Paternal authority in the society of enjoyment — the effects of alienation and disenchantment on the senex and name of the father
Abstract: In this essay, I track the evolution of paternal authority throughout society. Firstly, I compare the archetypes of fatherly authority between Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalysis. Then, I explain how Jungian psychoanalysis can be compatible with frameworks within critical theory. Finally, I track the evolution of the father archetype in today’s “achievement society”, or the society of enjoyment, where alienation and disenchantment are its main symptoms instead of separation and the boundaries between the private and public spheres are blurring. I claim that while traditional society was a society of the senex, modern society is a society of what Jung called the mana personality.
I: THE JUNGIAN SENEX/PUER AND THE LACANIAN NAME OF THE FATHER
Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious states that there are recurrent patterns remerging in mythology across history that shape our unconscious life. Those patterns he called archetypes. Two of those archetypes are the senex (the “old wise man”) and the puer eternus (the “eternal child”). Those two archetypes are opposites: one is the shadow of the other.
The senex is associated with everything that is old: old age, tradition, slowness, structure, conservatism, stability, seriousness, the past. The puer eternus is represented by the new: youth, progress, adventure, comedy, creativity.
Carl Jung’s archetype of the senex (the “old wise man”) partially overlaps with Jacques Lacan’s concept of the name of the father. The two archetypes are similar, though not identical. The name of the father, also called the symbolic father, is the mental function preoccupied with assigning structure and meaning to the symbolic order of the person. It is the law, and the meaning-giving function insofar as it sets the rules for which signifier goes to which signified.
The symbolic father is what Freud called “the dead father”, insofar as it represents an absent authority. The symbolic father is contrasted with the imaginary father, the latter representing a present authority, breathing down your neck and giving orders. The symbolic father, on the other hand, stands for the authority passed down symbolically, through name. “Legacy” is one example of the symbolic father, where one’s impact is felt even after one’s death. A crown can stand for the name of the father insofar as it confers the wearer the authority of the previous, now deceased, king — etc.
The senex, that is, the old wise man, would then represent the “almost dead” father. It is an authority that is not fully absent, but passive. Its positive aspects represent wisdom, but in its negative form it can get overly critical, cranky and bitter. Since the father is old in this case, it can only passively observe the action and give the main character of the narrative advice from afar. Whereas the name of the father fully represents the legacy/remnants of something that was in the past, the senex (old wise man) represents oldness and tradition in itself. Hence, the two archetypes intersect substantially.
We can see the interplay of these archetypes in various mental disorders. Bipolar disorder (manic depression) may be thought of as an oscillation between the two extremes of the puer/senex archetypes — where mania is a possession by the puer eternus whereas depression is a possession by the senex. The puer eternus represents creativity (generation of the new) and mania is an extreme, dysfunctional creativity: the person has racing thoughts and may have so many ideas that other people can’t keep up, they will jump from topic to topic in conversation, impulsively implement business ideas, talk really fast, have a lot of energy even without sleep, etc. In a manic person you can almost see the curiosity of a little child who is lost in fantasy — thus representing the moment when the puer eternus archetype takes the wheel in the person’s life. Depression is when the pendulum swings back, and the person becomes like an old, wise man: passive, slow, sluggish and inert, without energy.
Psychosis/Schizophrenia is said by Lacan to be caused by a foreclosure of the name of the father. In psychosis, the symbolic father is absent and one possible result is the infamous ‘word salad’ of schizophrenics (disorganized thought/disorganized speech) — this is the consequence of the absence of a stable master signifier. The closest Jungian equivalent of the name of the father is the senex, so if the senex (“the dead father”) is absent in psychosis I assume that, like in mania, it is the eternal child which takes the lead again. This makes sense as psychosis is also a form of dysfunctional creativity in many ways: schizophrenia is associated with an exaggerated pattern-seeking and a sense that everything is meaningful. Disorganized thought in schizophrenia also involves jumping from topic to topic without order and coherence. In both mania and psychosis, the senex (or “the name of the father” for Lacan) is absent, that function which gives order to the symbolic universe of the subject. Children like to play-pretend and sometimes fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality, so alike in mania, the puer eternus takes the lead in psychosis.
II: ENJOYMENT AND THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE SPHERES
If the senex is essentially defined by “oldness” then the name of the father is essentially defined by distance. The origin of the symbolic father in psychoanalysis is the Oedipus complex, where the father separates the child from the mother (their object of primary identification). Thus, the father archetypally represents the obstacle standing between the subject and their object of desire.
The function of the name of the father is to sustain desire and create enjoyment. Enjoyment is primarily achieved in an indirect way — the very injunction to enjoy kills it. Conversely, the more something is prohibited from being enjoyed, the more ‘attractive’ it becomes. The prohibited object becomes enchanted, almost as if a holy aura shines around it, it is infused with what Jung would’ve called mana. The object of desire now has an aura of mystery around it. The prohibition of an object of desire retroactively creates the myth of it having contained absolute enjoyment prior to the prohibition. In other words, the very reason you want it is because you’re not allowed to have it, giving the illusion of you wanting it even if there was no limit placed upon it.
The name of the father creates the separation between the private and the public sphere. It topologically stands for the barrier between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The name of the father is the law prohibiting certain acts, and laws get applied only as long as the wrongdoer is caught in the act. As long as a person breaks the law in private, they will not get caught. The more things are prohibited, the stronger the distinction between the public and the private sphere is. For example, prohibiting drugs does not make them disappear, but instead moves them onto the black market, where their use is less possible in public. The stronger the punishment for drug use, the more users have to hide their use from public view. Thus, the function of the symbolic father is two-fold: firstly, it increases enjoyment by enchanting the object of desire (the less you are allowed to do something, the more you want to do it) and secondly, it creates the private/public distinction by hiding enjoyment from public view.
III: JUNG VS. CRITICAL THEORY
Jungian psychoanalysis has always had a tenuous relationship with critical theory (and here I am not referring strictly to the Frankfurt School, but more generally to any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures). On one hand, critical theory (from strands of Marxism to post-structuralism and media theory) has been mainly focused on the fleeting nature of social structures, focusing on changes in society and sometimes even challenging the existence of human nature. On the other hand, Jungian psychology has been associated rather with conservative and traditionalist schools of thought, focusing on the aspects of humanity that do not change throughout history. This has made the two rather incompatible.
I seek to challenge this dichotomy. We can envision a compatibilist model between critical theory and Jungian psychology where the constant aspects of society interact with the changing aspects of society, the latter being the former’s environment. As an analogy, we can imagine the stable aspects of society (ex: the archetypes of the collective unconscious) like H20. In a cold environment, H20 turns into ice. At room temperature, it turns into water, and at high temperatures it becomes gas. Instead of envisioning the three states of the substance as one single entity (as the Jungian approach would lead us to) or as three completely different entities (as certain strands of critical theory would), we can think of it as three versions of the same entity.
In a similar way, we can conceptualize a model where Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious undergo certain changes in their manifestation corresponding to changes in society’s structure. Thus, we can use critical theory to examine sociological changes that influence the manifestation of Jung’s archetypes. What follows is an attempt at examining the manifestation of the archetypes of parental authority (senex, name of the father, etc.) along recent changes in the relationship between the private and the public spheres.
IV: ALIENATION IN THE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SPHERES
Both Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan have noticed a change in society’s structure in regards to enjoyment. Whereas traditional society was defined as a society of prohibition, today’s society is a society of public enjoyment. In “The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment”, Todd McGowan juxtaposes two different types of fathers: whereas traditional society was marked by the Oedipal father of prohibition, modern society is marked by the “anal father of enjoyment”.
“The new father is an anal father because he obsessively attends to every detail of our lives, prying into every private enclave where we might hide enjoyment. His anality consists in his controlling everything. For the anal father, the very conception of a private space (or a private enjoyment) does not hold. In contrast to the old symbolic father (who was an absent ruler and the ruler over a world of absence), the new father is overly present in our lives.”¹
Todd McGowan notes an element of suffocating presence in the modern society of enjoyment. The symbolic father is what creates distance, as I previously stated, and in psychoanalysis it is regarded as what guards the child from the suffocating presence of the mother (and more generally, the big Other). Thus, whereas the traditional father “ruled through absence, his very distance from the subject made him seem indestructible. The anal father rules through presence, which renders him vulnerable but also inoculates him from critique”².
While providing very good descriptions of the transformations in our societal structure in regards to enjoyment, neither Zizek nor McGowan provide adequate explanations of the material changes that created such phenomena. The key to answering this question lies in the distinction between separation and alienation and the role technological development had in transforming the former into the latter.
“To separate two objects, two people or two ideas means to isolate or segregate them, removing any means of communication between them. Two nations or two people that are separated have no means of interacting with one another. Two entities that are separated do not exchange information between each other in any way. Two entities are separated if they are at a very far ‘distance’ one from another. Separation strictly maintains the distinction between far and close.”³
Alienation, on the other hand, is closeness in distance and distance in closeness. Alienation is represented by long-distance communication. Capitalism very rapidly created more forms of alienating long-distance communication: first the phone, then the mobile phone, then the internet. Alienation is a double-edged sword insofar as it connects things that are physically distant, it also distances things that are physically close. To give an anecdotal example: at my former workplace, a hybrid-remote tech job, even in the cases where I went at the physical office, we still communicated through Microsoft Teams. We never had face-to-face meetings since we also had to include our colleagues from other countries, and thus, our office was a bunch of programmers who are physically sitting next to each other and talking to the person next to them through a laptop & headphones. That is a prime example of alienation: while the technology provided closeness in distance (we could communicate with colleagues from the other side of the globe), it also provided distance in closeness (I communicated to the person right next to me through the internet).
Alienation is the shadow side of globalization, its side-effect. Feudalism in the Middle Ages was marked by separation instead of alienation, and the master-signifier was land. The people who had power in feudalism, as Marx correctly noted, were the people with land who could extract surplus value as rent. The middle ages were a static society and globalization was minimal — power was tied to land precisely because of the lack of methods of long-distance communication such as cars. This is what Zizek and Todd McGowan call the society of prohibition, where the symbolic father could adequately create distance through its primary function.
Technological development led to globalization which led to the development of colonialism and capitalism. With the advent of capitalism, separation started to slowly be replaced by alienation and the symbolic father of prohibition by the anal father of enjoyment. The advent of mobile phones and the internet around the 1990’s represent the last change in the structure of capitalism where alienation has fully replaced separation as the symptom of the social order, creating a society in which the distinction between private and public disappears. Whereas separation creates a sharp distinction between private and public life, alienation creates what I previously named “the private-public self”⁴.
Richard Sennett wrote in “The Fall of Public Man” how up until the 19th century (before the advent of modernity) there was a sharp distinction between the private and the public sphere. There was no such thing as an ‘age of authenticity’, you were expected to wear a thick mask in public that was radically different from how you behaved at home. The pressure to be authentic entered the sphere towards the 19th century and what was previously the private sphere entered into the public sphere. Similarly enough, our public personas entered the private sphere through multiple technologies of surveillance. The pressure of authenticity and transparency leads to a loss of privacy and thus, to a loss of mystery. In the age of social media, where your private life is on constant public exposure, there are hardly any secrets to a person to discover. There is nothing enchanting about the Other. Before, people would protest in order to protect their information — now they willingly give it out on the internet. Values such as mystery, privacy and secretiveness are disappearing. A side-effect of alienation is thus disenchantment. The symbolic father is no longer effective, and privacy is replaced by crowdedness. The suffocating presence of what Lacan called the big Other is manifested through a suffocating presence of information.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it is not the decline of paternal authority that we are suffering today, as conservative critics often suggest. Instead, it is its suffocating presence. As Todd McGowan notes:
“The problem today is not that we can’t find the father, but that we can’t get away from him. (…) The traditional father directly takes up a position of authority, whereas the anal father insinuates himself as — and believes himself to be — just another subject. He is no longer an ideal that looks down on the subject from on high (from a position of authority), but an ideal that exists side-by-side with the subject. In contrast to yesterday’s aloof executive who issues commands but always remains out of sight of his employees, the figure of the anal father manifests himself in the contemporary CEO with an open-door policy, always seeking input from his employees rather than simply giving orders.”⁵
The absence of separating distance that alienation creates leads to a decline of the traditional symbolic father represented by the name of the father and the senex. Today’s society is a society of consumer culture and permissiveness. According to Byung-Chul Han:
“Today, power is assuming increasingly permissive forms. In its permissivity — indeed, in its friendliness — power is shedding its negativity and presenting itself as freedom. Disciplinary power is still commanded by negativity. Its mode of articulation is inhibitive, not permissive. Because it is negative, it does not describe the neoliberal regime — which beams forth in positivity. The neoliberal regime’s technology of power takes on subtle, supple and smart forms; thereby, it escapes all visibility. Now, the subjugated subject is not even aware of its own subjugation. Such a dynamic seeks to activate, motivate and optimize — not to inhibit or repress.”⁶
Since enjoyment is created by prohibition (an object you are not allowed to have is even more desirable), the society commanded by what Zizek calls “the super-ego compulsion to enjoy” paradoxically kills all enjoyment. In the traditional society of prohibition in pre-capitalist days, there was a sharp distinction between private and public, or between inside and outside; this prohibited enjoyment from the public sphere created the possibility of enjoyment in private. The symptom of today’s society is the infamous fear of missing out: and enjoyment is celebrated in public through technologies such as social media. Today’s anal-permissive father is analogous to a person holding a gun to your head and telling you “have fun, or you die!” — the more you are told to have fun, the less you are likely to do it. The pressure to enjoy is a hidden pressure to perform — and the boundary between work and fun is blurred as work is gamified and play outside work becomes a pressure to perform. Today’s neoliberal subject is alike a man not being able to keep his erection doing sexual contact because of the pressure to perform well — in this sense, it is only when it is not mandatory to enjoy that one can properly enjoy.
What Todd McGowan calls a society of enjoyment temporally corresponds Byung-Chul Han calls an “achievement society”. Todd McGowan describes present society as a society in which one feels the pressure to enjoy in public, whereas Byung-Chul Han describes present society as a society without “negativity”, with an excess of positivity. What both have in common is an absence of prohibition, the absence of the “no” of the father. According to Han,
“Achievement society, more and more, is in the process of discarding negativity. Increasing deregulation is abolishing it. Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society. Its plural form — the affirmation, “Yes, we can” — epitomizes achievement society’s positive orientation. Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.”⁷
V: THE RISE OF THE MANA PERSONALITY
The society of public enjoyment is a society of disenchantment. Mana, as Jung understood it, is disappearing from common objects of desire. When everything is permitted, nothing becomes magical — it is the transgression of a prohibition that creates mana. The very absence of such enchantment leads to a displacement of it upon authority figures. The absence of enchantment in the object of desire leads to a presence of enchantment in authority. In other words, the traditional society of prohibition was structured by the paternal authority of an absent father, without mana or energy, that would lead to the ‘infusion’ of prohibited objects of desire with mana. The situation today has reversed: it is the father himself which is infused with mana, and the objects which are now no longer prohibited being without it. The father has taken all the enchantment for himself. Whereas the society of prohibition was a society of the senex, the society of enjoyment is a society of the mana personality.
What Jung called the mana personality is “the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God”⁸ and “the figure of the magician, as I will call it for short, who attracts the mana to himself, i.e., the autonomous valency of the anima”⁹. The modern equivalent of the mana personality are self-help gurus that gather attention such as Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate was at one point the most googled person on earth. The rise in popularity of such figures should inform us of the change in structure that parental authority figures are taken. Whereas traditional society followed parental authority figures that were fundamentally based on negativity (i.e. — prohibition), modern achievement society makes popular authority figures such as Andrew Tate which are fundamentally based on positivity (i.e. — encouragement, achievement, “can” instead of “not”). The mana personality corresponds with this figure — it is by definition a personality infused with “mana”, someone who is mysterious because they hide a secret, or more precisely, the secret.
Whereas the traditional society of prohibition was a society in which enjoyment itself was held in secret, the parental authorities did not hide any secrets inside themselves. Nowadays, it is enjoyment itself which is no secret, but the authority figures that have an air of mystery and enchantment around them. It is almost as if who we make popular are the people who we think have the answers to life, the universe and everything.
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1: Todd McGowan, “The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment”, p. 46
2: ibid.
3: The internet and the social life under capitalism: alienation, fear of abandonment, surplus-enjoyment and “meta-objectification”: https://lastreviotheory.medium.com/the-internet-and-the-social-life-under-capitalism-alienation-fear-of-abandonment-91c19983b208
4: The Private-Public Self — an ‘Inside Out’ persona in the post-autistic era of transparency, and how ‘cold feeling’ and ‘hot thinking’ are invading politics and our intimate lives: https://lastreviotheory.medium.com/the-private-public-self-an-inside-out-persona-in-the-post-autistic-era-of-transparency-and-6beb09c687cf
5: Todd McGowan, “The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment”, p. 46
6: Byung-Chul Han, “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the new Technologies of Power”, p. 14
7: Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”, p. 9
8: Carl Jung, “Two essays on analytical psychology”, Part Two, p. 377
9: ibid.
