The strategy just changes form.

When women say men are animals, why do men happily get tattoos of lions on their chest? Why do they say, I am an animal, I am a beast, I am machine? Because men would rather be seen as this thing that’s compulsively driven to want sex than being seen as a person that wants care and love.

When a man approaches a woman genuinely and she rejects him, what does he say? Fuck you, anyway, I only wanted sex. He would rather be seen as an animal than a person that was requesting to be liked. And women don’t understand this because for them, asking for love is easier than asking for sex.

When women complain, why can’t men just be genuine? Why all the games and fake personality. Why not just say you like me? It’s like saying to a homeless person to just buy a house.

If he could, he would. But since he can’t, he asks for sex instead.

There’s the old parable about a fisherman who wanted to spend more time wiith his family. He would fish for a few hours, then spend the rest of the day with his family. But he has the brillaint idea that if he becomes more succesful, he’ll have more time to spend with his family. Genius. So he fishes for longer hours till he saves enough for better equipment. He can now afford new equipment and paying other people to grow the business. He starts a company and goes international. Finally, he retires at 60 in order to spend time with his family. Thinking “I’ve finally got what I wanted.” It’s a story about pointless striving. But it’s also a story about how a man avoids vulnerability by acquiring justification and rationality.

Instead of being a person that at one point could have asked - “hey, can you like me for me? Is this enough. Do I deserve love just for this?” He chooses to become succesful. So he can now tell himself “of course it makes sense that my family loves me and wants to spend time with me. I deserve to relax. Look at how much i’ve done, i’ve earned it.”

Though of course he has the audacity to then ask if his family would love him without the success. Which is rich coming from him, considering he was the one that avoided confronting that question this whole time. And now nothing she says can satisfy him because it’s too late. He’s already succesful, he can’t trust her answer.

Being busy has a masculine appeal. It’s a way of saying “I’m too busy to think of that lowly, commoner thing they call love.” And so it’s a funny thing that when a man spends most of his time alone at home, the first thing we think about him is that he must be lonely. I bet he wishes he had a girlfriend or a wife or even some friends for some intimacy. We don’t imagine that he’s wishing to be in a super important meeting right now. But then if we see a man wearing a suit and in a meeting, we imagine that they’re not thinking about love. That the only thing on their mind is busy-ness. Like he’s the type of man to only think about sex. Because the trick works. Wearing a suit and appearing busy makes people forget that you want love. And that’s the point. So people don’t know you’re soppy.

It makes me laugh. If men wanted sex, if they just wanted vagina, you would think one is enough. Or that it’s very easy to manipulate, be nice, a little funny, a little charming and you’re good. But men shoot themselves in the foot, because during that process they can’t let you know that they want affection. Just when you think oh he might be interested in me, he says “nice tits.” You got a little too close in realising he didn’t just want sex. He had to remind you why he’s here.

Why do men want different vaginas or more than one? Is it because sex is unsatisfying and you need more? Or is it because he’s not really asking for what he wants. And men say all women are the same, so why does he keep changing sexual partners? Well in a way, they all are the same. They all share one important quality - they won’t give him the love he wants. But that’s because he won’t ask for it. But he doesn’t recognise that he’s not asking for it, so he’s just angry at them.

For better or worse men are not aliens. They want the same thing. Just a funny way of going about it.

That’s not the end, lets do more examples why not.

Men do not want to be seen as desiring beings. Even though it’s what makes us human. But revealing you desire, reveals you want something that’s not perfectly in your hands to get it. Instead they replace with ornamental flowery, like moral codes, values and duties. Doing things because they must be done. He can’t express that he wants your attention and time. But he can say “you can’t go out, because that’s not what a respectable woman does with her time. And it’ll show you don’t care about this relationship.”

He can’t speak through himself, he needs to borrow ideas to communicate.

Why is eating sweets considered feminine and gay? Well because if you eat protein and healthy food which your body requires, it’s masculine behaviour. You’re doing something which you’re meant to do. It’s rational, it’s the consensus. You’re nourishing your body. You’re not revealing any desire by eating protein. But if you sweets.. pointless, irrational. You’re revealing that you desire something beyond it’s functional use. It’s not duty anymore, it’s extra. It’s fruity. Fruits are also gay I forgot. Vegetables are much more suave.

The man and his mild cold who acts like he has contracted cholera whilst riding the carriage from London to Liverpool. Men don’t ask for love and care. So when they have the opportunity to use a context where they might play a little and be like “oh no, good heavens, I’m dying.” In order to receive care, they’ll take it. I don’t desire your touch, I NEED it, but I NEED it purely because I am dying. Get the joke? PleASE DoNt Think I’m GAYYY.

It’s not that men and women can’t be friends. They can. But some men must sleep with their girl-friends. If a man introduces his hot female friend to his other friends. The first thing they’ll ask once she goes to the bathroom is “are you hitting?” He says no. They say “but you’re at least trying to right?” The thing is, he must want to sleep with her. Otherwise he has to admit to himself and others that he just genuinely appreciates her company and friendship with no ulterior motive. He likes the intimacy with this person and it doesn’t need to involve sex.

Anyway i’m listening to this tune Lootbeg, Bajazo - Grown Up in Leipzig West 2. As I write this, what a banger. But also stop calling men GAYYY.

Lets say there’s an event and a man rocks up in a pair of shorts. The other men look at him with disdain. Why does this man want to be comfortable? Whilst the short-wearer wonders why other men want to be suit-wearers,, are they trying to impress people? Do they look for approval? Everyone is throwing their own shit. If you’re comfortable, you’re excessive, you desire. If you’re wearing suits and spent a long time getting ready, you’re gay for trying too hard. And if you wear sunglasses outside, you’re masculine because it’s sunny and therefore it’s functional. But if you wear them inside, you’re desiring to look cool and therefore you’re back to square one. You’re square.

It’s easy for a man to say I need to go to work to earn money. It’s hard for him to say I desire to come home and we should have that relationship conversation so we can grow closer.

And even if he wants to spend time with his girlfriend, he has to lie to his friends that the old ball-and-chain won’t let him leave the house. It’s her fault. Even though he’s exactly where he wants to be.

“I am her, and I’m with me.”
‌
‌That line got me. It captures something I think most people are too scared to admit. We don’t want others. We want to possess the image of ourselves through the other. Desire isn’t just attraction. It’s a fantasy of completion. And every time you chase it, whether it’s love, sex, power, or even healing, it flips on you.
‌
‌Sam Rockwell's character spends years sleeping with women, trying to satisfy an urge. Maybe another body will exhaust him. But, he only becomes more insatiable.
‌
‌To be insatiated is perhaps when you are consuming things without substance. Though lack of substance is precisely what's sustaining you. What you are consuming is actually nothing you want. If what he wanted were simply these women, then one of them should have satisfied him. Instead every women was a promise that broke the same night.
‌
‌Eventually he asks a more interesting question, what exactly am I looking for in this woman? Is she somebody capable of completing me? Or perhaps I don't want her, I want to be her. On a tangent, I've met too many flounderers who like to dress in drag the first chance they get for an event. It's a shame Halloween only comes around once per year.
‌
‌There is an unstable boundary between desire and identification. To distinguish between wanting another person, wanting what we imagine they possess, wanting to be desired the way they are desired, and wanting to become the version of ourselves that seems possible through them. “Do I want you?” and “Do I want to be you?” are not always completely separate questions.
‌
‌So he changes positions inside his own fantasy. Instead of sleeping with the desired woman, he dresses like her and finds a middle-aged white man who resembles himself. The detail that the man looks like him is important. He has effectively placed a version of himself on the other side of the sexual encounter. He can now occupy the position of the woman he desired while another version of himself occupies his old position. I suppose porn does this effectively well. I mean, how many angles do you need to watch two people fuck. And who requested the shot behind the balls.
‌
‌But even that is not enough. He hires an Asian woman simply to watch. He does not only need to become the object of his desire. He needs the object herself to witness him becoming her. He looks into her eyes while the other man has sex with him and thinks:

“I am her, and I’m with me.”
‌
‌Perhaps this is the reason why sometimes people send a photo which should have been a screenshot. A screenshot gives you the information; the photo gives you their view of the information. The phone in their hand, the screen in front of them, the angle from which they encountered it. Sometimes we don’t simply want another person to see what we see. We want them to see it from where we are standing.
‌
‌His fantasy has become geometrical. There is the self. There is the person he desires. And there is the position from which he imagines that person experiences him. He is trying to occupy every point at once: to be himself, to become his object, to desire himself and to experience himself being desired.
‌
‌He wishes to experience himself from somewhere outside himself.
‌
‌Just as what we sometimes want is access to ourselves through the other. We want to know what we look like from inside their desire. Escaping our own nude prison. Which I suppose tattoos are like adding a bit of green to your prison walls to make yourself feel better.
‌
‌Attention is intoxicating in that it reveals a version of you that you could not produce alone. It would be more accurate to say you're borrowing people's eyes. If it happens to be the case you dont find yourself beautiful, the more you search for the eyes that find you beautiful.
‌
‌Which is okay until you mistake that the other person contains whatever they made possible in you. Not like being loved necessarily correlates to you finding the love within yourself.
‌
You start to feel like you need them as auxillary support. Keeping you up. Keeping your fantasy alive.
‌
‌So when you lose a person, you lose a version of you. Which in turn, is grieving you.
‌
‌The comical extreme of Rockwell's character makes something ordinary to see. Desire is rarely a simple line running from me to you. The other person can become a screen onto which we project missing possibilities of ourselves.
‌
‌And that is what I find moving about this scene. Rockwell’s character is intelligent enough to realise that the objects themselves are no longer answering the question. He has slept with the women. He has become the woman. He has reconstructed the fantasy from the opposite position. And eventually he arrives at Buddhism.
‌
‌Though this is another proposed solution to the same problem.
‌
‌The final movement - perhaps the problem is wanting objects at all.
‌
‌So he tries renunciation. Detachment from form. Detachment from self. Detachment from the endless carousel of craving and suffering.

And then, beautifully, he admits that he still misses the buzz.
‌
‌You can change your explanation for your desire much faster than you can change the way your enjoyment is organised.
‌
‌That is what made the scene emotional for me. Not simply that this man does not have the answer. It is watching somebody become intelligent enough to realise that every answer he has tried has reproduced the question.
‌
‌Sex did not answer it. Becoming the desired object did not answer it. Multiplying the fantasy did not answer it. Spiritual renunciation has not entirely answered it either.

But something important has happened. His behaviour is no longer random.

There is a structure connecting the apparently contradictory things he has done.
‌
‌There are reasons why the things you do that make the least sense to you keep making sense to some other part of you.
‌
‌And I sympathise enormously with people who remain confused by their own behaviour. Why do I keep making the same mistake? Why am I attracted to this kind of person? Why does somebody become less attractive once they finally want me? Why do I keep destroying something and then desperately trying to recover it?

We are usually given answers from spirituality, attachment theory, evolutionary psychology or conventional relationship advice. Some of those frameworks can be genuinely useful. But psychoanalysis introduced me to an entirely different way of asking the questions.

Instead of only asking what you want, it asks why you want in precisely this way.

Instead of only asking how to eliminate the behaviour, it asks what the behaviour has been doing for you.

Instead of treating masculinity and femininity as two collections of personality traits, it asks how becoming a man or woman changes the way a person negotiates desire, identification, loss, dependence and the other sex.
‌
‌And instead of assuming heterosexuality means masculinity desires femininity and femininity desires masculinity, we recognise our inherent bisexuality. Something of each is already involved in the psychic life of the other. Sometimes what attracts us in the opposite sex is precisely something we have struggled to recognise in ourselves.
‌
‌My joy in watching this scene was that psychoanalysis allowed me to understand the depths of it. My little way of feeling "haha you won't get it like me".
‌
‌But once I've had my excitement, I realise it's always funner to share.
‌
‌"If we hate each other, than why do we fall in love" is what I wrote in response. Taking our journey through how the mother and father shapes us differently. How our unconscious fantasies organise attraction, and why the people we love become entangled with parts of ourselves we have lost, rejected or never learned how to inhabit.
‌
‌Along the way, I want to answer questions that seem unrelated until you begin seeing the structure connecting them. Why is it so difficult to define what a woman is? What produces the peculiar solidarity that can emerge among men against women? Why do narcissistic personalities sometimes attract wealthy or powerful men? What actually happens psychologically in what men jokingly call “post-nut clarity”? When is overwhelming early affection love bombing, and when is it simply love?
‌
‌But underneath those questions are larger ones. Why do we desire anything at all? What are we perpetually searching for in other people? What does it mean when you desire something you already know will destroy you? How can you distinguish fantasy from what feels like a deeper intuition? And why does getting exactly what you thought you wanted so often leave behind the strange feeling that this still was not quite it?
‌
‌I'm around 350 books through my 500 goal. In an attempt to take ideas that can be extraordinarily difficult and turn them into something pragmatic enough to change how people understand their relationships.
‌
‌The book ends in a culmination of my thinking about gender difference. But I don’t want to simply give you conclusions about men and women. I want to build the framework slowly enough that, by the time we arrive there, you can see the structure for yourself.

Because the most interesting discovery psychoanalysis gave me was not an answer to the question of what we really want.

It was a better question.

Why do I keep wanting in precisely this way?

"Well, you know I moved here because I had to leave the states, but I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls. When I got here, I was like a kid in a candy store. If you've got money, no attachments, nothing to do... I started partying. It got wild. I was picking up girls every night—always different ones: petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, sometimes multiple ladies a night. I was out of control. I became insatiable.

You know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it. I started to wonder: Where am I going with this? Why do I feel this need to sleep with all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl—why does it have such a grip on me? Is she the opposite of me? Is she going to complete me in some way? I realized that after a million women, I'd still never be satisfied. Maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls... Really, not really. No, really... really.

So one night I took home some girl, turned out to be a lady boy, which I'd done before, but this time instead of me being with the lady boy, the lady boy was with me. And it was kind of magical. I got in my head what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting with me, and to feel that. So I put out an ad looking for a white guy my age to come over. Found a guy who looked a lot like me. Then I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls. I thought I looked pretty hot.

And then this guy came over and had his way with me. Then I got addicted to that. Some nights three, four guys would come over. Some I even had to pay. And at the same time, I'd hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing. I'd look in her eyes while some guy was with me, and I'd think: I am her, and I'm with me.

Hey, we all have an Achilles heel, man. You know, where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form, and some of us the same sex? It's a poetic act. It's a metaphor. A metaphor for what? Are we our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too, or inside could I be an Asian girl? I don't know. Guess I was trying to sleep my way to the answer.
Then I realized I gotta stop—the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about spirit over form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober isn't so hard. Being celibate though—it's tough. I still miss that buzz, man."

The spiral achieves a return without repetition. Revolutions of the same material approached at a different level of organisation. You are not standing where you once stood, even though you are looking at the same thing.

What changes is your capacity to take in what has always been present. An increase in capacity to remain in contact with aspects of reality that previously had to be defended against.

The psyche is constantly trying to maintain its existing equilibrium. Certain thoughts, emotions and so called contradictions are too destabilising to become aware of. Often these cannot be integrated into the organisation of the self. They remain at the edge of awareness, repeatedly approached and abandoned because staying with them for too long would disrupt the wrapping currently holding the self together.

The ascent is measured by how much reality you can allow into consciousness without immediately reorganising it into something safer.

Once one area becomes integrated, neighbouring threads loosen too. The psyche does not defend isolated ideas; it defends entire organisations of meaning. One defence often protects ten others because they all converge upon the same emotional centre. Remove one wall and light begins entering rooms you did not even realise were connected.

The spiral widens as it rises. Growth is exponential.

It comes to be that transcendence is actually a movement backward that leads to a movement upward. It’s by revisiting history that one can hope to integrate. The question of “why bother looking into the past?” is met with the answer, “because that’s where the future keeps hiding.” One must feel worse before they feel better. You become more childlike because you’re finally allowing the child back into the room. The difference is that this time you’re the adult accompanying him instead of leaving him there by himself.

Regression happens constantly. Under sufficient emotional pressure, every human being begins organising experience in older ways. We become more dependent, more frightened, more black-and-white, more desperate for certainty. The question is not whether we regress. The question is whether awareness survives the regression.

Transcendence involves becoming capable of passing through our history consciously without becoming consumed by them. Just like in spiritual states where you are able to be a pure observer. You can remember without being pulled into the scene.

Transcendence involves becoming large enough that no part of yourself has to remain on the outside.

Working through is exponential growth in awareness since defences spread like a virus cutting off the neural networks that lead to the core truth you are avoiding.

A common example is rumination, longing and overthinking around many instances in your life. As if there’s a missing thing you keep trying to return to. But the contents of these moments of overthinking are comparatively trivial. It’s like you’re thinking about cats, dogs and ducks when there’s an elephant standing in the room pretending not to be an elephant. No matter what answer you solve about dogs, it doesn’t directly translate to awareness regarding the elephant. And if you happen to manage to solve whatever question you had regarding dogs, congratulations – you’ve unlocked frogs. Finish frogs and sign up to worrying about parrots. The mind constantly feeds you gibberish equations to solve to keep you preoccupied from worrying about the real thing.

And yet I’ve exaggerated, because these other categories are not all trivial or gibberish but rather the path by which we might be able to guess what the core is. Since the psyche is associative before it is logical. Associated experiences do not need to make rational sense to you in how they are associated. It is not what they rely on.

Contradictions appear in your life and about yourself when you are focused on viewing things rationally. In this manner, two ideas or beliefs held can feel incomprehensible. You force yourself to decide which one must be true and which one false. We imagine that maturity consists in arriving at the correct position, eliminating ambiguity, and replacing confusion with certainty.

Contradictions are not evidence that something has gone wrong, but evidence that something deeper is trying to happen. Two apparently opposing positions can both contain truth because they belong to different organisations of experience. A person can genuinely love their partner while simultaneously wanting to escape them. Someone can sincerely describe their childhood as happy while also recognising that something essential was missing. Neither statement necessarily cancels the other. The contradiction exists because experience has not yet been reorganised into a form capable of containing both.

When we decide that only one side can survive, thought comes to an end. One position becomes our identity while the other becomes something to defend against.

Awareness is difficult because it involves remaining inside contradictions that the personality desperately wants to close. It means allowing yourself to genuinely experience, “I am both dependent and independent,” “I both admire and resent this person,” or “I both wanted this and regret it,” without rushing to tidy the experience into a single coherent narrative. Growth does not occur because one side defeats the other.

Play is one of the highest forms of development. Play is simply the capacity for meanings to move. It is the ability for something to become something else without immediately fixing what it is. A child picks up a stick and it becomes a sword, then a horse, then a fishing rod, without experiencing any contradiction. The meaning remains alive because it has not yet been imprisoned by certainty.

The same capacity exists psychologically. A thought can be entertained without being believed. An identity can be inhabited without becoming permanent. An emotion can be experienced without becoming the definition of the self. Play is not the absence of seriousness. It is the refusal to let meaning become dead. The healthiest people can borrow an idea for an afternoon without trying to marry it.

I often tell myself that my goal in life is to make 5 people genuinely happy in this life. Now, that is ridiculous statement to make. It’s also a ridiculous thing to genuinely believe. I’m not nearly miserable enough or lacking enough to only be able to make 5 people happy. Nonetheless, it’s a belief I can genuinely hold in one instance and disregard in another. Because it functionally helps me orient myself. It sets a standard of what I believe counts as doing something extraordinary for someone. It’s putting the North Pole on a map. I have absolutely no intention of living there, but it’s surprisingly useful to know which direction it is. But I can’t let myself get caught believing that it’s literally true. Otherwise I’ll become miserable at my lack of capacity.

Rigid beliefs and identities are lifeless. Every identity is built not on truth but because it was useful at a particular moment. Play loosens the relationship between ourselves and the stories we have been telling ourselves. Not to mention that self-development is miserable without play. The end is endless. If you can’t enjoy yourself along the way I wouldn’t even bother. One must be able to laugh at oneself for how tightly we hold onto a certain belief and how much we struggle to let go of it. Like a dog with a tennis ball in its mouth, we have to laugh at how strong the dog’s grip is. Though the tragedy is, the dog is more aware that it’s holding onto the ball tightly as play.

Flirting is not fundamentally confidence or charm. It is symbolic play. Every exchange exists between multiple meanings at once. Every sentence carries more than one possibility. Every gesture invites interpretation without demanding it. The attraction comes not from certainty but from movement. The moment everything becomes literal, the play disappears, and with it much of the vitality. It’s why a joke said twice dies. Because when you don’t understand or don’t hear the joke the first time, you’re not meant to ask the person to repeat. The content of the joke is meaningless, the effort underneath is that the person was trying to play with you. It’s as if someone threw a ball at you and you respond, “sorry, could you throw the ball one more time?” The throw wasn’t the point. Instead of catching the game, you caught the words. The correct reply to a joke you didn’t hear is “No idea what you said, but look at these biceps”. You were worried about offending them by not understanding the joke. Instead, what hurt is that you never threw the ball back.

I’ve found it to be the case that some people who are good at flirting are also very astute in their wider general awareness. At least in regards to awareness of other people’s behaviours and life in general. Though this does not necessarily still come with self-awareness. The work still has to be done. A cocaine addict is surprisingly good at reading people.

Now, if the spiral of awareness is rising upwards. Imagine a vortex running through it’s centre, like the eye of a hurricane. The spiral represents increasing awareness, increasing symbolic capacity, increasing freedom. The vortex represents emotional gravity. At any moment, a sufficiently powerful affect can seize hold of you and begin pulling you downward through earlier organisations of experience.

Relatively minor events produce disproportionate reactions all the time. Often at the dinner table couples fling shit at each other, because something happened at work that made them regress to their child-like organisation. Neither person aware they are doing it. A critique at work that makes you remember all the moments of inadequacy has to be met with your partner loving and praising your food. A slight jovial comment that your food leaves a little to be desired, throws you down a spiral. Feeling inadequate already, you were not ready to take one more comment hinting at inadequacy.

Every evening, somewhere, some poor bastard or bastardess is getting a telling off by a child wearing big boy pants or big girl pantress.

A forgotten good night text might make you respond through the lens of remembering all previous experiences of absence.

Under emotional pressure people do not choose immaturity. If it was a choice, almost nobody would. Hardly anyone wakes up thinking, “today is the perfect day to become impossible to reason with.” Though perhaps they’ll save it for tomorrow. Or I’ll be kind today because in a few days I know I’m going to blow up. Immaturity is simply what happens when older organisations of experience begin taking over. As children we possess fewer symbolic resources and more extreme defences. Experiences become all or nothing because we have not yet developed enough ways to organise them differently. You love me or you don’t. You agree with me or you don’t. I’m brilliant or I’m worthless. Nuance is a luxury the child simply cannot afford. And luxury makes unnecessary for the child to develop nuance.

Just as the emotional vortex can pull us downwards, it can also become the route through which old memories return. From a more stable point in the spiral, higher up, one can intentionally move downwards, reconnect with the emotions organised at that level, and bring them back up to be worked on with a greater regulatory capacity. Healing is like walking back into a burning building. People might be inclined to help if you told them another person was still inside. But instead, what’s in there is only things deeply personal to you. So you have to be the one that does it. That is, of course, until you convince someone to love you and like an idiot they follow in with you.

The great feat of the psyche is that it hides its own organisation from itself. Once a particular way of interpreting the world has become established, it no longer feels like an interpretation. It feels like reality. We imagine that our thoughts simply occur naturally, that our conclusions are obvious, that our reactions are authentic expressions of who we are. Rarely do we stop to ask why this thought appeared instead of another one, why this meaning became self-evident, or why this particular interpretation feels so unquestionable.

This becomes fairly obvious when discussions of religion or politics arise. Most people are perfectly capable of recognising that political beliefs were shaped by upbringing, culture or history. Religious belief, perhaps a little less so. Everyone thinks the other side has been brainwashed. It’s a remarkable coincidence that the only people who somehow escaped are sitting in your friendship group. But when it comes to spirituality, personality or the things we call “the real me”, people become much more reluctant. These suddenly feel discovered rather than constructed.

Psychoanalysis is deeply suspicious of that feeling. It does not give much credence to the idea of an authentic self waiting patiently underneath all the conditioning. Or at least, not in the way most people hope. It is not some pristine essence that existed before history got in the way. The authentic self is not buried beneath your past. It is largely made out of it. Perhaps the most convincing thing your history ever managed to do was persuade you that it had become your nature. Psychoanalysis hears something different. It hears, “This organisation has been so successful for so long that I’ve forgotten it was ever organised at all.”

Whether it is people thinking that their deepest calling is a particular profession, or believing that they must wait until marriage to have sex, we usually assume these are simply values. Okay, but what problem did the belief solve?

The difference between people of faith who go against the rule and have sex, and those who maintain chastity is not one of greater faith over the other. But of a difference of psychology. One person needs the rule more than the other.

Chastity is like a defence that dresses itself up as representing some higher value whilst intentionally there to avoid the painful emotional experiences that a sexual life can bring. And the accompanying feelings of what it means to fuse with another person on a bodily level. It isn’t necessarily running away from sex. It’s running away from everything sex eventually asks of you. If you’ve happened to take a celibacy year or two, you’re familiar with the dread that comes when you realise the year is up and now you’re meant to have sex again.

A defence is particularly successful once it no longer appears defensive. If you constantly felt yourself avoiding something, the avoidance would already be weakening. For example, phobias are bad defences. They’re partially okay because what the person is phobic of is never the actual thing the phobia represents. Nonetheless, the person is aware they are avoiding something.

Instead, our defences reorganise perception. Certain thoughts and explanations become easier than others. New age spirituality holds some beliefs that can genuinely lead to a beautiful life. The only problem is that people genuinely believe them. Instead of use them playfully and through an act of freedom choosing to believe them because it makes them feel good, or it makes their life more aesthetic. But genuine belief in them causes may problems. In particular the belief that one can be whole comes with relationship difficulties. Though it also goes without saying that some spiritual approaches, beliefs and cliches genuinely do reflect psychological mechanisms even if it’s not worded or explained in the same manner. Manifestation and chakra work of note.

The mistake is assuming the map and the territory have made a legally binding agreement.

We mistake coherence for truth. And we mistake memory as retrieval instead of interpretation. Every act of remembering is also an act of organising. We are not merely recovering the past. We are recovering the past from the standpoint of who we have become.

It should also be noted that whatever rational explanations you have developed in order to give meaning to your childhood experiences - “I’m glad that happened because it made me stronger,” or “I wouldn’t be who I am otherwise” - has very little bearing on the emotions experienced by the child living through those moments. Children are notoriously unimpressed by philosophical explanations they haven’t heard yet. Later rationalisation does not dissolve the earlier emotion. Only momentarily alleviates it to keep it at bay.

This does not necessarily mean our memories are false. That is the wrong question. A memory can be historically accurate and psychologically organised at the same time. It’s the conclusion you draw from the memory that you believe to be the only possible rational conclusion.

There’s a principle in psychoanalysis that harks back to Morgan Freeman’s answer on how to stop racism “just stop talking about race”.

The mind has an extraordinary ability to convince you that one question explains your entire life. Does anybody love me? Am I enough? Have I wasted my life? What’s my purpose? The annoying thing about these questions is that they don’t particularly want answers. Usually because they know before you do, no answer will satisfy them. If tomorrow you became completely convinced that people loved you, the question would just change to “Yes… but do they really know me?” Solve that one and it becomes “Yes.. but will they stay?”

Psychoanalysis asks whether question itself deserves to survive. You’re not going to solve your problem of not feeling loved by creating conditions where you’re loved more. But when you drop the question of “does anyone love me?” and focus on another question in life that brings more enjoyment to you. Love still matters when it happiness, it just doesn’t need to happen to conclude your fantasies. Love can be swapped with “happiness” for another analogy. From inside the question, life appears impossible unless happiness arrives. Outside the question, happiness is one valuable experience amongst many.

From your standpoint, you see no way possible that life could be about anything other than love and happiness.

Dropping the idea does not mean you stop caring about these things, they just matter less in how your life is organised. Another pitfall is spending your life trying to find the real you. Since there is no real you, you’re in trouble. Or that missing thing you’re looking for, doesn’t exist, but you don’t know how to stop searching for it. The psyche is very good at sending people on treasure hunts where it buried nothing.

One answer is that your attention is always travelling in one of two directions. It is either being pulled towards something that hasn’t happened yet, or it is being pulled back towards something that already has.

We tend to imagine the past and the future as independent. As though we can be equally invested in both at the same time. But that isn’t really how experience feels. There are periods of life where tomorrow is so compelling that yesterday barely asks for your attention. And there are other periods where tomorrow feels strangely empty, and the past begins demanding to be understood.

Think about someone who’s just fallen in love. They don’t usually spend the evening trying to work out why their Year 3 teacher made them feel overlooked. They are wondering when they’ll see this person again. They replay yesterday, not because they’re interested in history, but because they’re anticipating tomorrow. Their memories are organised around possibility rather than explanation.

The future has acquired gravity. It keeps pulling their attention forward. The past is still there, but much less alive than the future.

Perhaps that’s the better question to ask. Instead of asking why we become obsessed with our past, we should ask what was happening in our lives before that obsession appeared. What was it that had been pulling us forward, and what happened when it stopped?

Our desire is what moves us towards what does not yet exist. What pulls us into the future. Life speeds up when we become very preoccupied by what is coming next. We get lost in it.

So when we lose our desire. Which is what gives us our sense of vitality, our life. We lose our experience of feeling ourselves to be animated, to be in motion. Things begin to feel repetitive because they contain no propulsion forward. But feel instead like we’re jumping on the same spot.

When the future stops offering possibilities, our sense of time changes direction. Instead of asking, “What might happen to me?” you begin asking, “What happened to me?”

Our fascination with autobiography begins when the future feels less available. The hope, usually without realising it, is that if you can finally explain yourself, something will begin moving again. Though explanation and movement are not the same thing.

We lose our desire when we lose our sexuality. We tend to reduce sexuality to sex. But our sexuality is the part of us that remains open to uncertainty. To being changed by another person, to being changed by whatever we do. Our partners begin to feel repetitive when we refuse to be changed by them any longer. Our sexuality is our willingness to become interested in someone we don’t yet know, to imagine futures we haven’t yet lived, to allow desire to pull us somewhere unfamiliar.

We tend to categorise the person we date. We familiarise ourselves. Make assumptions. Put them into neat boxes in our heads. Everything we do to make them feel safe, deadens them in our eyes. In turn, blocking our desire towards them. We’ve left them with nothing to surprise us anymore.

When this capacity weakens, the future loses the possibility that something genuinely new might happen. A return to the past is instigated by a future unable to ask new questions.

Instead of becoming interested in someone else, we become interested in ourselves. Instead of wondering who we might meet, we wonder why we are the way we are. Instead of risking uncertainty, we begin perfecting explanations.

We mistake movement through our memories for movement through our lives. We become increasingly fluent in our history while becoming less available to our future.

The misconception is that our history is sitting behind us waiting to be remembered. Though it’s really moving through us. To call a dancer soulful is to say that they dance with their history through them.

The past isn’t something we leave behind. It’s something we keep doing. Which means that becoming fascinated by your autobiography is not quite the same as becoming familiar with your history. One asks, “What happened to me?” The other asks, “How is what happened to me still organising the way I live, love and desire today?”

It seems that in focusing on the past, we lose a sense of our future. While, focusing on the future incurs less of a cost in us losing our sense of the past. Since our past is always moving with us into the future.

It’s history as memory compared to history as something enacted through desire.

The point of looking backwards isn’t to become increasingly knowledgeable about who you’ve been. It’s to recover your ability to become interested in who you haven’t yet become.

Endless self-explanation is quite unsatisfying. The explanation becomes another possession. Another reason the future continues to wait. Explanation tries to close questions. Desire opens them. Desire asks “I wonder what might happen”.

Perhaps that’s why the periods in our lives where we feel most alive are rarely the ones where we’ve finally understood ourselves. They’re usually the ones where we’ve become captivated by something outside ourselves. Something that makes tomorrow feel more compelling than yesterday.

Maybe that’s what we should be paying attention to.

Instead of asking whether someone has made peace with their past, perhaps we should ask whether they’re still capable of becoming interested in their future.

Not optimistic. Not ambitious. Interested.

Interested in another person.

Interested in being surprised.

Interested in discovering something about themselves that couldn’t have been discovered alone.

The past will always remain part of us. It doesn’t need to be forgotten. But perhaps it also isn’t meant to become our permanent residence.

This is what it means in its deepest sense to rediscover our sexuality and vitality. Not to have more sex. But to find yourself once again pulled towards a future that cannot yet be explained.

I think there is, and it starts with an idea: we have become an incestuous society. That needs unpacking, because it doesn’t mean what it sounds like.

Desire, our human pursuit, is the effect of an imagined loss. A loss of paradise, or rather a state of complete satisfaction which we believe exists but does not.

As the baby first experiences the world as one without frustration, without separation, without limits. When it cannot yet even recognise there is a difference between itself and the mother. It cries, and food arrives. It cries, and because it doesn’t recognise the cry belongs itself, it cries even more. There is no gap yet between wanting and having. Of course this state was never quite as complete as the infant experiences it, and it can’t last. But the memory of it - real or invented - becomes the template for paradise. We spend the rest of our lives as adults who half-believe that state can be gotten back to: a wholeness before we were marked as lacking, before we found out we’re limited and can’t have it all.

This lost state leaves a void in us we look to fill until we’re full. And based on our other experiences, each person imagines a different object that can do the job. Money. A family. Mastering a craft. The right dress that will finally make you feel complete. The object changes person to person. The shape of the hole doesn’t.

In psychoanalysis, the incest prohibition is not just that the child cannot have the mother. But, that the child cannot return to this state. The wish to return must be renounced in order to grow.

The father’s role isn’t “you can’t have your mother.” It’s deeper: no one gets to have that. Not you, not anyone - the mother herself desires beyond you, she was never yours to begin with. The rule works because it’s not “someone else has what you can’t” but “what you wanted was never there for anyone to have.” This is our castration, our mark of being fallen beings who never get to return. The moment of our unbearable resignation that our satisfaction will forever remain partial. Because each thing we desire is secretly based on this wish to return to paradise, but we cannot get it. Nobody gets the whole thing, nobody gets to be whole.

This is roughly what the Buddhists discovered: don’t desire anything, because desire only produces pain. Nothing you attain will satisfy you, because it’s never the original thing you wished for.

Incest, structurally, is the temptation to believe separation itself could be undone.

The old position: limitation is the price of being a subject. You become someone by accepting you can’t have everything, can’t know anyone completely, can’t merge back with the world. The new position: every limit is a bug to be patched. Immediacy over mediation. Transparency over interpretation. Authenticity, meaning an inner truth that needs no one else’s recognition to be real, over identity as something conferred by others, imperfectly, through negotiation.

Paradise used to sit behind us, lost, mourned, never to be regained. Now it sits ahead of us, retrievable with the right technique, the right arrangement, the right removal of friction. Happiness becomes the recovery of something that, on the psychoanalytic account, was never actually possessed to begin with.

This is also where the fascination with the child belongs. The child carries the symbol of a time before sin - and sin, here, just means the bite that separates you from paradise and turns you into an adult. The child hasn’t taken that bite yet.

It’s worth asking why pedophilia skews so heavily male. One reading: men have a long habit of imagining women as without full subjectivity of their own - as people who don’t quite carry independent desire, who are there to follow rather than to want on their own terms. Subjectivity, remember, is the thing you get by paying the cost of separating from the mother: you become someone with your own desire only by accepting the loss that makes you a separate person. A fantasy that strips a woman of that separateness is already halfway to treating her like a child. The child just completes the picture - someone who still follows, still depends, still needs to be told what they want, who hasn’t yet paid the price of becoming a full separate self.

Which points at the real variable underneath all of this: how much separateness a person is allowed to carry before they start to feel threatening. Adult intimacy means facing someone whose desire you didn’t write and can’t control - someone who can refuse you, misread you, leave. People who can’t tolerate that look for relationships that shrink the other person down: dependent, idealising, unformed, a mirror instead of a subject. The fantasy was never really about age. It’s about avoiding reciprocity.

In plain terms - incest is the fantasy of a relationship with no risk in it, because there’s no real other person in it. Whenever someone is reduced to completing you instead of encountered as separate, you’re running the incest logic, even with no incest involved.

Which brings us to two identifications that have exploded in the same cultural window as this broader flight from separation: non-binary and transgender.

Read structurally, not biographically - these are cultural symptoms, not verdicts on any individual’s life.

To take a gender is to take a position in desire, and a position in desire comes with exposure: you can be wanted or not wanted, you can want and be refused. That’s the risk built into being sexed at all. Refusing every gender can be read as refusing that exposure - not describing an inner feeling so much as managing an anxiety. If you take no position, you can’t be caught wanting from anywhere in particular. You stay one step before the cut that makes you legible, targetable, answerable to another person’s desire. That’s the anxiety-disorder structure underneath it: not fear of a gender, fear of what accepting a gender commits you to - a direction, a vulnerability, an Other who gets to respond.

There’s a second cost, more specific. If I accept I’m a man, I’ve also accepted I’m cut off from the feminine — whatever I do from here on, nothing brings me back to some prior wholeness that included both. Every choice I make as a man is also, quietly, a renunciation of the woman I’m not. Staying unlabelled lets you dodge that particular grief. If I don’t commit to either sex, I haven’t technically lost anything yet. I can tell myself I’m still everything, still whole, still uncut - not limited by picking one side when I could, in theory, be both.

Transgender identity points at a different, older myth: not refusal of gender but fusion of both. The androgyne - Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, humans originally whole and double-sexed, split by the gods, condemned ever after to hunt for the missing half. That’s why the image is everywhere across myth and sculpture: hermaphroditic gods, dual-sexed statues, alchemical figures fusing sun and moon. Not really about anatomy - about totality. A being that already contains both halves needs nothing outside itself. It has resolved the split the rest of us are stuck living inside.

To make that concrete: living as one sex, rather than the fantasy of both, means specific, ordinary losses. Commit to a partner and you’ve foreclosed every other partner. Live as a man and you never get the first-person version of what a woman’s body carries, or the reverse. Age into one life and every other life you might have lived quietly closes. This is what “lacking” actually costs day to day - not an abstraction, but a running total of doors shutting behind you. The androgyne is the fantasy of a being who never has to hear any of those doors close, because it never walked through just one.

Structurally, the androgyne sits exactly where the lost paradise sits: before the cut, self-sufficient, exempt from the lack that runs everyone else. To be captivated by that image - or to want to become it - is to imaginatively reoccupy the position of wholeness prior to division, rather than go out into the world of others, sexed and lacking, and take the risk desire actually requires.

Which may be why trans pornography is one of the top categories straight men watch, and why some straight men will sleep with trans women. Not despite the fantasy of completeness but because of it - sleeping with a figure who reads, unconsciously, less like a man or a woman than like a god who never fell.

But why sex? Why does psychoanalysis put sex at the centre of all this, rather than treating it as one more item on that list.

People who identify as non-binary or transgender can live ordinary lives. They can accept limits; they can recognise it’s a hallucination to believe in a dream life. So why is sex the sticking point where the symptom plays out?

Because sexuality isn’t a category you enter later in life like other things. We are sexed and we are bodied from the beginning. The mouth, the skin and the rest are involved in our first experiences of satisfaction and loss. Meaning sex never becomes a category like career, which we take up later and use to fill the void. Rather, our sex, our body, is the original site where the hole was cut — where the void was created in the first place.

There’s a second reason it stays special. Money and mastery are fully covered by the symbolic world: there’s a rough, moving answer to “how much money is enough” or “what counts as mastering a craft,” and you can spend a lifetime chasing that answer, even if you never quite catch it. Sex offers no such answer. There’s no formula for “man enough” or “woman enough” that could ever close the gap between wanting and being wanted, the way a bank balance or a finished project closes the gap between wanting and having. And that absence is exactly the point: because there’s no formula, gender was never available as a filler to begin with. You can’t stack up enough masculinity or femininity and arrive at wholeness, the way you can stack up enough money and arrive, at least provisionally, at “enough.” There’s no unit to stack. Money and mastery are things the void reaches for, after the fact, once the void already exists.

Sex is the shape of the void itself, laid down before any of that reaching starts. You can’t fill a wound with the same material the wound was cut from - which is why sex doesn’t sit on the list next to money and mastery. It sits underneath the list, as the thing that made a list necessary at all.

In love, our deepest connections arrive as recognition. Not discovery but recovery - this is someone I knew, something that existed or should have existed, briefly, before it slipped away. The same misapprehension follows treasure. We imagine we seek it as explorers, but what makes treasure special is precisely that it was lost. Finding it would be restoration, not acquisition.

We want reparation. Hope, yes, but hope of what we had before.

Because beneath whatever adult we’ve become, the fantasy is still structured around a childhood paradise we believe we lost. Whatever that original experience was - it felt complete. Unrepeatable. No substitution quite gets you back there, and yet the wish persists.

Liberalism promises we can work toward something better. But the fantasy doesn’t want something better. It wants the same thing back. The only ideology that speaks directly to desire is the one that says: we can return.

Taxation, driven by loss, is what creates the class struggle. When you see your full salary first followed by a proportionate disappearance, you wonder who is to blame. It would be much easier if you were simply paid the smaller amount from the start. Possession precedes subtraction.

So there is a fundamental difference between a politics that says we can achieve peace and one that says we had peace already and we can get it back. The first asks you to imagine something new. The second just reopens a wound you already have.

Resentment doesn’t come from simple absence, it comes from dispossession. Which in turn creates an orbit.

Why do we desire to lose things? What does having an object/person of desire, before it becomes a lost thing, what does it do for us?

We circle. We lose ourselves in the pursuit of it. We become excessive. My greatest love disorients me. I take the wrong route, the extended route, hoping to run into her. Or funnily rather, I take the wrong route, the extended route, to avoid her. And even when I have her, I’ve become a person I convince myself I always was. I convince myself this is the path for me, this is who I am - all because of her pull. The object doesn’t just attract. It reorganises. Space, time, identity - everything bends around it.

This excess, this disproportionate charge an object carries - is actually what makes it an object of desire at all. You are lost when there is no object of desire. You get lost when there is one. The difference between the two is the difference between depression and obsession. Between a life with no gravity and a life bent entirely out of shape by too much of it.

And the original object - the one that sets up every orbit that follows - is so obvious we forget to mention it. There is no place like home, not even home itself. Because there are no people about whom we have the same feelings as our parents. Everyone has a thing about their mother. A thing about their father. The first objects are so total, so overwhelming, that everything afterward gets organised in relation to them. You spend your life refinding them or refusing to. And someone might say - you can’t reduce everything down to it being about my mother. Well in that case, I can be sure it’s about not your mother. The pull is binding regardless of direction. Wanting union or pulling away, it’s still about the mother.

This is what the incest prohibition actually sets up. The child wishes to dissolve back into oneness - the daughter with the father, the son with the mother. But can’t, in fear that the other parent will retaliate, that their love will be lost. So the child is left in an impossible position: knowing exactly what it wants, prohibited from having it. And this is the crucial thing - because the child knows what it wants, it has to get lost. It can’t go there directly. It has to pretend, even to itself, that it doesn’t know where it’s going.

So the child builds a labyrinth instead. It dawdles. Constructing elaborate detours that looks like lostness. It creates a person that looks like they’ve forgotten what they are doing there, as though for them it is no longer a labyrinth but a pleasant place to be walking. The means have become an end in themselves. It’s not that travelling hopefully is better than arriving. It’s that travelling is there to protect you from the possibility of arrival.

This is why desire produces so much that looks like its opposite. We create obstacles to prevent us from getting what we want. Like the Mexican fisherman and the investment banker. The irony of chasing success in order to eventually arrive at a life you could already be living. A moment you only recognise when it’s too late, and your friends and family have already left. Because if it wasn’t too late it means you could still arrive. But you mustn’t. So it must be too late. There must always be an obstacle.

Arrival always means the death of the identity you built around the pursuit. Your whole beautiful labyrinth.

The child who had to pretend it didn’t know what it wanted becomes sedimented into the adult who now genuinely doesn’t. Nothing appears charged enough to pull you toward it. No labyrinth gets built because there’s nothing to avoid. Just the collapse of desire - wanting that can’t find anything heavy enough to matter.

The other kind of adult goes the opposite way. Self-assured, certain, head down - not because they know what they want but precisely because they don’t. No prohibition to make them pause, no incest taboo to force the detour. So they charge. Excessively, irrationally, repetitively. They’re not building a labyrinth but one is forming around them, on the inside, until one day they stop and hold out their hand and ask: who is this.

So what do we need a map for?

Not to show you everything. A map that showed you everything would be useless - it would just be the ground again. A map works precisely because it lies. It cuts out most of reality. The mountain isn’t actually flat and neither is it all grey. If a map included every detail, it would stop being a map. It would overwhelm you exactly like the ground itself.

Orientation requires omission. To know where you are, reality has to stop presenting itself in its full complexity. You need a lie you can navigate b

To say you see very clearly, you understand very well, you’re fully aware - is both wise and dumb. Yes your map is very beautiful. But if you put it slightly aside, you’d see it doesn’t match the ground, the reality beneath.

This is where desire and maps are always in tension. Because desire pulls you toward the excessive - toward the thing that has too much charge, too much weight, too much reality to be simplified. The object of desire is always closer to the ground than to the map. It resists reduction. Which is why falling in love feels like losing your map - suddenly one person contains too much to be organised into background. Certain gestures become everything. Others disappear. You don’t love a person. You love the map you’ve made of them, yes, but you made that map because they were too much ground to walk across without one.

Identity works this way. To say I am this kind of person already omits countless other possibilities, contradictions, impulses. The self is not discovered - it’s drawn, like a map, with most of the territory left blank.

Every political map is a simplification that makes movement possible. The conservative map is old and wrong in specific ways but it functions - it tells you where you are, who you were, where the enemies are, what you’re recovering. It gives you an address. More than that - it promises that the ground it represents still exists. That the home is still there. That return is possible.

The liberal map keeps trying to add more detail, more nuance, more inclusion, more complexity - until it stops functioning as a map. The ground and the map collapse into each other. Nobody can move because nobody can find themselves on it.

In this sense, only children have homes. The child has a map so total, so overwhelming, so organised around those first objects, that the world is completely legible. Everything has a place. Everyone has an address. The child knows where it’s going even when it’s pretending not to.

The adult should feel lost. Not as failure but as structure. As the correct relationship to reality. To feel at home in the world as an adult is to be working from a map so old and so simplified that you’ve stopped noticing how much it leaves out. Comfortable, oriented, and completely wrong about the territory.

There is a difference between being lost and making yourself lost. The labyrinth was always protective - a structure built to keep you from arriving at something you couldn’t have, proof that something mattered enough to avoid.

But being lost, genuinely, structurally, correctly lost - is not the same as having failed to find yourself (getting lost). It’s the freedom to be lost. To have released the original object without betraying your desire. To be moving without an address, not because you’ve given up on arrival but because you’ve stopped needing the labyrinth to protect you from it.

Almost nobody gets there. But it’s what’s on the other side of the map. The ground, the excessive, the contradictory and the all too dense to navigate. The thing desire was always pointing toward and the thing every map was built to avoid.

Potentiality, what something could be, becomes actuality, what something is. This change produces time. Time not as a container but attribute of motion. And things happening, is what we call shit. Shit is not waste but what is. Shit is the actuality emerged from potentiality.

But shit happening requires a verb. Things do not occur, but are made to occur. The verb is fuck. To fuck is to cause. Shit fucks is high praise. When something is alive and well, we say it fucks. It is making shit happen. The universe is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to keep turning potentiality into actuality with force and consequence.

So fuck that shit is a statement of refusal and redirection. It says: I am not going to allow this particular actualisation to proceed unopposed. I am going to apply my own force, my own causation, back against it. I am going to be a cause in this situation rather than merely an effect.

This shit fucks and fuck that shit are our possible relationships to the causal structure of the universe. Either you are in alignment with what is happening, recognising its force and affirming it, or you are in opposition to it, redirecting your own causal energy back against it. Both are active positions. Both involve you as an agent, as something that fucks rather than something that is fucked.

There is a guaranteed amount of fuckery in the universe. And it’s a certainty that fuckery will happen. The only question is what you do with it.

Fuckery is neither created nor destroyed. It is only transmitted. When you encounter it, you have a choice about direction. You can take the fuckery and move it outward - this shit fucks, fuck that shit - or you can absorb it. Let it terminate in you. And that is how you become fucked.

The person who says fuck me has stopped transmitting. They have become the endpoint of a causal chain rather than a link in it. The fuckery accumulates and becomes self-destruction. Never let the fuckery stop at you. Take it and move it.

To be fucked is to be feminine. The one who is fucked receives. Hence why when things go wrong, a man can shrug it off and say shit happens. He is a witness to causation, but not its victim. When a women says shit happens, she is a bitch, she is cold. She is expected to be fucked and take it. Not indifferent. A bitch is a woman who says fuck you instead of fuck me.

Shit is gold. Shit is value. Shit is the first thing we produce, that we can give back to our gods, our parents. A child shits and smiles. Anxiety from dependency is relieved because the child thinks it has produced something of value to return to the other.

Hence, shitting gold means producing lots of value, lots of money. Pissing away gold means throwing it away.

The ass is the source of gold. Which is why billionaires fly out pretty asses and eat their shit. Worshipping at the altar of the thing that produces what they value most.

To give a shit, is to care, is to give value. Or to give out is to cause, to provide. To give in is to submit and receive. To let the fuckery terminate in you.

I don’t give a shit is to retain and withhold. This prevents change. This prevents time from shit happening, producing deadness in the person who doesn’t give a shit.

Time is generated in the space of the shit leaving the ass.

You can either take in and integrate the shit as a fundamental part of what you are. Or you can take out, remove the shit from within you and fling and project it out. To spread your shit.

To order take out is to refuse responsibility of one’s own shit and instead task it to someone else. I’m tired, fuck you, you make my food.

Producing your own shit from the food you cook feels wholesome because it’s cyclical. Producing shit from take out is fun because now you are producing gold without putting in the effort it took. You got away with something.

Capitalism came from Protestantism, because Luther had an anal confliction or rather conflation.

Luther was a monk. Retention, discipline and control. A monk who subdued the body, denied himself pleasure. He who mortifies the flesh, kills the body to save the soul. A voluntary submission to dying as the path to God.

But the more you retain the more you become aware of you’re retaining. The man who controls his shit becomes obsessed with his shit. And Luther, sitting on the privy, had his theological breakthrough.

The world is shit and it belongs to the devil. Everything produced in it is produced by the ego. And the ego is the devil. This is why no work can save you. There is no salvation on Earth. Not because works are insufficient but because works are the problem. Every good deed performed to earn salvation is an act of ego, which means it belongs to the devil, which means it makes things worse. You cannot shit your way out of the shit.

Luther’s saw his vision of the devil as the posterior. Black, filthy, smelling of sulphur. He said the devil would show him his posterior, attack him with his excrement. And Luther would fight back the same way. Threatening to fart on the devil, threatening to defecate on him. Declares the appropriate place for the devil is his anus, where he belongs. The devil attacks with shit and Luther returns it. A conservation of fuckery.

No devil, no God. According to him, God isn’t found by escaping the shit. God is found through it. In the privy. In the place of expulsion. In extremest alienation from God. To be saved, you must be brought to nothing. As long as you are still trying to act, to achieve, to maintain yourself, you remain in the wrong structure. The ego must die. God makes alive by slaying. Mortification of the self. Holy living becomes indistinguishable from holy dying.

Luther believed time would end. Christ would return. The shit would stop. This is what made his position bearable. You can endure living in the shit if you believe the shit will end. The world is the devil’s domain, works are worthless, everything visible is fallen - but temporarily. The end is coming. Time itself, which exists because shit happens, would cease.

And then the end kept not arriving.

And then the apocalypse faded as a serious expectation, the devil became unsustainable. Without an end in sight, the shit would just keep going. If works can’t save you, if there’s no institutional mediation, no confession, no penance - how do I know if I’m saved? You’re alone before God with nothing to read.

Except maybe this. If God is sovereign and controls everything, then what happens to you in this world might be a signal of your status in the next. Wealth doesn’t save you. But wealth might mean you’re already saved. Not a cause. A symptom. A sign.

So you accumulate not to earn salvation but to read yourself. The ledger becomes a mirror. If the gold is coming, maybe God is with me. If things are going well, maybe I am among the elect.

Except you can never accumulate enough evidence. The uncertainty never resolves. Salvation either happened or it didn’t, before you were born, and no amount of gold will tell you definitively which it was. So you just keep going. Retain. Accumulate. Defer. Produce. Not toward anything. Just to keep reading signs that never give a final answer.

This is why today (still) the rich want and must believe their wealth makes them righteous. They believe their actions are good, because why else would God have brought them riches. The theology is gone but the logic remains. Wealth still signals virtue. Success still feels like election.

And it’s everywhere. Right now. In your life.

When you dump someone you retained them, incorporated them into your life, and then expelled them. They became waste. The one who gets dumped doesn’t end the relationship. They’re ended by it.

Passing the buck. You have shit in your hands and you move it to someone else. The buck stops here means the shit stops here. I’m absorbing it. The consequences terminate in me.

Tax havens. You produce value inside a system, accumulate wealth within it, then expel the obligations outward. Offshore. Somewhere the shit won’t stick to you. You retain the gold and excrete the debt.

Who carries the shit and who doesn’t. Who is the fucker and who is the fucked.

And who owns the shit? Luther was clear about this. We are the devil’s property. The world is his domain and we are his assets. The devil is the first capitalist. He doesn’t produce. He owns. He accumulates. He extracts. We are the shit he retains.

The devil disappeared. The market took his place. We are still property. Nothing changed except we stopped calling it what it was.

The child discovers that the anal product is power. Gift, weapon, property. Used to obtain love, assert independence, commit aggression. These are the first forms of social behaviour and they never lose their connection to where they came from.

Money is the anal product made abstract. Clean, odourless, detachable from the body. But carrying the same charge - possession, control, retention. Money is not a replacement for shit. Money is shit.

Luther knew. He said money is the word of the devil, through which he creates all things, the way God created through the true word. His descendants just stopped believing in the devil. They kept the gold and lost the theology. Kept the structure and lost the awareness of what the structure was built on.

Shit has been sublimated. Made clean. Made abstract. Made holy. But it’s still shit. It was always shit. The only difference between Luther and us is that Luther knew where he was standing.

When Luther said the devil is lord of this world he was also saying guilt is lord of this world. The shit we deal with is accumulated, unresolved, unplayable guilt. The child exists in a state of pure debt. It owes everything and has nothing to give back except what it produces, which is shit.

So the first gift is shit. The first attempt at repayment is shit. A token to earn its place. To owe and to ought share the same root. Debt and guilt are the same word. The entire money complex is rooted in guilt trying to expiate itself. And work is how you try to expiate it.

Not because work is productive. Not because work builds things or generates value. But because work hurts and costs you something. It’s a justification. Labour follows sin. Rest produces guilt, pleasure must be earned. Productivity feels like moral worth.

The person who does nothing feels worthless not because they have produced nothing but because they have not punished themselves enough. They have not atoned. For what? For existing.

You do not work to enjoy the fruits. The economy is not organised around pleasure but guilt management. The first solution to guilt is to share it.

Archaic man gives not out of generosity. Not out of kindness. He gives because he wants to lose. To get rid of something. The gift is an expulsion of guilt. And the gods exist precisely for this - to receive the gift, to structure the human need for self-sacrifice, to give the guilt somewhere to go. I give so that you may give. The entire archaic economy is organised around this circuit.

This is what we already called giving a shit. To give a shit is to care, yes. But underneath that - to give a shit is to give your guilt to another. To discharge it outward. To expel what you cannot carry alone.

And it works, though not permanently. In archaic societies guilt could be periodically reset. Rituals of renewal. Ceremonies of expiation. Time was cyclical because guilt was cyclical. You accumulated, you discharged, you started again. No history. No compound interest. The accounts could be balanced.

The ability to promise means you cannot forget the past. Other animals live in the present. Man can promise, which means man can be held to what he said yesterday. Man is constipated with the past. The anal structure, retention of bodily structure, maps onto organising oneself around retention of the past. It sits there and demands to be dealt with.

Conscience is this. Conscience is the past sitting in you, watching everything you do, measuring it against what you owe. The watching institution of conscience and the time sense are connected because they are the same mechanism operating at different levels. You owe. You remember that you owe. You cannot forget that you remember. And so you are responsible.

This is what makes us both moral and miserable.

And if the past accumulates like shit, then time itself is excrement. Time is analised (or analysed). Fragmented into units that can be counted, saved, wasted, spent and invested. Wasting time produces the same guilt as losing money because they are the same thing. Time is money. Both are crystallised guilt. Both are things you can never have enough of. Both produce the same anxiety when they slip through your fingers.

You can only possess something as property once you see it as crystallised time. The object on the shelf is not just a thing. It is stored labor. Stored punishment. Stored atonement made solid. This is why consumption so often fails to satisfy. You acquire the object hoping it will retroactively justify the sacrifice it took to get it. Or possibly to even live through it. The hand crafted leather jacket as containing time (in invested labour) that you can purchase in the hope that that what you gain is not the leather jacket but time itself.

Archaic societies had no history. They did not record. Time reset and started again. History accumulates only when guilt accumulates. If guilt is regularly dissolved, you can return to the beginning.

At some point guilt grew faster than it could be expelled. And when guilt cannot be discharged collectively, it becomes individualised and internalised. And time becomes linear, the past is permanent. The debt is carried forward. Governments spend more today under the assumption that the future generation, benefitting from the groundwork the present government put in place, will produce more value and money which could account for the debt of the past. Yet, each cycle is the same, a carrying forward.

This is compound interest. Debt grows through time automatically. Faustian time and Faustian money. Time and money of the irredeemably dammed.

Money is condensed guilt. Not just shit. Condensed wealth is condensed guilt.

Christ’s sacrifice was supposed to abolish the debt. The debt is declared paid. The bill at the table came and Bill said “don’t worry guys, I got this”. But this doesn’t free you. But this creates an obligation or gratitude for an infinite gift that can never be reciprocated. You are forgiven, but precisely because you are forgiven by an immeasurable sacrifice, your indebtedness becomes endless.

So you try to be moral. You renounce. You discipline yourself. You repress the instincts. But repression frustrates the instincts. Which leads to aggression. And that aggression has nowhere clean to go, because it is directed at the very thing you love, the authority you are trying to please, the God you are trying to repay. So you cannot express the aggression outward. You turn it inward. Which produces more guilt. Which demands more renunciation. Which generates more repression. Which generates more aggression.

The harder you try to discharge the debt the deeper you go into it. Are you at the top digging your own hole, or at the bottom trying to dig yourself out. And does one lead to the other?

Work without enjoyment is pure self-punishment. And the man who cannot enjoy life passes his essence into things. Property accumulations are outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Things become alive and do what the man would like to do. Things become the god he would like to be.

Money breeds. Interest is an increment or an excrement. The fantasy of becoming father of oneself. Money inherits the infantile magic of excrement and becomes able to reproduce. But what this fantasy is really about is escape. Escape from the body. Escape from time. Escape from the punishment of labor.

The body is limited. It gets tired. It gets sick. It dies. It can only produce so much through its own effort. But money detached from the body, money that breeds on its own, promises value or repayment without suffering. Atonement without punishment. Gold without shit. Letting the money work for you.

This is desexualisation. This is disembodiment. The soul leaves the body and takes up residence in things. Money is the world’s soul. And gold is the proper symbol of this — unearthly, metallic, a gleam practically never found in nature. Gold takes away from the scene the life and the body their substantial being. It is an assertion of the existence of something beyond the body, beyond effort, beyond time.

And this is where we return to the bitch.

Earlier we said the bitch is a woman who says fuck you instead of fuck me. That she is punished not morally but structurally, for making the masculine move. Now we can say why that move is masculine.

The gift complex resolves guilt by identification with the mother. You give. You share the guilt. You acknowledge dependence and then overcome it by mothering others. This is the feminine position - not weakness, but a particular relationship to guilt and dependency. You feel what you owe and you try to discharge it outward through generosity.

The possession complex resolves guilt by identification with the father. You take. You accumulate. You deny dependence. And that denial transforms guilt into aggression. You are no longer trying to share the burden - you are shouldering it alone, and the effort of shouldering it alone makes you hostile. Taking is inherently aggressive because it is an obsessive denial of something that is still there underneath.

But denial always preserves what it denies. Freud’s insight was that you cannot deny something that hasn’t already been registered. The very act of denial contains a hidden acknowledgement. The subject says this is not true, but the need to say it reveals that it is. That is why denial produces a split in the ego - one part knows, another refuses to know. Both parts are active.

So man never forgets his dependency. Repression pressurises. Finds other outlets. It comes out as aggression, as dominance, as the compulsive need to accumulate more, to take more, to prove through possession what cannot actually be proven - that you are self-sufficient, that you owe nothing, that you are father of yourself.

The bitch is the woman who took the masculine position. Who converted guilt into aggression instead of absorbing it. Who said fuck you instead of fuck me. She is punished because she has refused the structural assignment — to be the one who receives, who gives, who shares the guilt, who acknowledges the dependency that the masculine position is built on denying.

She knows where the shit comes from. That’s why she has to be shut up.

The ultimate problem is not guilt. Guilt is the story we tell ourselves about why we cannot enjoy life. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organise a life of non-enjoyment. You would have to confront something more frightening - you are defended against vitality itself. Against immediacy. Against the present moment and what it actually feels like to be alive in a body.

Guilt gives you a reason. You cannot enjoy because you have not yet atoned. You cannot rest because the debt is not yet paid. You cannot simply be present because the past is still sitting there demanding settlement. The guilt organises the non-enjoyment into something that feels meaningful. Purposeful and noble.

And so we order takeout.

Not just because we are lazy. Not just because we are tired. But because to cook your own food is to be present. To engage with the raw material of your own sustenance. To produce your own shit from your own effort and sit with the cycle of it

So we expel the responsibility. We make it someone else’s problem. We take without producing. We get the gold without the shit. And for a moment it works. For a moment the guilt is discharged outward and we are free.

We are told to never forget. To remember history or repeat it.

The insistence that the past must be retained, carried forward, owed against. That we are responsible for what we did not do, to people we never met, in a time before we existed. That the debt is inherited. That the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

This is compound interest. Guilt that keeps circulating, does not produce repair. It produces repression and aggression. Guilt motivates punishment of yourself or of whoever is nearest.

You cannot shit your way out of the shit.

The only thing that ends a cycle is not more memory. It’s the capacity to live without the debt. To let the past be past. To stop destroying your own life waiting to feel like you’ve earned it.

I’ve felt it before, the feeling that this person loves me because of their wounds. They’re projecting. But that’s all love ever is at the start. That chemistry is always from the wounds. It’s not because the person is impressive in some manner.

And some wounds are more visible than others. Maybe I can say she doesn’t love me, she just has abandonment issues, she just doesn’t want to be left by me. And I can pretend I love without projection, without the wound. But this is like thinking the fat lady in the queue at the grocery store has more problems than me and my doom scrolling.

I love without projection is the lie I was telling myself right before I read in a book a few days later - that projection is necessary. Without it, love doesn’t happen.

Because to make someone central or significantly important in your life, your mind has to invest such a large amount of energy to make it appear that the ordinary person in front of you is far more interesting than they really are. I mean we’re all kind of bland by default. It’s other people that treat us as a divine answer to the unsolvable riddles in their head.

To fall in love is to pretend that someone is more than they really are. Love puts you into a specific inner perspective towards that person where every minor detail about them is interesting to you. It’s not felt as pretend. You experienced it as finally seeing clearly. That’s what makes it an alibi. Not a lie you tell others. A story you tell yourself that feels more true than anything else has.

This is why we recognise everyone has the chance to be seen as beautiful. Given that is, a person enters a specific perspective towards them. Where they see in them something no one else sees.

The alibi doesn’t last forever, it can’t. The worry is real. What if once they heal or the fantasy bursts, we’ll be uninteresting to them. Though that’s probably always bound to happen. But the disillusionment is just the next thing. The deception has done what it came to do - it got you in the room, it made you care enough to be changed by someone. What comes after is different from what brought you there. But that doesn’t mean what brought you there was wrong.

Again, love is just the vehicle. What we do with it after it arrives is what matters. I know someone said to me once “I think you only love me because you see me as someone to help”. I’ll paraphrase my response to make myself sound cooler but it was to this effect. I said “yes, but that’s only how I got here. But it’s not the reason I stayed.”

Love buys you time. Love is your chance. I’m here because of your boobs, you’re here because of my hair. But what should we now do about our predicament.

The equation is not universal. It is specifically a male solution to a problem both sexes share: what to do with the inside of the body. What it contains, what it produces, what cannot be seen or directly controlled. The girl encounters this problem and stays with it. The boy produces an answer. The answer is the equation. And like most answers that come too quickly, it forecloses as much as it resolves.

The Body as Factory

The body’s first order of business is production. It takes things in and it pushes things out. What comes out - feces, urine, milk, saliva - is not experienced the way an adult experiences waste or secretion. It is experienced as something made. Something that was inside, that belonged to the self, and that has now arrived in the world.

The child’s relationship to its bodily products is at first about authorship. Feces, for example, is something the child can hold onto, feel accumulate, and then release. What is excreted is felt as something produced, formed, made by the child’s own effort. The period of withholding is interpreted as production time. Immediate release feels like surrender, like giving in to the body’s demands and the mother’s commands. Delayed release feels like work.

The baby is understood in this same register - not in a relational sense, not as a product of sexuality, but in the same category as a bodily product: something internal that becomes external, something made that can be given or withheld.

The child animates the world with babies - food, feces, toys, objects can all take on this quasi-living, internal-external status. The distinctions we take for granted - between a person and an object, between a biological product and a human being - are not yet in place.

This is the shared ground both sexes start from. The oral and anal phases establish a chain of equivalences: breast = food = baby = feces. This is the child’s operative logic about what bodies do with what they contain.

This matters because it means the generative fantasy - the wish to make something, to produce life, to give it to another - does not originate in sexuality. It originates here, in the body’s relationship to its own products. Sexuality will later reorganise these meanings, redistribute them, give them new form. But the raw material is pregenital. The wish to make a baby is, at its root, an anal wish. A wish to produce something from inside the body and present it to the world, or to the mother specifically.

Both sexes carry this wish equally but diverge on their solutions.

The Anal Equation

To understand why feces becomes equivalent to the penis, you have to understand what the boy is trying to solve.

The boy, like the girl, has an inside. He has internal organs - testicles, prostate, structures he cannot see, cannot directly manipulate, and whose sensations are diffuse, hard to locate, and hard to control. These organs produce excitation that has no clear aim and no obvious outlet. The inside of the body, for both sexes, is experienced as something that generates pressure without providing the means to resolve it.

The girl stays with this problem, whilst the boy aims to get it out. To relocate everything threatening, diffuse and uncontrollable onto something visible, external and graspable. This is what the phallus is, in the psychoanalytic sense - not simply the penis as an anatomical organ, but the penis as a psychic object.

The organ is over-invested, made to carry meanings far beyond its biology: production, value and authorship. The capacity to act on the world. The phallus is what the penis becomes once it has absorbed all the investment that originally belonged to the inside.

This is the context in which feces = penis becomes possible. Both feces and the penis are now doing the same psychic work. They are both products of the inside that can be manipulated, that can be produced. Their meanings are conflated. They are both what the body produces that matters.

The girl does not make this move because she has no equivalent instrument to absorb the transfer. The clitoris is sensitive and clearly localizable - the girl knows where it is and can stimulate it directly - but it does not have intrusive qualities. It cannot enter another body, cannot deposit anything, cannot serve as the vehicle for giving something produced inside to someone outside. It is a receiving and resonating organ, not a delivering one. So the generative meaning of bodily products cannot be transferred onto it. The chain of equivalences stays diffuse, stays tied to the inside, stays without a clear external anchor.

For the boy, once the transfer is made, the logic completes itself almost automatically. If baby = feces, and feces = penis, then baby = penis. The generative fantasy - the wish to produce life from inside the body - has been fully relocated onto the external organ. The baby is no longer something produced from a diffuse internal space. It is something the penis makes. The site of production has shifted from the hidden inside to the visible outside.

The Girl’s Unsolvable Problem

The child wants to give the mother something. Specifically, to give her a baby. The relationship with the mother is one of total dependency, and total dependency is uncomfortable. The child receives everything - food, warmth, regulation, relief - and gives nothing equivalent in return. The baby, as the most valuable thing a body can produce, is the child’s answer to that imbalance. It is an offering. A way of becoming, for the first time, not just the one who receives but the one who gives. The child has understood that babies are what bodies make that matter most, and it wants to make one for the person who matters most.

The girl carries this wish directly. She wants to give the mother a baby, as the father can. But she immediately runs into a structural problem. To complete that circuit - to take something produced inside and deliver it into another body - requires an instrument she doesn’t have. The wish exists in full, but the somatic means to carry it through do not.

So the wish is rerouted. The girl turns to the doll. She tends the baby rather than delivers it. She becomes the one who feeds, soothes, adjusts - who manages the baby from the outside rather than producing it from the inside. And she becomes very good at this. Because her internal organs remain unmastered - she cannot locate them clearly, cannot act on them directly - she develops instead an acute attunement to what is outside her. The doll becomes the site where she exercises the mastery she cannot exercise internally. She reads it, responds to it, regulates it. What she cannot do with her own insides, she does with an external object. The wish to give is transformed into the wish to care. Giving a baby to the mother becomes tending a baby in the mother’s place.

The boy makes the same wish but has a different instrument available. The penis can enter, deposit, deliver. So instead of rerouting the generative wish into caregiving, he routes it through the phallus directly. He substitutes the milk with urine and the bottle with the penis. The girl tends the baby, the boy delivers to it. Care is reorganised as delivery. To give something to the baby is to insert something into it. The generative wish and the phallic organ have become the same thing.

This is also where the mother gets endowed with a phallus. The boy, faced with the mother’s apparent lack - she does not have the external organ that now organizes everything - does not accept what the girl eventually has to accept. He denies it. He imagines the mother as also having the phallus, which allows him to maintain his identification with her while preserving his own phallic organization.

Why is this denial necessary? Because by this point the phallus has become the boy’s primary organizer of meaning and value. It is what makes things real, what makes production possible, what gives the generative wish its instrument. If the mother - the most important person in the child’s world - does not have it, then the phallic organization is immediately threatened. It would mean that the most powerful figure he knows operates through a different logic entirely. That she generates, contains, and gives without a phallus. That the inside he has been so busy denying is not a deficiency but a capacity. That would pull the entire structure back toward what he has worked to escape: the diffuse, unlocatable, ungovernable interior.

So instead he imagines her as phallic. He maintains the identification - she is like me, organized as I am - and the threat is neutralized. The inside with its generative power is reassigned. It becomes something that belongs to women as a category, projected outward, no longer his problem. It becomes the feminine mystique - the mysterious interior that men find compelling and threatening in equal measure, without recognizing that the mystery was theirs to begin with.

The girl has no equivalent maneuver available. She cannot deny the inside because she lives in it. Her developmental task is not to relocate away from it but to find ways to tolerate and eventually organize it. That process is long, indirect, and never fully complete. The boy’s solution is faster and more total. But what it purchases in clarity and control, it pays for in foreclosure.

The Homunculus

Once baby = penis is established, the wish to make a baby undergoes a final transformation. It becomes a wish to make a baby alone.

This is the homunculus fantasy. The boy, having relocated the generative function entirely onto the phallus, arrives at a logical conclusion: if the baby comes from the penis, then the penis is sufficient. No internal space required, no maternal contribution.

The father’s son is an extension of his phallus. The phallic boy’s wish is that a boy-child be born as an extension of his phallus, and this contributes to the father’s later feeling that his son is an extension of himself. The homunculus is not just a medieval fantasy about tiny men inside sperm. It is the adult residue of this early psychic move: the belief, operating beneath conscious thought, that male generativity is self-sufficient.

The father’s son carries his name, his line, his legacy. The contribution of the mother’s body - which is considerably more than the father’s, biologically speaking - is acknowledged but somehow secondary in the symbolic register. What the father gives is felt as the essential thing, the thing that determines identity and continuity. The mother provides the container; the father provides what matters. This is not simply a cultural prejudice, although it has become one. It is the cultural residue of the equation. Baby = penis means the baby is fundamentally a phallic product, and the mother’s role, however biologically indispensable, is structurally minimized.

The same logic appears in the broader equation of male creativity with phallic production. The work a man makes - his books, his buildings, his ideas, his achievements - carries the same psychic valence as the son. It is something produced from him, bearing his mark, extending him into the world.

The man’s wish for a baby is sublimated into creative work. The creative work is the baby. The baby is the penis. The penis is the self extended into the world.

What gets lost in this equation is his inside. The internal generative space projected onto women and denied in himself. He may find it fascinating, something to dabble in, but he builds his life around avoiding it. He builds high rises to ascend rather than move deep within. What he produces he believes is what he is. His achievement is tied to his identity like the baby to the umbilical cord.

This is his particular anxiety. Creative and generative failure. Impotence, infertility, creative block. A sense that he has not contributed to the world, not done something great with himself. If the phallus is the site of all production and value, then a failure of phallic production is not a partial loss. It is a collapse of the organizing principle itself.

When he cannot climb high enough, he is threatened by the return of the inside. The deep calls when his strategy has failed. These failures carry a dread disproportionate to their practical consequences. He is only as real as what he can produce.

The Pact

The equation is a way of organising the world. Once the inside is made women’s burden, the boy is free to operate entirely on the surface. To produce, to penetrate, to explore. To extend himself into the world through what he makes and what he conquers.

His books, his buildings, his sons, his empires. All of it is the baby. All of it is the penis. All of it is the self pushed outward into a world that can be seen and measured and claimed.

The myth of Adam and Eve is this logic written at civilizational scale. God reaches into Adam’s inside and removes a rib - takes what was internal and converts it into a woman. Eve is Adam’s interior, externalized. She is what was once inside him, now standing outside him, now other. He can look at her. He can know her. He no longer has to know himself from within because what was within is now in front of him, separate, nameable, a thing in the world rather than an ungovernable pressure inside his body.

Then circumcision completes the movement. The feminine covering is removed. The glans is fully exposed. The pact God makes with man is built on this exposure: you will uncover what is hidden. You will penetrate and reveal. The obligation of the phallus is outward - to push into the unknown, to bring what is concealed into the light. The inside becomes the taboo, the feminine, the repudiated. Not because it was never his. But precisely because it was.

Circumcision formalises and sanctions this repudiation. The foreskin is the feminine covering. Its removal is a symbolic operation. The male body made unambiguously external. In exchange for giving up the last remnant of the envelope, God grants him a mission. Go out and uncover. Explore unknown territories. The taboo on the physical inside is what redirects that energy upward - into the life of the mind, into law, into the word of God.

The inside is woman. The outside is man. What is hidden must be uncovered. What is contained must be released. What is diffuse and uncontrollable must be mastered or projected onto someone else to carry.

She remains with what the boy gave away. He uncovers, but she is meant to look after what he uncovers.

The body, before the ego has arrived, is already doing something. It is already reaching, responding, recognising. The drive is already happening before we are present enough to claim it. Attraction takes shape beneath the part of us that uses words like “I want” and believes it is the one doing the wanting. This is why we cannot argue ourselves out of desire. The drive that precedes desire begins as irritability, where reason has no jurisdiction. It’s why you cannot construct a perfect case for or against someone. Because the higher does not necessarily reason with the lower. You cannot revise a verdict that was issued in a court you don’t have access to.

Passive life, the layer of instinct, affect, and pre-reflective response, is not raw material waiting to be shaped by the higher mind. It is already a kind of knowing. At this level, there is simply a leaning forward into a direction that does not yet feel like yours. So what do you do with a knowing that precedes you? You can suppress it. Build a life organised around its absence, develop habits and commitments and identities that run parallel to what the passive life is actually doing, and call that stability. Or follow it without ever actually choosing it. Mistake the pull for a decision, treat being swept as a form of agency, and wonder later why the thing you pursued so urgently feels, once reached, somehow hollow. Both positions share the same evasion. Neither of them involves actually meeting the drive - turning toward it, examining it, and making a deliberate decision about whether to own it.

The fiat is the moment the ego turns towards what the body has already decided and says: I see this. I did not choose it, but I am choosing what to do with it now. And it requires something that neither suppression nor surrender requires: the willingness to hold both layers simultaneously, to be moved and deliberate at the same time. It requires the capacity to tolerate the gap between what you feel and what you have chosen, long enough to actually close it. It is uncomfortable in a very specific way: it requires you to be uncertain about yourself, to not yet know what you are going to do with what you are feeling, to resist the pressure to immediately resolve the tension either by dismissing the feeling or by acting on it before you have made it yours.

What emerges from that process, when it actually happens, is not just a choice. It is, in a precise sense, a self. Because the self is not something you are born with and spend your life expressing. It is something that comes into existence through these moments of validation, moments where the passive and active layers of experience are brought into contact and made to speak to each other. Without those moments, there is no unified subject. There is a body with desires and a mind with justifications, running alongside each other in permanent parallel. And the person living that way is not living inauthentically in some abstract sense. They are living with a very specific structural problem, one that has consequences - consequences that eventually become visible.

The Woman Who Couldn’t Share Herself With Herself

Let’s say a woman, a wife, a mother, professionally functional - begins to experience what can only be described as a collapse of will. She loses the ability to want things. The capacity to form intentions, to move towards goals, to feel that her choices belong to her, drains away. The life continues but something has gone offline.

There was an accumulation. Over years, her passive life - the layer of instinct, preference, desire and felt response that precedes reflection - had been producing signals that her active life consistently refused to validate. A preference suppressed here, a longing unacknowledged there, an anger unfelt because there was no room for it in the architecture of the life she had constructed. None of these individual suppressions were catastrophic. Each one seemed reasonable or mature. This is what adults do, they manage their impulses, they prioritise, they maintain. Yet each suppression is a small severance. A place where the passive and active layers failed to meet.

The self as an agent with structural capacity depends on the continuous transaction between the passive and active layers. The passive life generates material, the active life takes that, validates it, and acts from it. When that transaction is functioning, there is a unified subject. Not performing a role, but expressing something that runs continuously from the body upward into intention. When that breaks down, everything above continues to stand.

What erodes is precisely the capacity that suppression was meant to protect. The woman was suppressing her passive life in order to maintain her active life - her commitments, her roles, her sense of being a reliable, functional person. The irony is structural: by refusing to validate what she actually felt, she was slowly dismantling the very faculty she was trying to preserve. Because the active life cannot run indefinitely on its own. It has no independent source of energy. It is not a generator - it is a transformer. It takes what the passive life produces and gives it form, direction, meaning. Cut off from that source, it doesn’t become more rational or more disciplined. It becomes empty. The choices continue but they are no longer choices in any meaningful sense - they are performances of choice, habits of decision-making, the body going through motions whose animating force has left.

This is what’s meant by not being able to share herself with herself. The passive self has been generating experience that the active self has refused to receive for so long that the channel between them has closed. There is no longer a self that both layers recognise. There is a performing self and there is a passive life still running underneath but unaddressed. She doesn’t become unhappy. Unhappiness would be informative. It would have been the passive life breaking through, making itself known, demanding to be addressed. She became unable to generate the sense that anything mattered enough to choose. A collapse of the volitional body. The capacity to move toward and commit. Which requires her to recognise that her desires have weight, that what you want is real, that the things you move toward belong to you. Strip away the layer that produces that felt sense - suppress it systematically, refuse it long enough - and volition doesn’t become more controlled. It becomes structurally unsupported. It falls.

What is important to understand is that this was not the result of making wrong choices. She had not chosen badly in any obvious sense. The marriage was not abusive. The career was not a mistake. The life she had built was, by most external measures, a reasonable one. The problem was not the content of her choices but their source - or rather, the growing disconnection between their source and their execution. She had been choosing from the active layer alone, using reasons and roles and maintained commitments as the engine of her life, while the passive layer - the part that makes choosing feel like it means something - had been systematically excluded from the process. And eventually, the engine stalled. Not because it ran out of reasons. Because reasons, it turns out, are not enough to run a life on.

Wholeness Over Goodness

Integrity is the state of being undivided. Integer, whole. A moral identity is not one organised around being good. It is one organised around being one thing rather than several things pretending to be unified. This distinction matters because the pursuit of goodness, as most people practise it, is precisely what produces fragmentation. To be good, in the ordinary sense, is to apply the active layer’s standards to the passive layer’s material - to take what the body produces and measure it against an external criterion, accepting what passes and suppressing what doesn’t.

This presents itself as the work of becoming a better person. Yet it’s the systematic creation of a divided self. Every suppression in the service of goodness is a place where passive and active layers fail to meet. Desires refused because they don’t meet the self-image become severed ends, accumulated over time. Over a period, you do not become good. You become a colligation of logical forms. A person assembled from reasons, from shoulds, from maintained positions.

The higher mind - the reflective, evaluating, standard applying faculty - is not independent. It does not generate its own material. It can only shape and direct what the passive life produces. It cannot manufacture the underlying substance. When people try to build a self purely from active intention - from choices made on the basis of what they believe they should want - they are attempting to run a system without its power source.

Wholeness does not mean giving every impulse permission. The claim is more specific. It is that the passive life must be met - not necessarily obeyed, but met. Seen. Brought into contact with the active layer and given the chance to be validated or consciously refused, rather than simply ignored. The difference between suppression and conscious refusal is not semantic. Suppression pretends the desire isn’t there. Conscious refusal acknowledges it, holds it, and makes a deliberate decision about it. The first severs the transaction. The second completes it - even if the answer is no.

The fiat is about the quality of engagement with desire, regardless of what you ultimately do with it. A person who feels an attraction they have decided not to act on - for reasons that are genuinely theirs, not performed, not borrowed from an external standard - and who has actually met that attraction rather than pretended it away, is more unified than a person who acts on every impulse without ever pausing to make it theirs.

What the fiat produces, when it functions, is what might be called a volitional body. A person in whom the felt and the chosen are genuinely continuous. A person whose decisions carry weight because they are rooted in something that was actually felt before it was acted on. This is the self that can sustain commitment - not through willpower, not through the repeated application of reasons, but because what has been committed to is genuinely theirs. The commitment draws on a real source. It does not have to be constantly re-argued into existence.

The person pursuing goodness - suppressing, managing, measuring their desires against an external standard - tends, over time, to become less capable of genuine moral action. Not because they have become bad, but because the faculty that makes moral action real - the felt sense of conviction, the weight of genuine wanting - has been progressively undermined by the very process they thought was strengthening it. Whereas the person pursuing wholeness - meeting their desires honestly, letting the passive and active layers transact, making real decisions rather than performed ones - tends to develop a capacity for commitment that is structurally more durable. The actions come from somewhere. They are not free-floating.

Love As An Operator

Love does not bring something to you. It exposes something in you. And what it exposes is not always what you would have chosen to find. The beloved is a catalyst whose function is to unlock access to parts of the self that were previously inaccessible. Not to create those parts. Not to fill a vacancy. To make reachable what was already there but could not be attended to.

When someone says I don’t know what I see in them, they are being more accurate than they realise. What they see is not in the other person in the straightforward sense. It is in the encounter - in what the encounter opens. The other person is the key, but the room it unlocks is yours. The room does not need to be pleasant for there to still be love.

What matters is not the quality of what is revealed but the fact of its revelation. Love does not navigate toward what is good for you. It navigates toward what is unresolved in you. Toward the areas of the self that have accumulated pressure precisely because they have not been attended to. This is why the most intense attractions are so often to people who, on reflection, seem wrong - because intensity is a measure of how much pressure has built up behind the door they are opening, not a measure of their suitability.

The pull towards certain persons does not stop existing because you have decided not to visit it. It continues to generate pressure. It continues to reach for whatever key fits its lock. The repetition is not a failure of learning. It is the passive life doing what the passive life does - moving toward completion, toward the areas of experience that have been left unfinished, with or without the ego’s cooperation.

What love demands, in this framework, is not that you find the right person. It is that you are willing to look at what the person reveals. This is a much harder requirement. Finding someone is passive - you are found as much as you find. Looking at what they reveal requires the fiat. It requires the moment of turning toward what has been unlocked and deciding to own it, to make it part of the transaction between your passive and active life rather than allowing it to remain in the gap. Because love will open the door. It will not make you walk through it. That remains your problem.

Sartre describes desire as a drive towards recognition: the desire to become real through the other’s regard. Not to be liked, not to be admired - to be confirmed as existing in a way that the self cannot fully do for itself. The other’s gaze is not simply a bonus. It is embedded in the structure of how the self coheres.

That fragility has a consequence. If I become real through the other’s regard, I cannot afford to lose it. Which means I cannot afford to let the other be fully free - because a free other might look away. This is the hidden engine of control in relationships that present themselves as love. And so we begin to manage the other - to arrange the conditions under which they will continue to be seen - which is precisely the move that kills what it is trying to preserve. You cannot be genuinely seen by someone you are managing. The gaze you have engineered is not the gaze that makes you real.

The only exit from this structure is not to need the other less - that is suppression again, the active layer refusing what the passive layer requires - but to have enough internal coherence that the other’s regard, while genuinely desired, is not the sole foundation of your existence. This is where the earlier sections become load-bearing. The person who has done the work of the fiat - who has built a real transaction between their passive and active life, who has achieved some degree of wholeness rather than goodness - brings a different structure to love. They can be genuinely moved by the other without being structurally dependent on them. They can desire to be seen without requiring control over what is seen. The love is real because the self doing the loving is real - not performed, not assembled from reasons, but continuous with its own felt life.

The self is not a private interior that occasionally makes contact with others. It is constituted in relation - shaped by other people’s temporal rhythms, affective patterns, and ways of being in the world, often without awareness. Love intensifies this process dramatically. To be in love with someone is to have your temporal structure reorganised by them - to find that the rhythm of your days, your sense of what matters, your capacity to feel, are all being continuously shaped by the encounter. The other person’s presence restructures the field in which you live.

Which means that the deeper risk of love is being changed in ways you cannot predict or control. To love someone is to submit your temporal and affective structure to a reorganising force whose outcome is not available in advance. You do not know, when you begin, what you will become. You know only that you will not remain what you are. Most people flinch. They seek the feeling of love while managing the conditions carefully enough that the transformation remains superficial. They want to be moved without being altered. But movement and alteration are the same thing. You cannot have one without the other. Love that does not change you is not love. It is comfort, and much less interesting.

The Ovidian line - amo et odi, I love and I hate - is the description of what happens when love does its actual work. It forces you awake in a place that is not familiar. The self that emerges from genuine love is not a happier version of the self that entered it. It is a more complete one - which is not the same thing, and which costs something that the comfortable self was not willing to pay.

The Distance

The distance most people are trying to close in relationships is not between themselves and another person. It was never that. It is the distance between the life they are living and the life that is actually happening in them — between the active self that maintains, performs, and chooses, and the passive self that has been registering a different reality all along, quietly, without being consulted.

This is what makes love so disorienting when it arrives in full. It is not introducing something new. It is making something that was already there impossible to ignore. The gap was always present. The passive life was always running. The desires were always forming, the dissatisfactions accumulating, the unlocked rooms filling with pressure. Love does not create any of this. It simply removes the conditions under which you were able to pretend otherwise.

And then it waits. Because what you do with what has been revealed — whether you turn toward it and make it yours, whether you find the fiat in the wreckage of your comfortable self-conception — that is not something love can do for you. Love is the force that opens. The opening is not the same as the entering. Most people stand at the threshold for years. Some for their entire lives. They feel the pull, they register the revelation, they understand — sometimes with great sophistication and clarity — exactly what is being asked of them. And they do not move. They explain instead. They process. They develop very nuanced accounts of why they are standing where they are standing.

The self is not waiting to be found. It is waiting to be made. And it is made in the only place it has ever been made — in the moment you stop managing the distance and step into it.

At the start, there are no relationships or intentions. No interiority attributed to anyone. There’s only intensities. Just felt sensations that are relieved or not relieved. Sensations that are experienced as events occuring in the zone of the body. They are not yet organised into cause and effect. No “someone” behind what happens.

The mouth and the milk are not seperate entities linked by action. They form a single event: mouth-milk. Or there’s the ear-sound and skin-contact. Experience is fused.

When the event is met with relief, the zone feels continous. The experience integrates. When relief is delayed or doesn’t arrive, there’s a lost coherence and complex frustration. The mouth feels invaded or torn by hunger. The skin feels exposed or overstimulated.

For an adult, delay is interpretable. We assume reasons. We imagine schedules, distractions, competing demands. Events can occur without being about us. The infant cannot assume this.

What is intolerable at this level is not limitation. It is arbitrariness.

If pleasure arrives without pattern, it can vanish without pattern. If unpleasure appears without structure, there is no way to anticipate or organise against it. Without pattern, there is no place from which experience can be held together.

When unpleasure intensifies beyond what the zone can metabolise, the response is not yet interpretation. It is functional suspension. The mouth refuses. The ear shuts down. The body stiffens or collapses. The solution is not to explain what is happening but to reduce exposure to it.

The decisive shift occurs when the event is no longer treated as pure sensation but as sign.

Milk does not come ceases to be only tearing in the mouth-zone. It becomes withholding. Withholding implies direction. Direction implies a source.

Relief does not simply arrive. It is given.

With this transformation, the fused event begins to separate. The mouth is no longer identical with milk. There is something that can give or not give. The voice is no longer only vibration in the ear. It becomes something that can address or fall silent.

An outside emerges. As a field from which satisfaction or non-satisfaction originates. Experience is now not only in the body but it’s happening from somewhere. Organised as something from someone. Someone who can give or not give. Someone whose presence or absence now matters because it appears to stand behind what happens.

The world begins to take the shape of a scene. The scene does not feel imagined. It feels discovered. The infant does not experience itself as constructing this explanation. The structure presents itself as how things are.

This is the earliest form of fantasy. Not daydreaming or narrative invention, but the structuring assumption that what happens does so because it is wanted.

Non-satisfaction can read as witholding. One is acted upon. There is an origin to what hurts. Suffering has direction. It is something done.

Aggression enters here, not as a new instinct added to the system, but as symmetry within it. If I am affected by what comes from you, then I can affect you in return. The grammar that organised satisfaction and withholding now organises retaliation.

But the separation is still unstable. The one who gives and the one who receives are not yet fully distinct interiors. They are positions within a single representational field. When hostility is imagined, it does not travel cleanly outward. It reverberates within the same scene.

To wish harm can feel inseparable from being harmed. Because the scene cannot yet secure a stable outside, the positions begin to collapse into one another. If harm comes from a source that is not fully distinct from me, then retaliation risks confirming that I am implicated in what injures me. The equivalence deepens: being harmed can begin to feel like proof of having caused harm. Suffering becomes evidence of guilt. Guilt becomes justification for punishment.

At this level, aggression does not merely circulate. It can invert. The wish to retaliate may harden into the belief that destruction is deserved. Self-attack becomes more stabilising than arbitrariness. If I am both the injured and the injuring one, then nothing is without cause. The pain may be severe, but it is at least structured.

This is the primitive root of later self-sabotage and masochistic formations - not love of suffering, but the preservation of a causal world. It is safer to be punishable than to be uncaused.

The same structure governs pleasure. If satisfaction is given, then to be satisfied is to occupy a place in the desire of the one who gives. Pleasure is no longer only relief of tension. It is confirmation of position. I am the one for whom this satisfaction is intended.

That position, however, is contingent. It depends on the continuation of that desire. If the giving stops, the place I occupied in the circuit disappears with it.

The most stabilising response is to sustain the movement itself. If I can also become the one who gives pleasure, I help maintain the desire that secures my own position within it. The circuit becomes reciprocal not out of generosity, but out of structural necessity.

To be loved is to be located in another’s desire. To love is to keep that desire in motion so that the location does not vanish.

If the circuit holds, experience remains organised. Desire moves outward and returns. Satisfaction is not an accident but part of an exchange. The scene sustains itself.

If the circuit falters, something more than pleasure is at stake. When desire withdraws, the withdrawal is not registered as a simple decrease in comfort. The position secured by that desire begins to erode.

Non-response therefore carries a specific weight. The instability is not abstract. It is felt as disorientation. Without the return movement of desire, the earlier risk of arbitrariness reappears. Events begin again to look uncaused. If satisfaction no longer signals that I am wanted, then pleasure loses its relational anchor. If withholding is no longer readable as directed, unpleasure risks sliding back into fragmentation.

Loving and being loved are not yet separable experiences; they are two directions of the same movement that prevents experience from becoming addressless.

Within this organisation, value takes on a specific form. To be the cause of pleasure in another is to matter in the most immediate sense. If my action sustains your desire, and your desire sustains my position, then desirability becomes proof of existence. I am not merely a body in which sensations occur. I am someone for whom something is wanted, and someone who can want in return.

The circuit does not eliminate aggression; it contains it. Hostility can be expressed without destroying the scene only if the reciprocal movement continues. Anger may strain the relation, but as long as desire still moves between positions, the structure holds. If that movement stops entirely, the scene risks collapsing back into arbitrariness. If aggression threatens to sever the link entirely, it risks collapsing the very structure that made retaliation possible. The maintenance of relation, even strained or ambivalent relation, protects against that collapse.

Over time, further differentiations become possible. The positions within the scene no longer overlap so completely. It becomes possible to experience a feeling without being identical to it. Pleasure can be recognised as something I have, not something that constitutes my entire place in the world. Anger can be felt without collapsing into the belief that I am destructive. Desire can fluctuate without erasing existence.

This shift marks the emergence of a more stable I. Not an I that is independent of relation, but one that can hold relation without dissolving into it. The scene is no longer the only container of coherence. The subject begins to acquire continuity that does not depend entirely on sustaining the circuit of desire in the other.

Only from this separation can loving gradually cease to function as ontological proof. It can become something enacted between two subjects who remain intact even when desire shifts, intensifies, or wanes.

The ability to love presupposes that one has first occupied a secure place in another’s desire. Only when satisfaction has been experienced as given - as addressed - can one later become the giver without collapsing into desperation or retaliation.

To love without having first been loved would mean trying to sustain a circuit that was never stabilised. The movement outward would not rest on security but on the hope of finally obtaining position.

I have to go, I don’t want to be here. Is converted to “sorry, my IBS is acting up.”

If saying “no” threatens attachment, belonging, or moral standing, refusal must find another route. It cannot go outward as aggression. It cannot go upward as conscious protest. It must go somewhere less visible and less accusatory.

Unlike speech, the body does not require justification. It does not need to explain itself. A cramp, a rush of urgency, a sudden inability to tolerate a substance — these are facts. They do not accuse anyone. They do not require confrontation. They simply occur.

I do not appear to be choosing refusal. The refusal appears to be happening to me.

The question, then, is not whether these conditions have biological components. They do. The question is what psychic work they are performing in addition to their physiology. What position do they protect? What conflict do they displace? What refusal do they allow without speech?

If we follow that question, patterns begin to emerge. Some symptoms block entry entirely. Some allow entry but cannot regulate what follows. Some disperse attention rather than contain it. Each form maps onto a different mode of negotiating intrusion, autonomy, and control.

Lactose Intolerance: Refusal of Entry

Milk occupies a peculiar position among foods. Most food requires transformation before it enters the body. It must be chewed, cut, seasoned, delayed, prepared. There is handling, interruption, mediation. Milk, by contrast, flows. It is taken in without resistance. It assumes receptivity.

Symbolically, milk is associated with an early relation in which nourishment precedes choice. It is the food that arrives before negotiation. One does not earn it, prepare it, or even request it in language. It is given, and it enters.

This is what makes intolerance to milk structurally different from intolerance to heavier or more processed foods. Steak can be cut. Bread can be chewed. Cheese and yogurt have been altered, fermented, culturally transformed. They are no longer raw. They bear the marks of intervention and distance.

Milk in its direct form retains something of immediacy. It evokes a mode of intake in which separation is minimal and consent is presumed.

If a person has difficulty with being entered, affected, softened, or altered by another, milk becomes an especially charged substance. The intolerance does not necessarily reflect a global rejection of nourishment. It reflects a difficulty with a particular mode of entry — one that bypasses deliberation and assumes openness.

This is why some individuals who describe themselves as lactose intolerant can tolerate aged cheese, yogurt, or processed dairy. These forms have been mediated. They have undergone transformation. They are no longer symbolically aligned with unfiltered maternal provision. The boundary feels safer because the substance has already been worked over.

Lactose intolerance, in this sense, functions as a stable boundary defense. It says, “This will not pass,” but it does so without accusation. A person does not have to claim aversion, disgust, or refusal. The body performs the limit.

IBS: Collapse of Containment

IBS does not say, “I will not take this in.” It says, “Once it is inside, I cannot manage what happens.”

The gut is not only an organ of digestion. It is the site where inside and outside are negotiated over time. Something foreign enters. It must be broken down, selected, absorbed, or expelled. This requires sequencing. It requires pacing. It requires authority over when to hold and when to release.

IBS disrupts precisely this authority.

The symptom is rarely starvation. It is urgency, cramping, bloating, oscillation. The subject does not control the timing of response. The body decides when something must be expelled or retained. Absorption becomes unpredictable. Release becomes premature or delayed.

Symbolically, this mirrors a failure of containment rather than refusal. Something has entered the psychic space before it could be metabolised. It has not been rejected outright. It has not been integrated either. It produces pressure.

Where vomiting is explicit rejection — “I will not keep this” — the bowel speaks a different language. Diarrhoea says, “I cannot hold this.” Constipation says, “I cannot release this.” IBS frequently alternates between the two, which makes its structure unmistakable. It is ambivalence enacted physiologically.

Containment requires the capacity to tolerate affect long enough for it to become representable. When that capacity is compromised, affect does not disappear. It moves downward. Instead of being symbolised, it is somatised.

IBS is common in subjects who appear regulated on the surface: reliable, composed, attentive to others. They do not erupt. They do not refuse openly. Their aggression is rarely visible. The disturbance does not go outward into confrontation or upward into panic. It goes into peristalsis.

In this sense, IBS reflects a disorder of regulation, not defiance. The person does not say “no.” They take in what is given — expectations, obligations, atmospheres — but cannot consistently decide when and how to process it. The bowel becomes the site where the negotiation between intrusion and autonomy breaks down.

IBS is common in people ho are described as reliable, conscientious, considerate, composed. They anticipate others’ needs. They manage atmospheres. They avoid unnecessary confrontation. They are praised for being easy, responsible, emotionally intelligent.

But very early, they learned that their discomfort is inconvenient, that their anger risks attachment. This produces a form of anticipatory regulation. They begin to monitor themselves before others have to. They swallow reactions before they form into speech. They time their responses for safety. They take responsibility for maintaining equilibrium.

“I didn’t choose this — my body did.”

That sentence preserves moral innocence. The person remains the good one. The disturbance is medical, not relational.

ADD: Mental Refusal of Capture

Where IBS relocates refusal to the gut, ADD relocates it to attention.

ADD is often described as a deficit of focus, but this description misses its structure. Many subjects with ADD can focus intensely, even obsessively, when the object of attention feels self-directed, chosen, or libidinally alive. What collapses is sustained attention to what feels imposed.

But imposed does not always mean externally enforced in the present. Often the demand has already been internalised. A person may experience as their own obligation, their own standard, their own ambition. Yet it’s someone elses expectation.

To attend is to allow one’s mental space to be organised by something outside oneself. In environments where mental availability was demanded early — where the child’s inner life was interpreted too quickly, defined too confidently, or entered without permission — attention becomes risky. If I stay here, I will be shaped by someone else’s rhythm.

The child discovers that thinking is one of the first territories that cannot be fully supervised. One can think without the Other knowing. One can drift. One can fragment. One can move laterally.

ADD exaggerates this discovery.

Instead of refusing overtly, the subject disperses. Attention shifts rapidly. Tasks are abandoned. Time is scrambled. Thought does not submit to imposed sequencing. It is a defensive dispersion.

Schedules, deadlines, linear progression — these represent externally imposed pacing. For some subjects, especially those who learned that compliance preserved attachment, staying bound to someone else’s timetable feels like surrender. “I’ll get to it later” is not merely procrastination; it is a way of reclaiming agency over sequence.

ADD also functions as an anti-interpretive defence. In families where the child’s mental states were named too early, corrected too quickly, or overwritten by adult meaning, stillness risked definition. If I remain in one place long enough, I will be told who I am.

Fragmentation prevents fixation. By never staying cognitively still, the person avoids being fully captured by the Other’s interpretation. They are present, but not entirely.

This is why ADD frequently coexists with creativity. Lateral association, novelty-seeking, non-hierarchical thinking — these are not incidental traits. They preserve a measure of autonomy from imposed structure. Thought remains mobile.

ADD is not primarily fear-driven, like anxiety, nor control-driven, like obsession. It is freedom-driven, though the cost of that freedom can be high.

Gendered Pathways of Refusal

In many boys, irritation is more socially legible and more tolerated. When a boy withdraws, becomes distracted, fidgets, or openly resists, these behaviours are more likely to be read as signs of frustration or overstimulation. Adults may interpret them as immaturity, energy, defiance, or temperament — but they are still recognised as expressions of something. The disturbance is visible as disturbance.

This matters because visibility creates space for defense.

If maternal or relational attention feels intrusive, overstimulating, or overly interpretive, the boy is more likely to register that irritation as irritation. He may not articulate it, but he can experience it as “too much.” Mental withdrawal becomes an available strategy. He pushes away cognitively, fragments attention, disengages. ADD, in this structure, becomes a way to refuse capture without directly confronting the Other.

The refusal relocates to attention.

For many girls, the situation unfolds differently. Irritation is less often named as irritation. Withdrawal may be read as moodiness or ingratitude. Compliance is rewarded. The girl is more likely to interpret intrusive attention as care, concern, or intimacy. The disturbance is misrecognised before it can consolidate into protest.

Where irritation cannot be clearly experienced as intrusion, mental flight becomes harder to justify internally. To withdraw cognitively may feel like betrayal rather than protection. In these structures, refusal is more likely to relocate somatically, producing containment disturbances rather than attentional dispersion.

This does not mean girls do not develop ADD. They do. But when girls develop ADD within this framework, it often emerges under slightly different conditions: where intrusion was intense enough to overwhelm compliance, where defiance was temperamentally stronger, or where identification with the caregiver fractured early. In those cases, mental dispersion becomes the only viable way to preserve autonomy.

Gender shapes the available exits.

Children form fantasies that are not really about getting specific things. They are about reaching a state where wanting itself would stop. Because wanting is threatening as it depends on others for fullfilment.

These fantasies are not remembered later in life, but they can be inferred from how we react to frustration, delay and separation. What the child wants is not simply the object - food, attention, comfort - but a situation in which these things would never be missing in the first place.

The fantasy is not: I want this now. It is closer to: I want a world where I don’t have to wait, ask, or depend. Satisfaction would be immediate and guaranteed. There is no need to signal, cry, negotiate, or tolerate uncertainty. The child would not have to adjust to anything outside themselves.

Fantasies are not experienced as fantasies but as expectations. When the expectations are frustrated, the reaction is not disappointment but outrage, panic, or collapse. Something feels fundamentally wrong, and not merely unpleasant.

Over time, the child learns, slowly and unevenly, that this state cannot be maintained. Satisfaction comes and goes. People are not always available. Needs are not always met on time. The child begins to adapt to this reality but the original fantasy does not simply disappear.

What happens instead is that the fantasy becomes unthinkable.

The child does not consciously give it up. There is no moment of recognition like, “I wanted something impossible.” Rather, the wish becomes incompatible with ongoing life. To continue functioning, the psyche has to stop recognising that it ever wanted a world without waiting or dependence. This is repression in its simplest form: not the hiding of a forbidden thought, but the loss of ownership over an original wish.

What remains is not a memory, but a pressure. The adult does not remember wanting an end to dependence, but they often feel restless, impatient, or unsettled in situations that require waiting, uncertainty, or reliance on others. Something feels wrong, even when nothing identifiable is missing.

The from the outside, independence looks mature, realistic and adjusted. Hence, it goes unnoticed what needs are really being met. Relationships, beliefs, ideals and conflicts provide proxy opportunities for a sanctioned form of dependence to appear. A place where dependence can be expressed which is normalised so one doesn’t recognise that they fear dependence.

A belief or ideal is framed as a truth or principle so one can see themselves as being in a noble pursuit rather as someone who is dependent on a view they subjectively prefer.

Desisiring reminds us too much of dependency. Therefore, it’s anaesthesised into value or moral claims and spiritual messages. “I want you” is converted to “I feel like we were meant to be together”. The personal stake is repressed and instead expressed as some mysterious message from the universe.

II. The Future Functions as a Container

Because desire doesn’t simply disappear, the psyche requires a place where it can be held without demanding satisfaction yet. That place is often the future.

When an original wish has been repressed, it can no longer remain attached to anything in the present without causing disruption.

The future offers a unique advantage. Desire can remain active without forcing confrontation with its impossibility. The wish can survive in the form of a promise rather than an act.

A wish does not insist on realisation. It only requires that something meaningful is supposed to happen later. The content of the wish can remain vague. What matters is that time itself is invested. The present is endured as a preparation period. The future does not have to arrive for this to work. The stabilising effect comes from the expectation. As long as something is anticipated, desire remains occupied.

Working toward the future becomes psychically equivalent to doing something about desire. Effort, planning, sacrifice, and self-discipline acquire a value that is not purely practical. They feel meaningful because they bind desire to a direction and keep it from turning back toward what cannot be lived.

This is why people can remain deeply invested in projects whose outcomes are uncertain, delayed, or even unattainable. What is being preserved is not the result, but the structure of waiting-with-a-purpose. Once again, from the outside it looks mature. It looks like ambition, hope, or perseverance. But at a deeper level, the future is serving as a container. It holds a pressure that cannot be resolved in the present and cannot be recognised as originating in the past.

Success, money, status are primal wishes to reach a state where one is not dependent on others. But because it is an impossible wish, the bar always has to be moved. The future state cannot arrive, because one would would recognise the wish is not met. Instead, one has to has fantasise that more success in the future might lead to fullfillment.

Desire is deferred so it can be experienced as continuity. For the sense that something will unfold in the future. That time is leading somewhere, that effort is justified.

This is a powerful and generally stabilising arrangement. It allows life to

proceed without constant crisis. It makes frustration tolerable and limitation survivable. But it also creates a dependency on the future itself. When anticipation collapses, when nothing is imagined ahead, or when the future loses its organising role - what returns is not disappointment about plans, but the older pressure that deferral had been containing.

III. Parenthood Activates This Structure

When a person becomes a parent, the future stops being an abstract horizon

and takes on a concrete form.

Before this point, desire could remain attached to time itself: to plans, projects, or the sense that something meaningful lay ahead. With the arrival of a child, that temporal structure reorganises. The future now has a bearer. From the outset, the child is not only encountered as someone who exists now, but as someone who will become. Attention is placed towards what lies ahead: what the child might be, what kind of life they will have, what will come of them. This is usually understood as care.

And it is care, but it is also something more specific. What the parent is hoping for is not simply that the child will be happy or successful. What is being invested is the parent’s own unresolved desire for continuation. The child becomes the one through whom something is supposed to go on.

This is not felt as using the child to satisfy a personal wish. It is felt as concern for the child’s future. The parent experiences themselves as wanting for the child, not through the child. The child is not consciously asked to repair anything, complete anything, or fulfil anything. Instead, they are quietly positioned as the carrier of a wish that no longer feels like the parent’s own. The parent does not say, “I want this through you.” The wish appears as self-evident: of course I care what becomes of you.

You can see this in how quickly the child’s development becomes charged with meaning. Progress reassures. Delay worries. Divergence unsettles. These reactions are often stronger than the practical stakes would justify.

What is being protected in these moments is not only the child’s wellbeing, but a temporal arrangement that has stabilised the parent’s psychic life. As long as the child is moving toward an imagined future, desire remains occupied and oriented forward.

From the inside, this feels loving. From the outside, it often looks loving. And in many respects, it is. The structure is not pathological by default. It gives coherence, motivation, and endurance.

IV. What Is Projected Onto the Child Is Not Expectation, but a Transformed Wish

What is being projected onto the child is not simply hope, ambition, or expectation. It is a wish that could never be lived in its original form.

The parent’s unconscious desire does not concern the child as an independent individual. It originates in an earlier scene involving the parent’s own parents. More precisely, it involves the wish to have a child with one’s own mother or father, or at an even deeper level, the wish to abolish generational separation altogether.

This wish is not merely socially forbidden. It is structurally impossible. To acknowledge it directly would collapse the distinction between parent and child, past and present, self and other. It would undo the very separations that make subjectivity possible. This is why repression is necessary in the first place.

But repression does not eliminate the wish. It only removes it from conscious recognition. What happens instead is a transformation.

The object involved in the wish remains a child, but its position is altered. What changes is the direction of the wish in time and grammar. Instead of “I want a child by my mother” or “I want a child by my father,” the desire is reorganised into a lawful, future-facing form: “May my child become someone,” “May my child succeed,” “May my child have a child in turn.”

The child thus comes to carry the future-oriented version of an impossible past.

From the child’s side, the fantasy of giving the parent a child performs a crucial psychic function. As a child, the subject is radically dependent and temporally “after” the parent. They are the one who needs, waits, and receives. Wishing to give the parent a child offers a way to escape being fixed in that position.

To imagine oneself as the one who will one day give what was given is not simply to imitate the parent. It is to imagine a state in which dependence would be overcome from the inside. The child does not merely want an object; they want to become the kind of being who no longer needs.

This fantasy follows a very precise logic: if I can be the one who already has, then having will no longer expose me to lack. Being and having would coincide. The child would no longer have to wait, ask, or desire. They would occupy the position of the one who gives, not the one who depends.

This is why the fantasy is stabilising. It transforms dependence into equivalence. The child remains dependent in reality, but psychically they become someone who could, one day, abolish that dependence by becoming the parent. The parent’s priority is not denied; it is made survivable by imagining its eventual reversal.

For the child, this provides a sense of place within time and lineage. To imagine oneself as someone who will grow up, become a parent, and give life in turn is to move from being only the object of care to being a future source of it. The child does not experience this as carrying the parent’s desire. They experience it as acquiring an identity that makes dependence intelligible and temporary.

At the same time, the child is also the recipient of the parent’s own future-oriented wish. The parent’s desire that the child will become, continue, and reproduce is not experienced by the child as foreign or imposed. It resonates with the child’s own fantasy of one day occupying the parental position. What the parent installs as a wish for the child’s future is taken up by the child as confirmation that this imagined solution is valid.

This is why the structure reinforces itself across generations. The child accepts the parent’s wish because it echoes a fantasy the child already needs: that dependence will end not through loss or separation, but through becoming the one who has.

Later, when that child becomes a parent in turn, the same transformation occurs again. The wish that once belonged to the parent is projected forward once more. Desire survives not by being satisfied, but by being transmitted.

In this way, the structure offers both parties a solution.

For the parent, the impossible wish is kept at bay through deferral.

For the child, the fantasy of becoming the parent offers a way to avoid the intolerable position of desiring and depending without end.

What is preserved, on both sides, is the hope that lack itself will one day be overcome, not by receiving, but by being.

What matters here is not the imagery itself, dreams often dramatise distress, but how the dream was understood. Owens did not treat it as symbolic, personal, or ambiguous. She treated it as a message. Shortly afterward, she contacted a third party, expressing the belief that Kirk’s soul was in “purgatory,” and suggesting that others knew far more about what had happened than they were publicly admitting. The dream was not positioned as an internal experience, but as access to a hidden truth: something real had occurred, something concealed, and she had been allowed to glimpse it.

This framing is crucial. The dream is not held as a dream that raises questions; it is held as a revelation that answers them. Its gaps - the failure to name who “they” are, the slipping away, the unfinished sentence - do not weaken its authority. They strengthen it. The lack of clarity does not invite doubt; it invites interpretation. Meaning is not absent but suspended, deferred, waiting to be completed by further disclosure.

The experiences moves outward. The dream becomes something about the world. About betrayal, secrecy, hidden knowledge, and moral wrongdoing. Others are implicated. A truth exists, but it is obstructed. The dreamer is positioned not as someone confused or distressed, but as someone who knows. Someone who has been shown something that others are hiding.

This is why the later event, when it occurs, does not feel random or tragic in the ordinary sense. It feels confirmatory. The dream is retroactively elevated. What was once ambiguous becomes prophetic.

The psychoanalytic question is not whether the dream predicted anything. It is why this dream, in this form, was experienced as disclosure rather than expression. Why it felt like access to a hidden order rather than a manifestation of inner conflict. To understand that, we have to look at what gives certain experiences their uncanny authority: the feeling that they did not come from us, that they arrived from elsewhere, and that they carry a truth we did not choose.

When an Experience Has No Clear Source

What gives certain experiences their occult or revelatory quality is not their content, but their lack of an identifiable origin.

Most of our thoughts arrive with a sense of lineage. We know roughly where they came from: something we read, a conversation we had, a memory that was stirred, a feeling that followed an event. Even when we are mistaken, the mind can usually tell a story about how the thought arose. That story is what allows us to say, this is my reaction, this is my fear, this is my imagination at work.

Occult experiences begin where that story breaks down.

A thought, image, or conviction appears without a clear sensory or associative path. It does not feel prepared, inferred, or constructed. It arrives whole. Because the mind cannot locate its source internally, it begins to feel imposed. The question that immediately follows is not what does this mean? But where did this come from? And when the psyche cannot answer that question from within, it answers it by turning outward.

This is the basic mechanism behind experiences that feel like telepathy, premonition, or revelation. The mind does not say, I am having a thought whose origins I do not yet understand. It says, something has reached me.

When an experience is felt as internally generated, it remains open to doubt, reflection, and revision. When it is felt as externally delivered, it acquires authority. Questioning it begins to feel like ignoring a message rather than interpreting a dream.

What was once an affect, an image, or a fantasy is treated as evidence. If something has been revealed to you, you are no longer just feeling, you are responsible for what you know.

Ambiguity intensifies conviction rather than weakening it. The dream does not specify who “they” are. It does not explain what the betrayal consists of. The mind fills the gap with whatever framework is already available - hidden elites, secret wrongdoings, suppressed truths.

The experience becomes self-sealing. To question it would require re-owning it as an internal production. And that is often more threatening than believing it came from elsewhere. Accepting this came from me means accepting that something in me thinks, wishes, fears, or aggresses without my consent. The occult framing avoids that humiliation. It allows the subject to say: something acted—but it was higher, larger, beyond me—and I was the one who perceived it.

That is why such experiences feel uncanny. They are both intimate and alien at the same time. What is encountered is deeply familiar - desire, fear, aggression, longing. But it returns stripped of ownership, wearing the mask of revelation.

This is how a private experience crosses the threshold into certainty. When an inner image meets coincidence rather than contradiction, the mind stops treating it as symbolic material and starts treating it as evidence. Meaning no longer feels tentative; it feels sealed.

Why Coincidence Feels Like Proof

An internal image appears. Later, an external event occurs. The two resemble each other closely enough that the mind binds them together. The experience is remembered as something I already knew. The direction of causality is reversed.

The mistake is not projection. Everyone projects. The mistake is projection with confirmation. In ordinary projection, reality pushes back. You imagine something, and the world contradicts it. The thought loses authority. Here, reality does not contradict the fantasy - it repeats it.

This is why these experiences feel so persuasive, not only to the person who has them but to those who hear the story. The timing feels too exact. The fit feels too meaningful. Skepticism begins to feel disrespectful rather than reasonable. The question shifts from is this interpretation accurate? To how could this be a coincidence?

This is why such convictions are brittle. They do not tolerate inquiry well. Asking for evidence feels like an attack, not on an idea, but on the position the subject now occupies: the one who knew, the one who saw, the one who was shown.

In the case at hand, the dream is not simply remembered; it is elevated. It becomes a point of moral leverage. Others are implied to be hiding things. Silence becomes suspicious. Disagreement becomes complicity. The dream does not just explain an event - it reorganises the social field around it.

What began as a private experience now carries public implications. And the more resistance it meets, the more necessary it feels.

The dream does not matter because it predicts anything. It matters because it organises conflict - allowing aggression, dependency, and ambivalence to appear in a form that feels external, justified, and morally intact.

Why Was Charlie Kirk Betrayed In The Dream?

Is it possible that Candace Owens herself felt betrayed by Charlie Kirk after their separation? Not just in a personal sense but in a way that is structurally common when professional alliances, shared missions, and identity-forming collaborations come apart.

Relationships involve identification, mutual reinforcement, shared language and a shared enemy. Over time, the other person becomes part of the scaffolding that supports one’s position in the world.

There is an ambivalence that appears after separation. Ambivalence does not mean confusion or mixed feelings in the everyday sense. It means simultaneous attachment and hostility toward the same object. One can admire, respect, or even love someone while also resenting them, feeling displaced by them, or experiencing their independence as abandonment. When the relationship must remain publicly dignified or morally coherent, these hostile elements cannot be easily acknowledged. They have to go somewhere else.

Aggression, in psychoanalytic terms, is often a response to dependency. When another person has mattered - when they have confirmed your position, supported your authority, or anchored your sense of purpose - their withdrawal exposes dependence retroactively. Even if the separation is mutual or justified, the psyche is forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: I needed you. For some personalities, especially those organised around autonomy, moral clarity, or self-mastery, that admission is intolerable.

Admitting “I was betrayed” is not merely admitting hurt. It is admitting vulnerability, reliance, and the fact that the other had the power to destabilise you. It threatens a self-image built around independence and strength. It also threatens the symbolic bond itself. To say “you betrayed me” risks turning the admired figure into an aggressor and oneself into the dependent party. For someone whose identity is bound up with authority and revelation, this is too dangerous a position to occupy.

So the aggression cannot appear directly. It is displaced.

In the dream, the anger and aggression does not take the form “ you betrayed me.” Instead, it appears as “they betrayed you.” The premonition of his death could be interpreted as her own hostile urges for his death in a symbolic sense. This death would put an end to her unconscious ambivalence, which is psychically difficult to tolerate. This shift matters. The hostility is moved upward and outward. From personal to cosmic. The betrayal is no longer interpersonal but systemic. The enemy becomes an abstract, omnipotent “they”: elites, forces, powers that operate beyond reach.

This vertical displacement serves several psychic functions at once. Abstract enemies are safer than interpersonal ones because they cannot answer back. They cannot contradict, abandon, or humiliate you. Ideology provides ready-made containers for affect: suspicion, anger, fear, and resentment can be placed into narratives that already exist. What might have been experienced as rivalry, displacement, or exclusion is transformed into moral clarity.

There may have even be a wish for his martyrdom, which closes ambiguity. It ends the rivalry without confrontation. As long as the other person is alive, active, and choosing, ambivalence must be tolerated. There is comparison, competition, and the possibility that the other continues without you. Death freezes the relationship. It seals meaning. It turns unresolved tension into moral narrative. Further, his death serves as the sticking point - “you should have not seperated from me, this is what eventually would happen.”

Catastrophe silences debate. It confirms the worldview in one stroke. Martyrdom does what argument cannot: it makes doubt feel obscene.

This does not require conscious malice. Psychoanalysis does not treat wishes as intentions. Wishes are structural pressures - ways the psyche seeks resolution when ordinary means fail. Dreams rarely stage desires directly. They stage outcomes. What appears is not “I want this to happen,” but “this has happened.” Irreversibility is often the true aim, because irreversibility eliminates uncertainty.

In this sense, the dream can be read as organising an unconscious wish for symbolic closure rather than prediction. Not “I want you dead,” but “I need this conflict resolved in a way that cannot reopen.” The line “they betrayed me” allows the dreamer to occupy the role of witness rather than rival. Witnesshood is elevating without being humiliating. It allows one to know without having to compete, depend, or plead.

This is where revelation replaces dependency. Dependency says, “I need you to choose me.” Revelation says, “I already know the truth.” Psychologically, this is a crucial shift. To need is to be exposed. To know is to be sovereign. Revelation abolishes dependency by converting it into certainty. “I know” replaces “I need.”

This also explains why argument cannot settle these situations. Argument keeps uncertainty alive. It requires exchange, listening, and the possibility of being wrong. Death forecloses interpretation. It produces a fact that cannot be debated. Audiences respond emotionally rather than analytically because emotion does not ask for verification; it asks for alignment.

Internal conflict is no longer something to be endured; it has been explained by the world itself.

This is why such experiences feel occult. Not because they exceed psychology, but because psychology has been externalised. The subject encounters their own aggression, dependency, and ambivalence as forces acting from elsewhere - and feels elevated by being the one who perceived them first.

What we are seeing, then, is not prophecy, but the psyche protecting itself from the humiliation of being divided. Love and resentment, loyalty and rivalry, admiration and injury are too difficult to hold together. So the mind does what it often does when ambivalence becomes unbearable: it turns conflict into revelation and calls it truth.

What Is The Purpose Of The Occult?

We are not comfortable with the fact that we are not masters of our own house. Something thinks in us before we do. Something wants, fears, remembers, and repeats independently of our conscious intentions. Psychoanalysis names this the unconscious, but the experience itself is humiliating: we are acted upon by forces we do not command. The occult begins as a refusal of this humiliation.

When unconscious wishes and drives cannot be borne as ours, because they feel too vulnerable, too aggressive, too compromising, they are not integrated or symbolized. They are expelled. What cannot be commanded, explained, or owned is exiled. And what is exiled does not disappear; it returns, but now in an altered form. It returns as something outside the subject, something supernaturally charged, something divine.

This is the core maneuver. I cannot bear not being master. I externalize what masters me. I then relate to it as a higher power.

The occult does not primarily express a wish to be God in the crude, omnipotent sense. It expresses a refusal to occupy the position of a divided subject - one who is moved by ambivalence, aggression, dependency, and desire without full control over them. Instead of accepting that “something acts in me,” the occult solution says: something acts, but it is higher, chosen, sacred—and I am the one who perceives it.

This is the narcissistic loop. The subject refuses to recognize certain unconscious forces as his own, but then claims privileged access to them. A destructive or aggressive impulse cannot be acknowledged directly, so it returns in the form of a message. What was originally an urge becomes a command; what belonged to the subject is now experienced as coming from elsewhere. The psychic scene is then elaborated with rules, rituals, and narratives that conceal this reversal from the subject himself. Responsibility is displaced, and with it, guilt: if the impulse is perceived as originating from a higher source, the subject can obey without owning.

This is not a wish to act freely, but a wish to act without responsibility.

At the same time, belief in omnipotent elites is itself produced by these same psychic forces. The elite is not only accused of mastery; it is made to carry mastery. The fantasy is not simply that some people possess power, but that power exists beyond ordinary accountability - outside the law, outside limitation. The elite is imagined as exempt from constraint, and therefore as capable of expressing what must remain forbidden for others. In this way, it becomes the externalised image of unconscious power: unseen, omniscient, orchestrating events from behind the scenes. What is intolerable as an internal force - aggression, envy, the desire to dominate - is relocated upward and reorganised into a coherent myth of control. What cannot be lived consciously by the subject is imagined as being lived elsewhere, on his behalf.

Crucially, the violence attributed to elites is not a misunderstanding of symbolism, but a distortion of it. Unconscious destructive wishes are symbolic in structure: they concern domination, annihilation, purification, sacrifice, and mastery. These impulses demand representation. This is why power so often surrounds itself with ritual. Ceremony, secrecy, and myth already indicate a recognition that something symbolic is at stake. But instead of containing these urges at the level of symbolisation, ritual is used to authorise their literal enactment. What should function as a limit becomes a passage. Symbolism does not replace the act; it sanctifies it.

In this way, the act is no longer experienced as personal aggression, but as the fulfillment of a role, a mandate, or a necessity dictated by a higher order. Violence is carried out under the cover of meaning. What psychoanalysis would require to be symbolised is instead enacted, with ritual serving as the mechanism through which inhibition is bypassed rather than maintained.

In this way, the subject preserves both innocence and fascination. The impulse is denied as his own, yet continuously contemplated. Power is repudiated internally, yet endlessly attributed to others. The myth of the elite thus functions as a psychic solution: it allows mastery to be disowned while remaining irresistibly compelling.

Once mastery has been externalised and lodged in the figure of the elite, the question becomes how others are drawn into this structure. Complicity does not arise because elites impose belief on passive subjects, but because the same psychic refusal is already at work on both sides. The occult does not spread through persuasion alone; it spreads through recognition. When power presents itself as secret, chosen, or exempt from ordinary constraint, it addresses something latent in the subject: the wish to escape division, guilt, and responsibility. What appears as seduction is in fact a meeting point between two unresolved positions.

To be approached, explicitly or implicitly, as special, initiated, or able to see what others cannot is not a neutral offer. It installs the subject in the very structure he has already projected outward. He is no longer merely fascinated by mastery; he is invited to participate in it. This invitation is compelling not because it fabricates desire, but because it gives form to desires that could not previously be owned. Elevation replaces ambivalence. Being chosen replaces having to choose.

From this perspective, the elite is not simply an oppressor, but a psychic organiser. It concentrates and dramatizes fantasies that are already circulating diffusely. What the subject cannot bear to recognise as his own —aggression, envy, the wish to dominate or annihilate —is encountered again as spectacle, scandal, or revelation. The elite becomes the stage on which forbidden impulses appear to be enacted, while the subject remains ostensibly innocent, positioned as witness rather than participant.

This is also why elites appear especially culpable without being structurally different. Power weakens symbolic constraint. Where law, consequence, and limitation recede, the ordinary necessity of symbolisation collapses. Drives that must be inhibited or worked through for most subjects encounter fewer obstacles to enactment. This does not require psychosis; it requires exemption. What distinguishes the elite is not the content of its impulses, but the degree to which those impulses encounter resistance.

In this sense, the elite functions as a kind of psychotic pole within the social field - not because it is detached from reality, but because it is insufficiently bound by it. Acts that would require symbolic mediation elsewhere can be carried out directly. Ritual then steps in not to restrain these acts, but to stabilise them, to give them coherence, continuity, and meaning. What should interrupt violence instead organises it.

For those outside this position, belief and fascination serve a complementary function. By locating mastery elsewhere, the subject preserves the fantasy that he himself remains governed, constrained, moral. Yet the price of this innocence is ongoing captivation. The subject must continue to watch, expose, interpret, and denounce, because what has been externalised never truly leaves. It returns endlessly in new figures, new elites, new revelations.

Thus complicity does not take the form of blind belief, but of psychic dependence. The subject needs the elite to exist in order to maintain the disavowal on which his own position rests. What analysis would require to be recognised as internal conflict is sustained instead as external drama. The occult solution is shared: mastery is denied, responsibility displaced, and the unbearable fact of division is kept at bay.

The same psychic solution reappears in spiritual form. Here too, the explicit aim is often the dissolution of ego, the pursuit of truth, or the renunciation of illusion. Yet structurally, these ideals are especially vulnerable to narcissistic inversion. What is disavowed is not ego as such, but division. The subject does not relinquish mastery; it is relocated. The ego survives precisely in the position of the one who has transcended ego. Likewise, truth ceases to be something worked toward and becomes something possessed. “Truth,” in this context, functions as exemption: exemption from doubt, from interpretation, from being questioned.

Spirituality becomes pathological at the point where it promises direct access. Revelation replaces interpretation; certainty replaces ambivalence; purity replaces conflict. The same refusal repeats in a softened form: I will not tolerate being a divided subject. I will not accept that my desire is opaque, that my aggression is mine, that my insight is partial and contingent. Meaning is no longer constructed through symbolic work; it is received. And because it is received, responsibility is again displaced.

This is why mystical frames bind groups so effectively. They provide a shared solution to the same unbearable problem. Everyone involved can say: it is not that I want this, not that I chose this, not that I am implicated. Something happened to us. Desire is absolved, aggression is sanitised, hierarchy is naturalised.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the occult is therefore not a belief system but a solution, an unstable onel to the problem of subjectivity itself. It answers the humiliating question, why am I not sovereign over myself?, with the consoling reply: because something greater moves through me - and I am chosen to know it. Mastery is denied while being quietly preserved.

Analysis offers no such consolation. It does not promise exemption, revelation, or purity. It asks something harsher: that the subject accept there is nothing divine required to explain what feels overwhelming. Only the courage to say: this force is mine, even if I did not choose it; this desire belongs to me, even if I do not fully understand it. The occult refuses this responsibility. That refusal - rather than ignorance, superstition, or evil - is its true purpose.

With the onset of Christianity, this psychic problem intensifies rather than resolves. The introduction of a single, transcendent God who claims sovereignty over the subject - who sees, judges, commands, and knows -radicalizes the humiliation at the heart of subjectivity. If there is a God who knows me better than I know myself, then the experience of being governed by something beyond my conscious will is no longer merely psychological; it is moralised, absolutised, and eternalised. The unconscious now has a name. It speaks as Law. The subject is required not only to obey, but to recognize that the source of command lies irreducibly outside himself.

Under these conditions, a counter-myth becomes inevitable. Figures such as Lucifer, the Gnostic demiurge, or Prometheus emerge not simply as rebels against God, but as psychic correctives to an unbearable asymmetry. If there is a master of me, then I must imagine that this master is false, corrupt, or tyrannical - and that the true source of knowledge lies elsewhere, or ultimately in myself. These myths do not abolish mastery; they invert it. External sovereignty is reinterpreted as stolen knowledge, hidden fire, secret gnosis. What was once obedience becomes awakening. The subject can now say: it is not that something rules me; it is that something has been withheld from me. Mastery thus quietly returns to its original place, inside the subject, disguised not as domination, but as liberation.

Hatred is not the opposite of love. Nor is it love that has become distorted or corrupted. Hatred exists on its own account.

To orient the terms briefly: love (Eros) is the psychic force that binds. It invests in people, objects, ideals, and projects. It promises reunion, satisfaction, and relief from tension. Hate (Thanatos) does not simply reverse this movement. It does not primarily seek to destroy the other person or object. What it targets is something more precise: dependence itself.

Hate emerges when the psyche is forced to experience itself as dependent—needing something it does not control, wanting something it cannot immediately have, waiting, suffering, or being exposed to frustration. What becomes unbearable is not the other as such, but the image of oneself that the other brings into view: I need. I lack. I am not self-sufficient.

This is why hatred is not, at its core, aggression toward the other. It is a refusal of a self-image. Anything that makes dependence visible—another person, a body, desire itself—can become hateful because it forces this self-presentation into consciousness.

A concrete example helps clarify this.

Suppose I believe abortion is immoral and evil, and you believe it is moral and just. What I end up hating is not necessarily you as a person. What I hate is the position you place me in. Your belief makes it possible that I am wrong. And if I am wrong, then I am not complete. I am lacking something—some internal certainty, coherence, or moral purity that I imagine would make my thoughts unquestionably correct.

In this situation, my conviction does not stand on its own. It exists only insofar as I am arguing against you. I need opposition, refutation, struggle, and continual reaffirmation to feel stable in what I believe. Your existence exposes a truth about my psychic position: my belief is not internally complete.

This is why hatred disappears when conviction is genuinely internal. If my belief does not depend on comparison, refutation, or dominance over other views, then your disagreement does not destabilize me. I don’t need you to be wrong in order to feel right. The relationship becomes distant or indifferent, not hateful.

Hatred intensifies precisely when the psyche realizes how dependent it is. I depend on your opposition. I depend on others sharing my view. I depend on constant confirmation to keep anxiety at bay. And this dependency becomes even more intolerable when someone who once agreed with me changes their position. The betrayal is not intellectual—it is psychic. The support structure collapses.

Hatred likes to announce itself morally. It says: you are evil, corrupt, disgusting, dangerous. But what it is actually reacting to is something quieter and more threatening: your existence proves that I am not internally complete.

The unconscious cannot easily acknowledge this. To admit “I hate my dependence on you” would require admitting vulnerability, lack, and exposure. It would mean acknowledging that the other has power over my psychic equilibrium. That is intolerable at a narcissistic level.

So the psyche performs a defensive inversion. It says: I do not hate my dependence on you; I hate you. Hatred becomes a screen that covers over dependency. And this is why hatred almost always moralizes. Evil versus good. Corrupt versus pure. Dangerous versus righteous. Moral language converts psychic fragility into virtue. It allows the subject to say, I oppose you because I am principled, instead of, I oppose you because your existence destabilizes me.

This dynamic becomes clearest when the other refuses to engage. If you remain calm, indifferent, or uninterested in arguing, anxiety spikes. A part of me knows I depend on the conflict to feel stable—and you are refusing to play your role. That anxiety quickly converts into intensified hatred. Indifference is often more enraging than opposition because it threatens to expose the dependency hatred is designed to conceal.

II. Love: And It’s Ruse

Love does not operate by sober realism. It operates by deception—not in a moral sense, but in a structural one. Love survives by presenting desire with something it cannot actually deliver, but must temporarily believe in order to keep going.

What stands on the other side of love is not neutrality, but Thanatos: the pressure toward silence, rest, and the end of needing. Thanatos does not want a better object. It wants the end of desire itself. Wanting is exhausting. Waiting is humiliating. Depending on something outside oneself is destabilising. Left to itself, the psyche does not choose desire; it chooses relief.

This is where love intervenes. Love offers a ruse. It presents the object as if it could finally quiet desire—as if satisfaction could be complete, as if tension could come to rest, as if dependence could dissolve into possession. Not consciously, not literally, but strongly enough to mobilise attachment and movement toward the other.

“If I find the right person,” the fantasy goes, “I won’t have to want like this anymore.”

This is not a belief we explicitly endorse. It is the condition under which desire becomes livable. If the psyche were to say from the beginning, “This person will not satisfy me, will not end my lack, will not relieve my dependence,” then desire would never take hold. There would be no cathexis, no risk, no love. The system would shut down. Thanatos would win by default.

This is why love always involves overinvestment. To love is to attribute more to the object than it can deliver. This is not immaturity or self-deception in the everyday sense. It is how desire functions at all. Love does not begin at the level of clear-headed judgment. It begins at the level of fixation, where the other is invested as the answer—not to a question you can articulate, but to a lack you cannot resolve from within.

This is why attempts to “love without projection” fail. Consciously, this sounds wise: don’t idealise, don’t expect too much, don’t turn the other into a solution. But structurally, love cannot begin under those conditions. Without projection, what remains is affection, attachment, cooperation, companionship. All of these are real. None of them are love in the strict sense.

The danger is not projection itself. The danger is totalisation.

Love can survive disappointment only if the deception remains flexible. There is a crucial difference between illusion and delusion. Illusion allows disappointment without collapse. Delusion demands fulfillment and cannot tolerate failure.

In workable love, the psyche holds two positions at once: the other is experienced as deeply significant, charged, irreplaceable—and at the same time, not required to abolish lack itself. Desire stays alive because the promise is never demanded to be kept in full.

In destructive love, the promise hardens. The other is no longer allowed to disappoint. When disappointment occurs, it no longer registers as “this hurts” but as “this proves desire was a lie.” At that point, humiliation replaces longing. Dependence becomes intolerable. And the psyche begins to look for a way out—not toward another object, but toward silence.

Love does not fail because the deception was false. It fails when the psyche refuses to keep the deception in play.

That refusal is not clarity. It is the beginning of withdrawal.

III. The Death of Relationships: When Thanatos Wins

Relationships do not usually end because love was an illusion. They end because the psyche becomes unable—or unwilling—to continue desiring under conditions of disappointment.

As long as the illusion remains flexible, love can survive. Desire moves, stalls, resumes. Disappointment hurts, but it does not invalidate the bond. The object can fail without being erased. Energy remains invested, even when strained. This is what keeps a relationship alive over time.

But desire carries a cost. It requires waiting. It requires tolerating uncertainty. It requires accepting dependence without guarantees. And for long stretches, it requires continuing to invest without knowing whether satisfaction will arrive.

Eventually, for some people or in some relationships, this cost becomes intolerable.

At that point, Thanatos begins to dominate the economy. The psyche stops looking for renewed investment and starts looking for relief. Not relief through fulfillment, but relief through ending the tension altogether.

This is where illusion hardens into delusion.

The fantasy shifts from “this person could satisfy me” to “this person is supposed to satisfy me.” Disappointment is no longer absorbed as part of desire’s rhythm. It becomes evidence of betrayal—not of the partner, but of desire itself.

What the psyche experiences at this moment is not simple sadness, but humiliation.

“I depended on you to resolve my lack—and you can’t.”

That sentence is unbearable. It exposes dependence too clearly. It confirms that wanting did not lead to silence, that attachment did not lead to rest, that desire did not justify itself. And so Thanatos offers a solution that feels decisive and clean:

End the relationship. End desire. End exposure.

This is why breakups can feel abrupt, cold, or strangely dead. The energy is not transferred to another object. It is cut off. Libido collapses rather than migrates. What disappears is not just attraction, but curiosity, resonance, emotional availability. The other stops mattering psychically.

This is not indifference. It is withdrawal.

Cold endings occur when the object has become too strongly associated with humiliation, when dependence feels intolerable, and when the psyche wants silence rather than transformation. The internal message is simple: nothing here should affect me anymore.

Coldness is not cruelty. It is defensive deadening.

But not all endings take this form.

In what might be called a warm ending, desire collapses while the object remains invested. The fantasy that sustained erotic tension is withdrawn, but the bond itself is not erased. Affection, gratitude, care, and recognition remain intact. The psyche is able to say:

“This relationship could not carry my desire—but it was real.”

This kind of ending is still painful, but it is not annihilating. Loss can be represented rather than denied.

And this distinction matters, because representation itself is what Thanatos resists.

To represent something is already to admit absence. Representation exists only because what is wanted is not fully present. Every memory, every symbol, every acknowledgment of loss says the same thing: I do not coincide with what I want.

Warm endings tolerate this. Cold endings do not.

Cold endings behave as if:

• the other never mattered,

• the bond never existed,

• nothing was lost.

This is not truth. It is the attempt to abolish the burden of representation altogether.

Relationships die, then, not because love was naïve, but because desire became too costly to maintain. What is rejected is not the other, but the ongoing work of wanting—of waiting, depending, and risking disappointment.

When the psyche can no longer tolerate desire, it prefers deadness.

And what often gets called “clarity” at this point—“I finally see things as they are,” “I was deluding myself,” “I’m being realistic now”—is less a gain in truth than a refusal to continue paying the price of psychic life.

That is the victory of Thanatos: not destruction, but silence.

We are here without a grand reason - or any reason at all. It is the scandal of our being and why we plaster meaning to our lives.

And even if there is meaning in the world, nothing in the structure of it required you in particular. You find yourself alive, in a body, with a history you didn’t choose, facing responsibilities you didn’t ask for - and none of that explains why it should be you rather than someone else, or no one at all. Existence does not come with justification attached. You are here, but being here does not answer the question of why you are here.

It’s not a depressive thought, it is the ordinary condition of being conscious. You experience yourself as someone who must decide what to do, how to live, who to be, without having a stable foundation that tells you in advance what the right answer is. There is no inner guarantee that says, “Relax, this is all grounded.” That absence is what Sartre means by contingency. You are not anchored by necessity; you are exposed to choice.

This is why looking inward rarely provides the kind of reassurance we often expect. When you try to locate a solid inner core, you find changing thoughts, moods, desires and memories instead. The idea of a true self is not something we lose; it is something we invent in response to the feeling that something is missing. It is a way of imagining that our uncertainty has a solution buried somewhere inside us.

There is no hidden version of you that could finally make your life feel justified. Depth isn’t a hidden substance inside us. It’s what develops when you live with freedom and uncertainty, when you don’t fully coincide with yourself and have to keep figuring things out. There was no original wholeness that got lost. The self is shaped by this lack of grounding, not damaged by it.

This matters because it shapes what we expect love to do for us. If you believe there is a true self beneath your uncertainty, then it makes sense to hope that another person might finally see it, recognise it, and confirm that it matters. Love begins to feel like the place where everything you have lived through could finally be justified - where your existence might stop feeling accidental and start feeling necessary.

But this hope is built on a mistake. Love does not fail because it cannot reach some hidden, authentic core. It fails because it is asked to do something no relationship can do: make your existence necessary, retroactively meaningful, or finally grounded. Love cannot turn contingency into destiny. It cannot make your life have had to happen. And when we ask it to, disappointment is inevitable.

Why Love Is Asked to Do the Impossible

Once existence feels contingent, it makes sense that we turn towards other people. Not casually, but urgently. If nothing inside me makes my existence necessary, perhaps your desire can. If you can choose me freely, I can feel justified. The hope is not just to be liked, wanted or cared for. The hope is that I feel - that it had to happen, that it wasn’t arbitrary, that it adds up to something. Love begins to carry the weight of this expectation.

For a moment, the world seems less random. Your past starts to look like a path rather than a series of accidents. Things that once felt meaningless begin to glow with importance, simply because they led to this point.

But the structure of this hope is already flawed. The problem is not just that love is freely given and therefore unstable. It’s that love is being asked to function as a foundation, and another person is not a foundation. The very thing that gives love its value - the fact that it comes from a free, contingent being - is what prevents it from grounding you. You are asking something that is itself ungrounded to provide ground.

Your partner is not necessary either. They did not have to exist. The problem is that we experience our anxieties as personal rather than existential and universal. And we imagine that they do not suffer the same. That they do have a solid core unlike us.

This is why reassurance fails even when it is sincere and consistent. The partner can choose you again and again, remain loyal, show up, care deeply - and still the feeling you are looking for does not settle. What you want is not confirmation that they love you now or even forever. But that their love grounds you.

To make you feel necessary would require their desire to stop being a free act and become something fixed, automatic, unquestionable. But the moment love becomes something that has to be there - something that functions like a guarantee - it stops being love and turns into obligation, routine, or control. What you want from love and what makes love meaningful cannot coincide.

The moment reassurance claims certainty about the future, it stops being a free expression and becomes a promise, a contract, or a demand. We can mean it fully and still not be able to guarantee it. Time keeps moving. People change. Freedom persists.

This is why reassurance has a built-in decay. It soothes the anxiety of contingency temporarily, but it cannot eliminate it. The relief it brings is real, but it is also fleeting. As soon as the reassurance recedes into the past, it becomes evidence that was true, not proof that will be true. The question returns, not because the partner failed, but because the structure of reassurance cannot convert freedom into foundation.

One partner seeks reassurance more often; the other begins to feel pressured or monitored. What began as comfort starts to feel like surveillance: Am I loving you enough? Am I showing it correctly? The reassured partner feels momentary relief, then renewed doubt. The reassuring partner feels increasingly responsible for regulating the other’s sense of being. Neither experience is wrong. Both are responses to the same impossibility.

One person seems “too needy,” the other “too distant.” But underneath these labels is a shared confrontation with contingency. One partner is trying to secure foundation through reassurance; the other is resisting becoming that foundation.

What Conflicts Are Really About

Most conflicts carry disproportionate emotional charge because they are always protests against something deeper.

An argument creates structure where uncertainty feels unbearable. It narrows the problem to something concrete: this action, that tone, this mistake. For a moment, the relationship stops feeling open-ended and unstable and starts feeling organised around a clear issue. Conflict doesn’t just express distress; it contains it.

This is why conflicts often feel urgent and moralised. The fight is not simply about what happened; it is about what it means. A missed call becomes evidence of indifference. A delayed reply becomes proof of fading desire. The partner’s behaviour is interpreted as a verdict on one’s importance: If this is how you treat me, what does that say about whether I matter?

Conflicts become a struggle over grounding. One person pushes for recognition, consistency, proof; the other feels accused, reduced, or trapped. Each experiences the other not just as frustrating, but as threatening - because the argument has become a site where existence itself seems to be evaluated. The goal shifts from resolving an issue to stabilising one’s position in the relationship. Tell me where I stand. Tell me what I am to you. The argument becomes a demand for certainty in a domain where certainty cannot be given.

Paradoxically, conflict can feel better than calm during these moments. Calm reopens the space of uncertainty. Conflict closes it. Even a negative definition, you’re wrong, you’re careless, you’re distant, can feel more bearable than no definition at all. Being hurt is often easier than being unsure. The fight gives form to anxiety by attaching it to a person and a story.

This is why conflicts repeat even after they are “resolved.” The surface issue may be addressed, apologies exchanged, agreements made. But if the underlying protest against contingency remains unrecognised, the structure will simply reattach itself to the next available trigger. What couples experience as recurring arguments are often the same existential demand returning in different disguises.

Conflicts are not primarily failures of communication or empathy. But failures to recognise impossibility. Until that demand is named, fights will continue to carry more weight than they can ever resolve.

Being Seen and the Structure of Shame

Sartre’s idea of being-for-others becomes essential, because it explains why love so easily turns into a threat to one’s sense of self.

To be seen by another person is not a neutral event. When someone looks at you, really looks at you, you do not just experience their attention. You experience yourself as something in their world. You are no longer only a subject acting and choosing; you are also an object being perceived, interpreted, evaluated. Sartre calls this the Look. It does not require criticism, hostility, or even an actual gaze. The mere possibility that the other is forming a view of you is enough to reorganise how you experience yourself.

This is where shame enters. Shame is not, first of all, about having done something wrong. It is the experience of suddenly being fixed. You feel yourself reduced to an image - needy, cold, selfish, inadequate, demanding—without having chosen that definition. Your freedom, which normally feels open and fluid, becomes arrested. You are no longer just acting; you are being seen as someone. And crucially, you do not control what that someone is.

In relationships, this happens on both sides of the reassurance conflict, but in different ways.

The person seeking reassurance is exposed of being seen as optional. Shame appears as the thought, often unspoken: If you don’t choose me freely, then maybe I am not worth choosing at all. The self feels in danger of collapsing into an object that can be set aside.

The person being asked to reassure is exposed in a different way. They feel themselves becoming an object too - but this time, an object with a function. They are no longer simply a subject who desires, chooses, or responds; they are experienced as the thing responsible for regulating the other’s sense of being. Their freedom starts to feel monitored. Their gestures are watched for meaning. Their feelings are inspected for reassurance. Shame appears here as the sense of being reduced to a role: the one who must provide stability, the one who must not waver, the one who must keep the other okay.

This is why reassurance can feel suffocating to give and desperate to receive at the same time. Both experiences threaten subjectivity, but in opposite directions. When I give reassurance in order to stabilise you, I begin to feel my own footing weaken. I am no longer simply choosing; I am being relied upon. My freedom starts to feel burdened, and with that comes a quiet anxiety of my own.

At that point, the roles threaten to reverse. If I am now unsettled, I may begin to look to you for reassurance in return - not necessarily through words, but through responsiveness, appreciation, or compliance. The moment you respond to stabilise me, the same process begins on your side. What started as care turns into mutual regulation. Each person’s sense of ground depends on the other’s steadiness, and because neither has real ground to offer, both begin to feel increasingly unstable.

Each attempt to secure the relationship pulls both partners further into vigilance. What was meant to create safety begins to generate pressure. The relationship is no longer just a site of connection; it becomes a site of existential risk. Each person senses, often without being able to name it, that their own stability is now tied to the other’s reactions. The fear is no longer simply losing the other, but losing oneself in the attempt to manage the relationship.

To accuse, to withdraw, to shut down, to push back - these are not merely emotional reactions. They are attempts to reassert a boundary, to regain a sense of subjectivity that has started to erode.

At this stage, the Look becomes unbearable. What the other needs from me feels too heavy; what I need from the other feels too uncertain. The relationship begins to oscillate between closeness and distance, reassurance and resistance. Love, at this point, is no longer simply intimate. It is destabilising.

Judgment as a Defence Against Exposure

Once exposure becomes unbearable, the psyche looks for a way to regain stability. Judgment is one of the fastest ways to do this. It feels like clarity. It feels like standing on solid ground again. And this is why it appears so reliably in relationships under strain.

Judgment is not primarily about truth or morality. It is about restoring a boundary. When I judge you, I stop being the one who is exposed and become the one who defines. The uncertainty that comes from being seen is replaced by certainty about who you are. I may still be upset, but I am no longer unmoored. I have a position.

This is why arguments so quickly turn into evaluations of character rather than discussions of behaviour. The issue stops being what happened and becomes what kind of person you are. Careless. Cold. Immature. Insecure. Selfish. These labels do more than criticise - they stabilise. They freeze the other into a knowable object. And in doing so, they give the judging person a sense of coherence they were losing. Judgement protects against shame. Instead of wondering how I appear to you, I decide how you appear to me.

This is why being right is so seductive in conflict. If I can show that you are wrong, inconsistent, unreasonable, or unfair, then I am no longer the one whose footing is uncertain.

Over time, judgment can replace intimacy altogether. Conversations become audits. Tone is scrutinised. Small actions are collected as evidence. Past moments are replayed and reinterpreted to support a narrative. This is not because either person enjoys conflict. It is because judgment creates a surface that feels safer than openness. It limits ambiguity. It reduces exposure.

But this safety is temporary. The stability judgment provides comes at a cost. When you fix the other into an object, their freedom disappears - and with it, the possibility of genuine recognition. You may feel steadier, but the connection thins. The other begins to feel trapped, misunderstood, or diminished. And as their sense of freedom erodes, they will either push back or withdraw.

This is why judgment escalates rather than resolves conflict. Each verdict invites a counter-verdict. Each attempt to define provokes resistance. When it becomes the dominant mode of relating, the relationship survives only as a structure of opposition - clear, rigid, and increasingly lifeless.

Love as Fusion and the Fantasy of Unity

When judgement no longer works, the psyche often turns to the opposite strategy. Instead of hardening the boundary, it tries to erase it. This is where the fantasy of fusion enters.

Fusion promises relief from contingency. If we are truly one, then separation no longer threatens. If we share the same interior, then your freedom cannot turn against me. If our lives are fundamentally merged, then I no longer have to face my own groundlessness alone. Love becomes the place where difference is meant to disappear.

This is why fusion is so often narrated as destiny. “Everything I went through led to you.” “We were meant to find each other.” “You understand me like no one else.” These statements are not simply romantic. They are attempts to rewrite contingency as necessity. If the relationship can be framed as inevitable, then existence itself feels less accidental. Suffering acquires meaning retroactively. The past is redeemed by the present bond.

Fusion also carries a promise of exemption from shame. If we are one, then there is no external gaze to threaten me. I do not have to appear as something to you; I am already inside you. There is no risk of being misseen because there is no distance from which you could see me at all. Exposure disappears along with separation.

Fusion suspends anxiety as the other becomes a shared skin. But the fantasy is unstable because difference inevitably reappears. They want things you don’t want.

At this point, disappointment often turns into accusation. “You’ve changed.” “You’re pulling away.” “You’re not who you were.” What is really being mourned is not the loss of love, but the loss of unity. The other’s re-emergence as a separate subject feels like a betrayal - not because they did something wrong, but because they resumed being free.

This is where fusion becomes coercive. The demand shifts from “be with me” to “remain what made me feel whole.” The partner is asked, implicitly or explicitly, to undo their difference for the sake of the bond. And when they cannot, conflict returns - often more intensely than before.

Fusion fails for the same reason judgment fails. It assigns love a task it cannot perform. It cannot turn two subjects into one without turning at least one of them into an object.

Love cannot undo separation, history or freedom. It only offers relation between two beings who remain contingent, exposed and unfinished.

Fight and Flight in Love

Fight and flight are not just emotional reactions. They are existential strategies. They appear when a person feels their position as a subject is under threat.

Fight emerges when someone experiences themselves being reduced to an object and tries to reverse that position. Structurally, it is an attempt to reclaim subjectivity by overpowering the other’s stance. When someone fights, they are often trying to say - without quite knowing it: I am not what you are making me into. The conflict is less about the topic at hand than about who gets to define the meaning of the situation.

In this mode, the other is pushed into the object position: wrong, unreasonable, unfair, blind. Being right becomes urgent because it restores a sense of agency. But this kind of fight is not really about the relationship. It is about resisting the feeling of being fixed, judged, or made into something without one’s consent.

Flight operates in the opposite direction but serves the same aim. Instead of pushing back, the person withdraws from the field altogether. They go quiet, delay, change the subject, disengage emotionally, or disappear. This can look like calm, maturity, or independence. Structurally, however, it is a refusal to remain in a situation where objectification feels imminent.

Flight says: You do not get access to me. If staying means being seen, evaluated, or required to hold the other’s stability, then leaving becomes the only way to preserve freedom. Autonomy is maintained by becoming unavailable.

Both strategies are understandable. Both are attempts to protect subjectivity. And both fail in similar ways when they are asked to do the wrong work.

Fight fails when it turns into domination. If I force you into the object position, your recognition no longer counts. I may win the argument, but what I receive is compliance, not confirmation. The acknowledgment I was seeking, freely given recognition, cannot be extracted under pressure.

Flight fails because withdrawal does not undo being-for-others. The look has already happened. The image exists. Leaving may preserve freedom in form, but often at the cost of isolation. The person remains sovereign, but alone, carrying the unprocessed exposure with them.

There are healthier versions of both fight and flight, but they require letting go of a central fantasy. Neither strategy can be used to solve the deeper problem of contingency. Fighting cannot make love foundational. Withdrawing cannot make exposure disappear.

A non-destructive form of fight is not about overpowering the other, but about remaining present without collapsing into an object or trying to control the outcome. It is the ability to stay in conflict without demanding that the other secure your sense of self.

A non-destructive form of flight is not disappearance, but temporary distance that regulates exposure without denying the bond. It is stepping back without pretending the other does not matter.

Both require the same shift: accepting that love cannot make you necessary, whole, or finally secure. Once fight and flight stop being recruited to abolish uncertainty, they stop being existential defences and become ordinary movements within a relationship - assertion, pause, return.

Why Reciprocity Cannot Save Us

When it becomes clear that love cannot make one person necessary to another, the fantasy rarely disappears. It simply shifts form. If one-sided grounding fails, the hope becomes mutual grounding: maybe we can do it together. Maybe if we choose each other equally, reassure each other equally, depend on each other equally, the instability will finally cancel out.

This is the fantasy of reciprocity as salvation.

On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Two people, two freedoms, meeting in balance. No domination, no submission. No one carrying the whole weight alone. But the structure of freedom does not work this way. Two unstable foundations do not combine into a stable one.

Reciprocity does not eliminate contingency; it distributes it.

Even in the most caring, reflective relationship, asymmetry is unavoidable. One person becomes anxious first. One person needs reassurance before the other. One person leans while the other steadies. This is not a failure of communication or effort. It is structural. Freedoms do not fluctuate in sync.

What people often call “equal” relationships are in fact organised around alternating roles. At one moment, you are the ground; at another, I am. The stability comes not from symmetry but from managed imbalance. And as long as only one person needs holding at a time, the arrangement can feel fair, even secure.

The problem appears when both people become vulnerable at once. Illness, loss, exhaustion, fear of abandonment, or external pressure collapse the rhythm. There is no longer a stable alternation. Both reach for grounding simultaneously. And at that moment, reciprocity has nothing left to offer.

This is why relationships often strain or break during shared crises. Not because love disappears, but because the fantasy that we can hold each other equally can no longer be maintained. Someone must become the ground - or the structure gives way.

Reciprocity can also turn coercive.

When mutuality becomes a standard rather than a gift, it invites accounting: I reassured you, now you reassure me. I showed up, now you owe me presence. Equality becomes measurement. Measurement becomes pressure. At that point, the demand is no longer: love me freely. It becomes: love me in a way that balances the books.

But a free act cannot function as a ledger entry. The moment love is required to stabilise the other’s existence, it stops being freely given. The structure repeats the original problem in a more polite form: freedom is again being asked to become a foundation.

This does not mean relationships must be unequal, exploitative, or cold. It means that no amount of symmetry can abolish the fact that each person must ultimately carry their own contingency. Love can accompany that burden. It can ease it. It can make it liveable. But it cannot absorb it on your behalf.

Acting Without Alibi

Once it becomes clear that love cannot make us necessary. There is no structure left to hide behind. What remains is responsibility.

Sartre’s phrase for this is acting without alibi. An alibi is any explanation that would excuse you from being the author of what you do. Fate, history, trauma, love, the other person, the relationship dynamic - these can all explain why something is difficult, but none of them can decide in your place. To act without alibi means accepting that no condition, no feeling, no recognition from another can finally justify you.

This is where most people quietly retreat. They do not reject freedom outright; they look for ways to soften it. They want a reason that would make their choices necessary rather than chosen. Love is often recruited for this task. If I act for us, if I stay because of you, if I sacrifice because it matters, then perhaps the weight of decision is no longer mine alone.

But this is another misunderstanding. Acting for love does not remove responsibility; it intensifies it. You are still choosing. You are simply choosing under a narrative that tries to make the choice feel less exposed.

To act without alibi is not to act coldly or selfishly. It is to act without pretending that something outside you guarantees the meaning of what you do. When you stay, you stay without claiming that the relationship makes it inevitable. When you leave, you leave without claiming that the other forced you. When you fight, you do so knowing that you chose to fight. When you withdraw, you do so knowing that withdrawal is your act.

This is deeply unsettling because it removes consolation. There is no final justification that will make the act feel clean. You cannot say, I had no choice, without lying to yourself. Freedom does not feel like empowerment here; it feels like exposure.

And yet this is precisely where dignity enters.

Sartre’s ethics are often misread as harsh or unforgiving, but the opposite is true. Acting without alibi does not demand purity, correctness, or consistency. It demands ownership. You are allowed to be conflicted, ambivalent, frightened, unsure. What you are not allowed to do - if you want to remain a subject - is to hide behind the fantasy that someone or something else decided for you.

This is also where shame loses its grip. Shame freezes you in what you have been seen as. Responsibility reopens time. The other may have judged you, misread you, fixed you in an image - but they cannot decide what you do next. That gap between being-seen and acting is irreducible. It is the one place the other cannot occupy.

Love, when stripped of its salvational fantasies, does not disappear. It changes form. It becomes the decision to remain in relation without demanding rescue. To care without asking to be completed. To choose the other without asking them to justify your existence.

This is not romantic. It does not promise harmony. But it is honest.

The ethical remainder of love is not consolation but commitment without guarantee. Not unity, but coexistence. Not being made whole, but acting anyway - without alibi, without excuse, without the hope that someone else will finally make it easier to be free.

That is not a failure of love. It is the price of taking both love and freedom seriously.

Moments of exposure, embarraassment, or scrunity don’t wound a concealed essence; they destabilise the boundry. We say “I feel empty”, “fragmented,” “all over the place,” because the surface has lost its holding function. The surface is not superficial. It is the operating system of our sense of self. The face, posture, voice, and skin are not decorations wrapped around a deeper self; they are the structures that allow it to appear. Recognition, shame, desire, anxiety, all occur at this limit. The surface keeps the world at a negotiable distance and holds enough edge and tension for meaning to form on the other side. Without it, experience does not deepen; it dissolves.

The Surface Self

If the self is an edge, the first task of the psyche is to maintain that edge. The boundary must hold firmly enough to create the feeling of an interior but flexibly enough to let the world in without overwhelming. Most people sense this directly: feeling “solid” or “centered” is simply the experience of a surface that is functioning. Feeling “off,” “strange,” or “not myself” is usually a disturbance of that boundary.

Social life makes this obvious. A mild insult destabilises the surface immediately. The pain is disproportionate because the boundry is not symbolic but physiological and psychic at once. Social anxiety is not the fear of people; it is fear that surface will fail under the gaze of others. The person does not fear judgement. They fear exposure will dissolve the thin distinction between inside and outside. Feeling buried in the sea of people, their words, their gazes. Where do I begin and where do I end?

Tattoos, clothes, muscle, grooming, aesthetic choices - these are not superficial attempts at style. They are reinforcements of the boundary, ways of stabilising the surface so the interior can continue to exist as a sensation. A coherent outward form produces a coherent inward one. Without these stabilisations, people often feel vague, uncontained, or undefined. A well-arranged room does not express a preference; it creates a boundary condition. It stabilises perception so that the sense of self does not disperse. When organisation becomes compulsive, it is not because the person loves order. It is because the interior has become too thin to maintain itself without constant work on the surface.

The distinction between containment and control appears here. Containment is when the surface gives enough shape for thoughts and feelings to form. Control is what happens when the surface must be constantly manipulated to prevent collapse. The first produces interiority; the second replaces it with management. Many people mistake one for the other and live in a state of continuous maintenance, mistaking survival of the edge for expression of the self.

Surface and Desire

Desire begins at the surface. Attraction is not a response to someone’s inner world but to the boundary that represents it. The flaws, scars, and small fractures in that boundary are not poetic embellishments; they are the entry points through which others sense the possibility of an interior. A perfectly sealed surface tells us nothing. A surface interrupted - slightly broken, slightly asymmetrical - signals depth without revealing it. A scar is a question that begs for an answer gated by the condition": who has earned the right to approach the event beneath it.

Beauty is a surface that resists full access. Seen in sculptures. Seen in art. The desire to “know” someone is sustained by something unreadable in their outline. When the surface yields completely - when everything is disclosed - the structure that produced desire collapses. Total transparency destroys the very tension that made the other compelling.

This is why early conversations matter. They are tests of the boundary. A person whose surface feels coherent and responsive allows the other to imagine an interior capable of holding tension. A person who lets you in too quickly produces the opposite effect. What appears as “unattractive” is really a perception of exposure: a boundary that admits anything cannot contain anything. If you open too readily, the other imagines that you cannot hold them - that your surface will collapse under pressure. Desire depends on resistance, not availability.

In dating, this boundary dynamic determines almost everything. Some people approach with a penetrating stance: they want to cross the surface, extract certainty, eliminate ambiguity. Others approach with a receptive stance: they want to be entered, affected, shaped. These are not gendered positions but structural ones. Desire becomes possible only when the two orientations create a stable tension at the edge. Libido is generated at the edge, not the interior. It’s generated when the surface is touched in the right way - by ambiguity, near-contact, atmosphere, anticipation. Surface events that awaken internal vibration. Desire is not a drive pushing outward; it is a resonance at the boundry.

Some people are overwhelming but not because of their feelings; they are overwhelming because they bypass the tension of the surface. They move directly toward an imagined interior the other does not yet experience as real. An interior is not something a person possesses in advance. It is something that forms gradually at the boundary—through small impacts, controlled distance, coordinated rhythm. The surface must hold long enough for an interior to develop in both people. When someone insists on entering too quickly or being entered too quickly, the tension collapses. What feels like intensity is usually an avoidance of the anxiety produced by staying at the edge. Remaining in that zone requires tolerating uncertainty, ambiguity, and the slow adaptation of two boundaries to each other. Many cannot bear that exposure. They rush past the surface because it is easier to imagine a premature interior than to endure the pressure required to build a real one.

Endless scroll functions as the perfect autistic object. It is infinite, safe, and one-directional. It moves but does not respond. It stimulates but never demands. Nothing unpredictable crosses the boundary; nothing is asked of the self. The surface remains intact because the stimulus does not push back. People retreat into it not to avoid the world but to avoid the tension of surface-to-surface negotiation - the pressure required to form a shared edge with another person.

The attraction of digital environments is not escape. It is the protection of a boundary that cannot risk deformation. Digital surfaces supply contact without reciprocity, novelty without friction, and presence without the anxiety of being sensed in return. They offer movement stripped of consequence—the exact condition required when the surface is too thin to sustain real relation.

Surface & Agency

Agency is not an internal force. It depends on the stability of the boundary. A person acts when the surface can hold the pressures generated by action. Every beginning involves destabilisation: risk, loss of the previous state, exposure, a small self-separation (“I am no longer the one who hasn’t begun”). A fragile Skin-ego experiences this as rupture. Starting is not just effort; it feels like putting holes in the container.

This is why agency so often feels like intrusion. To act is to cross the edge toward the world, but it is also to let the world cross back. The moment someone begins a task, questions appear: “Am I doing this right? Will this be judged? Does this count?” These are not abstract doubts; they are forms of penetration. The symbolic demands of the world—standards, evaluation, future consequences—enter the envelope. Action feels risky because it invites this intrusion. The person does not simply move toward the task; the task is now inside them.

So procrastination rarely improves through discipline. The problem is not effort; it is containment. The psyche keeps the beginning imaginary because reality feels too invasive. Any concrete step threatens to rupture the envelope and flood it with judgment, uncertainty, and self-observation. In that situation, inaction is a form of self-preservation: freezing is safer than risking fragmentation. It is structurally easier to remain in potential than to endure the cuts that real beginnings demand.

This is also why certain activities—games, scrolling, rituals like vaping—feel effortless while productive work feels impossible. In gaming, the envelope is provided from outside. The rules, feedback, and environment hold the player; the Skin-ego is outsourced to the system. There is action without intrusion: the world responds predictably and never demands more ego than the person has. Productive work reverses this. It requires the self to supply its own boundary, to tolerate exposure, to structure the field. The task does not just get done; it presses back on the envelope that tries to do it.

Creativity follows the same logic. To create something is to extend the boundary, to give form where none existed. This requires a surface strong enough to hold new tension. When the envelope is weak, creativity becomes defensive: perfectionism, endless planning, compulsive revision. The structure of creativity divides into three positions. The feminine position opens the surface - it receives, resonates, transforms. The masculine position pushes against it - it penetrates, imposes method, produces movement. The paternal position organises the tension between the two—giving structure, coherence, direction. Many people avoid action because they remain trapped in the receptive position, unable to transition into the intrusive one. Intrusion feels like a violation of the envelope: too forceful, too exposing, too risky.

In a stable system, masculine agency is not explosive. It is rhythmic: small, contained movements repeated within a dependable frame. Agency then becomes a continuation of the envelope, not a break from it. But where the Skin-ego is fragile, any move from thought to action is experienced as a cut—an interruption of continuity, a threat to cohesion. The inhibition around agency is not laziness. It is the perception that acting will damage the boundary that keeps the self from falling apart.

This is why confidence feels physical. A stable boundary produces a sense of uprightness, direction, clarity. A weakened boundary produces collapse, hesitation, inwardness. The body mirrors the envelope. When people say they feel “unsupported” or “not grounded,” they are describing the failure of an internal surface that normally backs them.

Control attempts to compensate for this. People create rigid routines, strict schedules, or excessively ordered environments, not because they crave discipline but because the external structure replaces the internal one. Control is a substitute for containment. It stabilises the surface artificially, allowing the person to act without feeling disintegrated by the act.

Surface, Common-Sense, And The Shared World

The boundary does not only create a sense of interior; it also creates a sense of world. The same functions that allow the self to hold together internally—coherence, continuity, filtering - allow perception to hold together externally. When the surface is stable, the world appears ordered and interpretable. When the surface weakens, reality loses structure. Things no longer “make sense” because the internal mechanism that produces sense has lost its rhythm.

This is correspondence. Sensations must map onto meanings; thoughts must map onto other thoughts. Without this mapping, experience becomes fragmented. This is the first layer of reality-building. But there is a second layer: consensuality. Reality becomes shared only when individuals’ surfaces can align—when one boundary can register another without collapsing under its impact. Consensuality is not agreement; it is the ability of two envelopes to form a temporary common edge. It is the structural condition in which one person’s world can touch another’s without puncturing it. When this works, communication feels smooth because each surface can absorb the pressure of being perceived and can return perception without distortion. When it fails, the world does not merely become confusing; it becomes uninhabitable with others.

Consensuality therefore depends on a precise balance. A surface that is too rigid reflects everything; no signal gets in. A surface that is too porous absorbs everything; no self remains to interpret the signal. Only a stable envelope can enter into alignment with another stable envelope. In such moments, communication feels seamless not because meanings are identical, but because each surface can tolerate the contact required to interpret the other’s meaning at all.

This is the origin of “common sense.” It develops from the earliest function of the skin-ego: the ability to fuse scattered sensations into a single, coherent perceptual field. Before a person can reason, they must sense in one piece. Touch, sound, balance, temperature, motion—these must converge into a unified contour of the body. Only then can the world be read accurately. Common sense is this sensory coherence projected outward: the capacity to register reality without fragmenting it, to let different impressions confirm rather than contradict each other. When the envelope is intact, perception is synchronised; the senses cooperate, and meaning stabilises. When the envelope is defensive or fragile, the senses decouple. One sees one thing, feels another, anticipates a third. Reality becomes noisy because the boundary cannot integrate its own data.

This explains the gender difference. A strongly defended skin-ego, common in male development, prioritises protection over integration. It filters too aggressively, dulls subtle signals, and interrupts the cross-modal coordination that common sense relies on. The boundary holds, but it does not register. Information is not confused; it simply fails to arrive as a coherent pattern. What appears as “lack of common sense” is often this defensive configuration: an envelope that remains intact by limiting permeability, at the cost of perceptual richness. The armour preserves the self but impoverishes the sensing.

Group formation follows the same logic as the individual psyche. When personal boundaries feel weak, people seek a larger envelope to hold them. Ideological communities, identity groups, and tightly fused social circles function as maternal containers: they offer a shared skin when the individual one cannot sustain coherence. The group becomes the holding environment, the regulating surface, the place where the fluctuations of the self can be absorbed without collapse. This is why such groups are intolerant of internal difference. Difference is not disagreement; it is a tear in the envelope. A dissenting view interrupts the smooth, womb-like continuity the group depends on. The in-group must remain internally uniform so that the envelope can feel seamless. Variation is experienced not as a challenge to ideas but as a threat to cohesion.

Rigid external boundaries appear precisely when internal ones are unstable. A person who cannot maintain coherence inside gravitates toward environments that impose coherence from outside. The function of the group is not solidarity; it is containment. The collective skin replaces the personal one. Fusion with the group stabilises the individual boundary by dissolving it into a larger whole. The price of this stability is the elimination of internal complexity; the group cannot allow nuance because nuance reintroduces differentiation, and differentiation breaks the fantasy of unity. This also determines the role of the leader. The leader is not simply an authority figure; they become the phallic mother - the one who holds, regulates, absorbs, and gives shape to the group. They are expected to contain aggression, preserve harmony, and maintain the envelope without asserting too much distance. If they introduce structure, law, or thirdness, they shift into the paternal position and puncture the group’s imagined interior. If they fail to contain, they are expelled as defective skin. The leader is tolerated only insofar as they reinforce the group’s fantasy of continuous inside.

Our Möbius Self

Our desire to cling onto narratives of an inner truth, “something deep inside” is our of way of protecting the illusion of interiority. Attempts to bypass the surface in search of the “real self” always fail. Excessive introspection does not uncover a core; it collapses the boundary that produces one. When people peel back layers hoping to arrive at authenticity, they often find only anxiety or confusion. Depth dissolves when the surface is overexposed. Meaning requires a limit, not excavation.

The self appears deep because the surface works. The more stable the boundary, the richer the sense of interiority it can sustain. The more fragile the boundary, the more the self feels hollow or chaotic. Depth is not the opposite of surface. Depth is a surface behaving well.

This is why the masks we wear are more real than the “true self” we imagine behind them. In Lacan’s terms, the subject is structured like a Möbius strip: what seems like an inside is simply the outside seen from another turn. There is no private core waiting to be revealed; the interior folds out of the surface, and the surface folds back into the interior. The mask is not a disguise that covers the self. The mask is the self in its only workable form - the continuous loop where inside and outside are the same material, differently oriented.

The demand for openness is rarely about truth itself — it’s about control over uncertainty. It’s an attempt to manage fear by eliminating surprise. When we refuse the other the right to an unconscious — to a space where they can wrestle privately with their own thoughts — and instead demand explanations they haven’t yet formed, they begin to feel guilty for what they haven’t even said. The space for spontaneity, fantasy, and contradiction — all the things that make us human — collapses under the pressure to account for everything.

When you live under constant observation — even if it’s the loving kind — guilt appears before any wrongdoing. Your inner thoughts already feel like evidence. You haven’t lied, but you feel dishonest; you haven’t betrayed anyone, but you feel untrustworthy. It’s the same psychological effect as being watched by a camera: the guilt isn’t a response to an act, but to being seen. The mind starts searching for what it must have done wrong to justify the unease. And when guilt has no cause, the unconscious creates one. The person who feels unjustly accused, or perpetually inspected, may end up producing a real reason for their guilt — an affair, a secret, an emotional withdrawal — simply to make the feeling proportionate. If I’m already indicted for a crime, I may as well commit one.

When there’s no room to think, the body starts to act. Everything that should have been processed internally is forced outward into behaviour. You can see it in couples who talk endlessly but never feel closer. They believe constant communication will keep their relationship clean of misunderstanding, but it only floods the psychic system. There’s no repression left, no inner filter. The person begins to do what they can no longer think about. That’s why betrayal, cruelty, or withdrawal so often erupt in relationships that prize honesty most. We act out to create separation because the unconscious is trying to restore its right to exist. The act replaces the secret.

In transparency, the erotic current that once moved between two separate worlds dries up under the pressure to merge them. Relationships built on constant disclosure become flat. Couples run out of things to say because they’ve already said everything. Their conversations shrink to recaps of daily events — reports rather than exchanges. The unconscious in each partner has been eliminated. With no space left for desire, imagination, or curiosity to grow, they can only speak from the surface of their senses. Desire, which can’t be controlled, gets replaced by communication, which can. The more they talk to avoid losing each other, the more they talk themselves out of wanting each other.

Eventually, the relationship begins to resemble a small surveillance state. Each partner becomes both the watcher and the watched. You monitor what you say, how you react, how honest you sound — not because your partner asked you to, but because you’ve internalised their gaze. You start rehearsing how everything will be received before you even speak. The more a couple tries to avoid hurting each other, the less capable they become of touching each other at all. Not long ago, a secret meant you were incubating a truth. Now it means you’re lying. You’re no longer allowed to interpret events privately; your partner must know so they can interpret them with you — to colonise your experience with their own.

Take self-esteem. If you are a king, if you’ve convinced yourself that you are beautiful, intelligent, funny and successful - then affection from others is not a miracle, but a verdict. Of course they should love you, you’ve given them every reason to. There’s no suspense left. Self-esteem makes affection predictable, and therefore meaningless. You’ve already closed the circuit. You can’t be moved by being loved when you’ve rehearsed every compliment in advance.

No one falls in love with a king. People fall for the one who risks embarrassment, who doesn’t have the right words, who’s a little out of their depth but steps forward anyway. The person who’s already certain of their worth can’t fall in love because they can’t fall - they can only select. But love isn’t selection; it’s surrender. It’s the moment someone takes aim at the part of you you can’t defend, and you let them.

Trust has become a contract. We don’t grant it anymore, we require it to be earned. People have to prove their consistency. It’s all very reasonable (and dreary), and that’s the problem. Once someone has demonstrated why they’re trustworthy, trusting them isn’t trust - it’s logic. Real trust isn’t proof-based. It’s an irrational decision to believe in someone despite having no guarantee that they won’t fail you. Faith is what makes trust human, because it’s unjustified. You leap anyway. You place your life in another’s hands, knowing they might drop it. And that’s the point: trust is only beautiful because it might be betrayed.

We’ve forgotten that faith isn’t naivety, it’s bravery. To trust is to say, I know you could hurt me, and I’m going to let you close anyway. It’s a conscious risk, not a calculation. And when trust is betrayed, something essential still survives: the fact that you dared. The modern mind hates that idea because it can’t be quantified. It wants risk-free intimacy, safety-certified connection. But what it gets instead is loneliness - relationships made of mutual observation, people performing reliability for each other while never truly stepping inside. Trust, in its original sense, is what love and friendship were built on: the willingness to be wrong about someone and still call it living.

Forgiveness used to mean something closer to grace. Now it means transaction. Someone apologises, promises to change, repays the debt — and we, if we’re feeling generous, grant them our approval. It’s all very civilised, very fair, but it has nothing to do with forgiveness. What we call forgiveness today is really moral bookkeeping: the careful balancing of wrongs and reparations until the numbers match again. It’s a zero-sum game, where both players keep score until no one can win. The one who’s wronged refuses to let go until compensated; the one who’s guilty lives in endless debt. It looks like justice, but it’s mutual imprisonment. Nothing new happens; the relationship just resets to zero.

True forgiveness breaks that logic entirely. It’s when one person decides to leap first - to release the other before they’ve earned it, to say you don’t owe me anymore without proof it won’t happen again. That leap creates the only victory love can have: one that no one controls. The forgiver feels the strange magic of letting go - that moment where resentment gives way to air. And the forgiven receives something even rarer: the shock of being met with mercy instead of measure. Both are changed. That’s the secret of grace - it’s not fair, and that’s why it works. Real forgiveness isn’t a settlement; it’s an act of faith that somehow, in losing, both of you win.

Oversharing is the modern counterfeit of vulnerability. We think that telling our whole story makes us brave, but most of the time it’s a pre-emptive strike - a way of controlling how others see us. We confess everything before anyone can ask, as if transparency could save us from rejection. But total disclosure isn’t intimacy; it’s insurance. When you tell someone every detail of your past, every trauma, every quirk, what you’re really saying is: I will decide the version of me you get to know. You leave them no room to wonder, to imagine, to misread you in their own way. Real connection requires a gap - a space between what’s said and what’s felt. Oversharing fills that space with noise, with explanations. It’s a way of narrating yourself so thoroughly that no one else’s perception can ever threaten you.

The irony is that what draws people to us isn’t what we reveal, but what we risk leaving unrevealed. The unknown is where love lives. When you tell someone everything, you deny them the joy of discovery - of forming their own version of you, flawed and partial and alive. Vulnerability isn’t confession; it’s permission. It’s letting another person see you without a script, knowing they might get it wrong. That’s what makes intimacy intoxicating - the creative uncertainty of being interpreted, not managed. But we’re so afraid of being misunderstood that we narrate ourselves into sterility. We mistake openness for courage when it’s really control. The truly vulnerable person isn’t the one who tells you everything, but the one who leaves a silence and trusts you enough to step into it.

Radical honesty is supposed to make us brave, but most of the time it just makes us rehearsed. We pride ourselves on being direct, on “speaking our truth,” but if you already know what your truth is, it’s not costing you anything to say it. There’s no vulnerability in repeating a conclusion you’ve already reached. You’ve thought it, refined it, softened its edges - by the time it leaves your mouth it’s safe. The honesty that people praise today isn’t risky; it’s managerial. It keeps you in charge of your own revelation. You decide what to confess, when, and how much it flatters you. That’s not exposure - that’s curation.

Real honesty is the opposite. It’s when the words come faster than your certainty - when you hear yourself say something and feel the air change. It’s when you tremble at what you’ve just admitted because you didn’t plan to, and now it exists outside you. That’s the honesty that can change things, because it doesn’t serve the ego; it destabilises it. It’s not the truth you believe, it’s the truth that ambushes you. The kind that makes you think, I don’t know where that came from, but it’s true. We say we want honesty, but what we really want is self-control. We want to sound sincere without ever being caught off guard. But the only honesty worth anything is the kind that leaves you a little bit exposed, a little bit disoriented - the kind that makes you feel, for a second, unprotected from yourself.

I suppose in our quest for safety, where nothing spontaneous can happen, we have created the deepest sense of vulnerability. Creating our own form of loneliness. Let’s share a toast to what we’ve achieved, but of course, me in my room and you in yours.