I am grateful for the opportunity to interact with Esther Meek’s thoughts around the significance of the other and the real, all of which are a gift to the school. In her essay, she invites us to consider the importance of the early “face-to-face encounter” between the mother and child, and she highlights the philosophical implications of these moments. As a psychoanalytic practitioner and thinker—for whom the early maternal relationship holds prominence—I am excited to step into this conversation with her and to interact with her ideas from my own position and experience. I approach this conversation as a counselor, educator, and psychotherapist who makes sense of the world through Lacanian theory and reinterpretation of Freudian ideas. But I am also coming to this conversation as a son, father, brother, and friend who is making his way in this world amid the community of fellow dreamers at The Seattle School.
Meek highlights the often-overlooked significance of an early encounter with the other, an encounter that helps to set the stage for the experience of being an I in the world. She locates the real in the mother’s smile and this first encounter with an other. I find her ideas exciting and a much-needed antidote to the dehumanizing, objectifying stance of modernity that so often seeks to nullify the other in defense of a flattened and buffered self.[1]
However, Meek’s meeting of the mother “gazing into their [infant’s] face in rapture, smiling a joyous, self-giving, surprises-filled welcome” strikes me as more fantasy and idealization than lived experience. Where in this picture, we may ask, is there room for a more complex reality of birth and parenting? I don’t raise this point to counter Meek or her overarching perspective but to complicate these early interactions between mother and child and to thereby help us face a more robust real in our encounter with the other. That is, instead of a binary between a perfect or rejecting mother, psychoanalytic thinking invites us to consider a split mother or a more robust human containing multiple reactions in this moment: exhaustion, joy, pain, relief, dread, hope, and more.
It is here that the difference in disciplines begins to shine. On the one hand, philosophical thinking is able to work with the as-if of an idealized experience, building off of metaphor to help allow for more nuanced thinking on the nature of knowing and modernism, as Meek is inviting us to do in her essay. Psychological reflection—and more notably psychoanalytic thinking—on the other hand, embraces and requires the obstinate complexity of the particular. The devil is in the details, or, as we have been discussing this past year at The Seattle School, “What if there’s more?” This matters because it is here, in the murky complexity of the real of the other, that we are confronted not with a form of rapturous relating that is but with a relating that is marked by pain, confusion, and disorientation. If we are to turn toward the other and experience the real, we will also encounter pain.[2]
The infancy period that Meek is highlighting in her essay speaks to the developmental stage of the preverbal infant through what Jacques Lacan calls “the mirror stage.”[3] This is when the child begins to recognize themselves in a mirror, which signifies the development of an ego and the capacity to externally image themselves.[4] This mirror stage is not so much a single moment as the culmination of countless experiences and interchanges between infant and caregiver over time. As such, while we may talk of specific interactions being significant, those individual moments symbolize recurring, iterative processes that have been played out again and again. Prior to this stage, the child’s experience of self is discontinuous and fragmented, or what Lacan refers to as a lack of cohesion or unity.[5] During this time, the child cannot bind sensory bodily experiences into a coherent sense of self. But as the child sees their reflection and is met with the approving gaze of their caregiver, who affirms that newly discovered image in the mirror, a unified sense of self as whole emerges. As a result, the child becomes split between its (mis)recognition of itself from the outside in the mirror, its disparate and fragmented bodily sense experiences, and its symbolic identification in the gaze of the mother—the sense of being seen. The I of the child forms out of this dislocation of self from an internal experiencer into an external observer. Our egos, in this way, are how we appear to an outsider—an image of ourselves rather than the whole.[6]
This development does not need to include the use of an actual mirror or moment in time, but it is in the reflection of the self as a unified entity in multiple mirrors (literal and figurative) that the child enters the stage. Lacan refers to the mother’s gaze as the first mirror.[7] And so the mother’s regard/recognition of the child is deeply significant to the formation of the first experience of the child’s ego, which begins to take place within that symbolic order. Here, Lacan reinterprets Sigmund Freud’s notion of the Oedipal struggle to describe the way this function becomes instated in the world of the child, and that theory is at the heart of Lacan’s diagnostic taxonomy.[8]
Before going too much further, it’s important to distinguish between female- and male-bodied caregivers and the maternal or paternal functions, particularly in the context of psychoanalytic theory. For a number of reasons, the mother/father metaphor is used in analytic discourse to speak of different functions, but the functions need not be housed within particularly sexed bodies. In a single parent home, for example, the same person embodies both the maternal and paternal functions. I invite you to consider those as metaphors rather than concrete representations of particularly sexed or gendered bodies.
What is important in these moments is, as Lacan highlights, the very possibility or capacity to engage with an other. The preverbal infant may or may not have been granted a space in the world by their mother. A primary caregiver’s inability to create a place for their own child can lead to a foreclosure of the child’s ability to enter a shared world with a differentiated sense of self and other. That is, they may have been physically born but are still psychically fused.
However, this differentiated sense of self that emerges from the mirror stage is never complete. Note that the ego that emerges is imaginary. The ego is guided by a desire for cohesion and coherence—both of which are resisted by reality. The ego is a conscious sense of self from the outside, and it is thus always a (mis)recognition of the self. As soon as I exist in the world, there is now a boundary differentiating what is me from not-me. Yet this boundary is imaginary; it is certainly functional, but it is not real. It includes experiences and feelings that fit within the image of me, and it resists those aspects that would threaten that image. This means that what we experience as other is also part of us. But that other is an inherent threat that continues to press itself into our safe worlds because it is the part of ourselves that was excluded from our ego—the not me that was formed as soon as me was established.[9] That means that Meek’s real in the gaze of the other rings deeply true from an analytic perspective.
However, this re-membering of the real is not always blissful or pleasurable; it can elicit disgust. It is resisted and excluded because it is painful and does not fit our image of ourselves. Lacan uses the term trauma to speak of this encounter with the real, that irrupts into our realities, disrupts our sense of ourselves, and disturbs our perception of the world.[10] So unlike Meek’s rapturous gaze, Lacan’s real is that which cannot be put into words—the unimaginable trauma that breaks in and overwhelms. Disgust is activated in these moments of in-breaking trauma to protect our egos and our imaginary realities. It is an affective and bodily response to the threat of contamination and it helps to maintain clarity around the boundary of what is and is not me.[11]
Consider your reaction to bodily fluids that leave your body. We have no problem with the saliva in our own mouths, but we are repulsed by spit as soon as it leaves our mouths. That repulsion is a disgust reaction that distinguishes what was once part of us—the saliva in our mouths—from what now must be avoided—spit. Disgust operates in the same way around thoughts, ideas, and our sense of self, protecting us from contaminants. This is perhaps most strikingly seen in what Robin J. DiAngelo calls white fragility.[12] The notion that I, as a white-bodied man, could be racist is an affront to the image I have of myself as a “good person,” and so I respond in rage at anything that may threaten to expose my racism. Kathryn Schultz highlights this phenomenon well in her TED talk on being wrong.[13] We resist the awareness of our mistakes rather than the reality of those mistakes. It’s the image, idea, and perception of myself as wrong that is more threatening (i.e., disgust-inducing) than the actuality of my error.
Returning to Meek’s encounter with the other with this understanding in mind, we can see that such an encounter often elicits not so much a warm feeling of connection but a disgust reaction. Meeting the other risks contaminating who we think we are and how we want to believe the world works. We are not masochistic when we resist this encounter; we are, rather, following Freud’s pleasure principle and seeking comfort. It feels better to keep the other at bay because the real of the other is an affront to our sense of self. They are a contaminant to our reality. In other words, opening ourselves up to an encounter with the real is an invitation into discomfort and our own disgust.
This, I believe, is an important nuance that can be added to Meek’s argument. The real is painful. It can be traumatic. It is destabilizing, disturbing, and disgusting. It dismantles our sense of self. Therefore, modernity’s resistance to this real can be understood not just as an epistemological error but as a psychological defense against the disturbance of the other. And yet, even though it is painful, the real-in-other is liberating and expansive. It is beautiful because I am more than I think I am. There is more to the world than I can imagine. I do not need to be confined or defined by my own ego or capacity to imagine. I can be free from the pursuit of happiness and comfort. There is hope beyond our ideologies.[14]
As a white, cisgender man, I find this point particularly important. My sense of self has been deeply formed by systems of whiteness and patriarchy (among others like heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and classism). That sense of self must be dismantled if I am to be able to hope for a better world, a better way of relating to others. So much of my image of myself is constructed around these fragile falsehoods that are propped up by societal privileges and oppression. It is important work to let those facades fall and hope that something new, something more robust can emerge. I must face the real of my image—an image which requires the oppression, alienation, and dehumanization of bodies that are dissimilar to mine—through encounters with others so that I can grieve the cost of my ego and hope for something more. My encounter with the real can’t be pleasant, but I must have a hope beyond my own comfort lest I be imprisoned by a capitalistic ego that can only chase pleasure at the cost of others.[15]
However, we must also be wary of a narrative that privileges suffering over the wisdom of one’s own body. The mindless pursuit of pain and discomfort is not seeking the real. The real may be disturbing, but not all disturbances are from it. Those in power have often used the fusion of suffering and the good to justify oppression. Each of us inhabits unique social locations with different forms and degrees of personal, societal, and institutional power that have formed us in our own ways. Our transformative encounters with the real will all be unique and cannot be forced upon us by those in power. Denying the reality of suffering for the “greater good” of transformation, the real, righteousness—or some other empty signifier for the better—is always in service of maintaining the status quo for the comfort of those at the top.
It is here that my Christian faith helps to point me toward the pursuit of wisdom and a way through the ubiquity of ideology, a way of discerning the masochistic from the liberative. Womanist theologian Wil Gafney writes that “if we listen to Wisdom and her child Jesus and follow their holy example we will find so much more.”In John 14:6 Jesus calls himself “the way, the truth, and the life” (NRSVUE). By pursuing these attributes, we are pursuing Christ. We are hoping for the disruptive God who “inhabits and transcends all of our categories, marking each one, each aspect of ourselves, our identities, our bodies, as holy, as fit for the divine.”[16] There is great liberation in finding that there is more to us, great joy in breaking free of our imaginary—and societal—confinements. The encounter with the real is a thing of beauty. At times, it is a terrible, overwhelming beauty but beautiful nevertheless.
The way of Jesus offers us a counternarrative to the individual, comfort-driven self, luring, instead, with a foolish hope to chase after the real. Christ inverts our normal sense of contamination, daring us to believe in the power of the miniscule to transform and redeem the whole. The foolishness of God trusts in the germinating power of love to erode the external power of self-sufficiency. Christ as eucontaminant—or contaminant for good—invites us into our fears and disgust, with a ridiculous hope that it is there in the cave we most fear to enter, the truth we are most repulsed by, and the gaze we are most hesitant to meet that we may know God and ourselves more fully. The eucontaminating hope of Jesus continually haunts our comfortable egos to call us out of ourselves and into life.[17]
And so, to return to Meek, I want to say an amen to her essay; I hold such gratitude for her gift. She is helping us as a community re-member what it is that fuels our Seattle School of Thought. We are dreamers who foolishly pursue the divine through a reckless embrace of the real-in-the-other. Let us face this pursuit, which is not without cost or pain. We have been alienated from ourselves and one another. The redemption of such ruptures is not easy or safe, but it is beautiful beyond description.
[1] See Philip Cushman, Travels with the Self: Interpreting Psychology as Cultural History (Taylor & Francis, 2019) and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).
[2] See Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Case Formulation (Guilford, 1999); and Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York University Press, 2023).
[3] See Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1–7. (W.W. Norton, 1977).
[4] See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1997); and Amy Allen and Mari Ruti, Critical Theory between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
[5] See Lacan, Écrits
[6] See Alexandre Leupin, Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (Other, 2004); Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (Routledge, 2015); and Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2013).
[7] See Lacan, Écrits; and Bailly, Lacan
[8] See Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Harvard University Press, 2000).
[9] See Allen and Ruti, Critical Theory; and Molly Anne Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Wiley, 2013).
[10] See
[11] See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 2009); Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality (Lutterworth, 2012); Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage Books, 2012); and Paul R. Hoard and William Hoard, “Eucontamination: A Christian Study in the Logic of Disgust and Contamination,” The Other Journal 32 (2020), https://theotherjournal.com/2020/10/19/eucontamination-christian-logic-disgust-contamination/.
[12] DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Beacon, 2020). Also, see Paul Hoard, “Beyond Fragility, Interpassive White Rage,” The Other Journal 35 (2023), https://theotherjournal.com/2023/05/beyond-fragility-interpassive-white-rage/.
[13] See Schulz, “On Being Wrong,” TED2011, March 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong?language=en.
[14] See Žižek, The Sublime Object
[15] See Hoard, “Beyond Fragility”; and Wil Gafney, “Wisdom’s Table Is God’s Table,” web log, Womanists Wading in the World, September 19, 2018, https://www.wilgafney.com/2018/09/19/wisdoms-table-is-gods-table/.
[16] Gafney, “Wisdom’s Table.”
[17] See Hoard & Hoard, “Eucontamination” and Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. (Indiana University, 2013).