Becoming Psychotic
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Becoming Psychotic
Journey into adult development and Neo-Lacanian psychoanalysis
After a short while, finally here is the next post which digs into how I got interested in adult psychological development, and the current theory I’m obsessing over.
Some personal background
In late 2021 and into 2022, I was suffering from a personal crisis, as one does in order to grow. It was a social rejection that triggered a deep sense of both shame and transformation, a loss of myself as I knew it.
The details of that story are for another time, but I found myself desperately searching for reasons why this might be happening to me. What caused this, and why did I act the way I did? What can I do to move forward and make sense of the world?
I immersed myself in a new reframing of my existence: autism and neurodiversity. I read endless posts online, and completed psychometric tests. I watched YouTubers and TED talks about what makes them autistic, how it’s more common and subtle than you expect, and that under this new paradigm of neurodiversity, everyone is valued despite their neurological differences.
I reexamined my childhood and my whole life through this new lens, and it explained so much that I had struggled with. This helped me, because it showed that I wasn’t a broken, flawed human being. But there are deeper neurological reasons that influence my perceptions and behaviours in ways that make sense to me, but make it difficult to interact with other “neurotypical” people.
However this explanation, this self-diagnosis, didn’t satisfy me. I decided to seek a professional autism assessment, and with the resulting diagnosis of social (pragmatic) communication disorder, a part of me felt satisfied and validated in this new identity, but a deeper part of me was still fundamentally torn. On one hand, I felt that acceptance of being different, of being autistic, is growth, like I had finally found myself at long last. But on the other hand, I needed more. That emptiness inside was replaced by something more real-seeming, but it was still incomplete.
In my search to understand how autism could fit into broader patterns of psychology, I became interested in the psychology of adult development. Because after all, the limited lens of autism misses the broader picture of human development and the role of nurture versus nature, right?
Through tpot Twitter memes, I became immersed in the ideas of Robert Kegan’s Constructive-Developmental Theory, an extension of Piaget’s childhood development theories into adulthood. Around the same time, I luckily stumbled upon another theory by @TiffaniNWarren rooted in the psychoanalytic philosophy of Jaques Lacan, which I will be calling the Neo-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of development.
In both of these theories, I sensed some deep truths in their explication of human development, in a way that feels truly real, that they can explain parts of myself, my relationships, and other people that was previously inscrutable.
While neither theory can be completely correct due to the nature of psychology and science in general, I believe an integration of them and others can reveal a map of how to grow and develop into better version of myself, and ultimately show others that they can do the same.
A brief introduction to Neo-Lacanian psychoanalysis
To preface this, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s okay to be skeptical about this theory, especially due its protoscientific nature. Human cognition is notoriously difficult to study scientifically, and there is a certain mystical, spiritual element to understanding the mind through Lacan. I’m skeptical too, but at the same time you can only really find out the truth by being open to it, which is what I aim to do.
In addition, there are fundamental primitives of Lacan’s theories which drive the following superficial description of Neo-Lacanian development, such as the orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, signifiers, the split subject, the Name-of-the-Father, and much more for which I don’t yet have a good understanding, so I will not dive into.
With this in mind, let’s start with the idea of “structure”.
Development through structure
Structure refers to something akin to the neural-cognitive structure of your mind, of your literal brain and nervous system. It’s the structure of your cognition which includes your perception of self, others, and the world; it’s how you make meaning. In normal circumstances with sufficient environmental support, you pass through a sequence of predictable structures, based on Lacan’s “clinical structures”: Detachment, Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion, and so on. The sequence looks like this:
Each structure is further divided into four phases: Preliminal, Liminal, Postliminal, and Crisis. You progress sequentially through each phase in order: autistic, histrionic/schizoid, borderline/antisocial, derealization, bipolar, dissociative/narcissistic, and so on. These roughly correspond with DSM psychiatric disorders, in the sense that each phase confers a particular cognitive strategy for dealing with the world which manifests in patterns of thought and behaviour corresponding to a particular disorder. It does not mean that a person in a given phase meets the thresholds for an actual diagnosis, often far from it, but it does mean it’s likely that a diagnosed individual has the corresponding structure.
Furthermore, the Liminal and Postliminal phases have two possible variants or styles: masculine and feminine. As you pass through a phase, you adopt one of these variants, and the one you adopt does not necessarily coincide with your actual gender.
Let’s breeze through the highest-level description of the first four structures, starting with the Detached structure.
Before you are born, your entire world is the womb your mother. So when you are born, you become in a sense “detached” from that world before you can psychologically begin to attach to the new one. In each structure you have a primary goal you are naturally driven to achieve, and the goal in Detachment is to psychologically attach to your mother (regardless of whether it’s your biological mother or another caregiver acting in that role). Prior to achieving this goal, you are continually, adaptively controlling the “symptom” of the structure, which in this case is Derealization: a feeling that the world is apart from you, that the world is essentially unknown and a potential threat. Once you can attach to your mother, the crisis of derealization is resolved and you learn the ability to attach to not only your mother but to other people as well. This ability to attach to people in a relational sense carries with you for the rest of your life.
This newfound ability to attach allows the experience of Psychotic structure to emerge. Think about the typical 1-year-old: they have a rather codependent relationship with their mother. Clingy, adoring her, but also willing to lash out and take out frustrations on her. You know that you are completely dependent on your mother, but also desperately want to individuate yourself, to acquire the power necessary in order to realize yourself as you see reflected by the world around you. “Reflected” is apt because Psychosis corresponds with Lacan’s “mirror stage”, when a child sees themselves reflected in a mirror (symbolically), recognizing themselves as distinct from the world. The goal of Psychosis is to realize this reflected persona: to “become” that person, so to speak. However, this persona is necessarily an unachievable fantasy. Therein lies the crisis of Depression, rooted in the denial of knowing that your fantasy is out of reach. With sufficient support, you can resolve this crisis by seeing yourself through the eyes of others as a participant in the social environment, which involves the setting of boundaries by a father archetype to “intervene” in the codependent mother-child bond.
In the structure of Neurosis, the focus moves from the mother to the father. Again, this is not necessarily your biological mother and father, but imaginary and symbolic representations, sort of archetypes. You are gaining this newfound sense of self, this new ability to participate in the broader social world of relationships. In Psychosis, you gained the ability to attach to people, but only in a limited instrumental sense. In Neurosis, a new sense of self starts to emerge from the way you relate to others, which means that any threats to your relationships become cause for the symptom of Neurosis: Anxiety. In seeing yourself through how you relate to others, it can feel like your world is constantly under threat, especially by the prospect of rejection. In order to protect yourself, you will be highly self-conscious and develop rules to abide by in order to be a “good person” in the perceived eyes of others. It’s as if you feel you are being quizzed or tested by the social environment in which you find yourself, and continually developing more elaborate sets of rules in order to modulate your behaviour. But this has a limit: eventually your system of rules will become too elaborately complex and self-contradictory, leading to a crisis of anxiety. Imagine a situation when you are forced to make an impossible choice, like being forced to choose between your best friend or your partner in a complicated conflict. To resolve this crisis, you have to realize that you cannot always be “good” in the face of a contradiction, so you must choose to be “bad”, break the rules and deal with the consequences.
Learning this capacity to choose, to have the freedom and agency to decide what’s right for yourself and not only for the sake of others, defines the start of the structure of Perversion. The symptom which emerges through Perversion is called jouissance, a French word roughly meaning “enjoyment”, which takes on a specific meaning in Lacanian theory. The colloquial understanding of the word “pervert” has relevance here, because jouissance relates to sexual enjoyment, but it is broader than that. Like previous symptoms, jouissance has a feeling in the body, which is like both pain and pleasure, and sometimes grief and heartbreak. The Pervert has, as described by Lacan, an “excess of life”. The freedom to choose is important because it’s part of the control mechanism for jouissance: you control it by saying “no” to situations of pain and pleasure. There’s an increasing amount of nuance necessary for Perversion and later structures that’s impossible to describe briefly, but in short, to advance past Perversion you need to surrender yourself, to let go and allow yourself to be interdependent on others.
That’s a massively simplified high-level gist of the first four structures. There are naturally a lot of questions raised by this, and a lot of things I left out, but things should become more clear below and in future posts. If you are familiar with other adult development frameworks like Kegan’s, you can probably start to see some congruence.
Progression and fixation
Essential to understand structure is to understand how progression works, and how we end up with adults who end up “fixated” on a particular structure and phase.
You progress naturally through each structure with sufficient environmental support. What does this mean? It can mean a number of things:
Your physical needs were cared for.
Your home environment was safe.
Your parents provided an emotionally stable atmosphere and had a healthy, secure relationship with each other.
Your parents were financially stable.
The community (including school, etc.) and the world at large was safe and predictable. e.g. not at war
No significant acute trauma or abuse occurred.
Key idea: at the time when your needs are no longer met by your environment, you commit to your current structure, with the phase corresponding to the adaptations you’ve developed to survive and cope with your symptom.
As a general pattern, parents typically can support their children up to the parents’ own structures and slightly further, but usually not significantly further. If there is a difference between parents, the parent with the more advanced structure and phase is typically the baseline, contingent on the child being able to spend enough time observing and learning from them. Detached parents produce Detached (sometimes Psychotic) children, Psychotic parents produce Psychotic (sometimes Neurotic) children, and so on. This is another way to frame what otherwise talked about as “generational trauma”.
You continue to develop of course, learning new skills and abilities as you grow older, but generally your rate of progression of structure and phase slows after childhood. This is how adults seem “fixated” at a particular structure. Development does not stop, but adults become more settled and stable in the adaptations they have formed. People will generally progress through at least one phase through the course of adulthood, and sometimes more depending on life circumstances and one’s drive for personal growth.
Key idea: with sufficient drive and effort, it is possible to continue to progress in structure throughout adulthood.
Identifying and population distribution
An important aspect of this system is that you can identify the structure of yourself and other people. A person’s structure is fundamental to how they see themselves, others, the world, and how they process information. It’s prior to someone’s personality and behaviour.
Because of this, there are common patterns of behaviour you can notice in people of different structures, from body language and facial expressions, how they act in conversation and relating to others, what they are interested in, the type of occupation they find themselves in.
I’ll discuss that more in a future post, but for now, the claim is that in the general population we find a distribution:
Detached: Fairly common
Psychotic: Very common
Neurotic: Very common
Perverted: Less common
Seminal: Quite rare
Examples of Detached people in popular culture: Temple Grandin (was autistic, now likely schizoid), Greg from Succession (histrionic), Britney Spears (was histrionic, now borderline), Elon Musk (antisocial), Alex from Maid (derealized), Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad (was antisocial, became derealized)
Psychotics: Harmony from Severance (bipolar), Michael Scott from The Office (narcissistic), Ron DeSantis (narcissistic), Donald Trump (paranoid, was narcissistic), Jordan Peterson (depressive), Walter White from Breaking Bad (depressive)
Neurotics: Kim from Better Call Saul (avoidant), Taylor Swift (progressed from narcissistic → schizophrenic → depressive → avoidant), Will Smith (phobic), Dylan from Severance (stress), Halsey (hysteric), Elsa in Frozen II (obsessional), Vladimir Putin (obsessional), Barack Obama (anxious), Dasha Nekrasova (anxious)
Perverts: Macklemore (dependent), Leonardo DiCaprio (was dependent, now fetishistic), Jon Stewart (repentant), Harry Styles (repentant), David Bowie (libertine), Slavoj Žižek (jouissance), Jesus Christ (was libertine, became jouissance)
Seminals: Bernie Sanders (preliminal), Mr. Rogers (liminal, feminine), Alain Badiou (postliminal, masculine), Jewel (was postliminal, feminine, now crisis)
It is fascinating to be able to recognize how different people are at different structures, much like identifying personality types. At the same time, there is an ethical imperative to not apply a “diagnosis” onto someone who is not open to hearing it. Should exercise caution in this regard with those you know personally, but I think that analyzing public figures is acceptable as a way to learn to apply the theory.
In future posts, I may dive deeper into exploring specific people and their progression.
Biological factors, nature vs nurture
It’s important to note the limitations of the Neo-Lacanian system. Being rooted in philosophy more than biology, it doesn’t account for biological differences between individuals. While this constraint is limiting in that it leaves out biological reasons why someone might become autistic, schizophrenic, or other conditions, it’s also a feature because it allows the system to remain focused on the project of what it means for the human mind to evolve towards self-actualization in a generalizable way.
There are, of course, countless biological factors which could contribute to someone’s developmental structure. Intrauterine stress, genetics and epigenetics, diseases, etc.
Regardless of the theory’s limitations, I think that it is valuable on its own as a sort of heuristic map for one’s psychological development. At the very least it is an interesting paradigm by which to see yourself, others, and the world, and useful as a tool for further insights to emerge about people.
Becoming Psychotic
Okay, back to the title of this post.
After the above, it should be clear now that Psychotic has a specific definition I’m talking about. If I tell the average person I want to become psychotic, that sounds bad!
In theory, I am (or recently was) in the final crisis phase of Detached structure, i.e. the derealization phase. I was skeptical at first, and being Detached, it’s especially hard to have a good enough grasp on reading myself and others to know on an intuitive level whether it’s correct. Luckily I could chat with my friend (and author of the theory) Tiffani who helped to confirm it. The better you are at reading people, the better you can pick up on their structure, and Tiffani is great at that.
The idea is that I want to transform myself from derealized to the first phase of Psychosis: bipolar. It’s a way of conceptualizing my psychological growth, to know what the “next step” of growth is for me.
So, what does it mean to be derealized, and to progress to bipolar?
Being derealized
Derealization can be understood through the disorder lens, but in the Neo-Lacanian system it’s a bit more nuanced. All Detached individuals experience derealization as the symptom of the structure, but in the final “crisis” phase of Detachment, it reaches its peak. The disorder is often framed as moving from being in a “normal” state, having a normal sense of self and surroundings, into disconnected or detached state. However, Detached individuals have not actually experienced this “normal” state that occurs once derealization is resolved. They have in fact adapted to the derealized state as if it’s normal.
Okay, so what does this look like in terms of patterns of thinking, perception, and behaviour?
One way to think about how derealization feels is jamais vu. Whereas déjà vu is the phenomenon where you feel like you have experienced the present situation before, jamais vu is the opposite: it feels like you are experiencing the present situation for the first time, even though you rationally know you’ve experienced it before. This happens because the Detached person has only learned splitting as a mechanism to process information about their conscious experience. Later structures will learn mechanisms like foreclosure, repression, and disavowal which enables new ways of processing information, optimizing your ability to focus on relevant information and feel more present in the social world. But because the Detached person has not learned these, they are naturally overwhelmed by information and cannot readily internalize it. This is why the jamais vu metaphor is apt, because the information you are receiving from the world is so noisy, you cannot construct a stable sense of your experience in the same way that later structures can. You are constantly “splitting off” parts of the world that are not relevant to you.
My sense from experience is that it feels like I am “split” from the world of human connection and relating. I still try and do form connections with people, but it happens on a more of a rational level, at a high construal mode. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either; in fact, it probably helps me notice things about people and social situations that others simply ignore or take for granted. But on the other hand, I really do want to learn to connect with people in a more intuitive, low-construal way.
I hope you can see the similarities between Detachment and what are commonly thought of as autistic traits. Also closely relates to avoidant styles in attachment theory.
In a future post, I may explore more about Detachment and derealization, and how it relates to my upbringing and environment. But knowing a bit about what derealization is, let’s see how I can try to grow into Psychotic structure.
Moving towards Psychotic structure
With sufficient support, an infant will normally progress from Detached to Psychotic structure around 3 months of age. The infant learns to securely attach to his or her mother as a safe and reliable caregiver.
But if I, as an adult, have not gone through that process, then what options do I have? Is it even possible to learn to attach at this stage in life?
To be honest, I don’t know the true answer to this. It certainly sounds difficult, because as you age, you gradually lose the neuroplasticity that is needed to learn such a fundamental ability. But in approaching this with openness, I’m treating my mind as a sort of laboratory where I can experiment with various approaches and see what works. Even if progress seems slow or absent, it’s still worth trying for the sake of it.
So, here are some things I am trying or plan to try to learn to attach and become Psychotic:
Mindfulness practice
Tai chi chuan
Psychedelics
Therapy
Travel
Mindfulness & meaning
It’s worth explaining a bit about my approach to mindfulness practice. The Neo-Lacanian system is not the only paradigm by which I am trying to grow; the other significant one is the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series by John Vervaeke. My meta-objective here is to try to integrate them together and generate a set of practices which are applicable in both systems at once.
A slightly more detailed list of things I’m trying and the rationale for doing so:
Mindfulness meditation: vipassana, metta
Part of the rationale is that meditation works to enhance one’s interoception. This is core to the ability to attach, because becoming aware of the sense of one’s own body allows you to learn to infer how other people are feeling.
The goal is to bring the skills from this practice into the real world in social settings. I’m learning that this is an essential aspect of the practice: training your attention so that you can notice things about yourself and others in the present moment. This is where the idea of practicing circling comes in too, as an open, safe, intentional way of fostering real connection.
Tai chi chuan
For the same reason as vipassana and metta, but this is a more embodied practice which can be more effective for developing interoception.
Developing visualization ability / “curing aphantasia”
This is an interesting one. In the Neo-Lacanian theory, Psychosis (Psychotic structure) is when you develop the capacity to produce fantasies, fantasies that you cannot distinguish from reality. There is an association here with visual imagery, and my hypothesis is that visualization is a key component to becoming Psychotic. I cannot visualize, I have what’s called aphantasia, so this idea of having any sort of visual fantasy is foreign to me.
The collection of posts on Reddit by r/Apps4Life linked above is something I have started to follow and aim to commit more strongly to.
Psilocybin
To aid in the above practices, I’ve been using psilocybin (magic mushrooms) to help temporarily nudge my brain from its usual patterns of cognition. In my experience, it has helped a lot to produce insights which would have otherwise been very difficult. The intuition I get is that it helps to simulate the subjective experience of later structure from an earlier one. It’s like I’ve had glimpses of the feeling of connection, of interoception enabling improved empathy, while under the influence of psilocybin. Predicting the thoughts and feelings of others, sensing the social atmosphere, has felt a lot more intuitive.
That said, I caution those who want to try drugs to aid in their practice. It’s important to do your own research first and have a principled approach to it.
Conclusion & disclaimers
To conclude this post, I want to strongly express that I am not an expert in Lacanian psychoanalysis or frankly any of the topics I mentioned here. What I’ve described is massively oversimplified and is probably misleading in some ways, but it is very much a world view under construction and I want to continue correcting and improving it through this journey. Especially if you are well-versed in Lacan, I would love to hear your feedback.
Find more of my notes about the theory here.
This whole thing feels vulnerable to post, but it’s also something I want to do and I feel is an important part of my journey. I do hope that this happens to help or inspire anyone reading this even in a small way.