A Blues-Busting Bulletin For the Holidays

Lacan Explains Holiday Distress and Lao Tzu Offers Solution (Vol. 3; Issue 47)

As the remaining weeks of the year fade away, magazines like Psychology Today, Good Housekeeping, or Prevention drip with syrupy slick articles suggesting useless, even ridiculous, ideas for quieting typical holiday blues. The few truly distress-diminishing concepts, found nowhere in those missives, surround the problem with idealization. Our heightened expectations for the winter holidays, infecting everything from struggles with gift selection to images of perfect parties with family and friends, create trouble. The anticipations, predictions, possibilities, hopes, and apprehensions run amok. They gallop through our minds like the apes circling the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Just think:

Related to gift-giving alone, feelings range from anxiety over quality of presents, envy for those able to spend more than you, overwhelm at the infinity of options, to guilt at your decision to not buy a single thing for anyone. Regarding social encounters, possibilities include excitement at connecting with your high school sweetheart, nausea at seeing your emotionally cold cousin, or dread at having Uncle Charley grill you—as he does every year—over why you have neither stable employment nor romantic love.

What lies in our unconscious mind fuels these disappointment-guaranteeing ideals? I decode a cryptic explanation from the obscure French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1978), and; I offer one eloquent solution from Lao-Tzu’s (400 BCE/2006) Tao Te Ching. Understanding the Lacanian concept may perhaps leave you less anxious but, at least, better informed. The Taoist solution provides instant relief—assuming you can achieve it (or you’re willing to practice facilitative meditative techniques to get you there).

Per usual, Lacan’s work requires careful clarification. I simplify his labyrinthine work through identifying his three components related to this problem of idealization. First, we all find ourselves only through the other. For Lacan, the ultimate other is the Mother, which he, therefore, spells as: (m)other. We look for what our caregivers’ desire (wish for, seek, want, etc.), and then we behave in a way that attracts it.

A fictitious patient I’ve described in earlier newsletters always searches for greater wealth. He seeks not to emulate either parent; he wants to satisfy his mother’s oft-spoken admiration of men who are “extremely wealthy, but you’d never know it.” In other words, our identities are not formed through modeling caregivers; they are created by watching what they desire, and then behaving in a way that attracts that desire. We constantly seek the desire of the “other,” and, therefore, exist “on the lookout.”

Second, because we are literally cleaved from our mothers at birth, a separation between us and them persists throughout our lives. No matter how much we try, we cannot perfectly match her (or any caregiver’s) desire. A gap always exists. In his unfathomable need to make his ideas unfathomable, Lacan calls this missing piece le petit objet a. Despite our continual hunting, then, we can still never perfectly find what we desire (which, as noted, initially emerges from striving to be the desire of the [m]other).

Lacan compared le petit objet a to the Greek term agalma. An agalma is a precious object hidden in a worthless box. In like manner, le objet petit a represents the always incompletely attainable wish. The "box" can take many forms, but its importance lies in the elusive object of desire living within the mysterious box.

Third and last, the life-long, never satisfiable searching for desire-satisfaction drives idealization. In essence, your reunification with your high school girlfriend will never be as sweet as you expect. In like manner, your queasiness about your cousin or angst about your uncle will not be as horrid as you expect. Because of idealization (or its opposite, devaluation), we live a smidge out of touch with reality. We are always in a state of imagining something better (or worse) in life.

As Slovej Žižek (2012), a Lacanian scholar, once declared, “the best experiences in life are those you either look forward to or back upon.” Why? Because you increase their value, using fantasy, by virtue of their existence as imaginary representations.

Much of Eastern philosophy advises immersing yourself in the present moment as a way to evade these lingering idealizations or devaluations. On its face a contradiction of what Žižek said, remember that his advice itself requires using the imagination. It is precisely our imaginations which cause so much of our distress.

As promised, here are a few citations from the Tao Te Ching, followed by chapter numbers, which espouse freedom from endlessly seeking le petit objet a. These are all variation of BE HERE NOW:

Free from desire, you realize the mystery; caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. (1)

Not seeking, not expecting, one is present, ready to welcome all things. (15)

Let things come and go effortlessly, without desire. Never expecting results, one is never disappointed. (55)

In summation, strive mightily to enter the holiday season freed from presuppositions. If your high school girlfriend shaved her head, votes for Trump, and is covered in tattoos, what a lovely surprise! How amazed you will feel if your cousin, enshrouded in saffron robes and fresh from a ten-year-silent retreat in Tibet, warmly embraces you. And finally, should Uncle Charley deliver a bear hug, express delight at seeing you, and report reading the Tao Te Ching 50 times, enjoy your bewildered feelings!

Unfortunately, and no matter how well-constructed, the last paragraph is completely worthless because it is rife with anticipation. Better to look up from your phone or computer screen, NOW, take a deep breath, survey the scene around you, and appreciate the sheer wonder of being alive. It is immeasurably difficult to achieve the ego dissolution required to experience pure being—an experience free of idealization or striving. Easy to describe; nearly impossible to achieve. But, that doesn’t mean aiming for it, like through meditation or other mindfulness methods, is not worth the effort.

That concludes this week’s missive. However, I’ve added more information for those few and lonely Lacan enthusiasts among my readers:

Lacan’s idea of le petit objet a represents his major contribution to psychoanalysis. It expresses the lack inherent in our subjective experiences (causing us to endlessly search for an always-elusive sense of completeness or fulfillment). We live with a foundational incompleteness, based on our archaic infantile helplessness. It creates the quest for fulfillment beyond purely satisfying biological needs. But, here’s the rub:

On the one hand, Lacan proposes that le petit objet a is fantasy. His phrase resembles Winnicott’s idea of the “transitional object” (1971), Freud’s (1910) notion of the “lost object,” and Klein’s (1935) concept of “part objects.” In other words, what we seek in our idealized images of holiday experiences is entirely fantasy-based.

On the other hand, and further illustrating Lacan’s ridiculously unnecessary obfuscation, he alternatively suggests we seek to recover real, actual experiences we once had—however fleeting. Lacan (1978) acknowledges a lived experience when he refers to the “unique, specified object we call the objet a” (p. 268). In other words, we grasped it, and then we lost it. Žižek (2009) clarifies, writing, “This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course, designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which emerges as being-lost” (p. 15). In brief, the objet a results from emergence and loss.

Alas, if you’re courageous or masochistic enough to have read to this point, you see the central anomaly. We felt, at least for a brief instant, satisfaction from a real other person (mother or caregiver). It emerged, we felt it, and it vanished. And yet, at other points, Lacan indicates this elusive satisfaction based entirely on fantasy, on our imagination. Is it a particle or a wave? You get the point.

Lacan never resolved the paradox. Endless future discussions, explanations, and dissections will keep Lacanian scholars almost as busy as literary experts working to understand James Joyce’s (1922) Ulysses. As Joyce proclaimed to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, the translator of the French edition,

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Regarding Lacan then, an enduring question remains:

Did Lacan’s enigmatic writing buy him immortality or lingering annoyance? It is, of course, a question rendered unanswerable unless you are opinionated, like me. I choose the latter. Lacan proffered many brilliant ideas, but one must tread through miles of muck and chaos to find them.

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References

Freud, S. (1910). Five lectures on psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 11:1-56.

Joyce, J. (1922). Ulysses. Oxford: Cambridge University Press.

Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16:145-174.

Lacan J (1978). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis. Miller, J. (Ed.). Sheriden, A. (Trans.). New York: Norton.

Lao Tzu. (2006). Tao Te Ching. Trans. S. Mitchell. New York: Harper. (Original work created in 400 BCE).

Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.

Žižek, S. (2009). The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso.

Zizek, S. (2012). Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso.