through motifs of castration and
universalised lack – and it is inescapable.
If the condition of possibility for transcending capitalism is the proletariat and
its allies – a working class that becomes conscious of its historical role but which
must also be a political movement of all the oppressed – then the condition of
possibility for transcending capitalist ideology is psychoanalytic myth. Like the
proletariat, it is formed as a stereotypically reactionary force with redemptive-
progressive qualities. The relationship between the proletariat and psychoanalytic
myth is contradictory, and the reactionary nature of each is, to begin with,
diametrically opposed. The proletariat is idealised and reviled as the working class
conscious of itself as exploited, and has come to be characterised by many supporters
and detractors as masculine, uncivilised and white (and in the imagination of liberal
erstwhile allies, macho, uncouth and racist). This is not the moment to refute such
ideological representations (to point out that the industrial working class was
often, from the earliest days of capitalism, composed of women, had a wealth of
learning and was explicitly internationalist), but to note how they operate, and
how the term ‘proletariat’ is connoted today.
Psychoanalytic myth, on the other hand, is idealised and reviled as an intrinsically
middle-class pursuit and, through its associations with the therapeutic frame,
conventionally feminine, cultured and not-quite-white (and in the imagination
of those caught in the no less psychoanalytically refracted position of defending
themselves against it, hysterical, pretentious and Jewish). One can see that the
contradictory relationship between psychoanalysis and the proletariat is itself
defined on the terrain of ideology, but when one turns to consider what the
historical logic of each is, then some connections start to appear, and this is
quite beyond the interest of the Left in psychoanalysis (whether that is an
academic Left disconnected from the working class or a proletarian Left
puzzling about how psychological phenomena operate in the emergence of class
consciousness).9
9 The socialist movements at the beginning of the twentieth century often turned to Freud
as a complement to Marx, and it was only with the rise of Stalin in the Soviet Union, to take
a case in point, that psychoanalysis was prohibited, counterposed to the interests of the
proletariat. In the structuralist and post-structuralist Left at the end of the century,
discussions of how signifiers from the dominant ideology may be rearticulated (which has
some bearing on the formulations in this essay) were underpinned by psychoanalytic theory;
for example, the arguments of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy (which anticipated – and here is also a warning – their flight from Marxism).
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Just as the working class abolishes itself as a category – formed as the class of
those who labour for others under capitalism and as a kind of category-mistake in
conditions of collective ownership of the means of production – so psychoanalytic
myth will disappear together with the paraphernalia of abstracted descriptions of
individual psychology that pertains to human beings set against each other in order
to survive economically. But this connection still begs the question about where we
are before the societal conditions that bear us are transformed; it does not explain
why psychoanalytic myth is essential to the Left now.
A first link was forged in the early days of anticapitalist politics, when those
who wanted to change the world also came to be defined by what they were
against and it became clear that alongside political-economic demands for
change, there had to be some understanding of, and combat at the level of
ideology. Ideologies of race and nation that functioned to divide and rule were
addressed through new forms of solidarity and international organisation, and
ideologies of gender and the family that functioned to buttress power relations
inside the working class were addressed through the formulation of rights over
reproduction. They were each addressed imperfectly, carrying with them traces of
the ideologies they attempted to surmount. In this first link, the question of ‘class
consciousness’ – that which would, in socialist rhetoric, turn the working class
into a proletariat aware of its position and purpose – came to resonate with and
refract elements of psychological, even quasi-psychoanalytic reasoning. That
which we were falsely conscious of maintained a certain representation of the
world conforming to the ruling ideas, which were the ideas of the ruling class, and
it was thus necessary to engage in forms of activity that would engage with the
world as it was, as it could be, another world that was possible.
A second link was forged in the wave of struggles marked by the signifier ‘1968’
and by a ‘second wave’ of feminism that took up and took forward the demands of
the ‘first wave’ equal-rights suffrage movements that accompanied early twentieth-
century socialist politics. Dimensions of oppression that had actually been the
concern of some participants in the earlier movements – sexism, heterosexism,
patriarchy – were articulated through ‘consciousness raising’ practices. The process
of consciousness-raising promised access to what had been alienated, but it also
went further, to question what men had lost as they forged a masculine
consciousness that would be compatible with capitalist forms of ownership and
management of others. The ‘consciousness’ that would be ‘raised’ would thus be
something of the unconscious, something that operated to hold subjects of
capitalist ideology in place (reproducing structures of power at the level of the
unconscious) and something that spoke of what had been lost (opposing
structures of power at the level of consciousness). Sexist and then racist ideology
were interrogated and the desire of those who were oppressors and oppressed
clarified or released from the depths. In this second link, the therapeutic frame for
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embedding levels of personal change in political activity also provided an even

more nourishing seedbed for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic myth.
To say that psychoanalytic myth is essential to the Left does not mean, of
course, that it is always helpful, but merely that this myth sticks to contemporary
practices of the Left and to the way the Left characterises itself in relation to
ideological struggle. At stake here is as much the way that ‘the Left’ is turned from
being a diverse collection of political movements that once cohered around the
proletariat into the name for an ahistorical ideological position, a position that is
incorporated as a player into the game of bourgeois politics and so rendered into
an ideological position itself.
But these links are essential to the Left, and to the history of anticapitalist politics
that knows that this politics must also be something else; feminist, antiracist and,
today we should say, ecological. The transformation of class consciousness into
something which reflexively includes itself so that the internal divisions of a class on
the basis of race, culture, gender and sexuality come to be seen as sources of strength
rather than weakness has not only, then, been accompanied by the influence of
psychoanalysis in popular culture, but influenced by it.
Psychoanalytic myth on the Right

If psychoanalytic myth is on the Right, and it is, it is often as an unwelcome ally
of an ideology that confirms that the present order of things is natural and
universal. Other specifications of individual subjectivity – behaviourist, cognitivist,
spiritual – have often been more malleable and dependable than psychoanalysis to
those in power. In order to function on the Right, a therapeutic frame that absorbs
psychoanalytic myth and factors it into everyday commonsensical images of the self
and personal change has been necessary. It is within that frame that psychoanalytic
myth operates as a form of ideology.
The therapeutic frame has been so successful in recruiting psychoanalytic myth
to its own ideal of self-centred insight and social adaptation, that psychoanalysis
in the clinic is then positioned as either the epitome of humanism (confirming
therapeutic images of the self) or its diametric opposite (brutally undermining
therapeutic ideals). Either way, once this positioning has been set in place,
psychoanalysis must then be treated with a degree of suspicion. There is indeed a
tendency for psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world to turn itself into a form
of humanist therapy or neurological self-management in order to solve the political
problems – of collusion with abuse, cultural privilege, elitism – that have beset it.
When psychoanalytic myth in a therapeutic frame sets out positions for subjects
to adopt so that they can speak and be understood, it does not merely lay out empty
spaces in language that invite us in, for those spaces have a texture in which we
are invited to feel certain things as well as speak about them. There is something
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particularly pernicious about the therapeutic frame that draws us all the more
tightly into psychoanalytic myth, into its network of assumptions about the world,
individuals and the insides of their minds. The therapeutic frame includes, for
example, attention to widespread cynicism about therapy that operates to
complement and confirm that very influence of it upon us as a type of speech. There
is a requirement that there should be a depth of commitment to it as one speaks it
that makes it difficult to step back out of it when one has finished speaking. To speak
in a position therapeutically is to perform subjectivity in such a way as to find it
difficult to perform any other position again in the same way. Therapeutic discourse
also functions within certain apparatuses of care and responsibility that conceal, at
the very moment that they reproduce, patterns of power.10
One of the peculiar and entrancing characteristics of therapeutic discourse is that
we achieve our position not only, or not even, by displaying knowledge, but by
displaying our interiority. The distinctive shape of each of the components of
therapeutic psychoanalytic myth is in how they are interrelated with the others. This
interrelationship is crucial, and the texture of psychoanalytic myth within the
therapeutic frame only works because there are certain assumptions about the nature
of emotions and relationships; affect for therapeutic subjects has a crucial role in
defining the self and relationships, and relationships are seen as the necessary
medium for elaborating a therapeutic sense of self and emotions. Specified
relationships structure the self and operate as a medium for emotions, and the
rhetorical forms that operate for the Right in psychoanalytic myth are then as follows:
1. Recognition. There is a self that is treated as something that is deep under the
surface, and the way we find this self requires another person with a self, another
who has bought into psychoanalytic myth as deeply as us. To hear someone
employing therapeutic discourse say ‘I don’t know if you really heard me’ is to
connote, as if to denote an image, a concept, something inside. You physically hear
the appeal for recognition of a type of speech, but the myth here frames this image
in such a way that we must also find ourselves in the presence of a deeper self
inside that could really ‘hear’ or ‘not hear’ what is being said. Notions of ‘hearing’
and ‘being heard’ are spoken of in therapeutic discourse, and require some deeper,
10 The ideological role of the therapeutic frame is usefully outlined by Frank Furedi in
Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, and his account has no
particular allegiance to psychoanalysis nor animus towards it. He does embed his critique of
therapeutic culture in a broader diagnosis of the way individuals are encouraged to represent
themselves as vulnerable, and he thus implicitly calls to an ideally robust nontherapeutic
self that would be able to see through and refuse these lures, which is a conception of the
subject that also, itself, owes something to psychoanalysis and the texture of psychoanalytic
myth (as well as hostility to psychoanalytic myth that is defined in relation to it).
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or behind the surface, emotional reception that is more profound than simple
acoustic reception. It is this that produces a texture in which recognition by others
is sought, and lamented when it appears to be denied.
2. Fragility. The self is fragile, and it must be so for it to be accorded the status
of a self to be recognised by others in psychoanalytic myth. Psychoanalysis has
sometimes portrayed human beings as quite fragile, but this fragility is much
more intense in therapeutic discourse. When the therapeutic frame is employed in
the political realm, it is necessary for all those who speak to claim some form of
‘victim status’ through which fragility of the self can be confirmed. Attention to
harm, deliberate physical harm, then provides the template for emotional distress,
in which forms of trauma turn resistance into a sign of deep vulnerability. Those
who respond to events that are assumed to create traumatised victims without
showing their fragility are viewed as pathologically defended and even dangerous,
perhaps even as those who prey on fragile others and cause them harm.
3. Boundaries. There is an oscillation between boundary mania and boundary

phobia. Therapeutic space is a domain where we will find talk about ‘containing’
emotions and talk about ‘safe places’, but it also provides the template for other
forms of professional practice which then require ethics codes to enforce boundaries
and even the template for friendship. This has reached a point when therapists
become so worried about what they call ‘boundaries’ that they cannot be involved
in public political activities because their clients might see them or interact with
them outside the therapeutic space. This is where we see boundary modelling, and
an injunction to clients to respect boundaries. This injunction marks a division
between public life and private life, which, in the therapeutic space as such, are
actually necessarily blurred.
4. Affect. Emotions operate in and around the self, concealed and revealed in a
game of hide-and-seek through the medium of relationships that give them pre-
eminent status. Emotions can be intuitively grasped but not spoken of exactly, for
they exist at another level beneath language, and this quality is something that a
therapeutic training will often promise access to. An opposition between thinking
and feeling, and a privileging of direct intuitive access to feeling over rationalisation,
confirms their power, and there is in some arenas, as a consequence, a refusal of
theory (language) as a kind of defence (against emotion). To take up a therapeutic
identity and to display it to others is to show that one knows what other people are
feeling, and the therapeutic subject is able to say ‘you are angry with me’. How could
it not be correct if they felt it to be so? Emotions are not only treated as inside the
self, as deep, but as ‘between’ people in some way – that the group is ‘angry’, for
example – with inside and outside being mapped onto feeling and expression.
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5. Expression. There is accumulation and discharge, but in the service of expressive

speech. In this way, emotions are bound up with morality, with some ways of feeling
and showing feeling viewed as healthy and good. Here we are invited into forms of
signification that require a certain texture to the practice of speaking for them to
function mythically. This rhetorical figure is relayed in therapeutic discourse through
resignification and investment of everyday words with emotional force – ‘special’,
‘important’, ‘painful’, ‘hard’ – and when these words are said in a therapeutic way, they
are very much more ‘special’, ‘important’, ‘painful’, ‘hard’, for example, and accorded a
greater moral weight than when said in everyday speech outside psychoanalytic myth.
6. Performance. Self and emotions are reiterated in the texture of psychoanalytic

myth space through bodily activity. Expression is lived at a level of spontaneity
which calls for performance of gesture congruent with affect, but also more than
this in the performance of performance, the indication that one is a being who
speaks thus with one’s body. A crossover between therapeutic circles and dramatic
circles, where devotees of therapy are the ‘luvvies’ of psychoanalytic myth, creates
spaces in which therapeutic discourse is accompanied by a kind of dramatic acting
out of what the emotions are that are supposed to be in the talk, and certain
modes of speech thereby indicate sensitivity to the reactions of others. There is
sometimes the complete opposite to such bodily practice among orthodox
psychoanalysts, who will do their best not to act out emotions as they speak (and
these figures are potent in psychoanalytic myth as negative examples), but either
way, we see the importance attached to the exteriorisation of emotions as part of
the performance of therapeutic identity.
7. Morality. Those embedded in psychoanalytic myth must lead their public life
as moral example. Therapeutic modes of being require an ambassadorial role, and
the figure of the po-faced humourless psychoanalyst (who refuses to perform
affect inside and outside the clinic and thus functions as a powerful exception to
confirm the rule) functions to reinforce a precept concerning the importance of
publicly conforming to good rules. Those drawn deep into therapeutic identity
display, as a condition of being, a consciousness of the importance of being good
people who will be worth identifying with. It is then that they become the most
unbearable bureaucrats in bodies charged with the regulation of who may and who
may not speak psychoanalytic discourse from privileged sites of interpretation.
It is the very pervasiveness of these rhetorical figures on the Left that renders them
into objects of ridicule and suspicion on the Right. Nevertheless, these are ways
in which the progressive aspects of psychoanalytic myth are outweighed by a
conformist model of the world and the self who is thought to inhabit it and speak
about their unhappiness with it.
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Necessity and limits of psychoanalytic mythologies

Psychoanalytic myth as a complexly textured representational practice, is
crystallised, in critical analyses of the kind offered here, into something that may
be read as more powerful and more closed than it actually is. The process of
analysis and the rather pessimistic view of mythology as ideology that it may
produce, necessarily draws us in to it, implicates the analyst of psychoanalytic
myth. There are a number of different stances we can take toward the myth as we
trace its contours and its effects, and each position we adopt risks confirming its
peculiar texture as a regime of representation of the individual subject.
We might choose to idealise psychoanalysis itself in its supposedly pure sites of
interpretation, and hope that it would be possible to extract a genuinely
psychoanalytic position from its banalisation in popular culture. The difference
between psychoanalytic theory and the therapeutic frame that renders it into an
ideology of the Right might then serve to separate us from its power, or so we might
hope. Alternatively, we might search for alternative views of human subjectivity –
biomedical specifications derived from psychiatry, cognitive-behavioural models
from psychology, and humanistic-spiritual conceptions from counselling – and use
these as levers to open up psychoanalytic myth and free ourselves from it. The
difference between commonsense and psychoanalysis would then serve to separate
ourselves from psychoanalysis altogether, it would seem. The problem with images
of the psyche is that in psychological culture – and we cannot but speak within a
tautological universe of some kind when we are speaking from within any particular
human culture – our psychoanalytic reference points and the alternatives that pit
themselves against it draw us into an assumption that is itself psychoanalytic, at one
with psychoanalytic myth. That is, the ideal that we identify ourselves with comes to
define something bad and dirty inside ourselves that must be cleaned away, inside
ourselves deep down in something that is ‘it’ (perhaps even named ‘id’).
We might choose to take another tack, and try to discover what the consequences
of psychoanalysis are for good conduct, what the impact of psychoanalytic myth
might be for those subject to it. Again, psychoanalysis provides a compass by which
we can differentiate good from evil, and it shows the way to moral acceptance of the
value of hard-won rational thought and to the need for each individual subject to
take responsibility for the irrational taken-for-granted ideas that beset us. The terms
of this position, in which there is an attempt to put self centre stage where the
chaotic forces of the it were, signal clearly enough that some kind of psychoanalytic
myth about the nature of civilisation is present even at the moment when
psychoanalysis attempts to dispel mythical thinking altogether. Those who refuse
psychoanalysis are caught, however, when they try to define what that good conduct
would be that aims to differentiate itself from psychoanalytic myth. Here, on the
other side of psychoanalysis, we are still determined by a conception of putative laws
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of behaviour that operates very effectively, perhaps even more effectively, in the
manner of something above I – the superegoic force that prohibits and prescribes.
An apparently more democratic option might be to balance the different vantage
points that appear in a culture from within and against psychoanalytic myth and find
a middle way that will honour them all. A more judicious handling of the myth that
did not either set up an idealised vantage point from which it could be understood
or set in place a set of rules with which it could be evaluated, might also enable us to
take a more academic approach to it. This consensual approach might operate on
something like the maxims of multiculturalism, and psychoanalytic myth would
then be treated as a kind of subculture which jostles alongside other subcultures, with
some benefits to those who participate in it and who are calling for some respect
from those who are outside it. Like multiculturalism, however, there is still an
assumption that there is one reasoned centre from which the different competing
forces are managed, and an assumption that each constituency can be categorised so
that it can be contained and the advantages and disadvantages to all be judged. This
hidden centre which values a number of different competing forces that it must keep
out of, has the name in psychoanalysis and in psychoanalytic myth, ‘ego’, and so this
option is very quickly implicated in the myth even as it tries to distance itself from it.
Might there be another way? Perhaps to embrace rather than escape from
psychoanalytic myth, to embrace it in a way close to irony, but actually even closer
to the myth so that there is a knowing reproduction of its texture such that we can
enjoy it, use it and thereby release ourselves from its grip. There are traditions of
cultural-political activity, for example, that employ the motif of ‘overidentification’,
which is already an elaboration and parody of psychoanalytic language. Of
the many ‘micro-nations’ that have appeared to revel in patriotic fervour while
undermining any allegiance to geographical territory, the Neue Slowenische
Kunst have gone furthest, taking up the work of Kazimir Malevich, founder of
Suprematism, and injecting a variety of disturbing contents into the pure forms of
the black circle, black square and black cross. In a twist on representations of good
subjects saluting national flags, for example, their Garda project recruits soldiers
from competing armed forces to salute the flag of a ‘nation’ that issues its own
passports but which calls on all in this world and beyond to be members of it as
‘global citizens’.11
11 A detailed overview and defence of strategies of overidentification, in which psychoanalysis

is presented as merely one of many theoretical resources to immerse subjects in ideological
practices, is to be found in Alexei Monroe’s study Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK.
The intersection with contemporary avant-garde art practice and feminist theory is outlined
by Marina Grznić in Situated Contemporary Art Practices: Art, Theory and Activism from
(the East of) Europe, and this polemical restatement of work running in the tradition of
Suprematism and NSK is more explicitly indebted to psychoanalysis.
128
There are many practices of unravelling and refusal of psychoanalytic myth

that already exist, and ‘interpretation’ of them threatens to draw them back into
the frame, into the myth again. A representational practice with a texture that
draws us in, so that we feel it working inside us as a condition of our commitment
to it, demands new strategies of reading that traces that texture, re-represents it
and finds enjoyment in the way it works instead of in other affective forces below
the surface. In that way, we fold ourselves into it on different terms and find
ourselves out of psychoanalytic myth in much the same way, necessarily
paradoxically, as those who unravel and shift position in relation to personal
forms of myth, to who they thought they should be in psychoanalysis.
129

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PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES

This edition first published in UK and USA 2009

Copyright © Ian Parker 2009

The author asserts the moral right to be

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY 97

These little essays on what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by

Art, whether in a gallery or recruited into advertising, provides another medium

On a Saturday night in Leeds, I learnt something about pinball and psychoanalysis.

I used to go to a slow-open group about once a week. The number of group

reflection on what is happening is determinedly cognitivist in character – that is,

What is the relationship between learning and enjoyment? A schoolroom at

assessments, devices becoming more popular, in UK psychology at least, and

a place where he felt he was genuinely learning something. He compared this to

on our experience of education reveals that this metaphorical narrative of

to convey a message through a murky medium which seems to have a life

through the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) at its Institute in London as

Marxist intellectuals published in London, rarely included articles about Ireland

to some circumstances (whether these are in the form of information or events).

sets up for us as active or passive consumers. To do that, however, we also have to

A psychoanalytic reading of cultural phenomena finds in every little thing an

One of the ‘side effects’ of psychiatric medication is a dry mouth, and an

interpretation of that particular structure. It has become dangerous, it is causing

Japanese culture is often invoked as an exemplary case by those concerned with

I am looking up at the underside of a Greek chair. Interlocking fibres that form

Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice

Psychoanalytic myth as a textural system

in a logic characteristic of the texture of psychoanalytic myth, the ostensible

to hold such objects in place, and in such practices of segregation there is

It is possible, then, to repeat and annotate the figure provided by Barthes in

i) signifier ii) signified

The texture of this representative myth is therefore replayed in such a way as to

The subsistence of the concepts

Psychoanalysis is an explosive signifier in the semiotics of ‘race’, and this

4 Barthes makes this argument in Mythologies, but he then already appeals to

as from a disinterested observer. This is where the concern with transference –

Reading and deciphering psychoanalytic myth

has theological proportions. If hermeneutic interpretation was originally directed

Tracing what is lost in psychoanalytic myth

supplements to what psychoanalytic myth can enable us to speak about within

unconscious motivations of any participant, including ourselves – and to display

Recoding bourgeois subjectivity

7 Classic semiological studies of ideological forms, such as Judith Williamson’s Decoding

Psychoanalytic myth is depoliticised speech

more of the same). This is by virtue of the production of a certain form of

8 The role of the discipline of psychology in this historical process of psychologisation is

therapeutic subject gains from being in a self-destructive relationship or situation.

Psychoanalytic myth on the Left

inscribed in it; Left-wing psychoanalytic myth is essential. It is essentialising,

embedding levels of personal change in political activity also provided an even

Psychoanalytic myth on the Right

3. Boundaries. There is an oscillation between boundary mania and boundary

5. Expression. There is accumulation and discharge, but in the service of expressive

6. Performance. Self and emotions are reiterated in the texture of psychoanalytic

Necessity and limits of psychoanalytic mythologies

11 A detailed overview and defence of strategies of overidentification, in which psychoanalysis

There are many practices of unravelling and refusal of psychoanalytic myth

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