Wednesday 5 August 2009

notes on lacan versus shamanism

Lacan sees paranoia and ambivalence as normal, adult psychological states -- (with the ironic proviso that nobody is mentally healthy!).

I think Lacanian theory is very much immersed in the notion of original sin -- hence its attempt to reduce the importance of the place of the Mother (and of women). However, as Gagan points out, the feeling that an infant might develop, that it is "evil" for having desires for being nurtured that overwhelm the parent, involves a self-misunderstanding concerning the nature and meaning of infantile aggressivity -- namely because the emotion itself is morally neutral, and that, given the right (ie. neutral/receptive) circumstances, the expression of the emotion would enable one to achieve a neutral equilibrium in relation to the world; that is, the emotion would self-neutralise. However, I suspect that Lacan imports too much of a feeling of uncertainty, regarding the infant's true moral status, into his assessment of the existential state of the normal functioning adult. That is, he doesn't seem to implicitly understand that the infant subject's aggressivity would be neutralised, if he were left to the normal recourses of Nature (so long as Nature was allowed to function as Nature, rather than in terms of the constraints of "Civilisation".) So, Lacan's next step is very Catholic -- and he requires "The Name of the Father" to effectively baptise the infant into a Civilised state that is specifically divorced from Nature (identified as original sin). And this divorce from Nature (as from the Unconscious) creates the basis for Lacanian paranoia in the adult state, and for suspicion of the other (which is all, actually, based on the logical correlate that one doesn't really know what one's Unconscious is doing -- for in the Lacanian paradigm, one truly doesn't.)

I think the rigidity of the Lacanian psyche, at the level of adult development, is what produces the discomfort of the ego in relation to the rest of the psyche -- since the Lacanian Unconscious is alienated by the structuralistic imperatives of language, imposed by Society ("from above").

It is this anti-Natural edifice of linguistic determinism that in fact creates the pathologies that a different approach to culture could easily bypass. The shamanistic paradigm is quite different, since it is seen that a return to Nature is a way to restore equilibrium (as, for instance, between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind).

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Cultural barriers to objectivity