The lecture hall is three-quarters full.
There are therapists, NGO women, someone from HR, two students who have come by mistake and a bearded Czech man in a linen jacket who thinks he is attending something called “Reimagining Masculinity in Central Europe.” He isn’t.
At the back sit the Man and the Editor.
“Today,” says Lacan, “we will discuss narcissism.”
The Man snorts.
“Typical,” he says to the Editor. “The French. You ask them about love and they accuse you of narcissism.”
“He’s got a point,” says the Editor quietly.
“No he hasn’t.”
On the screen appears a slide.
CASE STUDY: THE MAN
The Man sits up.
“Fuck off, that’s not me. Is it?”
A woman in front turns round.
“Is that you?” she asks.
“No,” says the Man. “Obviously not.”
The slide changes.
A picture of the Man appears. Big red cheeks, bushy eyebrows. Denis Healey circa 1975. The IMF yet to be called in, Concorde in the hangar.
The woman in front turns around. “It is you. You liar. Bloody liar,” she says to him. “What a liar, can’t believe it. Bloody liar,” she says to a friend sat next to her.
Lacan is on Slide 3:
impossible women
impossible countries
collapse
fathers
drinking
work panic
writing instead of living
wanting to be special
The Editor peers at it.
“It’s not badly structured,” he says. “Though I think he’s overdoing the work panic.”
“Easy for you to say,” says the Man. “You don’t have to pay ZUS.”
“No,” says the Editor. “I have to listen to you talk about paying ZUS.”
Lacan points at the list with a long yellow finger.
“This man,” he says, “believes himself cursed.”
The Man leans over to the Editor.
“Well, I am.”
“No,” says Lacan, hearing him somehow. “You believe yourself uniquely cursed.”
A pause.
“Which is much more satisfying.”
The audience laughs.
The Man feels at once humiliated and vindicated.
There it is again, that old warm movement in the chest. The feeling not simply of being criticised, but of being specially criticised. Seen. Singled out. Persecuted in an interesting way.
He looks around the room with a kind of tragic dignity.
“They don’t understand,” he mutters.
The woman in front turns round again.
“He literally does understand,” she says.
“No,” says the Man. “Not properly.”
The Editor sighs.
Lacan clicks to the next slide.
IMPOSSIBLE WOMEN
“Ah for Christ’s sake,” says the Man.
“He repeatedly chooses women who are unavailable, married, impossible, confusing or all three at once.”
“She was not impossible,” says the Man loudly. “She was just…”
“Cruel,” says the Editor.
The Man glares at him.
“You’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am on your side,” says the Editor. “Unfortunately, your side is often ridiculous.”
Lacan smiles slightly. “The impossible woman allows him to suffer without ever having to risk the ordinary humiliations of love.”
The Man folds his arms.
“Oh yes, because ordinary love has worked out brilliantly for me.”
The audience laughs again. At him this time. Lacan is back on comedy form, with no Freud to heckle him from the back of the room.
The Man feels the familiar rush of self-pity. Not simple sadness. Something richer. More luxuriant. A shampoo and a conditioner all in one.
The beautiful gloss that no one has ever suffered quite like this, or had such amazing hair. That his pain is somehow finer, more intelligent, more literary than other people’s. That his heartbreak deserves not merely sympathy but a grant from the Ministry of Unhappy Faces.
He can almost see himself as he likes best to imagine himself: alone in Warsaw, misunderstood, broke, abandoned, drinking coffee at a lakeside Green Coffee Nero.
The Editor is watching him.
“There,” says the Editor quietly. “That face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you turn into the Heroic Victim.”
“I am a victim.”
“Yes,” says the Editor. “But not always heroically.”
The next slide appears.
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS for educated people
Lust = Love
Pride = Intelligence
Sloth = Processing
Wrath = Honesty
Envy = Political Critique
Greed = Need
Gluttony = Sensitivity
The Man laughs bitterly. “This is nonsense.”
“Is it?” says Lacan.
“Yes. I’m not proud. I have terrible self-esteem.”
“Classic narcissism,” says Lacan.
“I’m not greedy.”
“You want women, work, money, love, admiration, rescue and for everybody finally to realise how difficult your life has been.”
“Well when you put it like that.”
“And your self-pity,” says Lacan, “is merely pride turned inside out.”
The Man goes red.
“Fuck you.”
“Observe,” says Lacan to the audience. “He experiences criticism as persecution. This allows him to feel both wounded and superior.”
The Man turns to the people beside him.
“You see? This is exactly what I mean. Typical French intellectual. All abstraction, no humanity. I am not a specimen.”
The man beside him nods sympathetically.
“My ex-wife was French.”
“Exactly,” says the Man.
The Editor has gone very quiet.
Lacan clicks to the final slide.
THE FANTASY THAT UNDERSTANDING CHANGES ANYTHING
The room stills.
The Boy, sat in the front row, looks up.
“But he knows all this,” he says.
Lacan nods.
“Yes.”
“He knows about repetition. And narcissism. And impossible women. And fathers. And Poland.”
“Yes.”
“And he still does it?”
“Yes.”
The Boy looks back at the Man in horror.
The Man wants suddenly to defend himself.
To explain that it was not so simple. That he had really loved her. That Poland really had trapped him. That he had suffered. That there had been reasons.
The Editor leans over.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re doing it again.”
On stage Lacan closes his notes.
“The narcissist,” he says, “does not merely suffer. He watches himself suffering. He admires himself for surviving it. He becomes the mirror that tells himself how exceptional he is, even in despair.”
A pause.
The Man feels a stab of self-pity so enormous and so exquisitely unfair that for a moment he almost wants to cry.
No one, the Man thinks, has ever been humiliated like this.
Lacan is not, however, finished. “There comes a point, after lust, wrath, envy, self-pity, collapse, impossible women, impossible countries and all the other old routines, when the Man discovers his final symptom,” Lacan says.
“He will tell everyone everything.”
“This always feels, at first, like courage. He will confess. He will explain. He will finally be honest.”
The Editor, who is inching quietly away from the Man along the back row, relives in his mind a few buried sequences. “He will tell Joanna about Sara. Sara about Joanna. O about M. M about O. Friends about the drinking. Journalists about the collapse. Readers about all of it. He will write it down. Better still, he will publish it,” he thinks to himself.
The Editor used to love this stage. “At last,” he would say, rubbing his hands. “Material.”
There is something wonderfully flattering about self-exposure. The sense that one is exceptionally brave, exceptionally open.
Lacan is back at the podium.
“Confession,” he says, “is often only narcissism that has learnt to cry.”
The Man objects immediately.
“No. I’m honest.”
“No,” says Lacan. “You are theatrical.”
The Boy looks worried.
“But surely it’s better to tell the truth?”
“Of course,” says Lacan. “The question is why and to whom.”
The Man knows why.
Or thinks he does.
That if he tells the whole story clearly enough – childhood, fathers, Poland, M, drinking, money, panic, the whole sad travelling circus – then someone will place a hand on his shoulder and say:
Ah. So that’s why you’re such a cunt.
In that case, everything is forgiven.
No one ever says this.
Lacan is watching him with mild contempt. “You do not confess in order to be known,” he says.
“Then why?”
“You confess in order to remain the centre of the story.”
The Man is silent. Because this, too, is true.
The Boy is sitting at the back of the room now. He looks very small.
He has been waiting all this time for someone to come and rescue him. Instead he has been given an adult version of himself with a notebook and a tendency to mistake self-exposure for change.
The Editor closes his notebook. For once, even he looks ashamed.
Outside, the world continues in its ordinary way.
But first, the Man needs to get something off his chest.
The loop, having been on the ropes, shuffles closer again.
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