What is Deep Socks?
Deep Socks is the world’s first political self help book. If your politics are shallow, whether center, left, or right, reading this book will take you deeper. You’ll start to think in longer time spans, use unique, and perhaps extremely idiosyncratic language. You may feel lonely, for a time, because you are the only one around practicing deep politics. Everyone around you still lives in shallowworld, for a while at least.
Right now, we’re making a first draft of this book via serialization. Because we will take a year to write it, it’s organized into seasons. We begin in winter, specifically, in “Shallow Winter” - a situation of political decline (cold) combined with confusion and widespread misuse of names giving us a shallow field of vision. Each season has three parts: one around the center, one around the right, and one around the left. We have completed the winter section on the center: “Winter in Managerland.” There’s more than 30,000 words to read on managerialism, the central ideology of the center. You could read it chronologically, starting from the condensed history of managerialism, or jump in from the Second Millennium Managerial Prize, which offers a solution for iatrogenesis, injury and death caused by medical “care”. According to to a 2018 literature review in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care: ”Most of the literature establishes that modern medicine is one of the major threats to the world health.” What does iatrogenesis have to do with managerialism and the political center? Read that article.
We are now three articles into “Embers of Fascism” - the part on the winter of the right. Does it sound insulting to say that the embers of fascism burn on the cold plain of the right? If it doesn’t then you will surely enjoy today’s content: Lacanian Therapy For Fascist Psychosis.
Lacanian Therapy For Fascist Psychosis
The first part of this essay will introduce a very basic model of Lacanian Therapy. Lacanian Therapy is an intentional commodification of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. We take exquisitely complex concepts and figures developed by Jacques Lacan and turn them into an easily understood and operationalized therapeutic modality. In order to understand what Lacanian Therapy can do, you’re only going to need to learn six pieces of Lacanian Jargon: the Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Name of the Father, Foreclosure, Slippage. Not only will these help you understand Fascism, and fascism-related psychosis, you will also be able to bond with appealing Lacanians.
The Real, The Imaginary, and The Symbolic
Lacanian Therapy is based on Lacan’s famous distinction between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. These are three registers of psychic experiences, which is a complicated way of saying that they are three ways of experiencing reality. As babies, in the womb, we are blended with the environment around us. Experience is a buzzing flowing chaos; we are experiencing what Lacan called “the real.” Then we see ourselves in a mirror, and make an “image” of ourselves. Instead of the flowing chaos of the first stage, we now have an image of the self, and an image of the world.
Here our experience takes the form of “The Imaginary.” And then we learn to speak: we enter into language. This is the world that Lacan calls “The Symbolic.” It is a world that is defined, in Lacan’s terms, by the Name of the Father.
The Name of the Father
Imagine yourself as a child doing something that you thought was wrong. Why did you feel guilt over this? Why did you imagine being blamed by your father for what you have done? Because (at least according to Lacan) the name of the father structures and gives shape to the entire “symbolic” register of experience. The name of the father gives force to all “shoulds” or “oughts” in a language, any appeal to morality, to right, to justice, to appropriateness, to taste, correct behavior; all that is normative comes from the name of the father.
Foreclosure
Foreclosure is a translation for the forclusion which was Lacan’s translation for a German word used by Freud: Verwerfung, which can be translated as rejection, repudiation, warping, or fault. Lacan used “foreclosure” to designate the exclusion of the “name of the father” from psychic experience. This “foreclosure” of the name of the father is one half of Lacan’s account of psychosis. The other half involves a description of the inherently slippery nature of language, what Lacan called “slippage.”
Slippage
Lacan put a surreal twist on Ferdinand De Saussure’s conception of linguistic activity as involving arbitrarily determined signs referring to signified aspects of realty. According to nosubject.com, “For Saussure, signification was a stable bond between signifier and signified, but for Lacan it is an unstable, fluid relationship.” The use of the signifiers “der Baum”, “oak” and “leafy living being” to describe a tree on the corner (the signified) is a good example of stable, “Sausseurean” signification.
To get a sense of how significant can be unstable, fluid, slippery, consider the way that the sign “fascism” works in Jason Stanley’s “How Fascism Works.” Here, in the introduction, to the book, Stanley gives something like a definition of fascism:
“Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. Every mechanism of fascist politics works to create or solidify this distinction. Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.”
In this passage, Stanley uses us at least four different signifiers (mythic past creating, propaganda utilizing, anti-intellectualism promoting, and unreality creating) to describe one signified: “fascism.” This is formally similar to the “stable” Sausseurean signification: a bunch of different signifiers are being used to signify something. But there’s a difference between that tree on the corner and fascism.
That tree is a chunk of reality that we can signify in different ways. Fascism is, itself, a signifier: it’s a word, a concept: it points towards something else. When we use the word “Fascism” as a signifier, what is it signifying? Not just one thing: it could signify evil, it could signify a specific historical political movement, it could even signify a kind of mental disposition: “Kill the fascist inside of you.”
Now we are almost ready to put the two pieces of Lacan’s theory of psychosis together. As you will surely remember, Lacan used the word “foreclosure” to describe the exclusion of the “name of the father” from the symbolic order. This problem is this: if the symbolic is a pillow, the “name of the father” is the zipper, and when it comes unzipped (foreclosed) then instead of a well-formed pillow, we have feathers flying through the room: this is psychosis.
Lacan’s Theory of Psychosis
Let’s put the whole argument together now. Psychic experience has three possible registers: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. We begin in the real, undifferentiated from the world, experiencing chaotic intensities. A glimpse of ourselves in the mirror allows us to enter “the Imaginary.” As the name suggests, this is a “world” of images, nonverbal, a kind of perpetual dream. When we begin to speak, we enter the third register: “the Symbolic.” Symbolizing is a slippery activity: what was the signified becomes the signifier, creating a constant deferment of meaning: what exactly does fascism mean? This symbolizing is structured and contained by the “Name of the Father” - Lacan’s spicy word for the normative power of language itself. In psychosis, then, this “Name of the Father” is “Foreclosed” and our symbolic experience becomes unstructured. Think of psychotic word salad, of taking everything in reality as a sign for something, and most of all, of paranoia. When in a psychotic paranoid position everything becomes a sign of the conspiracy: all of reality becomes slippery, a signifier.
Fascist Psychosis
The signifier Fascist Psychosis has at least two signifieds: as a fascist-kind of psychosis, or as a psychosis that takes fascism as its object. The most apparent manifestation of fascist-kind psychosis is the mass shooting with fascist justification. It comes as no surprise to see Anders Breivik give a fascist salute in a Swedish court. “Fascism” here describes a specific kind of paranoia; a chain of signifiers linking the decline of the nation, religious-ethnic decline, social democratic youth camps, the crusades, guns, explosives, boats.
It would not be quite accurate to say that Jason Stanley’s aforementioned book “How Fascism Works” is a useful example of “psychosis that takes Fascism as its object.” Because this second type of psychosis is not individual, but social: the contemporary usage around “Fascism” has clearly psychotic-paranoid characteristics. Because of the particularly slippery nature of signification “Fascism” can be seen everywhere, in everything. The “reasoning” goes something like this. Replacement theory is Fascist. Both mass shooters and members of Donald trump’s milieu refer to replacement theory. Therefore Donald Trump is a Fascist. Of course, Stanley’s reasoning is not this schematic, or bald, but the basic form is the same: a slippery chain of signifiers lets us see Fascism everywhere we want to see it. What’s going on here? From the perspective of Lacanian therapy, the answer is clear. What’s going on here is the foreclosure of the Fascist Name of the Father.
The Foreclosure of the Fascist Name of the Father
Once upon a time Fascism was a whole vibe. It was a world, just like techno is today. And just like techno contains Berghain and also some random rave in Nebraska, Fascism contained Ezra Pound and the Ustaše. Techno today still has the Name of the Father; that’s why people still wait for hours to get rejected at the Berghain door. But the Fascist father shot himself in the head in 1945. Hitler foreclosed fascism, in other words, and hence: we get fascist psychosis. Fortunately, there is a treatment.
Lacanian Therapy Treats Fascist Psychosis
If you already get the real/imaginary/symbolic distinction, it will be easy to understand how Lacanian therapy works. Problems happen when the symbolic is disordered: when there’s no “name of the father.” Instead of a structured, meaningful discourse about fascism, we have a confused feather-storm of signifiers signifying other signifiers. How do we zip up the feathers into the symbolic fascist pillow?
Short Session
Normal psychoanalytic sessions ran 50 minutes. Ever the innovator Lacan developed the “short session.” This meant, in practice, that a session could end whenever the analyst decided. Now we decide that this session is over.