looks like

When I was taking a photograph from Green's of the buildings toward Atlanta, this guy, homeless perhaps, walks up to me and tells me where I can find a better view. He didn't ask for money. He was articulate and knowledgeable. I doubt that I'm going into the building he suggested and trying out the view: I don't like being confronted by strangers and people with badges. I'm a low risk person. Still I've been known to take risks. 

The thing is, I wouldn't suspect someone who looks like this to be helpful - much less engaging. But there you have it. I say this in conjunction with how people respond to paintings, especially portraits (which might be photos as well). The other day I saw a picture of Walker Percy and someone had captioned it "a face that knew despair." My immediate thought was, "you say this because you know something of Percy's life and that the Moviegoer is composed around the theme of despair." I don't know if a group of 50 viewing dust jacket photos and painted portraits would arrive at this same conclusion or the same conclusions (49 percent say despair 30 percent say dyspepsia 21 percent say contentment, or some like as that). Rembrandt's Man with a Magnifying Glass elicits similar captions. All about what people think they see in a face. 

I question whether what we learn from these captions and assertions is anything about the subject; instead I think we learn something of the viewer. Why do they make the judgment they do? What draws them to the particular emotion or spiritual state they claim to see? In the case of Percy, is this a romanticization of despair? I know that I certainly care more about faces that evince despair - If I can say that about them (even though my evincing is unjustified). I associate melancholy with creativity and despair with Kierkegaard (and Percy) and an honesty about existence. 

I mused earlier about how clouded our idea of God is with our projections. Here I muse that even our view of other people is clouded by projections. In turn, they don't really know us. What a world where at every corner we are faced with illusion more than fact. I say Illusion not in the sense of immateriality - you (my imagined reader) and I are hard, tangible objects, as biologically present as anything else in the universe. Instead I think Lacan's categories of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are helpful here. The world we construct is symbolic and this world is constructed over against the real. The real at every step threatens to overwhelm the symbolic. Individuals have problems where they cannot fit themselves into the symbolic, so they construct  an imaginary relation with an Other - another person, the name of the father (which is a symbolic conceit - not some name of an actual father - but the symbolic force of the office of father). So we finesse our way through life in a fantasy - a fantasy where we "please" the other and are given a symbolic place - a place secured against the devastations of the real.

Typically the symbolic is sorted out of the real. The real is all there is - or at least in relation to the individual's perspective. And that relation is like this: think of "all there is" as a library of unmarked uncataloged books. The infant is distressed at such a thing but adults come along and open these books and show how to understand, label and catalog the contents. As the individual leaves off being an infant she begins to catalog some volumes for herself. Traumas occur when new volumes arrive than can be cataloged - previously cataloged volumes are mis-shelved or have their markings removed. At some point an individual may ask herself, "where am I in this symbolic world? Is this world created by me or for me by others? Are the books adults cataloged for me actually cataloged correctly? What is "correct"?" and so on.

What Lacan deals with is how the subject exists (and here Jung says something very similar, which may seem curious), and his claim is that the subject exists as an object of fantasy. The ego itself is a fantasmic or imaginary construction (made for others, especially The Other) and a source of frustration (others don't appreciate how we've constructed ourselves - and we did it to please them, those others, The Other - why is mom angry at me? why is God angry at me?). Hence therapies that attempt to bolster or cure the ego fail - they don't arrive at the issue of the individual, which is located at the border of symbolic and real, and identified as a symptom thriving on joissance powered by fantasy.

And it is in this area of fantasy that therapy happens. (I'm bypassing the role of the signifier here: suffice it that  in terms of therapy, focusing solely on the signifier leaves things in the realm of the imaginary. Lacan even indicates that suggestions from the therapist only serve to substitute one signifier for another - the symptom remains in place) The goal is to understand what your fantasy is in the first place. Since the fantasy (not your daydreams or something fantasized, necessarily) is mostly unconscious (we might say, it's the life we've lived to please the other, The Other, any other - look I did this for you, why don't you understand?) the fantasy must be constructed from the content of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, bungled actions - like a puzzle. The goal is to see yourself as an actor in your own drama (one might say, see where you are in your own library) and begin to act with some flexibility or introduce flexibility into the fantasy, the life drama. It is this act of acting in the symbolic, not the imaginary, that loosens the symptom's hold on joissance and unbottons the symptom, draining out the joissance, the anger, what ever is in there. Life becomes more livable - or one is able to live with the facts of one's life.