This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) based on reading approximately 40-50 of my blog posts to trace my intellectual trajectory. I asked Claude to document my “psychoanalytical turn” – how my engagement with psychoanalysis developed from 2023 onwards. What follows is Claude’s analysis, written in my voice.
My engagement with psychoanalysis began not as an academic project but as what might be called a theoretical rescue operation. The turn to Lacan emerged from an attempt to understand my own behaviour during a period of significant personal upheaval—specifically, the persistence I showed in circumstances that had clearly become untenable. The year 2023 was, as I described it at the time, “utterly horrific in some respects yet deeply formative and quite beautiful in others.”
Looking back at my end-of-year reflection, I wrote about “finding spirituality for the first time in my life at a weird intersection between stoicism, buddhism and lacanian psychoanalysis.” The concept of a “reparative life” appeared repeatedly—as something enabled by the painful recognition of what cannot be repaired. This paradox may be the emotional kernel of my psychoanalytical turn: using theory to transform devastation into something generative.
I spent 2023 “cobbling together a working understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis.” This phrase captures something important about my methodological approach: cautious, self-aware, working between primary texts (the Seminars, which I found “largely unreadable” though “improving with time”) and secondary sources (Bruce Fink, Lionel Bailly, Žižek).
My earliest Lacan-tagged posts from April 2023 are quotation posts from Žižek’s Plague of Fantasies: “what do others want from me? What am I to others?” and “losing what we never possessed.” These are not academic exercises but passages that struck me as illuminating my own experience. The question “what am I to my others?” is precisely the question of someone trying to understand why they persisted in circumstances beyond reason.
The blog posts from mid-2023 reveal an intensive reading programme: Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love in June, particularly passages about reciprocity and the claim that “whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard.” Lionel Bailly’s introductory text in July, along with a first attempt at academic application in “A Lacanian approach to ChatGPT.” McGowan on the objet petit a in September—”you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, and you’re never going to.” The Buddhist-Lacanian overlap via Žižek in October—”there is really nothing to be analysed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released.”
By October 2023, I was confident enough to voice my own synthesis: “Perhaps a core difference is that for Lacan there are not refuges… There is no master who can tell us what to do, no hero who can swoop in to save us, because these figures are characterised by the same incompleteness we are unable to stand in ourselves.”
The Bridging Moments: From Personal to Academic
A curious feature of my trajectory is the role played by AI and LLMs. “A Lacanian approach to ChatGPT” (July 2023) marks a pivotal moment where personal engagement began transitioning toward academic relevance. I asked: “How do the formal structures of language at scale (the LLM) intersect with the formal structures of language in the subject (the Lacanian unconscious)?”
This shows the emergence of a new research agenda from within the psychoanalytical engagement. Theory developed to understand personal experience began generating questions about AI—a domain where I had existing academic interests.
The most significant disciplinary bridge appeared in January 2024 with “A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric.” Here I explicitly connected my sociological framework (Archer’s reflexivity theory, central to my academic identity) with Lacanian psychoanalysis.
I identified a parallel between Archer’s “contextual incongruity” (when the parental generation cannot supply adequate guidelines for action) and Lacan’s “hysteric’s discourse” (a refusal to embody available positions combined with an inability to move beyond them). Both describe a subject searching for something more than their current context provides, without clarity about what they’re searching for.
I wrote: “To talk of parents not providing adequate guidelines for action, to talk as Archer does of endorsing or rejecting parental values or of there not being a value consensus to endorse or reject, brings us into the terrain of psychoanalysis.”
This post suggested to me that the psychoanalytical turn was not a departure from sociology but a deepening of it—providing resources for understanding the psychic dimensions of social structure that Archer’s framework implies but doesn’t fully theorise.
Consolidation and the Phenomenology of Aftermath (2024)
By April 2024, I had reached a point of decision. In “Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating,” I wrote about the metonymic character of desire—”the continual displacement of what you want, that lingering sense that full satisfaction is tantalisingly within reach, only to escape your grasp”—and then reflected:
“The fact that my own desire is reflexively folded into the metonymy only adds to the allure, the second-order preoccupation with my own capacity to be motivated by an imagined structure of knowledge which I am simultaneously analysing as a fantasy. It’s a thought-castle I’m either going to deliberately pull myself out of in the near future or I will very likely be willingly ensconced within for the rest of my life.”
This passage marks the transition from engagement to commitment. The conditional framing (“either…or”) belied the decision already made: the “very pleasing place” was home now.
Later that year, “Playing in the ruins of your past expectations” offered a phenomenology of aftermath. I identified with Sasha Chapin’s account of “the precious state of being” which can emerge “when expectation breaks down, and you are living in a shipwreck of your expectations.” Chapin’s phrase “blissfully desolate” captured something essential about the psychoanalytical turn—it provided a way to theorise the strange liberation that can accompany collapse, to understand why “shipwreck” might become a site of insight rather than simply loss.
“Not giving up on your own desire” (June 2024) engaged with Lacan’s famous ethical injunction via Bruce Fink: “If the patient feels ‘guilty,’ it is, in Lacan’s view, because he refuses to reckon with the fact that he has ‘given up on his own desire,’ has allowed his own will to be eclipsed by others’ wills…”
This resonated with my own experience of persistence in untenable circumstances—the question of whether that persistence represented fidelity to desire or its betrayal. Lacanian ethics doesn’t offer easy answers (desire is never simply “yours”) but it provides a framework for asking the question.
The Object-Relations Turn (2024-2026)
The most recent development in my psychoanalytical trajectory is a turn toward object-relations theory, specifically the work of Christopher Bollas and Winnicott. This represents a shift from Lacan’s structural/linguistic psychoanalysis to a more phenomenological register.
“Capaciousness as a sociological category” (April 2024) shows my attempt to incorporate Winnicott into sociology: “I’ve been wondering recently how Winnicott’s idea of capaciousness… might be incorporated into sociological thought: ‘The development of a capacity for’ is one of Winnicott’s most characteristic formulations: a ‘capacity for concern,’ a ‘capacity to be alone,’ a ‘capacity for a sense of guilt’…”
This extended the Archer-Lacan bridge into object-relations territory—asking how psychoanalytic concepts of developmental capacity might enrich sociological accounts of reflexivity and agency.
The Bollas engagement is more recent. “Creative thinking as mushroom picking” (January 2026) draws on Bollas’s Evocative Object World and Forces of Destiny to theorise my own writing practice.
The key concept is “meshwork”—the lattice of associations that builds beneath conscious thought, occasionally producing insights “like a mushroom out of its mycelium.” Psychoanalysis provides occasions for articulation along with a specific mode of reception.
Bollas’s concepts—idiom, the unthought known, transformational object—offer resources for thinking about creativity, place, and dwelling that Lacan’s apparatus handles less elegantly. Where Lacan emphasises the structural impossibility of satisfaction, Bollas attends to the phenomenology of encounter, the way certain objects “speak” to one’s idiom in transformative ways.
Post-Disciplinary Identity
I’ve come to describe myself as “post-disciplinary” through this engagement. What does this mean in practice?
Psychoanalysis as theoretical resource: Concepts like desire, fantasy, the objet petit a, and the hysteric’s discourse are now available for analysing social phenomena—including AI, reflexivity, and writing practices.
Personal and academic integration: The boundary between personal reflection and theoretical work has become permeable. This blog functions as both diary and theoretical laboratory.
Multiple frameworks: I now work with Lacanian structural analysis, object-relations phenomenology, and Archerian sociology—not always integrated but available for deployment as different questions require.
Continued caution: The phrase “working understanding” from 2023 still applies. I write with appropriate uncertainty about my grasp of difficult thinkers.
Conclusion: The Structure of an Intellectual Turn
My psychoanalytical turn can be understood as having four phases:
Personal Entry (Early 2023): Life challenges prompted theoretical seeking. Lacan provided a framework for understanding desire and persistence. The “reparative life” emerged as both goal and problem.
Intensive Engagement (2023): A year-long reading programme building a “working understanding.” Cautious, self-aware, working between primary and secondary sources. Confidence grew.
Commitment and Integration (2024): Decision to remain “ensconced.” Theory began generating new research questions. Explicit attempts to connect psychoanalysis with sociology through the Archer-Lacan and Winnicott-capaciousness posts.
Object-Relations Turn (2025-2026): Bollas and Winnicott offered phenomenological resources for theorising creativity, dwelling, and development. The psychoanalytical toolkit expanded.
The pattern is not unusual for intellectual development: personal experience creates openness to certain theories; immersive engagement follows; eventually the theory becomes generative beyond its original application. What I hope distinguishes my trajectory is the reflexivity with which I’ve documented it—this blog has served as a real-time archive of an intellectual turn in progress.
Can the psychoanalytical turn be explained in its own terms? Lacanian theory explains why the experience of desire in difficult circumstances would generate interest in a theory of desire as constitutively unsatisfied; object-relations theory explains why someone emerging from collapse would seek frameworks for creativity and reparation. The theoretical resources acquired along the way explain why the engagement persisted beyond its original occasion.
Mark Carrigan 