The return of the real and The Zone of Interest

(Will contain spoilers/spoil things)

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Front Fanon, in addition to being an anti-colonial revolutionary and theorist, was also a psychiatrist. He recounts a case in Algeria in which a man exhibited a range of symptoms, including increasing domestic violence, that could not be explicated via classical psychoanalytic theory. Breaking with protocol, Fanon directly asked: “What do you do for a living?” As it turned out, the man was a police inspector, namely, a torturer, working for the French during the period of anti-colonial uprising.

We have all heard of the so-called banality of evil. What is more interesting is the evil that is not so easily banalised, so easily assimilated and routinised into life.

The Höss family live a good life. The system into which they have committed themselves works efficiently. We see the Germanic gestures to health in the form of fishing, hiking, riding, fresh air. To this end, the film is largely flat and two-dimensional, with little in the way of tension and release. At one level, it is a program rather than a sympony.

Herr und Frau Höss are depicted as an ordinary couple and set of parents in certain respects, but we should not be too quick to relegate them to say, Leonard Cohen’s diagnosis of Eichmann. Enough detail is given regarding their casual sadism, and the distorting effects of their ‘work’ to glimpse them as odious monsters. To the man with a hammer everything is a nail and thus it is also for the commandant of a death camp. The hypocritical yet Puritanical touches in the couple’s bedroom scenes furnish some other examples. Rudolph Höss rapes a woman, then comforts his daughter, and humours his wife.

There is a long history of philosophical and aesthetic debate about the possibility of giving representation to trauma, and to the Holocaust in particular, and the director of this film, Glazer, has opted to omit representation in the form of direct visual images. In the absence of images of the horror of Auschwitz, there is a risk that the film could have depicted nothing more than the bourgeois existence of a bureaucrat’s family intermingled with scenes of country life which amount to some protocols for hygiene and exercises in accounting.

What the film shows instead is the return of all that which cannot be assimilated into this otherwise well-ordered system. It shows it in the form of disruptions: scenes in block colours; a negativised angel of mercy scattering apples; the jarring sounds of death and brutality. Above all, it avoids the direct depiction of trauma, choosing instead to displace it onto objects (and sound, and music, and poetry, here, I include as object). Consider Frenzy by Alfred Hitchcock. The moment of the serial killer’s murder of a woman is not directly given, but instead the film displaces this traumatic event onto the otherwise innocuous street as the camera moves away from the crime scene. It is a return in the real, and not the return of the repressed (i.e. something that could be recuperated as desire). Think of Tony Soprano and his panic attacks, but think also that Tony Soprano was never in the business of murdering and mutilating civilians.

The viewer is, in a sense, implicated in The Zone of Interest’s ‘turning away’, but the characters themselves are not. Herr and Frau Höss cannot be grasped via a logic of repression, or bad faith. They know very well what they are doing, but they presume that they can get away with it unscathed. If there is any depiction of self-deception in the film, it belongs to the mother of Madame Höss, who is clearly anti-Semitic in the abstract but who also recoils to see the logical conclusion of her beliefs enacted concretely. She turns away and takes flight, but not, the director tells us, for reasons of conscience. When I say that the operative logic here is not the paradigm of repression, it is definitely not in any way to suggest some form of madness is the culprit either.

In this case, the evil in which the film’s protganists are involved leaves them literally covered in its detritus, in the form of ash, bone, teeth and smoke. This return of the unassimilable leads to Höss consulting a doctor late in the film. Well-ordered murder, even in a fine country manor, is bad for one’s health. By the end of the film, Höss retches and dry heaves, but cannot alleviate himself of the object stuck within himself. The symbolised object, the one that can be effaced, given a plus or minus sign, is always at least minimally assimilated, but so much worse is the object that one cannot be rid of. This is the object petit a in Lacanian language, and this is the one that the murderers are stuck with at the end of the film, and it casts every other ‘banality’ of their existence – excited phone calls, celebratory drinks – into a completely different light. Höss is a bulmic of death and suffering, and one who cannot purge,

Let’s not forget that Auschwitz was the end product of a long process of ‘instrumental rationality’. The Shoah began on the Eastern front, wherein the most fanatically racist of SS volunteers would spend their days shooting captured and helpless civilians of all ages at point blank range. Notwithstanding the volunteers’ fervour, this activity proved to have ill-effects on all parties, and the death camps, with their mediation of murderer and murdered via checkpoints, walls, buttons, etc were a response of sorts to this problem. The killers still knew that they were killing, obviously, but there were certain screens allowing for the illusion of reduced subjective implication at each particular step.

In colonial Australia, we are no newcomers to genocide, but here colonial subjects are objects to be ‘managed’ more than eliminated or cleansed. We might think of the so-called ‘Intervention’ of 2007, supported by both major political parties, on the basis that it was for Indigenous people’s own good. There are no innocents, here, but relatively few genocidaires, and vanishingly few who are open about it.

Some may observe, quite correctly, that Glazer’s film centres the Germans and not the Jews, the perpetrators rather than victims. I suspect that this is the point. Nazi’s are already cinema’s most readily-available bad guys, and another movie depicting them as evil would be utterly redundant. Moreover, relative to virtually every other horrific catastrophe of the past 100 years, the Holocaust is well-documented and memorialised, which is not to say that anybody is done with it. What this movie demonstrates is that for all the instrumental rationality, for all of the relative marginality of the victims from within thei Nazi standpoint, the victims are nonetheless not eliminated. They return in the real, in the form of ash, and waste, and sickness that can never be dialecticised or abolished. Under Nazism, it was the Nazi who defined the Jew. It was not a question of the latter’s belief or practices. Conversely, whilst occupying a very different position, the Nazi comes also to be constituted by his or her Other. He carries it within him, irrespective of whether he knows it. The Nazi, too, has an unconscious, and the Nazi, too, is tormented in the real. I suspect this, and not the Nazi’s moral pungency, is the point of the film, and also the source of its discomfort for Zionists. (I am referring to the hysterical backlash to the director’s comments at the Oscars). One can utilise personal and social hygiene, as we see in Zone after the children bathe in the poisoned river, and after Höss perpetrates his rape. Like Lady MacBeth’s spot, things in the real cannot be washed off. The real is the impossible. It isn’t cleaned away, neither with water nor bulldozers.

Amidst the genocide of Palestinians, aided and abetted by many other nations, isn’t the Zionist wager that the ‘flower of youth’ of Israel can be deployed to sow propaganda, sexually assault and torture prisoners, maim and murder children, be indoctrinated in radically fascist and racist ideology, projecting every imaginary ugliness onto the figure of the Palestinian, and somehow return home from all this and go back to ‘normal’? That the rapists, murderers, professional liars and spectators finding jouissance in gore-porn will somehow re-integrate into well-ordered communities and families without symptoms, unscathed? Comparisons to 9/11 have been plentiful, even though support for war, much less genocide, was far more equivocal in the US than it is in Zionist Israel. Can a society overwhelmingly dedicated to reaping the benefits of genocide and ethnic cleansing truly be okay? Unscathed? This is the wager of the genocidaires. The early evidence suggests that they are terribly wrong, and Glazer’s film is a powerful articulation of this error.

The University Discourse, Revisited

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Recently, I heard the re-articulation of a thesis that I’d heard before, from someone whose work I know and respect. The university is all but dead, except for its function as a corporation, but nonetheless the discourse of the university proliferates as never before. Meanwhile, disillusioned academics are leaving the university to retrain as psychoanalysts.

I don’t disagree with these claims, but I’d like to suggest a reconsideration of Lacan’s notion of discourse, or language that constitutes a social link. The discourses can be read in a very expansive way, as social formations, and there’s nothing wrong with this reading, but in the first instance, I find it helpful to read them narrowly. By this I mean that the discourses, after Soler (in ‘Lacanian Affects’), can be read as bonds in the form of the couple. We are not dealing with monogamous couples: the master can have many slaves, the teacher can have many students, and so on.

In addition to the four discourses introduced by Lacan in the late 1960s (those of the Master, the University, the Hysteric and the Analyst) Lacan later introduced a fifth, pseudo-discourse, namely that of the Capitalist. It is a pseudo-discourse as the sorts of social bonds that arise from it are fleeting and ephemeral, the bonds between a buyer and seller, or perhaps those of a gig economy worker and an employer.

Looked at this way, the student-teacher relation that traditionally characterised the discourse of the University looks to have deteriorated in favour of a merchant-customer relationship, and is sometimes even explicitly articulated as such. The university is in the grip of the discourse of Capitalism. Without defending the University discourse, it used to produced bonds that were sometimes enduring. The discourse places knowledge (the S2) in the driver’s seat whilst addressing itself to a surplus, the students, depicted here as an excrescence, an excess, something outside of the system (hence being represented by the little a). The function of the discourse is essentially assimilatory. Those outside the knowledge-framework come, by a process of discipline, to be assimilated within it, culminating in the production of the students as barred subjects.

What’s remarkable is that this complex process of assimilation occurs without overt coercion. The disciples willingly submit to a master-teacher, paying homage for a number of years, and ultimately becoming master-teachers in their own right, with their own coterie of disciples. This model of university life was common in Europe (and elsewhere) until relatively recently. It is likely that Lacan himself had considerable experience with it.

Again, without defending this discourse, it isn’t entirely sinister. The bonds created within it can be kind, and rational arguments can be made for certain professions – surgeons, for example – to have submitted candidates to a rigorous educative process before allowing them free reign as practitioners. The decline of the university is a decline of its discourse and coincides with the ascendancy of the capitalist.

I’m not sure, from a psychoanalytic perspective, whether the discourse of the University is pre-eminent today. I think that we would need to disentangle the University from the Capitalist, and ‘science’ from ‘tech’ (i.e. as given in the form of the lathouse) to answer the question. It is true that the devices that we carry around almost ubiquitously produce knowledge, in the form of data, but I’m not sure that this knowledge is the scientific ‘knowledge’ that animates the discourse of the University. First, once you turn a gaze upon a subject, there is of course surveillance and discipline and the usual Foucauldian themes, but above all there is jouissance and anxiety, whatever the units of data being produced. The gaze is a drive-object, and as such its proximity always produces anxiety and jouissance. Do not be fooled by readings of Lacan that claim that capitalism hijacks the desires of subjects. Capitalism does not hijack desire but rather operates at the level of demand, which is always, like the Law, a ‘double-pivot’ concept, pointing both to the drive and to love. Capitalism is anti-desire. I write this after Shrove Tuesday; capitalism has no Lenten renunciations or pauses.

Second, when it comes to the data-knowledge generated by devices, the university barely knows what to do with it. AI is a mess, and it becomes progressively stupider with each human interaction. The devices generate what is quantifiable rather than what is important, and thus the technological gaze is one in which there is an inbuilt castration, albeit, a castration that is disavowed in the discourse of Capitalism. Science emphasises data as use-value, whereas capitalism takes it from the perspective of exchange-value, even if the underlying use-value is pure junk.

Notwithstanding the foregoing discussion, what I would like to propose here is that Lacan’s formulation of the University discourse seems to me to be aimed not at hapless academics and their students, but at analysts and their institutions. This is because, institutionally speaking, psychoanalysts are often – perhaps mostly – stuck in the University discourse. When the primary criteria for admission to a psychoanalytic school are the applicant’s ability to assimilate the ‘house style’ of speech and writing, pay homage to selected masters, and exemplify their positive transference to the institution, it is undeniable that we are dealing with a University discourse.

Rather than opine about specific institutions, I would rather ask the more abstract question: how would we know whether or not a given analytic school was merely disciplining ‘students’ university-style? One response is to consider what becomes of the little, unassimilated objects a of the discourse. Are they simply assimilated, or does the school itself change to accommodate them without their complete assimilation as precondition? If the latter obtains, the analytic school may not yet be reducible to a university function.

These questions may be tedious, but they’ve occurred to me recently in the context of psychoanalyst’s forays into political polemic, and in terms of all that which functions as excess for institutions, as a blindspot. If this were a documentary, and not a mere blog post, this is where a voiceover from Raoul Peck who appear, intonting: ‘We need to talk about something’.

In Lacanian institutions, mostly, at least, colonialism is a blindspot par excellence. That it finds no rigorous discussion within most Lacanian schools is all the more puzzling in that it was not a blindspot for Lacan himself. He made passing references to colonialism throughout his teaching. His daughter, Judith, was arrested for pro-Algerian activism in the 1960s, a period in which peaceful protesters were being hauled lifeless from the River Seine. The dead would be found with their hands tied or cuffed, indicating the intervention of police and fascists, if this isn’t tautology. This is all in the background of 1960s Paris during its great intellectual blossoming. Lacan and Fanon likely had a passing acquaintance with each other’s work. One of Lacan’s colleagues, Octave Mannoni, dedicated an entire book to the question of psychoanalysis and its relation to colonialism. One of Lacan’s closest associates, one Solange Faladé, was a senior analyst of African background. She wrote a work on Apartheid South Africa, and was a figure of institutional importance prior to a split with (or purge by) Jacques-Alain Miller. Colonialism was therefore an element of discourse within Lacan’s own lifetime, and only subsequently disappeared to the point where it’s practically disappeared from many contemporary psychoanalytic discussions. (There are some notable exceptions). I cannot myself say for sure what might have intervened in the meantime to cause its disappearance, but the perpetuation of institutional analysis via the University discourse is one plausible hypothesis.

Again, speaking strictly hypothetically, what would happen if an institution’s most senior figures started uttering delusional or nonsensical statements, divorced from any non-imaginary referent? If, for instance, a school claimed that the present time is governed by the universal ideology of egalitarianism? A properly analytic school, it seems to me, would at the very least allow for some counter-claims. A school mired in university discourse – Lacan himself noted that this was the discourse appropriate to the USSR and Stalinism – would simply have candidates repeat the nonsense.

I write this thinking of the academics retreating from their university wastelands into the supposedly greener pastures of analysis. Here, too, there is disillusion. For those who come to take psychoanalysis seriously, things are often like a love affair. We must ask what comes after the honeymoon. Large swathes of clinically-oriented Lacanian psychoanalysis have used the University discourse to foreclose or dismiss Lacan’s proximity to colonialism, not to mention his longstanding interest in Marx and in dialectics. Racism, homophobia, sexism and anti-trans bigotry remain ongoing themes among Lacanian analysts and their instutions. There are scandals involving rape, and bullying. The lack of epistemic humility, or even basic curiosity belongs in the category of hubris, with some of the most insular and ignorant people in the world making sweeping generalisations as if to unconsciously produce evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is a field sometimes populated with moral cowards and conformists, symbolically rewarded for their silent complicity. At a time when so many clinical psychoanalysts are literally supporting an ethno-supremacist genocide, their sadistic jouissance and imaginary paranoias on full public display, embracing the nihilism of liberal cynicism not just as personal idiosyncrasy but in the name of psychoanalysis, it is essential to go against and beyond the institutional gatekeepers. We need a return to Lacan.

The Base-Superstructure Homology in Psychoanalysis

The following was excerpted from a response to a case presentation with the Lacan Circle of Australia, on 11th March, 2023:

Woke in Fright

Since 2017, prominent Lacanian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic schools have made an explicit  turn towards a politically reactionary version of liberalism. In this milieu, political party involvement is viewed with suspicion, or as pathologically symptomatic, and there is a sweeping equivalence between left and right that permits its authors to deploy terms such as ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ or ‘LePeno-Trotskyisme’. In this context, unsurprisingly, the same analysts denounce ‘wokeism’, segregation and identity politics as one of the principal evils of these troubled times.

Solitude, poetry, and herd psychoanalysis

Apparently, in about 3-4 months, the psychoanalytic group of which I am a member will feature a debate or discussion on the topic of Jacques-Alain Miller and his followers’ contributions to Lacanian discourse: the ‘One-all-alone’, the real unconscious, the ‘autism’ of jouissance, generalised foreclosure, the limits of meaning, the non-existence of the Other, the non-existence of symbolic paternity in particular, etc. Without dismissing JAM’s contributions in toto, I’m not likely to be on the pro-JAM side of the aisle. The practical effects of JAM’s positions are not entirely benign. They include racism, homophobia and transphobia, a blindness to colonialism, paranoia as an institutional imperative, and the abolition of the Freudian unconscious, as well as sublimation. I’ll turn to some of these another time.

The Treachery of Images

The scene was the mass uprising of students and workers across France in 1968. Famously, Lacan engaged with some of the students involved in the attempt at revolution. Two IPA analysts, writing under a pseudonym, denounced the students as would-be Stalinists acting out their infantile Oedipal problems. The IPA analysts, however, were not merely expressing a political opinion, but explicitly articulated their position in terms of the psychoanalytic jargon of their school, lending it a veneer of ‘scientific’ authority. It is a good example of University discourse, in other words, in that it places (psychoanalytic) knowledge at the centre of what in fact is a thinly-veiled partisan political intervention. (This great piece by Rabaté discusses the episode at length).

On Psychoanalytic Training

The three pillars of psychoanalytic training – a presentation to the Lacan Circle of Australia, February 2022

The discussion below was given to an audience in Melbourne, and elsewhere (via Zoom), and whilst it has specific reference to local developments in Melbourne involving the Lacan Circle of Australia, perhaps it might be of broader interest.

Brief notes after a conference on general madness and our times

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If one were to critique the wild sociopolitical diagnoses of certain Lacanians, it sounds as if one is critiquing a straw man: We are leaving the age of the father. The efficacy of the entire symbolic order is in question, including metaphor and metonymy. Subjects now are without lineage, and there are only ‘parents-all-alone, children-all-alone’. The problem is that these are all either direct quotes, or accurate paraphrases. The social theories of the analysts are themselves made of straw, before one even gets to the critique of such theories.

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The Name-of-the-Father is only operative if installed via ‘tradition’, according to Lacan, and since all that is solid melts, etc, the Name-of-the-Father is conceptually defunct. Except that this understanding of ‘tradition’ is temporal rather than structural, and suggests that any change in a society would produce foreclosure. Instead, in structural terms, ‘tradition’ can be defined as that which has a place in the symbolic order, that which can be registered in the field of the Other. At the level of institutions (but not necessarily bodies) it’s the accretion of signifiers, not just a chronology.

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The idiotic, ‘structuralist’ Lacan who is used as a foil to the clever, ‘late’ Lacan is another example of a straw man. The former paradigm, whatever its faults and limitations, never claimed that one could endlessly signify away one’s jouissance, or that matters of the body were matters of indifference. Lacan did imagine, briefly, that structuralism might furnish psychoanalysis with scientific foundations, but he changed his mind.

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The ‘late’ teaching of Lacan is ambivalent in its tone toward psychoanalysis, and many-sided in its themes and positions. To give an exegesis of it is then to either stitch together an ill-fitting assemblage that somehow totalises everything – which nobody, to my knowledge, has ever done – or to subtract elements from the teaching in order to produce a consistency. If one is left with the latter, then we are in the realm of curatorial choices, which necessarily reflect the priorities and prejudices of the curator. The hyper-individualistic Lacan, the Lacan who wants to excavate meaning, are curatorial constructions as much, if not more than they are definitive summaries of the late seminars and writings. Yes, there are gestures to the limits of sense, but there are also gestures to the overdetermination of art and poetry. Poetry does not only evacuate meaning; it is also meaning squared.

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In these decadent times, it is the fathers more than the children who suffer from Oedipal anxieties. This isn’t to say that the children are doing well.

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It is true that one can make an analogy between (neurotic) fantasy and (psychotic) delusion and conclude that everyone is mad. Why not?

As a hypothesis, however, what the analytic procedure does with the fantasy is different to the delusion.

In fantasy, one begins with:

Contingency/Trauma → Fantasy

In analytic procedure, this eventually becomes:

Contingency/Trauma → Interpretation/Construction 1→ Interpretation/Construction 2  → etc → Fantasy

See Freud’s paper, ‘A child is being beaten’, for more specific examples of this. 

In delusion, at least, in my opinion, the links between elements will resist construction. In the place of each construction, there will instead be an ellipsis:

Contingency/Trauma → … → Delusion

There are different views on what can be done with this ellipsis, but it remains an ellipsis all the same. Maybe some will find this distinction a little too cute.

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We  can probably abandon any hope of finding harmony, stability, compatibility in a partner, etc, and, at most, aim for relatively liveable forms of disharmony, instability, incompatiblity. Making friends with one’s madness, if one can find a friendly version of it.

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This is not my idea, but Ivan Karamazov’s maxim that if there is no god, then everything is permitted is, in essence a Christian (rather than atheist) slogan. By the same taken, the teenager who says that ‘When my parents are out of town, everything is permitted’ is not exactly demonstrating proof of independence. This is worth keeping in mind whenever listening to claims about a ‘mad’ society that is supposedly beyond the Law, lineage, paternity, metaphor, etc. 

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It is obvious that psychoanalytic theory and praxis requires, urgently, an analysis of its own social conditions, and equally obvious that it lacks the means for any such analysis. Hence, the wild sociological generalisations found above when analysts attempt to make proclamations about the ‘subjectivity of the times’. Moreover, the same analysts who I’m sure are perfectly adept at acknowledging their own subjective positions in the clinic seem blithely unaware that, in social matters, there is no view from nowhere, no omniscient third-person perspective. Get rid of this disavowal and one would also get rid of a good deal of bad theorising, boomerism and pearl-clutching. Then there is the question of the material conditions of psychoanalysis itself. If the analyst qua theorist is geriatric, wealthy, largely treats less established analysts, and never children or patients in and out of psychitric hospitals, they are likely no more qualified to opine on psychosis and society than any layperson.

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In one sense, the presentation of clinical cases and testimonies of the pass provide endless research, because each always deals with singularity, endlessly. In another sense, however, if the cases and testimonies that are presented never call existing theory into question – not by direct critique necessarily, but merely by pointing to a lack here or there – then the presentations start to look like an ideological exercise, mimesis of a house style. Or, at the very least, they constitute a very limited mode of ‘research’, at best something like Kuhn’s ‘normal science’; at worst, a discourse of the university with a disavowal of the transferential relations at stake therein. Beyond all of the expansive readings of the university discourse, it comes down to a relation of discipline through discipleship.

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‘In Seminar VII, the real is far from the symbolic’. At the level of the heterogeneity of the respective registers, yes. But in their structural relations, doesn’t everything in Seminar VII point to their intimacy?

As Nestor Braunstein puts it in his book on jouissance, one does not need to establish an order of primacy between jouissance and the word. Each implies the other. The point of inaccessibility, das Ding, is called into being by the symbolic order.

Lacanian Dialectice and the Poetics of Interpretation

The following was presentation at the Lacan Circle of Australia’s Cartel Presentation Day on 13/11/21. The theme of the cartel was Lacan’s Seminar XXIV.

CBT is Aristotle with Facebook brain – A note on paranoia as an epistemic ideal

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In Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) discourse is reduced to data, and this data is further submitted to the Aristotlesque requirement of non-contradiction, albeit, without any Aristotelian depth of intellect.

Consequently, cognitivism and CBT affirm the existence of an unconscious, but this unconscious is entirely continuous with the conscious. It’s more of the same, more or less. Contrast this with the Freudo-Lacanian unconscious, which is disruptive, punctual, discontinuous, and structurally incapable of completion.

It’s no coincidence that CBT first arose when cognitivism was displacing the increasingly-discredited behaviourism from the laboratory (though not yet the clinic, in the Anglosphere at least). This was the age of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance, in which, like good Aristotelians, the subject abhors contradiction. Since contemporary CBT reaffirms a data-based, continuous unconscious, Festinger’s ideas fester still. Show the subject that his suffering arises from the faulty conviction that he always bungles his relationships/work/studies – show him the contrary evidence, the errors in his logic – and he will be obliged, by way of contradiction, to renounce his conviction, and thereby eliminate his suffering.

It was not until the era of neoliberalism that these Aristotelian outtakes reigned supreme over the clinic, for reasons that I have attempted to explicate elsewhere, but which are largely economic and biopolitical in character.

At the heart of the adventures of Freud and Lacan is the proposition that, in at least a thousand different ways, human subjects, divided as they are, exist in permanent, structural contradiction. There are so many examples of this in the centuries that preceded them that I would say that Freud and Lacan merely articulated and formalised, rather than discovered this fact. My experience is that it is common knowledge amongst the uneducated, and that perhaps the educated have some catching-up to do.

The clinical work of psychoanalysis cannot, on this basis, be oriented toward either completeness or consistency, if one means by this the overcoming of contradiction. Repression, disavowal, denial, foreclosure, the law of the exception, the law of the not-all are but some of the psychoanalytically-articulated responses to contradiction. After Gödel,he who trades consistency for completeness deserves neither.

But let us suppose that the psychoanalytic premises are wrong, and that the cognitivists are really as evidence-based as they say. In principle, the latter would be able to work with a subject to produce an image of perfect consistency, with the offending data eliminated. The outcome would resemble nothing so much as the most brittle paranoid delusion. The subject attains an image of coherence with all that is unassimilated sent packing, much line a refugee ship at Australia’s borders. This is the best case scenario for treatment by CBT principles, and we need only look at the outcome of excessive Facebook consumption to see what befalls those who cannot live in contradiction.