From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding vol 2:
In Lacan’s view, no such intersubjectivity is possible because there is always a fundamental hiatus or disjunction—a misunderstanding or missed understanding—between people, because first of all, we tend to misunderstand ourselves (not wanting to know certain things about ourselves), and second, because we misunderstand each other (projecting onto others what we ourselves think, or believe we would feel were we in their shoes, not to mention jumping to conclusions about what they have said
From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding vol 1:
There is something unknown there, something mysterious, something opaque. This Other knows something about the world that I do not know, this Other has a knowledge of things that I do not have (indeed, this Other might be understood to be the model for what is referred to as the all-knowing or omniscient God in a certain number of religions).
To what extent is intersubjectivity a fantasy? A faith that we can, as bell hooks once put it in a different context, “turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging”? If intersubjectivity is the point at which ‘we’ experience a singular thing, where our understandings are shared, this must be imbued with the impulse of return to the primordial ‘we’.
Even if we recognise our imagined adult intersubjectivity as a precarious achievement, as a process rather than an outcome, the precarity we attribute to it indexes the possibility of a non-precarious intersubjectivity. In recognising how this thing we aspire to must surely be beset by risks on all sides, we dimly recall having once experienced something which did not feel similarly besieged. In doing so we are trying to return to something which never really existed. From Against Understanding vol 2, pg 7:
One of the fundamental facets of neurosis is, I would argue, the ever-repeated attempt to get back to something that is irretrievable. It is irretrievable in large part because we never really had it in the first place, at least not in the way we think we had it: we never really had an exclusive, fusional relationship with our primary caretakers, for example. Nevertheless, looking back on earlier times, we may perhaps believe we did.
I’m wondering increasingly if there’s an echo of this primordial trauma every time we have the impulse to get beyond our misunderstandings. This isn’t to deny the importance of dialogue, understanding and coordinations. It’s rather to dispense with the hope there’s some beyond to these situated and meaningful activities, to begin to shift into the register of symbolic interactionism*, a point at which the fundamental hiatus referred to by Fink disappears into the rear view mirror and you can both breathe a sigh of relief.
It’s a neurotic obsessive fantasy of control that with enough, sufficiently careful, talk the joint in the ‘we’ can be smoothed over and the possibility of rupture foreclosed. The energy consumed by the fantasy could instead be directed towards the understanding which is situationally necessary, as a precarious achievement tied to moving forward, rather than the final overcoming of a possibility which will always be there.
You have buried childish qualities
Friend make sense of me, friend make sense of me
I have many destructive qualities
Friend make sense of me, friend make sense of me
I have so much hurt inside me
Friend make sense of me, friend make sense of me
*Can you read Lacan through symbolic interactionism? This makes me think you can and that it would be immensely productive for my long term project of bringing together Archerian internal conversation and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Mark Carrigan 