Weltanschauung-Delusion: Then & Now
Neil Gorman
As we consider the gaze and the effects of the gaze on the clinic today, it may be useful to consider Freud’s concept of Weltanschauung,[1] an “intellectual construction that solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.”[2] Freud goes on to say, “The possession of a Weltanschauung of this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Believing in it, one can feel secure in life, one can know what to strive for, and how one can deal most expediently with one’s emotions and interests.”[3] Freud also said people using Weltanschauung can be seen as a form of wish fulfillment, and names the wish which is the foundation of all Weltanschauung: a wish for an authority that can justify people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.[4]
Shifting from Freud’s terms to Lacanian ones, I believe we could say that a Weltanschauung is an attempt to produce an Other that is not lacking, an Other of the Other that would desire the authority to sanction or pardon anything.[5] Moving towards Lacan’s last teaching, when Lacan says, “[Freud] thought [...], that everyone is mad, that is, delusional,”[6] we might propose that at the level of the statement, we have Freud’s Weltanschauung, but what these signifiers slide over is what Lacan calls delusion.
If we combine the concept of Weltanschauung with the concept of delusion, we might have a new construction: the Weltanschauung-Delusion – a tool subjects could use to transform their “misery into common unhappiness.”[7]
The clinic of today is different from what it was in Freud and Lacan’s time. A great deal has changed. Miller reminds us of this when he says:
Until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former’s place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past.[8]
Following Miller’s words, my claim is that Weltanschauung-Delusions have changed from something that helped people find ways to suffer less and find enjoyment within the Law’s prohibitive effects which organized the discourses that organized social life in the past, to something that encourages the release of the drive and unprohibited access to jouissance via a demand to Enjoy! regardless of the Law, within the dominant discourses of the here-and-now.
This change in discourse is evident in a shift in the gaze from the gaze of a prohibiting Father to the gaze of an Other that looks on with interest and approval as people “do what makes them happy,” regardless of the consequence.
References
[1] This term has been translated as “worldview” or “ideology.” However, Freud said it was “a specifically German concept, the translation of which into foreign languages might well raise difficulties.”
[2] Freud, S., “The Question of Weltanschauung” (1933) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII, London: Hogarth Press, 1964, p. 158.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, p. 159.
[5] Ibid, pp. 162-164.
[6] Lacan, J., (1978), “There are Four Discourses,” trans. A. Price with R. Grigg, Culture/Clinic 1: Applied Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, p. 3. Emphasis is mine.
[7] Freud, S., “Studies on Hysteria,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893-1895), London: Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 305.
[8] Miller, J.- A., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2013 (from the cover).