Yes! We can all be too-much.
The concept of too-much-ness pervades Mr. Oppenheimer’s essay; whether in relation to Bollas’ essay in the New York Times regarding the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia, computer software’s reproduction of schizophrenic-like language, human being as human experience, or the excess (i.e., inadequacy) of language in the mental health field. The concept is so-much that I feel compelled to join him in further challenging the language we employ in the mental health field by polemicizing the very nature of human being. I would like to note that my theoretical point of departure is not original, but is little known in North American psychiatry and psychology. Consequently, I think it can further this conversation.
Oppenheimer draws our attention to a Bollasian pericope in which he states, “To be successfully normal, then, we rather have to dumb ourselves down,” to get away from the too-much-ness of our minds. Bollas continues by saying that his work with “schizophrenics has taught me that when defenses against the complexities of the mind break down there can be a breakthrough of too much.” The outcome, he argues, is that “selves cave in.”
I believe that Oppenheimer accurately points out that Bollas “almost gets it right.” Rather, Oppenheimer states, “We’re not even as good at being normal as Bollas’s formulation would suggest. We can’t dumb ourselves down that much. Or if we can, it’s at the cost of living a fully human life.”
In fact, Oppenheimer is so correct that I do not know if he fully recognizes how correct he is. And it is precisely this point that I would like to elaborate from a Lacanian vantage point: That if we would like to become more human(e), more “normal” we needn’t become more dumb, we need to become more schizophrenic (in the Bollasian sense). In other words, we need to become more. Hence, my title is not a simple affirmation of some intuitive description of the human experience, but a promise. A promise, which points to the possibility that we can all hope to become too-much. Now comes the much more arduous task of describing what I mean; precisely, the task that parallels this becoming more or too-much.
For me, it is imperative that we begin with Lacan. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan further revolutionized the Freudian revolution which in essence unearthed the unconscious, its processes, and its effect upon conscious life. Lacan’s revolution was in demonstrating that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” (1981/1993, p. 167). Again, not that it is a language but that, as Lacan states in his seminar The Psychoses, “It’s a phenomenon that always presents the essential duality of the signifier and signified” (Ibid.).
In other words, that psychic life is dependent upon the unfolding tension between acoustic images and the words they engender (i.e., the signifier) and the ideas, constructs, and meanings we humans attribute to these signifiers (i.e., the signified). More specifically, that this relation between signifier and signified produces a gap, a void, an absence around which psychic life is structured. But how does this abeyance appear and what does it mean for us practically?
Lacan made it quite clear that a signifier is in and of itself empty, that it “doesn’t refer to any object, not even to one in the form of a trace.” Rather, Lacan says, “It refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign…” (Ibid.). What Lacan is saying is that the signifier, in its primacy, stands apart from the thing it signifies. That it is not dependent upon it’s effects (i.e., upon the signified) in order to exist or for us to know that it exists. Rather, a signifier functions to reveal an-Other signifier, and in so doing presents itself as absent.
To take Lacan seriously is to accept that language traverses our psyche from the beginning and as such inducts us into human being. This human being, however, is engendered by the lack the signifier creates in the center of its being. As such, the price we pay for becoming speaking beings is to never be enough. Therefore, words fail us miserably, we misunderstand each other, not to mention ourselves, and we spend our speaking lives attempting, to varying degrees of success, to veil this lack. How so? By appearing to be whole, complete, coherent, and intact.
In this fundamental sense, we are all alienated and we are alienated because of language. Therefore, we might say that from the beginning the self is already caved in! In this sense the “normal neurotic” does not differ from the “abnormal schizophrenic.”
To extend this argument further so as to polemicize the language of mental health, we would be really hard pressed to know what any of these signifiers inherently means. In fact, we do not know and cannot know what they mean yet we cannot escape the conviction that they must mean some-thing. To use the signifier “normal” or “abnormal” or “neurotic” or “psychotic” is equivalent to employing any other signifier because that signifier will point us in the direction of an-Other (signifier), and so on. The danger is in claiming to know.
Indeed, Lacan asserts that if one wants to better understand what distinguishes a neurotic (psychological) structure from a psychotic (psychological) structure it is precisely the phenomenon that in the psychotic structure the signifier does not point to an-Other. In other words, it has no-Other referent. It is here that the signifier and the signified are indissoluble. It is only in this structure that someone can claim with absolute certainty that s/he knows exactly what s/he means. It is precisely in this regard that we can say that the medicalization of human being in diagnostic manuals such as the DSM is a discourse founded in psychosis.
Earlier I stated that if if we would like to become more human(e), more “normal” that we needn’t become more dumb; rather that we need to become more schizophrenic. I mean this, however, in the theoretical space where Lacan inverts Bollas and traditional North American psychoanalytic thinking.
For Lacan, psychosis is not the byproduct of failed or overwhelmed psychological defenses as it is for Bollas. For Lacan, the psychological structure called psychotic is the result of a foreclosed signifier that keeps us from becoming more alienated, more of a subject. Again, if the structure called psychotic is one in which signifier and signified are bound such that meaning is fixed, little to no alienation is truly possible because we can sustain ourselves in the concreteness of the word. However, the less bound signifier and signified are, the less fixed their meaning, which creates greater states of alienation. For Lacan, this more is the so-called normal, whereas for Bollas “more” is psychosis! It is precisely in this inversion of human being that I suggest we find a promise. The irony is that it is a promise of and for more in all of its possible permutations. More mis-understanding, more alienation, more lack, but ultimately more humanity. Let us all strive for more!
Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III the psychoses 1955–1956 (Russell Grigg, Trans.). New York, NY: Norton & Company. (Original work published in 1981).
