Aurelien – Forever Again…Why the time is always Now.

Of all the advances in our understanding of the human mind over the last century or so, none is more fundamental than the discovery of the Unconscious and the slow realisation of how it functions, and yet none has had so little effect on how we think about the world most of the time. This essay is about what might happen if it did.

In theory, Freud’s insights (yes, I know he had predecessors, I don’t have the space to cover everything, sorry) carried all before them. The mechanical model of the functions of the brain, the assumption that the conscious mind was all that mattered, or even existed, the belief that there was an exact correspondence between thought and expression, and that we said what we meant, and meant what we said, were no longer tenable. In daily life (where, ironically, people had always recognised the importance of apparent verbal confusions and errors) it became common to talk about “Freudian slips,” in English and a lapsus révélateur in French, even among those who had never read, or even heard of, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Generations of literary students were introduced to the idea that Proust’s narrator does not always understand his own motivations, and that when Antonio in The Merchant of Venice knows not why he is so sad, it is because of his unacknowledged feelings for Bassanio.

Only in academic psychology, ironically, was the idea of the unconscious scorned and belittled. In the first half of the twentieth century, psychological research was under the cosh of behaviourism, and thus only peoples’ actual behaviour mattered, not what they thought. The irritable rejection of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement was reinforced by the desire to make psychological research seem a “hard” science, dealing with things that were quantifiable and so could be shown on graphs and in tables. Only slowly did psychologists come round to studying mental processes at all, and they were finally obliged to take unconscious processes into account only when readings showed that things were happening in the brains of experimental subjects of which the subjects themselves were entirely unaware. It’s only quite recently that psychologists have grudgingly come to accept the insights of psychoanalysis, and to recognise the enormous importance of the Unconscious. It’s now accepted that the Unconscious is fundamental in determining our thoughts and behaviour, and that unconscious mental processes are in reality highly sophisticated and adaptive, even if we are largely unaware of them. Indeed, some psychologists, have gone so far as to suggests that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work, and that, in the end, conscious will may be only an illusion.

Yet the effect of this recognition on the way that history, biography, political science and topical punditry are written has been close to zero, with a few unhappy exceptions we’ll touch on later. This is, to say the least, strange. There’s no question here of trying to erect new and elaborate psychological theories to explain current or past events; only registering the thought that, now as in the past, decision-makers and those who write about them may be acting or speaking for reasons they aren’t wholly conscious of. Yet on various occasions over the decades when I have suggested, in print or in person, that these kinds of factors need at least to be acknowledged, I have been received with everything from simple incomprehension to irritable dismissal. That is, to say the least, curious.

Partly, of course, we are dealing with the kind of reach-me-down vulgar scientism of the nineteenth century that still determines how most people think about the world. The materialist world-view, increasingly abandoned over recent generations by scientists themselves, still has a powerful grip on the thinking of even educated people today. It has the advantage of making sweeping explanations easy, of requiring little knowledge of subjects like language and culture (and, indeed, psychology) and providing conveniently reductivist explanations for just about everything that happens in the world. Crudely materialist interpretations of history and current events are proved wrong or incomplete with soporific regularity, yet they remain as powerful as ever. Pundits assume that actors, even in crises, behave with unimpeachable rationality, and are driven by entirely conscious motivations, most of them wholly materialistic. This is, to say the least, peculiar.

Part of the reason for that, as I’ve already implied, is that it is easy. This way of thinking fits comfortably into Realist and Neorealist theories of state behaviour, and into many rational actor paradigms of political behaviour. It plays well with attempts to reduce all political behaviour to economic factors, which began with Marxism, but didn’t end with it. And most of all it avoids the need to think of political actors as living, breathing human beings with their own frailties, wants and needs, rather than cardboard cutouts acting according to some theoretical model. It’s also the political science equivalent of theories of the rational economic actor with perfect information and, at least in theory, opens the way to finally treating political behaviour with the (spurious) intellectual rigour of economic theory. In addition, of course, Freud is currently unfashionable, for no obvious reason other than that he was born in the nineteenth century into a very different society, and didn’t think the same thoughts as our contemporary cultural elites do. But even so, no-one would seriously suggest these days that the Unconscious therefore does not exist after all. (And anyway psychoanalysis as a discipline has developed considerably over the last century.) Yet the fact is that unconscious motivations demonstrably and unambiguously do play a role in the way that both the general public and political elites conceive of the world, and the way that they try to interpret events.

Here’s a simple and classic example, which has actually been studied by historians. If you look carefully at the language used by supporters of the war in Ukraine, you find very quickly the argument that we must “Stop Putin Now,” or … something will happen in the future, we know not what. This injunction is repeated endlessly by countries that are often far away: (Paris is around 2500 km from Moscow, for example.) Indeed, it’s often repeated by countries that have no strategic disagreements with Russia at all. So Britain and France, among the greatest alarmists, have had reasonable relations with Russia for a long time. They have mostly been allies, and apart from the short Crimean War, and supporting different sides in some conflicts, their relations have not been especially conflictual by European standards. There is no logical reason why they should be enemies, still less fight each other.

The answer, of course, lies in the experiences of the 1930s, and especially the auto-flagellation that the British and French political and intellectual classes inflicted upon themselves almost immediately after the Munich settlement in 1938, and increasingly once the war started. Whole books have been written about If Only We Had, or If Only We Hadn’t, or Who Are the Guilty Men? and, most of all, This Must Never Happen Again. Those like Churchill and De Gaulle who were not in government at the time succeeded in imposing a narrative of weakness and cowardice in the face of aggression which dominated the historical account of the period for a long time, and is by no means disposed of yet. And when the British and the French become temporarily weary of self flagellation, Americans are always prepared step in to fill the gap. “Something,” it appears, should have been done, but as often in such cases, that something cannot actually be defined, and never progresses beyond the handwaving stage of “standing up to aggression” or something similar. The notion that somehow Germany could have been persuaded or coerced into accepting the Versailles provisions for ever, or alternatively could have been given a good thrashing in a quick preventative war, continue to circulate in the absence of any supporting evidence.

At this point, it’s important to recall that the most basic, but also the most surprising, thing about the unconscious mind is that it has no sense of time. It is always Now. We know this from our personal experience: a trauma, a disappointment, an error of judgement from decades ago if unaddressed produces the same physical and emotional symptoms today as it did then. We’ve probably all met people who did something they bitterly regret when they were much younger, and who unconsciously act out rituals of expiation all their lives, as though the past could thereby be changed. And of course from the point of view of the unconscious, where the time is always Now, it could be. Various therapies exist to try to bring these conflicts into the open and perhaps dispel them, but nothing like that, so far as I know, is available for the western political class.

What is striking is how the urge towards expiation in this case was at first relatively open, and over the decades has slid imperceptibly down into the unconscious. The mantle of the new Hitler and the new Nazi regime has been placed on the shoulders of some unlikely recipients: but then the unconscious has its own special logic. In the late 1940s, it was widely thought, and frequently argued, that Stalin was simply repeating Hitler’s pattern of territorial conquest, and so needed to be stopped. In the 1950s, Nasser was the “new Hitler” and his Philosophy of the Revolution was the new Mein Kampf. The British and French congratulated themselves that the Suez operation had at least prevented Nasser’s destruction of much of Africa. In the sixties, Patrice Lumumba was the new danger man, just as the victory of the FLN in Algeria was feared to open the way for a Soviet invasion of southern Europe. The Domino Theory that led to the Vietnam War was essentially an example of this way of thinking, as was the western reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but by this stage the reactions of western leaders had lost all touch with the events of the 1930s, and had become largely unconscious. By the time of the two wars against Iraq or the bombing of Serbia, then in my observation, these ideas had pretty much retreated into the unconscious entirely, leaving only stray verbal traces behind in the conscious mind to signify their presence.

But as analysts have always said, what’s really important is not what people want to say, but what they actually do say, and what they reveal inadvertently. The Ukraine crisis is an absolute classic, the epitome of how generations of guilt and attempted expiration, of the abuse of history for partisan political purposes and the use of buried emotions as excuses to justify wars everywhere has finally sunk so far down into the unconscious that the participants no longer even know why they think what they think. And indeed, any fair-minded observer would have to conclude that the runaway Ukraine crisis is being desperately and inexpertly steered from the western side by a group of leaders of strictly moderate abilities who frankly now have absolutely no idea what they are doing. This is, of course a frightening prospect if you happen to be a westerner, and its understandable that some have sought solace in imagining a shadowy anonymous group of manipulators who Know What they are Doing, whilst others have maintained that wherever we happen to be at any given moment moment was The Plan All Along. (I’ll come back to the origin of such ideas in a moment.) But if you think about it, then if you accept that most of our behaviour in our daily lives is determined by unconscious factors, shouldn’t that be at least as true of political crises, with their panic, stress and lack of information?

So here we are, led by people scarcely aware of what they are doing and why, living a collective hallucination and playing at making the decisions their great-grandparents should have made but didn’t. Thus, the “war” that some western leaders and pundits light-heartedly envisage against Russia today is symbolically the un-fought aggressive war against Germany of 1938-39, just as the arming of Ukraine is a kind of expiation for the failure to send arms to the Republican government in Spain during the Civil War: an action many have argued (wrongly in my view) could have prevented the Second World War. And for what it’s worth, on the side of the argument, that supports Russia the unconscious motivation is to symbolically fight the un-fought pre-emptive war that could (and some think should ) have been unleashed by Stalin in 1941. There is some evidence that the current Russian leadership is driven by these very same unconscious impulses, but I don’t really know enough about Russia to judge.

That’s all I’m going to say directly about Ukraine, because I’ve covered various other aspects of the issue at some length elsewhere. I want to move on to ways in which we might understand more generically the influence of the unconscious on the psyches of decision-makers, with examples, but first a number of caveats are necessary.

To begin with, my argument bears no relationship at all to the popular psychologising of historical figures, as though we could get inside their skulls. (“What must Napoleon have thought as he started out over the Atlantic Ocean from St Helena in 1816?” We have no idea and it would be a waste of time and effort to speculate.) Nor is it related to the fashion for amateur psychoanalysis of dead people, as in attempts to explain the Second World War by reference to Hitler’s apparently troubled childhood. And neither is it feasible to try to construct some kind of general theory of The Unconscious in History, precisely because the contents of the unconscious mind differ from person to person, as do the effects of the Unconscious, and the circumstances in which these effects become important. Moreover, most political decisions are made by groups (even if a leader has the final say) and almost by definition the contents of my unconscious mind are not the contents of yours. Only in cases like that above, which I have called the Munich Syndrome, can you talk of the collective influence of the unconscious mind roughly in the same direction and at scale.

Anyway, we shouldn’t lightly diss the unconscious mind: we need it. If every thought, word and deed had to be consciously prepared and executed, we wouldn’t be able to live. The issue is what’s in the unconscious mind, whether it’s dangerous in a given case, and why it is that those who write learnedly on the causes of war never consider the insights of psychology, and take refuge instead in misleading banalities about instinctive human aggression. The influence of the unconscious mind is not always bad, nor are the decisions it proposes, and for which the conscious mind has to find a rationale, necessarily wrong or inadequate.

Finally, and most important, the fact that decisions are largely made by the unconscious mind does not mean that they are necessarily random or irrational. After all, it’s fairly clear that all decisions and speech are influenced by the unconscious mind to some extent. Indeed, psychologists tell us that in extreme cases—paranoiacs, for example—these processes can be and frequently are rational and coherent. You can verify all this by going to any conspiracy site, where anal-retentive personalities with too much time on their hands use ingenious arguments and highly-detailed research to try to convince us that, say, Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike, or that the Nazis escaped to Antarctica in 1945 by flying saucer.

If you accept the unremarkable hypothesis that the unconscious mind figures as much in decision-making in a crisis, and writing and speaking about it, as it does in everyday life, then you would expect to see common patterns from everyday life repeated there, and indeed that is so. A few simple examples will have to suffice. One is simple blindness to things we don’t want to see. Thus, both friends and enemies still treat the US as if it were a decisive military power in Europe, when in fact it has no military forces capable of making a difference in the fighting in Ukraine. This is one of those inconvenient truths that we just decide not to talk about, like the approaching need to pay back a loan or the worrying lump that we don’t want to acknowledge could be malign. The unconscious shields us from the need to actually do anything to meet the new situation.

A parallel case is our ability to forget and distort inconvenient facts, and remain convinced of their truth even under pressure. I’ve been told by various people who were around at the time, for example, that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was in response to the expulsion of ethnic Albanians, although a simple glance at the news stories of the day, not to mention my own recollections, shows this is wrong. But unconsciously, people invert cause and effect in such situations to make themselves seem virtuous. There are lots of other “memory hole” cases: a good one is the now-common belief that Syria had no chemical weapons in 2013, although the government admitted it did, and they were withdrawn under international control. In both cases, the unconscious functions as a powerful Editor, shaping and simplifying our memories (as the miserable results of relying on eye-witness evidence in court cases inevitably demonstrate.)

A related case is where the unconscious mind retreats in disarray from a problem that is too big and frightening to resolve or understand. It would be interesting to know, for example, if the world leaders and their advisers gathered at the COP meetings on the environment are consciously aware of the state of the world’s climate and what is likely to happen. There are some things that are just too overwhelming to assimilate, and our unconscious mind hides them from our normal consciousness. I was thinking of this recently when reading a number of articles about the Gaza ceasefire which presented themselves as disinterested, and which dwelt lovingly on the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack and the need to make sure that Hamas didn’t take part in the next government, but didn’t actually get round to mentioning Palestinian deaths at all, even to minimise them. This is the unconscious keeping distressing things that we can’t process out of the conscious mind, and it’s a fair bet that many European leaders and their advisers are probably in that situation.

The question then is whether there are any ways of thinking about the unconscious mind in a more organised fashion, and whether we can hitch a ride on the work of someone who knows a great deal more about these issues than I do. Let me suggest that some of the work of Jacques Lacan might be useful here.

Now there are a couple of security warnings to give first. Lacan was a notoriously, and deliberately, complex and difficult thinker, who changed his mind about a number of important issues over the years, and did not seek a large public, preferring to limit his audience to his professional colleagues. He published little in his lifetime, and his legacy is a series of weekly seminars over the second half of his life, subsequently typed up and released slowly in edited form over the years, after his death in 1980. It’s unclear whether they have all yet been published, but if you are feeling brave you can find a copy of the transcripts here. In addition, the complexity of his thought and expression made accurate translation difficult, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that several of the most impenetrable schools of modern American social theory have their origins in misunderstandings of what Lacan said. (Nothing if not a piquant outcome for a psychoanalyst.) The results of his influence are therefore somewhat equivocal.

Nonetheless, let me smash and grab a couple of Lacan’s most interesting and useful ideas, and see where they lead us. Each is valuable: neither, as you would expect, is wholly original. In each case I’ll briefly outline them and then move on to saying how I think they can be useful in understanding both how political crises are managed and also how they are interpreted and written about. If you are interested in taking them further there are several good guides to Lacan’s thought in English, of which the most recent and the most jargon-free is by Todd McGowan, who also has an informative YouTube channel.

The first is the idea of the Symbolic Order, which is the structure that underlies all our actions, and gives them significance. It is how we understand reality, and how, through language, we communicate with others. The Symbolic Order is not optional, and we are always subject to it. Now this sounds like Structuralism, and indeed students of Lacan have found clear precedents in Lévi-Strauss and Saussure, but Lacan is at pains not to present the Subject as a helpless victim of the Order (as Marcuse and Foucault might) but as an active, subjective individual. The Subjective Order sets out a series of concepts (some have called them “fictions”) which enable the Subject to orient itself, but there is no overall visible structure, and indeed it acts only indirectly. These concepts are not necessarily mutually consistent, nor even coherent, and they do not impose themselves upon us. We accept those that best correspond to the needs of our psyche. There is, of course, no reason for the concepts to faithfully mirror the actual order of things, which is an important point we’ll return to in a moment.

Language is all-important here, and Lacan inherits from Saussure the idea that there is no link between words themselves (signifiers) and the objects to which they supposedly refer (the signified). Language does not therefore refer to the reality of objects. Insofar as there is a relationship, it is negative: so, says Saussure, the signifier “child” is simply understood as conventionally meaning “not an adult.” But whereas for Saussure the signified is most important, for Lacan as a psychoanalyst, the signifier—in this case the words that are actually used—is what really matters, because the signifier represents the workings of the unconscious mind: how, if you like, the unconscious elects to portray the material world to others and to itself. An obvious relevant example is the signifier “aggression,” whose almost infinitely variable use tells us a great deal about the person using it and how they see the world. In my youth, a certain type of person would ask “how can we stop US aggression in Vietnam?” thus communicating in summary form, albeit unconsciously, a whole political philosophy. These days, if someone tells you that the war in Ukraine is a result of “NATO aggression” (and they aren’t working for the Russian government) this similarly communicates, albeit unconsciously, an entire world-view, and enables you to forecast their opinions on a whole range of other questions.

Moreover, not all parts of the Symbolic Order have the same status: some signifiers are higher status than others. Few political movements voluntarily embrace the signifier “extreme,” for example: it is considered a low-status signifier, irrespective of the actual policies the movement may embrace, and how it would have been described in the past. Likewise, signifiers go in and out of fashion: “patriotic” has in my lifetime moved from a broadly positive to a mostly negative signifier, as dictated by mysterious rules of interpretation. It is notorious that violent political groupings do everything they can to avoid the signifier “criminal,” although their activities are undeniably so according to the laws of their country. The IRA was prepared to have some of its men starve to death in order to try to change the signifier to “political prisoner.” In these cases, of course, the reality, the signified, didn’t change at all. And the effects can be quite profound. Fifty or sixty years ago, young males tended predominantly to attract such idealised signifiers as “adventurous,” “self-reliant,” “mature,” and “dependable,” to which they were encouraged to aspire. These days, young males are overwhelmingly signified as “violent” and “sexually aggressive,” and, to general surprise, they are increasingly so. As you sow, so shall you reap.

Although Lacan did not discuss the political use of signifiers, some of those influenced by English translations of his work did. Feminists pointed out that a number of professions (fireman, milkman) used the suffix “man,” and, confusing the original German words Man, a neuter word meaning “somebody” or “a person” and Mann a masculine word meaning, well, “man,” claimed that using a different word would encourage women to take up new lines of work. To some extent this has been implemented: the “dustbin man” of my youth is now a “refuse disposal operative,” although I don’t have any figures for female participation in that area. But more importantly, there’s a modern political tendency to change the signifier to something which actively distorts or disguises what the signified actually is. So “unhoused” sounds as though a homeless person is just temporarily short of a house, “undocumented” suggests that an illegal immigrant simply hasn’t been given documents yet through some error, “job seeker” disguises the fact that the person concerned may just have been made redundant, and puts responsibility upon them for finding employment. More seriously, perhaps, signifying Gaza as a “war” brings with it a whole series of assumptions and norms, many naturally unconscious, which have the practical effect of changing what we think about events on the ground—the signified.

The second concept I want to discuss is the Grand Autre, somewhat inelegantly translated into English as the Big Other. By this, Lacan means not formal authorities like government, but rather a kind of social authority whose dictates we follow and which structures our lives, and indeed enables us to make sense of the world and to communicate with each (little) other. However, and again in contradiction to the Structuralists, Lacan is very clear that the Big Other has no objective existence. It is a collective human construct, made up of rules and customs we create for ourselves (if this sounds unlikely, just consider a school playground.) We reify the Big Other, we seek its approval and recognition and we take our symbolic identity from it. But because it doesn’t actually exist, we can never satisfy it, and because it is a collective construct of our devising, it cannot provide us with useful guidance.

The Big Other appears in many forms, some of them competing. In is original form it is of course Parental Authority: not our actual, flawed, human parents, but the concept that we create around them. In the days when parenting was stricter than it is now, adolescence was the moment of challenge to and liberation from this Big Other, and its replacement by wider social rules. These days, in a world of permanent adolescence, many of our leaders and pundits remain in combat with their parental Big Other: Mr Putin, for example, is for many of them the figure of the stern parent who, unlike their own won’t let them have everything they want, like Ukraine. And the illusions that we have about our parents when we are small—omniscient, omnipotent, all-surveying, with mysterious rituals we do not understand—get transferred as we grow up into imaginary abstractions like the Patriarchy, or the Deep State, or even projected upon real-life Intelligence Agencies, all of whose knowledge and powers are also without limit and whose workings are forever mysterious.

But, says Lacan, liberating ourselves from the parental Big Other, if we can do so, only means that we search for other Others. We seek validation, status and recognition from other imaginary collective constructs. Some are obvious—the legal system, dominant social codes, organised religion—but some are more indirect and more interesting. There is a mainstream political Big Other, where the price of admission and recognition is having the Right Opinions. We can see this at the moment with Ukraine and Gaza. But there are also dissident or transgressive Big Others, where individuals seek recognition and status precisely from not having the Right Opinions or behaviour. Ten minutes drive from where I am writing this are communities where status and recognition comes from disobeying the law, using violence and making lots of money quickly, and where the Big Other is organised drug-related crime.

It is not impossible to escape the effects of the Big Other (indeed, Lacan saw this as one of the objectives of psychoanalysis) but it is very difficult. Genuine individualists are extremely rare, which is why, for example, every time I follow a link to a blog which “exposes the lies” about Ukraine or Gaza and is proudly independent and fiercely nonconformist, I find it says exactly the same thing as every other proudly independent fiercely nonconformist blog which exposes the lies etc. In many ways, this is not surprising. Outside our immediate life experience, and perhaps professional knowledge and experience, few of us actually have what is needed for genuinely independent judgements: all we have, is the choice between Big Others. This isn’t to say we don’t or shouldn’t have personal opinions, but if we start broadcasting them, and expecting others to listen to us, we have to accept that we are doing in practice is seeking approval and validation from a Big Other, or conversely, by being rejected and ostracised, we seek approval from Another Big Other. It’s notoriously the case that there is no-one more conformist than the thorough-going nonconformist: only the Big Other is different.

It’s important to understand what this does and doesn’t mean. The Unconscious is not something to be afraid of, it’s not some primitive residue of violence and terror, and the decisions it takes (which are most of them) are not inherently any worse than the decisions taken by the conscious mind. Without it we couldn’t function. But as its name implies, it’s beyond our conscious control and it has no sense of time: it’s always Now. Some people find this frightening and off-putting, and it’s unsurprising that we go to great lengths to find rational, conscious, explanations for decisions taken by the Unconscious, just as in turn we go to great lengths to find rational, conscious explanations for decisions by governments and organisations which are obviously mostly the product of unconscious forces.

In reality, little of the above should be controversial. Consider: there are two possibilities. Either all judgements and decisions and speech have a tendency to rely disproportionately on the Unconscious and on unconscious motivations, hopes and fears, or uniquely, in the case of managing and writing about political crises, only the conscious mind is involved at all, and everybody (or at least some hypothetical Big Other) knows exactly what they are doing. (That sound you heard was William of Occam sharpening his Razor.) The issue is not whether this picture of how things work is true (since it obviously is), but how we make use of it to better understand the world. I’ve tried to make a few timid proposals here.