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Today, I made this, and I’m releasing it only to those of you who have been generous enough to give me your time, attention, and some money to help me offset the costs of making Speaking Body.

It’s a short video where I try to explain something that makes psychoanalysis different from most forms of psychotherapy.

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This episode of the podcast is something I recorded several weeks back, and it was going to be the last installment in a series of video podcasts that I put out when I launched this season of the Speaking Body Podcast. I never released it because I had to make a lot of edits that made the video look a little too cut up (i.e., there were way…

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The Lead

In the time between my last dispatch and this one, summer has moved along. There have been more long days, tons of sun, lots of heat; my garden has produced massive zucchinis (pictured above), and I’ve continued to indulge in my summertime ritual of moving and thinking more slowly than I do at other times of the year. I’ve also been immersing myself in the work of Stephen Batchelor, reading his writings, watching YouTube videos of him giving talks1, and listening to podcasts in which various people have interviewed him.

At this moment, I’m sitting in a cafe drinking an iced Americano. I don’t have anyone with me, so I’ve chosen to sit at the counter. My laptop is open in front of me, and the screen shows the Safari web browser with several tabs open. One of those tabs is the Substack editor where I’m typing these words. The tab immediately to the right displays the prior dispatch I sent out and (re)read before starting to type these words. 2

As I read what I sent two weeks back, something that really stood out to me was this:

Batchelor formulates a secular form of Buddhism stripped of metaphysics and ontology.

Another way to state what I was driving at there would be to say,

Batchelor reformulates Buddhism as an ethical practice rather than a metaphysical or ontological system.

This continues to feel very important to me as I delve further into Batchelor’s formulation of an ethics informed by secular Buddhism. However, I also realized that in the prior dispatch, I did not elaborate on this point enough.

• What does it mean to use Buddhist ideas and principles as an ethic?

• How might an ethic informed by secular Buddhism compare to one informed by psychoanalysis?

• Why should we consider stripping Buddhism or psychoanalysis of metaphysics and ontology?

These (and other questions along these lines) are the questions I did not spend enough time grappling with in my prior dispatch, and they are the questions I’d like to spend time thinking and writing about today.

The Nut Graft

Let’s start by thinking through three things and how they relate to psychoanalysis and secular Buddhism.

Metaphysics:

Two Lacanian aphorisms that I associate with the concept of metaphysics come from the Écrits, where Lacan writes “There is no metalanguage that can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other.”3 What each of these suggests to me is that there is no universal authority that can provide subjects with a way of life guaranteed to work. There is no final Truth (with a capital T) that a person can use as a north star to ensure they arrive at the place they are meant to reach. All of this feeds into another Lacanian idea: “There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same.”4

I see this as relating to metaphysics because (I think) metaphysical systems typically claim to describe reality from a standpoint outside the conditions they describe. The Lacanian position, as I understand it, is that it is not possible to take up a position outside of the conditions of our own experience.5

I’ve spoken about this with other non-Lacanian people, sometimes with philosophy graduate students who are particularly interested in metaphysics. They will sometimes say something along the lines of, “Even if we only have a subjective experience, you have to admit that there is an objective reality (a metaphysical Truth) outside of that subjective experience!”

Whether there is an objective reality isn’t something I claim to know. My point is simply that whatever reality may be, I never encounter it objectively. I only ever encounter it through my own (subjective) experience.

I think Batchelor argues that many people understand Buddhism as a metaphysical system capable of revealing the ultimate nature of reality that they can access through intense meditation, contemplation of Zen koans, or other spiritual practices. Still, he does not want to see Buddhism that way. Instead, Batchelor sees Buddhism as an ethics.

This is fascinating to me because I think some people can see psychoanalysis (psychoanalytic theory/ortodoxy) as a kind of metalanguage, an Other of the Other, as something that can offer access to a metaphysical Truth. However, this is not how I see psychoanalysis! I see psychoanalysis the way Batchelor sees Buddhism, as a set of ethical practices —practices available to ordinary people— that can change people’s relationships to what Buddhists call suffering (dukkha) and what I’d call their mode of jouissance, symptomatic repetition, and fantasy structures.

To be clear: Whether there is ultimately a metaphysical Truth is an interesting philosophical question! I don’t think that thinking about this or attempting to answer this question is a waste of time, and I don’t think Lacan or Batchelor would see it as a waste of time either. (Lacan would probably be interested in what kind of jouissance a subject derives from trying to answer this question.) What strikes me is that both Lacan and Batchelor are saying someting remarkably similar about their respective practices —in both instances, what matters is not fidelity to a metaphysical belief or truth claim, but cultivating a different way of responding to the reality one actually experiences.

Ontology:

I see ontology as a subset of metaphysics, which is concerned with asking the question of what exists.

Does the self exist? Does God exist? Does the unconscious exist? Does the Dharma exist? Does the Phallus exist? Does time exist? Does the signifier exist? Do dreams exist? Is emptiness something that exists? Does the Other exist? Does human nature exist? Does karma exist? Does marriage exist? Does the Name-of-the-Father exist? So on and so forth.

I realize the list above is long, probably unnecessarily long, because you got the point after two or three examples. While editing this, I almost made it shorter, but decided to keep it long because I thought it was actually a good way to demonstrate the endless, repetitive metonymic questioning that ontology opens the door to. It is that kind of questioning that can go on forever.6

While I don’t believe there is anything evil or fundamentally wrong with asking questions about what does and does not exist, what it means for something to exist, how X exists if it does exist, or with pondering one question like this, then the next, on and on, forever and ever. What I’m interested in doing is revealing something about what happens in this questioning and changing the way people relate to that process. To do this, I’m going to rely on something I read in Batchelor’s book After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for the Secular Age, where Batchelor talks about the Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow.

The Buddha tells the story of a man who has been struck by a poisoned arrow and lies bleeding to death on the ground. Before allowing his friends to bring a doctor to remove the arrow, the man insists on knowing the name of the person who shot it, the place where he lives, the complexion of his skin, and so forth, down to such absurd details as the kind of feathers on the arrow shaft: “whether those of a vulture or a crow or a hawk or a peacock or a stork.

My reading of what Batchelor is doing here is that he is trying to show how, when someone is suffering, they can become overly interested in theoretical questions about suffering and its causes. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with these questions, but pondering them can become a problem if it prevents a person from actually doing things (i.e., engaging in practices) that could help them by changing their relationship to their symptomatic ways of living their lives.

During my time as a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, I’ve had several people come to me for psychoanalysis who have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Lacan’s teaching. I’ve witnessed some of these people spend a lot of time talking about what they are doing symptomatically in very theoretical terms, by which I mean they use their experience to demonstrate and understand the theory they have been reading. They ponder what they are going through by pairing it with a psychoanalytic concept, and then the next time I see them, they have moved on to another concept. They ask questions like, “Is this my mode of jouissance?” or “Is this the sinthome, the symptomatic remainder that I need to learn how to enjoy?” There is nothing wrong with those questions, but I believe they are usually a defense against encountering the real of the symptom.

When this happens, I will think that a kind of ontological thinking, in and of itself, has become symptomatic. I consider the possibility that there is a kind of jouissance (ironic satisfaction) in this kind of endless theorizing. In general, one thing I will do is ask a question along the lines of, “I can see you know the theory; that’s abundantly clear to me. But what I’d like to hear more about is what is happening to you when you…” This is my attempt to try to privilege subjective experience over demonstrations of theoretical mastery. Sometimes, I might be more direct and say something like, “I’m not going to discuss theory with you. Please say more about why you bothered to come here today.” Or perhaps, “I think you might be using theory as a defense so that you don’t need to talk about your symptom.”7 Regardless of the style of the intervention I use, I am generally trying to get past metaphysical and ontological modes and move more toward what I would consider the radical and ethical aspect of psychoanalysis.

Ethics:

In After Buddhism and the other writings of Batchelor that I’ve been reading, he consistently proposes that one way to think about suffering is to see it as a kind of reaction to our conditions. I’d go so far as to say that he often describes this reactivity as a repetitive reaction, which has obvious parallels to symptomatic repetition compulsions.

Another point in Batchlor’s work is that we can’t completely free ourselves from reactivity. This strikes me as similar to the Lacanian idea that we will always be symptomatic. However, I think it is interesting to consider the idea that an experience of practices—doing something consistently—might change how a person relates to the suffering they experience, relative to their symptomatic representations.

In After Buddhism, shortly after the section I quoted above, Batchelor says this explicitly when he writes,

The purpose of the Buddha’s teaching is not to resolve doubts about the nature of “reality” by providing answers to such conundrums but to offer a practice that will remove the “arrow” of reactivity, thereby restoring practitioners’ health and enabling them to flourish here on earth.

It seems to me that what Batchelor says about Buddhism could also be said of psychoanalysis.

Perhaps the most succinct way to formulate what Batchelor is doing here is to pose it as a few questions:

• What if we use Buddhism as a set of principles that shape how people live their day-to-day lives, rather than as a system that explains what reality ultimately is?

• What happens if we don’t approach Buddhism in a scholastic/adademic way that is available only to those who can dedicate an enormous amount of time and energy to studying it, and see it as a set of ideas that normal people can make use of in their normal lives?

Incidentally, these are the kinds of questions I often ponder about psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and as an embodied practice.

The Kicker

As I wrap up this dispatch, I find myself thinking of something that Freud wrote at the very end of Studies in Hysteria.

When I have promised my patients help or improvement by means of a cathartic treatment I have often been faced by this objection: ‘Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?’ And I have been able to make this reply: ‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.’8

When I read Freud’s words right now, I sense a huge similarity between what he is expressing and what I’m discovering in the writing of Batchelor: There is no cure for being human, for being what Lacanians call a divided subject or speaking body. Batchelor frequently remarks that Buddhism grew out of an encounter with the fact that all human beings are subject to birth, sickness, and death, and experience the diminishment of their bodies and minds as they age.

While I could be wrong about this, I believe that even though we can’t escape pain and suffering, we can engage in practices that can change the way we relate to our conditions and the suffering inherent within those conditions.

Today I’d like to introduce you to a new project within Speaking Body: a podcast called Artificial Analysis.

It grew out of a realization that I think many psychoanalysts will soon have to grapple with: AI is no longer something happening “out there.” It has already begun to enter the analytic situation.

Rather than trying to cover every aspect of AI, each episode will be organized around two orienting questions:

• How might the continued use (and growth of use) of AI affect the clinical practice of psychoanalysis?

• How might the continued use (and growth of use) of AI affect the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge?

These questions will serve as the thread running through the podcast.

My expectation is that each conversation will wander into unexpected territory, but I’d like to keep returning to these two concerns as a way of orienting the discussion.

In this pilot episode, I describe two surprising clinical encounters in which analysands shared details of their psychoanalytic sessions with large language models (ChatGPT and Claude). The models responded using Lacanian concepts, and the analysands then brought those AI-generated responses back into their sessions with me.

I also talk about discussing these experiences with trusted friends and colleagues at a Knotting Seminar, where they sparked hours of discussion about both the possibilities and the risks that AI may introduce into psychoanalytic work.

What the project is and what it is not:

Artificial Analysis isn’t a podcast about predicting the future. It’s a podcast about thinking carefully about a future that has already begun.

I’m not looking for authoritative pronouncements about what AI will or won’t do. Instead, I hope to create a space where analysts, scholars, and other thoughtful people can engage in considered speculation about where these developments might lead, and how psychoanalysis might respond.

My hope is that this first episode raises more questions than it answers—and that you’ll want to hear more as these two questions move us into our next episode.

My plan is to release a new episode about once a month. If inspiration (and time!) allow, there may occasionally be more.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think. If this episode raises questions, criticisms, concerns, or possibilities that I haven’t considered, I hope you’ll get in touch. And if there are topics you’d like me to explore or people you’d like me to interview, I’d love to hear those suggestions too.

Table of Contents

00:00 A Patient Uses ChatGPT

01:37 Claude and Lacanian Concepts

02:43 Conference Sparks Bigger Idea

04:59 Launching Artificial Analysis

05:28 Two Guiding Questions

07:24 Subscribe and Get in Touch

08:00 Closing Goodbye

This is an audio version of the prior dispatch I sent out yesterday.

(I thought I wasn't going to make this into a podcast, but today I realized I wanted to…So… Yeah… Here it is.)

If you think I should keep making both written and audio versions of this stuff, please let me know!

-N

The Lead

For most of my life, the academic calendar has organized my life. It started in elementary school, continued through middle school and high school, then through community college, a bachelor’s program, and finally graduate school. After earning my undergrad, I became a high school teacher, and after I eventually finished grad school, I became a university professor, which prolonged the prominence and influence of the academic calendar well into my adult life.

As a teacher and a professor, I would spend the academic year giving a set of preoccupations the majority of my available thinking space. These preoccupations were networks of ideas I had been actively refining via researching and teaching. The kinds of things that were on the “front burner” of my mental stove. This work, more often than not, left me feeling like I had learned interesting things. However, I also felt a cognitive version of what I felt like physically after doing a very long run: spent, worn out, in need of some recovery time.

So, when the long summer break arrived, I would work less, indulge in pleasure reading and watching films, read widely, and generally let my mind wander, spending time with ideas (usually new ones) that I did not have the time or energy to explore during the more structured academic year.

Today, I’m not a student or an academic. Be that as it may, summer is still a time when I slow down the pace of my work and go into more of a research and reflection mode, when I try to suss out what direction(s) I’d like to devote my time and attention to next.1

I’ve been in my summer mode for a few weeks now. I’ve been thinking about things and considering ideas at a much slower pace, and I’ve come across some really interesting things that are (mostly) new to me. While this new stuff isn't the psychoanalytic ideas I like to think about, I’ve found that putting it in conversation with familiar psychoanalytic ideas is surprising and fascinating.

The Nut Graft

One of the things I’ve been spending time exploring is the writings of the secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor, whom I discovered via an episode of the Ezra Klein show (on the NYTimes website and on YouTube).2

As I explored more of Batchelor’s writing, I was very struck by how he consistently described his Buddhist practices as an ethics of uncertainty that is grounded in engaging with and then making use of not knowing things about ourselves, our minds, our desires, our day-to-day subjective experiences, and so on. The more I read Batchelor, the more I realized that he was describing how not knowing about ourselves and others makes us more curious.

After hearing this interview, I read the book After Buddhism (Amazon, Bookshop), where Batchelor formulates a secular form of Buddhism stripped of metaphysics and ontology.

After listening to the Ezra Klein interview, reading this book, and watching more of Batchelor talking in YouTube videos, I noticed how he points out that when we feel certain, we are more likely to act in ways that tyrannically impose what we believe to be right on our own behavior and on the behavior of others. Batchelor also puts forward a compelling argument that a far more ethical way of acting in the world becomes available when a subject develops a capacity to resist the seductive affective feelings that accompany certainty. The ethics of Batchelor’s secular Buddhism are an ethics of not knowing and knowing that we don’t know. It is an ethic that takes what we assume to be true and questions it. It is a sustained gentle curiosity (as opposed to a rigid certainty) directed towards our subjective experience, others, and the world we share with others.

• The more curious we are, the more we slow down and become interested in what is happening within and around us.

• The more unsure we are about our preferences, the more interested we become in why we developed them, and the less likely we are to impose them on others.

• The less certain we are about what we know, the less we try to assert or prove it, and the more open we are to learning.

The Kicker

When I read Batchelor describing these practices, I found myself thinking that it sounded very similar to the practices I’ve tried to cultivate in my formation as a Lacanian psychoanalyst and the ideas that I’ve been trying to transmit to you via the Speaking Body podcasts and videos I’ve made.

I’m also in the very early stages of forming a new cartel to explore the intersection of Lacanian praxis and theology. My plan is to see what happens when I put this secular dharma alongside and in conversation with Lacanian praxis.

To do this, I’ll continue reading Batchelor and other Buddhist thinkers through my Lacanian lens, and I’ll share what I discover here by sending out a written account of what I’m learning every two weeks or so.3

Sundry Stuff

I suspect that the dispatches I send out about this will be:

• Short (although damn near every time I say I’m going to make things short, I end up not doing that and writing long stuff… So… Who knows).

• More like rough drafts than finished products.

• Organized like this dispatch has been organized, with a lead, nut graft, kicker, and sundry stuff sections.4 There will be a few footnotes too.5

Hey there folks,

Back in May of 2024, I started working as a member of what, in the Lacanian world, is called a cartel that was looking into The American Discourse…

I write those words, and I realize that I’m not sure how many of the people reading them will be familiar with the way Lacanians use the word “cartel,” so I’m going to go on a bit of an explanatory digression thing for a bit.

[Explanatory Material: Start]

A cartel is a small working group, typically composed of three to five members and a plus-one (plus-un). Introduced by Jacques Lacan in 1964, the cartel is one of the fundamental ways work is organized within Lacanian psychoanalytic schools.

Unlike a traditional class or reading group, a cartel is not centered on the transmission of knowledge from an expert to students. Rather, each participant develops a particular question or area of inquiry, using the cartel as a space for discussion, study, and elaboration. The role of the plus-one is not to teach or supervise, but to facilitate the work and help keep the group’s inquiry in motion.

The term cartel can be confusing for English speakers, who often associate it with criminal organizations or economic monopolies. Lacan used the word in its older sense: a voluntary association formed around a specific purpose. Participants work together while maintaining the singularity of their own questions and investigations.

Lacan developed the cartel to foster study and research while avoiding the hierarchies, identifications, and groupthink that can arise within institutions. The goal is not consensus, but the production of something unique by each participant.

[Explanatory Material: End]

Jumping back in

So, as I was saying, back in May 2024, I started working on a cartel that was looking into The American Discourse. The question I was considering surprised most of the other people in the cartel: What can professional wrestling teach us about American Discourse today?

I’ve been working on three different texts during that time, and I thought it might be interesting to share one of them via a Speaking Body dispatch.

Below you’ll find a draft of one of the texts I’m still working on, which I feel is done enough to share. If you have any questions, comments, criticisms, or concerns, I hope you’ll let me know.

If this is interesting to you please let me know that as well, I may turn it into a podcast episode.

-N

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Introduction

A significant part of Lacan’s teaching discusses how the paternal function incorporates the subject into the symbolic order by connecting the subject’s desire to the castrating and limiting effects of the Law, thereby creating a lack that allows desire to emerge as a motivating force the subject can experience. In On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, Lacan establishes that the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier that is the foundation on which the symbolic order rests. When the Name-of-the-Father is inscribed within subjectivity, it enables the subject to operate within the symbolic network of meaning, and it produces a constitutive lack that makes desire possible.^[1] In Seminar III, Lacan demonstrates what happens when the Name-of-the-Father fails to be inscribed, and the subject must then find alternative ways to stabilize their relation to the symbolic and the real.^[2]

Jacques-Alain (following Lacan) has pointed out many times that a consistent and stable Name-of-the-Father, as a guarantor of the Law’s legitimate authority, has declined significantly, leading subjects to cobble together a pluralized, less stable set of Names-of-the-Father (plural), which can be used to tie their subjectivity together.^[3] In this text, I aim to show how shifts in American professional wrestling—from the more traditional “kayfabe” era, where there was a stable symbolic order, rules mattered, and the hero/villain binary was clear— to the post-kayfabe era, where authority is seen as corrupt and incompetent. I will also try to introduce a new concept, which I’m calling the No-of-the-Heel, as a symptomatic substitute that knots jouissance and desire within a stable subjective experience.

Nom du Père & Non du Père

Lacan associates the paternal function with the signifier Nom du Père, which has been translated into English as the Name-of-the-Father. However, I believe this translation misses a vital aspect of the pun Lacan is using. When spoken, Nom du Père sounds nearly identical to Non du Père, which would translate into English as the No-of-the-Father. Focusing on the Non du Père / No-of-the-Father aspect of Lacan’s wordplay has provoked me to consider: what the Father (i.e., paternal metaphor) might be prohibiting?^[4]

I say this because it seems to me that the prohibition against jouissance is not as simple as, “You can’t have any jouissance. No jouissance will be permitted at all!” My view is that the No-of-the-Father isn’t necessarily a complete prohibition on jouissance, but rather a restriction on experiencing it in public, where others must confront it. To put it another way, the No-of-the-Father isn’t a signifier of a total ban on jouissance; instead, it represents a limitation on how one can experience it.

This is reflected in Freud, who (I’m obviously summarizing a lot here) explains that civilization relies on a renunciation of the drive, which doesn’t eliminate the drive but transforms it. In this way, I believe Freud demonstrates that civilization is like a dam that redirects the flow of a river from a destructive rushing current into a more controlled flow that can be used for various purposes. Lacan goes further than Freud by insisting that jouissance is structurally excessive, always at risk of spilling beyond the boundaries set by civilization. However, in both Freud and Lacan, the paternal prohibition functions as a dam: not eliminating excessive jouissance but preventing its overflow from being experienced in public. To put this as succinctly as I can -in private, jouissance can be indulged; in public, its excess must be restrained.

This logic gave rise to fantasies (i.e., unconscious narrative structures acted out in symptomatic ways) of transgressing by secretly enjoying what was forbidden. The transgression was sweetened by “getting away with it,” by not getting caught and punished. I believe that the No-of-the-Father, which prohibited public displays of jouissance, and thus created the conditions where people could transgress and get away with their transgression by enjoying privately or secretly, ordered classical modernity and the social contracts (i.e., symbolic order) within the social structures of modernity. My claim in this text is that the No-of-the-Father does not order contemporary American discourse, and as a consequence, fantasies that heretofore ordered how people accessed their modes of jouissance have fundamentally changed as well.

This is not to say that contemporary American discourse is no longer ordered, or that an order is lacking! My claim is that the ordering function of the No-of-the-Father as a castrating agent of the Law/symbolic order has been replaced by a new kind of prohibition, which I will call the No-of-the-Heel and describe in detail below. However, before describing how the No-of-the-Heel functions, it would probably be helpful to orient the reader to a few signifiers, which are part of the parlance of professional wrestling.

The Logic of Wrestling:

The logic of professional wrestling has traditionally been a straightforward binary of a staged conflict between a hero and a villain. In wrestling terminology, the hero is called a “babyface,” and the villain is called a “heel.” Generally, the babyface is the character who fights with integrity and exemplifies noble submission to the symbolic by always following the rules. The babyface is also the character that the audience is meant to identify with emotionally. The heel, on the other hand, is the character who flagrantly cheats and breaks rules. The heel also shows open disdain for their opponent, the referees, the audience (who usually boo them), and the symbolic rules designed to make matches “fair.” In this way, we see jouissance delivered when a hero, whom the audience identifies with, follows the law and endures hardship as their rival gets away with breaking it to gain a temporary advantage, but the hero eventually emerges triumphant over the cheating villain.

Another key element in the logic of professional wrestling is “kayfabe,” a term that describes the practice of keeping the illusion alive that what audiences see in the ring is a genuine competition. Up until the 1990s, there was a strong dedication to maintaining the fiction that the babyfaces and heels despised each other and that their in-ring actions were real violence. To do this, wrestlers would stay “in character” in public and during media appearances. Babyfaces and heels never traveled together or socialized. And if anyone suggested wrestling was “fake,” the wrestlers would react angrily. Today, we live in what is called the post-kayfabe era, where everyone involved in professional wrestling acknowledges that the audience knows it is a work of fiction^[5] with predetermined outcomes. Be that as it may, the audience appreciates the character work (acting) and the genuine athletic talent required to perform a kind of serialized-violence ballet.^[6]

A claim I’m making in this text is that wrestling from the kayfabe era is characterized by a stable set of semblances that reflect a simple hero/villain binary and an unambiguous symbolic order. The post-kayfabe era, by contrast, reveals what happens when symbolic order loses its efficacy—when everyone knows the entire performance of wrestling is a fiction, yet the structure of wrestling as a medium persists in a transformed way.

The Function of the Heel:

By acting in a way that the audience views as unfair and dishonorable, the heel triggers two desires. First, they want to see the babyface or justice triumph over underhanded tricks, and second, they want to see the heel lose and get their “comeuppance.” Usually, the heel gains the upper hand through visible cheating, but the referee misses it. The heel then brags and taunts the babyface and the crowd. Of course, this is a mistake on the heel’s part because, while they taunt, the babyface recovers and fights back with renewed energy infused with righteousness and virtue. Often, the heel wins, almost always by deploying some underhanded trick and getting away with it. Every time a heel wins, their victory intensifies the audience’s desire for the babyface to defeat the heel even more. When the babyface finally wins, it must be after a hard-fought struggle. For a babyface’s win to feel meaningful, it must come after the heel has cheated and made victory seem impossible. If this doesn’t happen, there’s no emotional release or sense of justice for those supporting the babyface, who keeps striving for a virtuous win without breaking the symbolic rules.

The heel’s core function in the drama, which I call the No-of-the-Heel, is to deny the babyface and those identified with the babyface the satisfaction of a clear win. Additionally, the heel must do this by being seen to defy the symbolic order, to quite literally perform a breaking of the rules, which the audience clearly sees, and get away with it.^[7] By doing this effectively, the heel prolongs anticipation, disrupts the flow of jouissance, and ignites the flames of desire. In this way, the heel represents a new kind of prohibition. Where the No-of-the-Father once said “No” in the name of the Law, the No-of-the-Heel now says “No” in the name of rivalry. His function is not to prohibit jouissance, but to block the other from accessing it. The prohibition becomes relative, partisan, and endlessly reversible.

Transference to the Heel:

Audience attitudes towards heels have shifted over many decades. Understanding this shift can help us better grasp the broader changes in American politics and discourse. Historically, wrestling fans naturally identified with, supported, and cheered for the babyface, while harboring a strong negative transfer toward the heel. However, starting in the 1990s, there was a noticeable shift: fans began cheering for the heel rather than the babyface.

There are several reasons for this shift, but in this text, I will examine one I find particularly interesting, given what I see happening in American discourse more broadly today. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the owners of the largest and most commercially successful wrestling promotions sought to transform wrestling (their product) from a relatively niche form of entertainment that catered to wrestling fans’ particular preferences and sensibilities into something with greater mass appeal. As they did this, they created babyface characters designed to appeal to kids, and these babyfaces won in ways that wrestling fans viewed as “too easy.” In other words, the babyfaces were not losing enough, and their wins became rather hollow. This shifted the view of the babyface to someone who was a corporate puppet. In a sense, the way the wrestling promoters in the world of professional wrestling “pushed” the babyface as a victorious hero was something the audience had to accept, even though they did not identify with the babyface’s struggle. The babyface who was the beneficiary of this corporate push was seen as betraying the wrestling fans even more than the heel’s cheating. In a sense, from the wrestling fan’s point of view, the heel was continuing to do his or her job, fulfilling their role, while the babyface was seen as the real villain because they were accepting a position they had not sufficiently earned.

As a result, the audience began to identify with and root for the cheating villain, seeing the traditional hero as the real rival. This shift shows the way the babyface became lumped in with the elites who ran the professional promotions. As wrestling became more of a product, many wrestling fans saw what the elites were doing as a form of cultural appropriation. When the heel denied the babyface their “rightful” victory, it became a way for the audience to experience the pleasure and excitement of denying the corporate owners of the wrestling promotions.

I ask the reader to consider how modern American discourse reflects a shift from traditional fantasies and stories that shape social life. These stories typically feature a “good” hero or babyface representing a group aligned with the Law, fighting against a “bad” villain or heel who disrespects the Law’s boundaries. I believe we see this dynamic in American politics, where many public figures act like heels whose mode of jouissance is to deny their rivals’ jouissance. In this dynamic, both the right and the left have rejected the Law as a universal principle and are driven by a form of jouissance that depends on denying their opponents.

I’d also like to highlight how this dynamic shows that spectators now openly cheer for and enjoy the heel’s actions. The audience is really into the heel breaking the rules to stop the babyface, who follows the rules, from winning. The heel’s wrongdoings are seen as more admirable than submitting to the symbolic order.

The No of the Father/Law vs. the No of the Heel

I believe the concept of the heel and the idea of the No-of-the-Heel help shed light on what is happening in today’s American discourse, where the right is not guided by traditional conservative principles or values but is driven by the need to deny the left access to jouissance. The American left is not much better; it is often not motivated by the principles and values of liberalism and has become focused on preventing the right from accessing jouissance. We see this very often in how political figures from both the Republicans and the Democrats behave poorly and justify their actions as necessary, yet they condemn the other side for doing the same. In this way, they are like a heel who cheats shamelessly when it benefits them but cries foul and calls trickery whenever their opponent wins. Each side acts as a heel to the other, claiming that their own enjoyment is allowed, while the rival’s enjoyment must be blocked, mocked, or taken away. In this way, the heel represents a new form of prohibition. Where the Father once said “No” in the name of the Law, the heel now says “No” in the name of rivalry. In contemporary politics, the fight is no longer over the Law itself, but over who gets to enjoy—and who is made to watch that enjoyment be taken away.

I recognize that what I’m presenting here is not a fully theorized account of the No-of-the-Heel. What I am presenting is my ongoing attempt to think and theorize this concept within the Lacanian orientation. As of this writing, there are still many things I’m actively considering about how the No-of-the-Heel could have come to occupy the place and the function of the No-of-the-Father in prior eras.

^[1] Lacan, Jacques. “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis.” In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, 445–88. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

^[2] Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.

^[3] I believe that Miller shows us this in many places; however, these are a few that figured in my own thinking as I wrote this text.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited.” Translated by Adrian Price. Psychoanalytical Notebooks 26 (2013): 33–48.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “A Fantasy.” Translated by Thelma Sowley, revised by Michele Julien. Psychoanalytical Notebooks 34 (December 2019): 9–24.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes.” In Scilicet: Woman Does Not Exist, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Christiane Alberti, and Angelina Harari, 15–24. London: New Lacanian School, 2022.

^[4] I want to give credit for this to Thomas Svolos, who first pointed out to me the importance of how this term is translated.

^[5] The term “work” is another professional wrestling term that refers to when wrestlers are “working,” or trying to convince the audience that the story they are acting out has an element of reality to it. An example is when wrestlers today have a match and start “Talking shit” about one another on podcasts and other media appearances. Wrestling fans who hear these podcasts will ask themselves, “I wonder if that wrestler actually does not like the other one, like on a personal level, or if it is just a work.” The opposite of a work is a “shoot,” which is when a wrestler really dislikes another wrestler or the promotion (institution) they wrestle for, and they let it slip by saying something negative and meaning it. Another example would be the wrestlers CM Punk and AJ Lee, who are married in real life. Wrestling fans will say they are “shoot in love,” i.e., really in love; their marriage is not a work.

^[6] Many factors have accelerated the shift from the kayfabe era and its practices to the post-kayfabe era. Most notable are federal regulations and taxation around sports betting (pro-wrestling is not a sport and is therefore not subject to such regulations/taxes), and, always on social media, tracking what happens in the industry.

^[7] In this way, the heel is engaged with the old way of the Name-of-the-Father as a demand to keep jouissance private, but in a very interesting way. I say this because the heel does keep their cheating secret from the referee (the agent of the Law), but performs it in a way that is very obvious to the audience. In this way, the heel is saying to the audience, “Look! I’m going to break the rules, defeat the precious hero you identify with, and I’m going to get away with it!” When this works as intended, it makes the audience identify more with the babyface hero and increases how much they hate the heel and want the hammer of the Law to come down on the heel.

Since publishing my recent interview with Sam McCormick, quite a few new people have subscribed to Speaking Body. I want to take a moment to say thank you! I’m genuinely grateful that you’re here, whether you’ve been following for a while or only recently found your way to this work. There are many things asking for your time and attention, and I don’t take it lightly that you’re giving some of yours to Speaking Body.

Alongside this note, I’m also releasing a bonus video/podcast for paid subscribers. It comes from one of the tangents Sam and I went on during our longer conversation, where each of us says a bit more about our own experiences as analysands.

I took this section out of the main interview because, while I found it interesting, it didn’t quite fit the overall arc of the conversation. But it felt worth sharing, and it will now be available as paid-subscriber content on Speaking Body.

As a small gesture of thanks — especially to those who have recently joined — I’m offering a 20% discount on annual paid subscriptions. This brings the price down from $50/year to $40/year for the first year.

A few details:

The discount applies to annual subscriptions only, not monthly subscriptions.

It is good for the first year only. After that, the subscription renews at the regular annual rate, though you’re of course free to cancel before then. Substack will also send a reminder before your renewal date.

The offer is available through this link:

Get 20% off a paid subscription

This discount will be available until Friday, June 5, 2026.

Paid subscriptions help support the time and labor that go into Speaking Body: the interviews, essays, editing, conversations, and the ongoing attempt to make a space for psychoanalytic thinking that can move between the clinic, culture, politics, art, and everyday life.

Thank you again for reading, listening, and being here.

Warmly,
Neil

Welcome to a new paid-subscriber “B-sides” format for the Speaking Body Podcast, featuring tangents and unused material from long-form interviews, starting with outtakes from his conversation with Sam McCormick of Lectures on Lacan.

Subscribe now

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I’ve been working on mixing and editing this for a few weeks, and I’m very pleased to release it to you. I hope you like listening to it as much as I liked making it!

Show Notes:
In this episode of The Speaking Body, Neil speaks with Sam McCormick, professor of communication studies at San Francisco State University and host of Lectures on Lacan. What begins as an interview quickly becomes a wide-ranging conversation about Lacan, teaching, fatherhood, clinical practice, and psychoanalysis as a lived experience.

Neil and Sam discuss what it means to read Lacan seriously without turning Lacanian language into empty jargon; the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to deal with what cannot be mastered; the place of the real, the end of analysis, the role of the analyst, and the importance of uncertainty in clinical work. They also touch on the question of making psychoanalysis more accessible, the meaning of payment and the body in analytic treatment, and the possibility of bringing Lacanian work into broader conversations beyond the clinic and the classroom.

Table of Contents:

00:00 Welcome and Setup

01:02 Why Sam McCormick

01:57 Scheduling and Ditching the Plan

04:25 Neil Leaves Academia

07:42 Live vs Asynchronous Teaching

10:51 Fatherhood Leads to Lacan

16:25 Knowing How to Deal

18:57 Sam Introduces Lectures

21:37 Building a Global Community

28:13 Seeing Suffering Everywhere

31:45 Psychoanalysis as Experience

33:39 Certainty and Repetition Loops

36:19 Discourse Theory and Mastery

42:45 Neurosis Psychosis and Not Knowing

46:33 Analyst as Little a

48:13 Trash and Sainthood

49:52 When Analysis Ends

50:45 Draining Jouissance

52:57 From Knowing to Desire

55:43 Hysteric Trap of Insight

57:50 Threshold of the Real

01:03:20 Why Teach Lacan

01:05:19 Access and Affordability

01:07:17 Psychoanalysis in Streets

01:09:00 Why the Fee Matters

01:14:56 Teleanalysis and the Body

01:19:37 Being Versus Having

01:22:31 Miller on Existence

01:29:22 Littoral Zone and Borders

01:32:20 Closing and Next Steps

Rather than positioning the analyst as someone who knows and interprets, this episode argues for a different stance—one that privileges observation without certainty, and intervention without a predetermined aim.

Through simple clinical examples, I try to show how shifting from judgment to noticing changes the structure of the analytic encounter. Instead of trying to produce insight, the analyst proposes something and remains open to what unfolds.

This episode is an invitation to rethink what it means to listen, to intervene, and to practice psychoanalysis.

The Episode Summarized

Psychoanalysis is not about applying what the analyst knows. It is about noticing something without knowing what it means—and without knowing what effect it will have.

An Example from the Episode

A patient repeatedly says they want to stop procrastinating but continues to do so.

• A judgmental intervention might assert:
  “You don’t actually want to stop procrastinating.”

• A noticing intervention might say:
  “You’ve been saying this for a long time, and yet nothing seems to change. That’s interesting.”

The difference is not just in tone—it’s in structure.
One tries to produce insight; the other opens a space to see what emerges.

Key Topics

• Psychoanalysis as a practice oriented by not knowing

• The role of lack and desire in analytic work

• A contrast between psychoanalysis and knowledge-driven therapies

• Connections between psychoanalysis, science, and ethnography

• The clinical distinction between judging vs. noticing

• Why trying to make something happen can interrupt the analytic process

• Noticing as a way of proposing rather than asserting

• How uncertainty functions as a clinical tool

Fin

I hope you find this episode interesting and useful. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can leave a star rating or review wherever you listen, or tell a friend about the show.

Share Speaking Body

And, of course, you become a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Till next time, take care.

-N

Hello and welcome to the Speaking Body Podcast. I’m your host, Neil Gorman.

This is another short, solo episode—just me talking directly to you.

I want to start off today with a short recap of what I presented in the last episode, where I tried to lay out what I see as a really essential aspect of how psychoanalysis is practiced.

Recap & Review

When you last heard from me on this podcast, I made the claim that a psychoanalyst does not take up the knowledge that is supposed to them, which also means a psychoanalyst does not take up the authority that comes with the knowledge an analysand provides them via transference by assuming that the analyst knows something that the analysand does not know.

So all of this is a description of what a psychoanalyst does not do. So what do they do?

What does an analyst offer an analysand?

1. My claim is that a psychoanalyst offers something like curiosity.

2. Which is another way of saying the psychoanalyst gives what they don’t have.

3. Or, the psychoanalyst does not give what they have; they give what they lack, which is a weird idea.

4. And what makes echo analysis unique in the therapeutic marketplace

   ---

Set up this episode

What I want to do in today’s episode is build up the argument from the last episode by doing something that I think is different, because I haven’t seen anybody else do it.

This way of operating—this position of not knowing, this refusal to rush into understanding— might be unique to psychoanalysis in what I call the psychotherapeutic marketplace (the sorts of therapeutic experiences people can buy), BUT it’s not unique to psychoanalysis.

There’s another practice, where something very similar shows up. And that field is ethnography.

Science: Another unlikely companion

Before I get to ethnography, I want to start with something that might seem a little unexpected: science.

Now, I want to be clear upfront — I’m not a trained scientist. So take what I’m about to say with that in mind. But here’s how I think about what scientists actually do when they run experiments.

Scientists know a lot. They’ve studied. They’ve read. They’ve trained. But when they sit down to design an experiment, they’re not doing it to prove what they already know. They’re doing it because there is a question they genuinely don’t have the answer to.

Take a simple example: a scientist wants to know what happens when a particular substance is given to mice before they run through a maze. They don’t know if it will make the mice faster, slower, or have no effect at all. So they run the experiment. They observe. They learn something.

And then another scientist, somewhere else, runs the same experiment. It might look like they’re trying to prove the first result — but they’re not. They’re actually asking a new question: Is this replicatable? Was the first result a fluke?

And sometimes, the third run of the same experiment produces a totally different result. Suddenly, a whole new set of questions opens up. Why did it work differently this time? What does that mean?

This is actually very similar to how psychoanalysis works. When an analyst offers an interpretation to a patient, it’s not meant to be a final answer that unlocks everything. It’s more like running an experiment. You offer something, and then you see what happens. And if it lands — if it creates a new connection, opens something up — that new knowledge doesn’t close things down. It opens up more questions.

In this respect, I think science and clinical psychoanalysis share a similar ethic.

Moving on to Ethnography

Now, before I go any further, I want to keep this simple. I’m not going to get into a technical definition of ethnography or anything like that. Instead, I want you to imagine something.

Imagine a person leaving their home base, where most things make sense relatively easily, and traveling into another place (another culture, location, or community) where what is natural and normal is, to some degree, different than what is natural and normal in the traveler’s home.

And imagine that this traveler’s goal is to understand:

• How do people in that place live?

• How do they organize their lives?

• What’s natural and normal for them?

• What’s polite vs whats rude?

• What matters to them?

• Etc.

This is, in a very simple way, what an ethnographer does.

What an ethnographer does not do is assume that they already understand, because they know that assuming that you understand tends to lead to the mistake of projecting what you already know onto something new, and that is a good way to misunderstand.

Additionally, when someone assumes they know all about something, they tend to pay less attention to it, making them more likely that they will miss something interesting.

An ethnographer wants to learn, and to learn, they have to start from the belief that they don’t know about what they are witnessing.

So what does a good ethnographer do instead?

• They slow down

• They listen.

• They observe.

• They do their best to resist the urge to jump to a conclusion.

• They allow themselves to not understand.

• They let things be confusing for a while.

In short, they use their lack of knowledge productively by taking their time and letting important connections and insights unfold slowly.

A shared ethic

If that sounds familiar, it should. Because it’s another way of describing what I believe is the ethic that orients the practice of psychoanalysis.

In both cases, there’s an encounter with something.

1. For the ethnographer, it’s another culture, another group of people, a different place, another way of life.

2. For the psychoanalyst, it’s another person’s unconscious. Another person’s way of speaking, desiring, suffering, and enjoying.

And in both cases, there’s a temptation.

• The temptation to assume we already know and understand what we are witnessing.

• And in both cases, the practice depends on resisting that temptation.

Not because knowing is bad! But because knowing too much or arriving at understanding too quickly can actually get in the way of the emergence of:

• What psychoanalyst would call “formations of the unconscious” or just “the unconscious.”

• and what the pop-ethnographer Chris Arnade has described as “thick culture” as opposed to the more visible “thin culture.”

I’ll quote Arnade here:

Thick culture is the plot we follow, while thin culture is the stage settings.

And I’ll rephrase that into psychoanalytic language by saying

The unconscious is the plot we follow, while the way we consciously go about it is the stage setting.1

Another way to say this might be that both ethnography and psychoanalysis are practices that require a certain degree of respect for the patient for what is at the core of the subjectivity of what is Other to them. They understand that what lies in the depths is shrouded in layers of opacity. And instead of trying to eliminate that opacity right away, both practices, at their best, make room for it.

• They allow it to be there.

• They don’t get overly frustrated by it.

• They work through it slowly.

They are not exactly the same

Now, I also want to be clear—these two practices are not the same.

An ethnographer, at the end of the day, is usually trying to produce some kind of knowledge. They might write something. They might describe what they’ve learned. They might try to make sense of a shared way of life, then take that understanding and turn it into a book, a presentation, or something along those lines.

A psychoanalyst is doing something different.

The goal is not to produce a description of the person sitting in front of them, which will then be shared with others. What happens in psychoanalysis is the production of an experience that has more to do with the patient/analysand coming into contact with their unconscious and learning something from that encounter.

And in psychoanalysis, all of this remains private. What happens in the session stays there; it is not shared with others outside that session.2

Conclusion

But even though the aims are different, I think the ethical practices of ethnography and psychoanalysis have a lot in common.

• Both practices depend on a kind of restraint.

• A willingness to not know.

• A refusal to reduce the other person to what is already known or understood.

And I would go even a step further: I think that when this ethical position is lost, something goes wrong in both practices.

So what I’m trying to lay out across these episodes is something pretty simple.

Psychoanalysis is not defined by what the analyst knows. It’s defined, at least in part, by how the analyst relates to what they don’t know.

And what I’m proposing today is that this way of relating—to not knowing, to the other, to meaning—is not unique to psychoanalysis.

It shows up in other places, too. Ethnography is one of the clearest examples of it.

I’m going to leave it there for today.

Wrap up

As always, I want to say thank you for your time and attention. I really do appreciate it.

If you want to learn more about the podcast, you can head over to speakingbody.substack.com. You’ll find episodes, writing, and ways to support the work if that’s something you’re interested in.

And until next time, I’m in your ears.

Take care.

-N

00:00 Welcome and Format

00:37 Big Idea Setup

02:02 Psychotherapy Side Explained

03:34 Transference and Authority

05:32 Helper Model Benefits

06:46 Switch to Psychoanalysis

07:58 Not Taking Transference

09:19 Curiosity Over Knowing

11:41 Interpretations as Hypotheses

13:02 Continuum Not Binary

13:54 Key Takeaway and Wrap

15:17 Thanks and Where to Find

A video/podcast about a key preoccupation for The Speaking Body Podcast: “dark forests,” private or semi-private online spaces (often on Discord, Signal, or Telegram) where people speak about topics or in ways they believe aren’t safe in public due to backlash or cancellation.

Drawing on my experience as a psychoanalyst, I contrast this with …

Read more

In this episode of the Speaking Body Podcast, I introduce a new “short podcast” format inspired by Lacan’s short session.

I explain how Lacan sometimes ended sessions right after a formation of the unconscious to produce disorientation and increase the analysand’s interest in interpreting their own speech.

Next, I connect psychoan…

Read more

In addition to Speaking Body, I co-host and produce another podcast, Subject of the Unconscious, where I discuss various aspects of psychoanalysis and the Lacanian orientation.

As of today, five episodes of that podcast have been released. You will find links to all of them below.

1. Episode 1: Pilot

2. Episode 2: How Psychoanalysis Changes Over Time

3. Episode 3: Diagnosis

4. Episode 4: Nonsense

5. Episode 5: Experience

More information can be found here.

P.S.

nonesuch nemo is the name of my “band.”

I announce a relaunch and rebrand of my podcast, formerly The Informed Podcast, explaining that my views and relationships to psychoanalysis, theory, practice, and institutions have changed over the years. He renames the show Speaking Body and expands it into a broader project, including a website (speakingbody.com) that will archive my writing, offer a newsletter, and sometimes include video episodes on YouTube while keeping the same RSS feed for existing subscribers.

Going forward, the podcast will focus less on applying psychoanalytic theory to topics like film or literature and more on psychoanalysis as lived practice:

(1) the clinical perspective from my work with patients,
(2) the experience of being an analysand as essential to practicing psychoanalysis, and
(3) how psychoanalytic work extends beyond the consulting room into everyday life and subjectivity.

I will sometimes use specialized Lacanian terminology, but aim to restate ideas in more everyday language.

00:00 Welcome + Why the Podcast Needed to Change
01:11 Outgrowing the Old Format: How Neil’s Relationship to Psychoanalysis Shifted
02:50 Should I End It? The Decision to Rebrand Instead
03:31 Introducing the New Name: Speaking Body (Podcast, Site, Newsletter)
04:24 Audio to Video: Expanding to YouTube
05:06 What to Expect: A Practice-Focused Psychoanalysis Podcast
06:47 Three Angles, Part 1: Clinical Work in the Consulting Room
07:24 Three Angles, Part 2: The Analysand Experience (Why It’s Essential)
08:39 Three Angles, Part 3: Taking Psychoanalysis Out Into Everyday Life
09:54 Keeping Lacanian Terms Accessible: Less Jargon, More Plain Language
11:29 Wrap-Up: Thanks for Listening + Welcome to Speaking Body

Going forward, I will focus less on applying psychoanalytic theory and focus more on psychoanalysis and on how psychoanalytic work leaves the consulting room and affects everyday life and subjectivity. While I will sometimes use specialized Lacanian terms (e.g., jouissance, discourse of the master, object a, imaginary/symbolic/real, drive), I aim to restate key ideas in more commonplace language whenever possible.