Interrelating the pandemic as symbol, as imagined and in reality

Problematic Sexual Paradoxes of Pandemic Response (Part #11)

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The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is known for developing an understanding of the relationship between symbol, imagination and reality. Strongly influenced by Freud, his controversial innovations led to his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association, together with his followers. Their contrasting perspective on the pandemic is therefore of relevance given the cognitive dynamics between its experience as a symbol, how it is imagined, and the reality to which people are exposed.

Quotations from Lacan of relevance to the pandemic (termed "pandemonium") featured in a presentation by Julia Evans on the occasion of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan's sayings on or near 'pandemic', Lacanian Works, 21 June 2020), including:

• Again and again, authors addressing distinctively fetishistic phenomena speak of something through which the subject declares his relationship to sex.... We start by asking why and we immediately get into a kind of pandemonic chaos, with different [clinical] orientations crowding around to explain why the subject may be more or less distant from the object and feel arrested or threatened, or feel convicted. Let us first look at this structure. Here it is in the relation of the 'beyond' and the veil on which we can in some sense project ourselves, establishing for ourselves â-- as imaginary capture, as the seat of desire â-- this relation to a 'beyond' which is fundamental for any establishment of the symbolic relation. The descent of the ternary rhythm subject-object-beyond into the imaginary register, is fundamental for the symbolic relation (Seminar IV : The Object Relation & Freudian Structures 1956-1957, 30th January 1957, para 18)Â
• Quoting Marquis de Sade: The existence of murderers is as necessary as plagues; without both of them everything in the universe would be upset. . . . such dissolution serves nature's purposes, since it recomposes that which is destroyed. Thus every change operated by man on organized matter serves nature much more than it opposes it. What am I saying? The service of nature requires far more total destructions . . . destructions much more complete than those we are able to accomplish.....
  The death drive is to be situated in the historical domain; it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain, that is to say, insofar as a reference point, that is a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the functioning of nature. It requires something from beyond whence it may itself be grasped in a fundamental act of memorization, as a result of which everything may be recaptured, not simply in the movement of the metamorphoses but from an initial intention. (Seminar VII : 4th May 1960 : See Seminar VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis: 1959-1960)

For Jacob Johanssen, the paranoid-schizoid insights of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, are supplemented by Lacan's notion of the Discourse of the Hysteric in arguing that social media posts often express experiences, thoughts, and fantasies in a schematic manner. They reproduce a paranoid-schizoid logic characteristic of a hysteric mode of relating to an Other (e.g. the expert) that is allegedly withholding important information from the subject. . (Social Media and Coronavirus: Paranoid-Schizoid Technology and Pandemic? November 2020)

For Simon Western (Covid-19: an intrusion of the real the unconscious unleashes its truth Journal of Social Work Practice, 34, 2020, 4; a special issue on ecology, psychoanalysis and global warming: present and future traumas):

Covid-19 reveals our interconnectivity, how nature needs to be re-imagined beyond our 20th century perceptions of it being an outside force, something of beauty to observe and protect, or to use as a resource or to control when disruptive. The paper takes a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective to reflect on Covid-19 as master signifier of contagion. Covid19 is an intrusion of a traumatic Real into our lifeworlds. The Real enunciates a particular truth to us; that we live in a precarious, inter-dependent connected world, undoing the hegemony and fantasy

For Leigh Tennant: The Covid-19 Does Not Exist (Lacanian Review Online, 21 October 2020)

Covid-19 ideology denies the existence of social antagonisms and is quick to claim we are all in this together â-- but there is no together! ... Day to day, we generally accept that our society is built on the open exploitation of one another and that the preservation of private property is upheld over all other forms of meaning. The body is the object of our private property, and we love the heroic scientists who protect it from all 'alterity'. We have willingly closed our bodies' borders to the Other, in the name of our love â-... for the Other?....

My question to the alethosphere is this: why are we willing to pause our lives â-- indefinitely, I will add â-- in response to an event where we don't experience anything of its real? The only real the majority will experience (despite their clear unconscious desire for the opposite â-- a desire for death they must defend themselves against, which is why they were so anxious) is the non-sense of house arrest, screens and boredom....

The only leftist position I can make out, despite a complete reluctance to take a position, is a desire for the government to implement even stricter rules and for there to be even less democratic process. All in order to protect our new master, the 'victim'. This false opposition between 'health' and 'economics' will lead to destruction unless we can exceed the empirical and start talking at the level of the existentialÂ

For Gözde Kiliç: Coronavirus as Metaphor (Lacanian Review Online, 6 April 2020):

In conclusion, illness is always already a metaphor. This is what brings it into being as a discursive construct in the space of power/knowledge. Under the medical gaze, to use a Foucauldian phrase, we have become so familiar with objectifying, reifying, and externalizing illness that it is almost impossible to envisage it outside of semantics, that is outside the realm of our dreams, fantasies, and projections. In this light, I think the virus is itself a fantasy. It principally serves to quench the quest for perfect health. The belief that better days are coming once we get rid of this pandemic, that life will be wonderful when we get back to our healthy selves again, is the underlying hope that drives our "war" with the virus. Indeed, with every new virus, our desire for immortality is renewed and gains postponed satisfaction. However, as Dubos shows, this "mirage of health" is ill-fated as long as humans try to stay ahead of microbes. Just like our eternal fight with death -- a fight that we cannot win -- our struggle against illness is doomed to replay on a continuous loop with no real success, that is until one day we learn to come to terms with our mortality.

For Thomas Svolos: Coronavirus and the Hole in the Big Other (Lacanian Review Online, 14 March l 2020):

This pandemic has struck, and unlike prior epidemics and pandemics, we â-- scientists, physicians, the general public â-- do not know a lot about it.... So, we are confronted with a big lack in the Other. And, speaking beings have a difficult time tolerating this kind of lack of knowledge, this void. So, as happens in so many other situations, people fill up this hole with something, often that very thing which defines how they engage the world. In the psychoanalytic community, we call this fantasy, and we see these fantasies, these opinions, these perspectives about what is happening take so many different forms. For some, this is a catastrophic event, an apocalyptic event, leading to a great deal of fear of the unknown. For others, feeling immune from any possible impact of the Other on them, this is no big deal, something that will pass, nothing to worry about. And, then, there are those imagining agents of one sort or another as the actor behind what is happening. These individual perspectives on what is happening often say more about the person with them, obviously, than the situation that the person is describing.

Given the degree of engagement of "Lacanism" with the pandemic, the triangular schematic that is a central feature of Lacan's insight (left below) merits enrichment in the light of the current global experience. The schematic also echoes that of various much-cited patterns of significance to the study of cognition and associated experience (such as those below). The relevant controversies, presumably predictable, are usefully reviewed by Maurizio Meloni (A Triangle of Thoughts: Girard, Freud, Lacan, Psychomedia, 14, 2002).

That of Jacques Lacan is a version of the triangulated Oedipus complex (mother-child-father) combining Freud's theory with structural linguistics, developed from the theories of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Jakobson (John Phillips, Lacan and Language). Descriptions are variously offered by Cadell Last (Jacques Lacan and the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real 21 February 2018; Jacques Lacan and the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real, YouTube, 21 February 2018).

Triangulated Oedipus complex (Jacques Lacan)	Phenomenological epoché (Francisco Varela)	Semiotic triangle of meaning (Charles Ogden)

The images above were first juxtaposed in an exploration of Visualization in 3D of a trinity of connotations as a cognitive pill (2017) as part of a discussion of "pill pushing" -- a metaphor of considerable relevance to the strategic response to the pandemic (Psychosocial Transformation by "Pill Pushing"? Model-making, strategic advocacy and the myth of the "red pill". 2017). The visualization possibilities were subsequently further developed (Interrelating disparate threefold cognitive patterns as a polyhedron, 2017).

3D Configuration on tetrahedron of triadic articulations (screen shots of unfolding-refolding animations )
4 "Cognitive" triangles (GIF animation)	4 "Symbolic" triangles (GIF animation)
Images prepared using Stella Polyhedron Navigator

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