Toxic Positivity in the Context of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Updated: Nov 29, 2020
Interview with Colin Wright, Associate Professor in Critical Theory, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
On an everyday level, I think everyone encounters forms of toxic positivity.
Everyone, at least once, has been at a party, felt sad or melancholic and been
identified as a “foreign organism” by this whole system of the fun-loving crowd,
and then been flooded with passive-aggressive demands to “cheer up”, to
“enjoy”, to “stop being grumpy” - which is to say negative or unhappy. Or maybe
they have come across a confusing job application stating something like “we are
looking for happy people”; or found they could not talk to friends or family
members about deeply harrowing experiences or thoughts without hearing how
the “glass is always half full,” when in reality, for them, the “glass” felt completely
empty. In short, I think most people can relate to the fact that negativity is not
easily or “healthily” tolerated within a capitalistic culture.
I spoke with Colin Wright, Associate Professor in Critical Theory (Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham) who is currently working on the book with a title Toxic Positivity: A Lacanian
Critique of Happiness and Wellbeing to find out more on the subject of toxic positivity in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

NL: First of all, could you please define “toxic positivity” and speak about your
upcoming book with the very interesting title Toxic Positivity: A Lacanian
Critique of Happiness and Wellbeing. Why have you been interested in
researching this concept (toxic positivity) in particular, and why in the context
of Lacanian psychoanalysis?
CW: Well, I should be honest from the outset and say that I stole ‘toxic positivity’! I took it
from the queer theorist Jack Halberstam, who uses the term in his book The Queer Art
of Failure. The main argument there is that ‘success’, and all the positivity that is meant
to come with it, is in fact often violently normative and limiting. Dominant ideas of
‘success’ inherently exclude more marginal ‘queer’ forms of subjectivity and practice.
One of the toxic effects of this kind of positivity then is that it prohibits the bad feelings –
anxiety, sadness, anger etc. – which, in such a sunny and upbeat society, are bound to
accompany the alternative lifestyles and forms of desire often deemed ‘failures’ by wider
society. Halberstam is interested in recovering the transformative potential of these
negative affects (Sarah Ahmed has made a related argument about the politics of the
‘feminist killjoy’), and I share that interest.
My own project is to extend this idea of ‘toxic positivity’ into the fields of happiness and
wellbeing, and the innumerable injunctions we are subjected to nowadays to ‘always
look on the bright side’. I would argue that this new superegoic happiness is toxic in at
least three ways.
Firstly, it is toxic for the whole philosophical and Enlightenment project of critique, since
critique implies the negative. Marx took from Hegel, for example, the idea of the ‘labour
of the negative’ as the motor of dialectical change: conflict or contradiction is what stops
things becoming stagnant. And yet today, the negative is pathologized as a “cognitive
bias” that one should simply get rid of through Mindfulness, CBT, or Neuro Linguistic
Programming. This is toxic for the political function of critique as well, because sources
of unhappiness are presented not as a matter of social injustice out there in an unequal
world, but as an internal matter of individual responsibility for one’s own attainment of
satisfaction and wellbeing. This really nullifies some of the more revolutionary
deployments of the idea of happiness and its absence, for example in the French and
even American Revolutions, which turned the demand for happiness into a rallying cry
for social not just individual transformation (though the American Revolution quickly
shifted from a civic notion of happiness to one giving primacy to the private pursuit of
property and wealth).
Secondly, I would argue that this positivity is toxic in the very real sense of being bad for
our health. The relentless emphasis on measuring and enhancing our wellbeing is
making many of us ill! As a psychoanalyst, I definitely encounter people who are made
to feel worse by their inability to achieve or maintain this ideal of happiness and
wellbeing. It’s difficult to understand one’s own suffering when the broader consumer
culture promises endless modes of intense pleasure and fulfilment, or when social media
presents carefully curated images of everyone else’s apparently perfect lives. The
complication is that we all know people perform an idealised life on Facebook which
probably bears no relation to their lived reality, and yet, affectively, we behave as if this
knowledge makes no difference to us: we feel as if everyone but us is able to enjoy life
in a direct and uncomplicated way.
Thirdly, I am interested in linking toxicity to toxicology and thus to ecology, since the
happiness of consumer capitalism is clearly leading to unsustainable environmental
damage. Here, my inspiration is Félix Guattari’s short but rich text, The Three Ecologies,
in which he argues for a much more integrated way of looking at the overlaps between
the mental, the social, and the environmental planes. In my book, I am trying to work my
way towards some kind of antidote to the toxicity of toxic positivity, and this surely has to
involve a different conception of a more-than-human ecological happiness which
encompasses the wellbeing of the planet in its very finitude and fragility?
As to why Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is a very simplistic answer to that, which is
that I am a practicing Lacanian analyst and see most things through this lens! But
beyond this personal point, whilst some critiques of happiness studies and positive
psychology have now appeared (see people like Mike Davies, Sam Binkley, Ashley
Frawley etc.), it is striking that psychoanalysis of any stripe is almost completely absent
from or even dismissed by them. I think this is because psychoanalysis is conflated
much too quickly with psychotherapy and even psychology, whereas it is almost
diametrically opposed to them. This is a real omission because psychoanalysis already
has quite a sophisticated theory of happiness and its opposite, for example in Freud’s
Civilization and its Discontents. But also because the clinical practice of psychoanalysis
necessarily works carefully with these same tensions between socially provided images
of fulfilment (though advertising and film and television for example) and the very
different, indeed singular, fantasies and desires of particular subjects. Analysts can’t
ignore ideals of happiness but we also can’t sign up to them.
I would argue that this positivity is toxic in the very real sense of being bad for our health. The relentless emphasis on measuring and enhancing our wellbeing is making many of us ill! As a psychoanalyst, I definitely encounter people who are made to feel worse by their inability to achieve or maintain this ideal of happiness and wellbeing. It’s difficult to understand one’s own suffering when the broader consumer culture promises endless modes of intense pleasure and fulfilment, or when social media presents carefully curated images of everyone else’s apparently perfect lives.
Lacan, moreover, saw these problems with happiness becoming a master signifier very
early, in the late 1950s and 1960s. In his seventh seminar on The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, for example, he called happiness a “bourgeois ideology” and advised
that analysts should have nothing whatsoever to do with it. He was also very dubious
about the emphasis in other forms of psychotherapy on the category of affect, as if
‘feelings’, especially supposedly pleasant ones, could provide a clinical compass for
analytical work. I find this a very useful corrective today when affective investments in
modes of intimacy have been turned into what Eva Illouz has called “emotional
capitalism”. Lacanian psychoanalysis focuses more on (sometimes uncomfortable, often
inconvenient) subjective truths than on apparently ‘good’ or pleasant feelings. Despite
appearances, the latter often alienate us yet further within the normative demands of the
Other. As analysts then we definitely do not turn suffering into a virtue (as in aspects of
Christianity) or into a melancholic mode of aesthetic sensibility (as in aspects of
Romanticism): we are still in the business of alleviating suffering rather than celebrating
it or pretending it is heroic! But equally, as analysts we cannot orient an analysis around
the promise of happiness or support our patients in their ‘constitutional right’ to pursue it.
For structural reasons, analysis is ultimately subversive of these norms around
happiness and wellbeing.
NL: I was not surprised to learn that the Self-Improvement Industry is estimated
to grow to $13.2 billion by 2022. In his recently published book McMindfulness,
Ronald Purser explains “how mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality”
and the product of the “narcissistic individualism of the wellness industry”. He
argues that “mindfulness is so market-friendly because it appeals to this highly
individualistic, entrepreneurial ethos. It’s all about ‘me’ and self-improvement. It’s
thriving in a culture of narcissism. The focus is firmly on delivering a more happy
self. This is a real kind of social myopia: it squarely places the responsibility for
being ‘happy’ within the individual themselves, rather than taking into account all
the systemic, structural aspects of society that are causing the cultural malaise
that has so many people flocking to the wellness industry for answers.” I came
across an article reviewing Pursers’ book with the title “Why Corporations Want
You to Shut Up and Meditate,” which, in my opinion, perfectly captures the
problem with the self-improvement industry.
So, could you please speak about this constant pressure and encouragement to
focus solely on our own selves? To look for the answers, problems, causes, and
solutions only within - and never without? And also, the constant pressure to
enjoy?
CW: I would completely agree with Purser that the kind of ‘self’ encouraged by the self-
help industry is not just any old version of selfhood, but specifically the one imposed by
neoliberalism. In contrast to more traditional or collectivist cultures, the neoliberal self is
seen as a kind of isolated economic unit, something that must constantly be invested in
with the hope of future returns that will add value. Everything is calculated to make a
profit, and indeed we see frequent references to notions such as psychological or
emotional ‘capital’. In his lectures on biopolitics, Foucault captured this nicely with the
idea of the ‘entrepreneur of the self’ which involves subjecting all values, behaviours and
decisions to the economic rationality of cost-benefit analyses, even in the realms of love
and intimacy (witness the proliferation not just of ‘pre-nups’ but of ‘pre-pre-nups’). But
unlike the Homo Economicus of classical liberalism who was ascribed the power of
rational decision, the neoliberal subject is essentially completely empty and malleable,
making it absolutely identical with this endless task of its own adaptive self-fashioning.
Hence the constant pressure you mention to focus on ourselves, to literally work on
ourselves and to be the result of our self-work. On the one hand, this is presented as the
essence of autonomy and freedom (‘be all you can be’, as the slogan goes), but on the
other, it implies that you would be nothing without this relentless work. As well as
emptying the self, the injunction to maximise happiness and wellbeing – to count and
accumulate them - is simultaneously extremely individualising and responsibilising. It is
all down to you. If you fail, it can only be your own fault. You must be lazy or lack ‘grit’.
And as you suggest, reifying this version of selfhood has the effect of completely erasing
the structural aspects of broader social systems that play an enormous role in forming
the self in the first place, even if individualism encourages us to deny our indebtedness
to the social Other that preceded us. From a psychoanalytic point of view, narcissism
can be defined by the idea that the self does not need, let alone proceed from, the
Other. Such is the illusion characteristic of the ego. But the flipside of this is serious
isolation for the individual and a dissolution of the social bond into something like
Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’. There is a by no means accidental homology
between the emergence of this extreme responsibilisation of the narcissistic ego, and
the neoliberal project of dismantling the welfare state - a somewhat paternal Other that
was once willing to be in some way socially responsible.
Neoliberalism sees to it that the Other’s place is taken by the market, and this starts to
answer your other question about where the constant pressure to enjoy comes from.
Lacan, as you probably know, has a particular word for enjoyment which is often left
untranslated because it doesn’t have a precise English equivalent. That word is
jouissance, and it is helpful because it combines enjoyment with a kind of uncomfortable
intensity or too-muchness, so that jouissance is somewhere between pleasure and pain,
or the peculiar pain pleasure can lead us towards. If we keep that in mind, then the fact
that the market enjoins us to enjoy constantly, relentlessly, and always more rather than
less, can be appreciated as both pleasurable and painful, painful because pleasurable.
Jacques-Alain Miller has been particularly clear about this: where once, in Freud’s day,
the superego was largely prohibitive and repression was the dominant psychic
mechanism, today the superego takes the form of this injunction to enjoy without cease
and without limit. It follows that subjects are exposed to the drive, including its deathly
aspect, without much protection from desire or fantasy. These two things work in tandem
then: not only must you constantly work on yourself, but you must enjoy it; equally, this
enjoyment is what entangles us in repetitive practices we also suffer from.
It is as if the 20 th century complaint was ‘I can’t’, whereas in the 21 st it has become ‘I can’t
not’!
NL: As already mentioned, we could observe manifestations of toxic positivity
literally everywhere around us but when this notion also leaks into the sciences, it
becomes not just upsetting or toxic, but in my opinion, unspeakably harmful and
damaging.
For me personally, a most shocking manifestation of science poisoned by
ideology, was when I heard a very respected psychiatrist giving a lecture, where
she mentioned that “today, the opinion of many psychiatrists became similar to
the religious view, that ungratefulness causes depression, i.e. unhappiness.” She
claimed that even when it comes to the material world, “it does not matter if you
possess a lot or a little, it does not matter if you are grateful for the piece of bread
and roof over your head or if you own all luxuries in the world, the bottom line is:
if you can be grateful for what you have, you will be happy. Or at least you will not
be unhappy and depressed.” And the most striking part was that she presented
this statement as a pure fact, not as a theory.
How can it be that this toxic notion that the self is fully responsible for being
mentally healthy or happy, and that the environment is only a small or
unimportant factor, has become so deeply integrated and rooted not only into our
culture, media, everyday life, politics, and so on, but also into the mental health
systems - into the very way patients are assessed, diagnosed, and informed about
their problems?
CW: Yes, it is regrettably common to hear the sentiment expressed by this psychiatrist,
and in all sorts of other fields claiming scientific legitimacy such as psychology and even
neuroscience. Her position sounds quite like that of the Stoics, especially someone like
Epictetus who stressed a kind of steely inner virtue that cannot be touched by external
misfortunes. On the other hand, I think this resemblance with eudaimonic philosophies in
Ancient Greece is quite superficial and should be challenged, which is why your
question about how we got to the point that this psychiatrist’s position can be presented
simply as a fact, is a really good one.
There is a very long history behind this which I can’t outline here (though the first chapter
of my book tries to), but a couple of more recent salient factors can be mentioned.
Firstly, I think the discourse of ‘health’ itself has been re-calibrated over the past half-
century or so in the direction of neoliberal productivity and performance, pushing it well
beyond any notion of the mere absence of ailments. This can be seen in the World
Health Organisation’s definition of health in 1948 to include a state of wellbeing over and
above merely being free from illness: for the WHO at that point, health was “a state of
complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease
or infirmity”. Moreover, by 1984, at a time of increasing ascendance for neoliberal ideas,
the WHO then shifted their definition of health, making it nothing less than “a resource
for living”, a resource determining “the extent to which an individual or group is able to
realize aspirations and satisfy needs”. You can see in the relation between these two
definitions a trajectory that moves health more and more towards the psychological and
physiological conditions for being, above all, a consumer. Coming to meet this from the
other direction, as it were, it is increasingly common to hear talk of the ‘health’ of the
economy, as if it too were a body.
The politics behind the pseudo-Stoic idea that one should be grateful for whatever one has, no matter how little or how precarious, is obviously a useful way of skirting over the increasingly massive inequalities in society and the ways in which they are magnified by things like class, gender and race. This is what I was getting at with the idea that toxic positivity is toxic for the politics of unhappiness, since this psychiatrist is effectively robbing us of the right to such a negative affect which may not be ‘pathological’ at all, but completely justified by our circumstances.
This is why I have chosen to focus on the concept of wellbeing as well as happiness in
my book: the former has been one of the ways in which the biopolitical aspects of the
latter have extended their reach into more and more aspects of life. A linking concept
between the two would be an idea like Martin Seligman’s ‘flourishing’, which actually
tries to move beyond the acknowledged subjectivism of happiness in order to
encompass more ‘objective’ sociological criteria such as health precisely, but also
longevity. This move to social metrics which can be aggregated on a national level is
very attractive to governments concerned with whole populations. Secondly then, I
would also connect the psychiatrist’s comment you mention to the rise of Happiness
Studies and positive psychology which really emphasise their empirical, scientific
credentials and have done an impressive job of turning this neoliberal vision of
happiness into a widely accepted ‘fact’, so much so that it now influences a broad
spectrum of policies. This ‘fact’ now moves seamlessly between distinct types of
discourse, ranging from self-help and life-coaching to education, managerialism, and
governance as supposedly benevolent ‘nudging’.
But the politics behind the pseudo-Stoic idea that one should be grateful for whatever
one has, no matter how little or how precarious, is obviously a useful way of skirting over
the increasingly massive inequalities in society and the ways in which they are magnified
by things like class, gender and race. This is what I was getting at with the idea that toxic
positivity is toxic for the politics of unhappiness, since this psychiatrist is effectively
robbing us of the right to such a negative affect which may not be ‘pathological’ at all,
but completely justified by our circumstances.
NL: Of course, this psychiatrist’s approach is a very extreme case, but even if we
discuss the standard scenario, if you mention to a psychiatrist that you're, say, a
refugee, feel alienated, have a housing problem, a poor-quality job, are broke, feel
constantly discriminated against, are in debt and/or poor and so on, they will
"keep it in mind", but still within the context of a particular diagnosis - not as the
main or direct cause. In short, when it comes to diagnosis, most often the
message to the patient is: the main reason for your diagnosis is a chemical
imbalance in your brain and everything else (poverty, unhealthy environment,
abuse in childhood, etc.) was just a trigger or contributing factor.
The chemical imbalance story is known to help diminish stigma and ease the
patient’s shame but If someone's suffering and mental deterioration is the direct
result of their unhealthy environment and their socioeconomic situation, yet they
are still told the problem is basically in their head—not in the sense that it's made
up or is their fault directly of course, but in the sense that the problem is still in
them—this obviously does not ease the shame, but instead creates even more
confusion. And most importantly, keeps us - as patients and also as a society -
once again focusing only on our own selves, seeking problems only within,
looking only inwards.
How problematic is it, in your opinion, when ideology influences science and
scientist to such an extent? And what are the other ways ideology and toxic
positivity leaks into the sciences?
CW: In his seventeenth seminar, entitled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
made it clear that in his opinion science was increasingly becoming entangled with
capitalism, and that this was causing a mutation in our relation to knowledge. This is
what he referred to as the ‘discourse of the University’. Knowledge in such a discourse is
uncoupled from experts as such, and starts to have what he would call ‘real’ rather than
symbolic effects, increasingly via the manufacturing of little gadgets and gizmos that
become drive-objects for consumption via the market. This is almost worse than
ideology influencing science, if we understand ideology as a relatively coherent set of
ideas and values connected to some kind of consistent worldview. Thinking of ideology
in that way relates it to meaning and meaning can always be challenged by other
meanings. Liberal democracy, in a way, depends on that notion. Yet the ‘real’ rather
than symbolic knowledge typical of the university discourse has direct effects outside of
meaning as such. Science becomes toxic in my sense when its positivism is mortgaged
to positivity, to new techniques and objects that have measurable effects which turn a
profit at the level of actual or psychological capital, but which leave what we understand
as the subject in psychoanalysis far behind.
We could approach the issue of psychiatric diagnoses you mention from this point of
view. The by now well-developed critiques of ‘Big Pharma’ show that psychiatric
categories, of the kind we find proliferating in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used
by psychiatrists the world over, have been pulled in the direction of particular pills that
have particular psychoactive effects. That is to say, ‘depression’ – once understood
through the much richer category of ‘melancholia’ - becomes whatever responds to pills
marketed as ‘anti-depressants’. In this way, the science of psychiatry is tethered to the
multibillion-dollar market in drugs. So one of the reasons some psychiatrists pay little
attention to the more personal, existential circumstances of their patients (though some
good psychiatrists still try to), is that their very role has been re-organised around
prescribing these pills and then policing the patient’s adherence to their ‘meds’. We can
even feel sorry for psychiatrists in the sense that their expertise has been impoverished
to this extremely quick and simplistic exchange which just fits their patient into a
category so that a corresponding pill can be prescribed.
In his seventeenth seminar, entitled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan made it clear that in his opinion science was increasingly becoming entangled with capitalism, and that this was causing a mutation in our relation to knowledge. This is what he referred to as the ‘discourse of the University’. Knowledge in such a discourse is uncoupled from experts as such, and starts to have what he would call ‘real’ rather than symbolic effects, increasingly via the manufacturing of little gadgets and gizmos that become drive-objects for consumption via the market.
As you point out, the notion of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain was a crucial piece of
the jigsaw in moving mainstream psychiatry in this direction, and I would also point out
that this explicitly involved a move away from the inheritance, within psychiatry, from
psychoanalysis. The third iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published in
1980 was the one which introduced this idea of chemical imbalance, expanded the
number of diagnostic categories considerably, and then aligned them with the growing
market in anxiolytics and anti-depressants. But crucially it did so by deliberately purging
residually Freudian nosological categories. This is not a coincidence. As analysts, we do
not inhabit this medical or psychiatric discourse (even if some psychoanalysts are also
psychiatrists, and even if there is no incompatibility between doing an analysis and
taking some of these drugs), and we really do listen to all the personal and indeed
singular circumstances of the people who come to see us. What the analysand can say
about their life and circumstances is the very material we work with. You mention
shame, and that’s one of those complicated affects we could attend to closely by not
assuming it is straightforwardly negative (though without assuming it is inherently
‘positive’ ether). After all, if the idea of “chemical imbalance” relieves some people of the
stigma of mental illness, it is in exchange for a radical passivity in the face of their
diagnosis, and in many cases for lifelong dependence on prescription medication.
Shame is close to desire but also responsibility and one of the questions you are raising
is where to locate the latter. In a sense, the “chemical imbalance” framework says “this is
just the way it is”. There is not much to do but accept that this is how you are hard-wired,
and stick to your pills. It’s not a discourse that produces any questions about
responsibility. If the poor, racially harassed immigrant you describe feels shame at his
condition, a parallax shift could allow us to be ashamed of the social and political system
that contributes to his suffering, a system we are also part of. That would at least raise
the question of responsibility, but crucially without answering it simplistically by reducing
him to a mere ‘victim’ of the system either, since this would erase his responsibility (and
his agency). His shame might also be a point of entry into the question of his own desire,
clearly frustrated by his circumstances. In this nuanced sense, shame might be an affect
to work with rather than get rid of.
Of course, there have been radical and critical strands within psychiatry which have
been able to engage with these more social and political questions about responsibility,
though they have been pushed well out of the mainstream. I am partly thinking of Frantz
Fanon here, who was a psychiatrist as well as an anti-colonial revolutionary. Already in
the thesis that allowed him to practice as a psychiatrist in France, he was arguing for the
‘sociogenesis’ of several mental disorders and he would of course take this argument to
Algeria, where he saw first-hand how a violent colonial system actively made people ill.
He actually quit his job running a psychiatric ward because he felt it was futile to help
‘crazy’ people recover enough to be returned to a society which was itself completely
mad. As a revolutionary, he wanted to “treat” society instead, and yet he did not cease to
practice as a psychiatrist and remained interested in this complex knot between
individual symptoms and social systems.
NL: Slavoj Zizek, when asked whether or not happiness seems to be important to
him, answered: “Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't
know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want but to
dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep
satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you
want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy;
happiness is a category of slaves.” Maybe, this concrete view can seem too
radical for many people, but at the same time, in a world where happiness and
success are set as an ultimate, final, most important goal, words like this could
also sound refreshing and freeing, as are Zizek’s words about being allowed not
to enjoy.
What do you think about this dichotomy of happy versus meaningful,
purposeful life?
CW: Zizek seems to be channelling Nietzsche here, who also worked with this
opposition between two kinds of happiness: on the one hand, the lazy and docile
contentedness of what he called ‘the Last Man’ (most of us, arguably, today), and on the
other hand, a kind of affirmative joy which comes from triumphing over great struggles.
Zizek is really emphasising the first kind when he says “happiness is a category of
slaves” and links it to stupidity. It is also easy to agree with his Lacanian point, that what
makes us ‘happy’ in this first sense is being able to dream about what we do not have,
rather than actually getting it. Isn’t advertising predicated on precisely this mismatch?
I definitely agree, then, that it is refreshing to hear someone expressing such an
antipathy for everyday notions of happiness in the current climate, perhaps shocking
some us out of our complacency. Zizek has this palpable enjoyment in going against the
grain of the consensus, which I do think we need now more than ever. On the other
hand, going against the grain requires the grain (just as iconoclasm remains tied to the
icon), and I’m not so keen on the resulting value-judgment which privileges struggle as
inherently meaningful over and above a disdained herd-mentality. In fact, I don’t think
the former is immune to commodification by the very discourse of happiness being
disparaged here. To stick with an example from Nietzsche, one of his phrases from
Twilight of the Idols which everyone knows even if they don’t know where from –
paraphrased as ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ – has become a slogan for
the strand of Happiness Studies that stresses ‘resilience’ and ‘grit’, and even ‘post-
traumatic growth’ rather than PTSD.
This is one of the most befuddling things about happiness today: while it seems to
recommend blissed-out mindful disengagement, it also exudes a breathless tone of
permanent revolution - of the self, not society - which glorifies its own version of eternal
struggle. The ‘meaning’ attached to this version of “struggle with oneself” is wholly
normative and indeed ideological. Neoliberalism has effectively deconstructed this
opposition between happiness and existential meaning, turning the latter in a hard-won
‘authenticity’ in the face, precisely, of the banality of ordinary life, but really it is just
banality by the backdoor.
In a way, the Lacanian way out of this questionable binary is to suspend such general
value-judgements about meaningful versus non-meaningful modes of existence, which
are rooted in a rather Romantic philosophical anthropology. The other Lacanian exit
involves leaving meaning itself behind, as a sort of alienating trap laid by the social
Other. In the end, the jouissance, which analysis distils from the blahblah of free
association, doesn’t mean anything per se. Because one’s relation to jouissance is
always ultimately radically singular, which is to say non-communicable with others, it is
completely outside of meaning.
NL: Could you please speak about “The Lacanian Alternative”?
CW: Lacan has a completely different understanding of the subject compared to the neoliberal self, and I find it both much more realistic and actually much more hopeful.
First of all, Lacan’s is a divided and ultimately a castrated subject simply by virtue of the fact
that it speaks, that it gets its sense of Being not from things-in-themselves but from
language; this is immediately very different from the neoliberal ideology of limitless potential
and the right to unbounded enjoyment through consumption. The neoliberal self comes
down to a stubborn disbelief in castration, or at least a delusion that it can always be side-
stepped with the help of new gadgets and technological advances etc. This is one of the
reasons why we seem to be in such a mess regarding environmental devastation: we seem
incapable of accepting that the planet’s resources are finite and that brand new green
technologies might not in fact allow us to continue consuming at the same rate whilst
somehow retaining biodiversity and so on. Secondly then, it follows from the structurally
castrated nature of the speaking being that this simplistic idea of happiness, as some kind of
lasting state of fulfilment, can only be an illusion, an empty promise which capitalism
specialises in holding out to us, yet breaks at every turn. Thirdly, especially in his later
teachings Lacan really emphasises the singularity of the subject as a unique invention in the
face of this issue of language and its effects on the body. He says somewhere that
jouissance is dissident, and this is because the know-how that the subject invents for dealing
with it really doesn’t have a place on the market. Unlike the DSM discourse we mentioned
earlier, which reduces all ‘disorders’ to an opportunity to monetise mental health seen as a
global market, Lacan effectively insists on the symptom – or sinthome as it becomes in his
twenty third seminar – as political in the sense of finding no pre-existing place in dominant
discourses. My clinical experience echoes this: listening to the details of someone’s
symptomatic suffering is always like inventing a new language, one that only the analysand
and, if he or she is lucky, the analyst speak.
What makes us ‘happy’ is being able to dream about what we do not have, rather than actually getting it. Isn’t advertising predicated on precisely this mismatch?
For many people, psychoanalysis has always seemed to strike a pessimistic or dark note. In
one of his earliest recognisably psychoanalytic publications, Studies in Hysteria co-written
with Josef Breuer, Freud famously limited his clinical ambitions to “transforming hysterical
misery into common unhappiness”. This might sound bleak, but I find his frank acceptance
that life does in fact include periods in which happiness diminishes and withdraws, a useful
antidote to the superegoic demand for happiness that I have called toxic. In some ways,
Freud’s later comments on happiness in Civilization and its Discontents, bring up the
etymological root of the word happiness in the Old Norse ‘happ’. As indicated by its
appearance in words like ‘happening’, ‘happenstance’ and ‘haphazard’ and so on, ‘happ’
brings happiness closer to luck or fortune, and thus contingency. But contingency is
precisely what the neoliberal self, so invested in mastery, control, and accumulation, finds so
difficult to accept. That is just one of the many reasons I believe we desperately need the Lacanian alternative in this era of Happiness Tzars and Wellbeing Indexes.