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Every time you make a decision you confront your symbolic castration

From Josh Cohen’s Not Working loc 855:

Decisions, after all, involve an inevitable moment of negativity; they intrude brutally into the omniscient fantasy that we can be, do or have whatever we want.

From Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0 by Bruce Fink loc 680-689:

the “bedrock of castration,” which we might characterize as follows in Lacan’s terms:   1) The encounter with the fact that explanations can never be complete, for something is always left unaccounted for and there is always more that could be said 2) There is no such thing as perfect harmony between people, whether of the same or opposite sexes, there always being “a psychological phase-difference” between them (Freud, SE XXII, p. 134), they always being at cross purposes (Lacan, 1998, p. 78) 3) That no one has all the answers, and that no future outcome can be thoroughly predicted in advance—one simply has to choose and make the best of one’s choices 4) That one cannot do or be everything in life—one’s time on earth is limited as is one’s energy and abilities.

Castration means we are not whole, do not have everything we want, cannot be everything we might have wanted to be, cannot do everything we may have wanted to do. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, immortal beings.

This I think is the point at which realist reflexivity meets Lacanian psychoanalysis. The impossible project is rapidly starting to feel tractable, at least on a conceptual level!

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