Transcription
Today I have adopted the disheveled med scientist look. I hope you like it. My hairdresser is in a hospital, not because of me, for a change.
Okay, Shashanim. Today we're going to discuss desire and violence in narcissistic families. But first, we have to define, of course, what are narcissistic families or households, because the family is a dying thing, or at least marriages. A narcissistic household has parents, children, or a narcissistic household can be deprived or devoid of children. But within a narcissistic household, there's at least one narcissist. It could be in a typical nuclear traditional family. It could be mother or father. It could be siblings. It could be, um, a lover. So within the household, there is at least one narcissist and other non-narcissists. This is what I would call throughout this video a narcissistic household.
A narcissistic household triggers dynamics which were described by Rene Girard. We'll talk about him in a minute, and these are known as mimetic desire and mimetic violence. Stay with me for a truly wild ride in the outer recesses of the French intellectual mind. My name is San Vagnin. I'm the author of Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a professor of psychology, disheveled or not.
In narcissistic households, authentic desire is suppressed. You're not allowed to express emotions, motivations, attitudes that are authentic, that are true to yourself, that reflect who you truly are. You're not allowed, you're not permitted to establish boundaries. Consequently, when the members of the household are children, they fail to develop a functioning self or a functioning ego. Rather than authentic desire, the narcissistic household, or the narcissists in the household, encourage, uh, mimetic desire. So authentic desire is sacrificed in favor of mimetic desire and its correlate, mimetic violence. What on earth am I talking about? Can I transition to English? Yes, I can. Stay with me and you will understand every single word I've just said. I hope I do too.
Rene Girard created a theory called mimetic theory. He suggested that human desire is not autonomous. Human desire is imitated. We look at other people and we imitate them. We appropriate their desires, their dreams, their fantasies, their wishes. Girard was that close to the concept of shared fantasy, but he never crossed the line. That attainment belongs to Sander in 1989. Still, Girard describes described all the mechanisms of shared fantasy. He suggested that the conveyance, the conduit, the conveyor belt of desire was mimes, mimicry, imitation, emulation. And he said that because people end up desiring the same objects, this creates competition for these objects. He introduced the concept, the economic concept of scarcity. And so objects are scarce, physical objects, but also human objects. If you are competing for the same woman or for the same man, you would know what he was talking about. This scarcity of objects creates a competitive environment. And since we imitate each other, we have this herd mentality of imitating each other in our desires. This inevitably, ineluctably, gives rise to competition, which easily deteriorates and devolves into violence. Think about the queues when a new iPhone is released and how people often end up fighting within these queues. This rivalry inevitably creates conflict, and this is what he called mimetic violence. And he said the way societies resolved, ameliorated, and mitigated mimetic violence is by uniting against an arbitrary victim, and he called it the scapegoat mechanism.
And here is the sequence. When we ask ourselves, what is it that we want? What is it that we truly desire? What is our fantasy, our dream? We look at other people, and we look to other people. They say, "They desire an iPhone. I'm going to desire an iPhone, too." This creates competition because the number of iPhones is limited. The scarcity and this competition gives rise to conflict and possibly, in extreme cases, to violence. To prevent this pervasive violence, to fend off against this aggression, society sacrifices some of its members. These sacrificial members are known as scapegoats. So mimetic desire, people don't know what to desire. They look to others, models. They determine what is worthy of desiring. Desire is therefore a triangle: subject, model, object. And desire can be internally mediated or externally mediated. If the model is out of reach, for example, if a role model is a celebrity, what results is external mediation. This comes very close to the work of Bandura. But by the way, so the result is external mediation. If the model, the role model is close, for example, a sibling, a friend, a colleague, a teacher, a peer, classmate. So if the model is close, and we tend to emulate or imitate or mimic a close model's desire, this is known as internal mediation, and this leads to intense direct rivalry.
Mimetic rivalry, mimetic violence is when two people who are close together in physical proximity, in daily friction, in a relationship, in a dyad, in a family, in a in a community, two people who share the same physical and mental space want the same object. They become rivals. They imitate not only each other's desire. They adopt each other's tactics, but they also imitate and emulate each other's hostility. The focus shifts from the object to the rivalry. The rival becomes the object, in a way. The rivalry intensifies and spreads throughout the family or throughout the community. And this is what Girard called the crisis of distinctions. I am sure that as I speak, many of you can apply everything I'm describing to the narcissistic family. Everything I've just said applies in you. It applies powerfully in the narcissistic family, more so than in normal, healthy families. In the narcissistic family, mimetic desire is everything because authentic expressions are forbidden. And because, in most cases, the self, the formation of the self, is disrupted. There's no authentic desire because there's no authentic self. So everyone imitates everyone. In a narcissistic family, mimetic desire is the bon, the name of the game and the plat.
So mimetic desire leads to rivalry. For example, one of the objects could be the narcissistic parent's admiration and approbation and approval and conditional love. So the siblings would compete for this scarce object, and as they compete, they would develop rivalry, conflict, and very often this will culminate in violence. Ultimately, the whole family, in order to prevent a disintegration of the unit, in order to secure a smooth functioning, the whole family will settle on a scapegoat, a scapegoat mechanism to prevent total destruction from mutual emerging violence within the family unit. The family unites against an arbitrary, marginalized scapegoat, a member of the family that can be safely sacrificed. The shared violence against this victim restores peace, creates a founding myth for the family social order. It is the ethos of the family.
Rene Girard was born in a very interesting place in Avignon, in France, and he died in Stanford in the United States. Obviously, he was he was many things. He was a literary critic, a scholar, a philosopher, and he made numerous and very often controversial contributions in fields too many to enumerate. His theory of mimetic desire was focused on trying to understand what makes people tick. So it was a kind of extension of Fagi's work of me on mentalizing. It was an attempt to generate a universal theory of the mind, a theory of everything in the field of mind studies. And he, he sought to to un to he sought to comprehend the transition from desire to conflict. He believed that human desire begets conflicts. And he asked himself, why is that? And then he came up with the idea of sacrifice and the theory of the scapegoat. And that concluded the defense, so to speak.
Those of you who have been attuned to America's political scene have heard people like Peter Thiel and JD Vance quoting profusely from the work of Rene Girard. Girard developed the concept of mimetic desire in his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. The book was published aptly in the year that I was born, 1961, a momentous year for many reasons. Mimetic, imitative desire postulates that humans' objects of desire are determined not by individual psychological factors, but instead by interpersonal dynamics. In this sense, mimetic desire is an object relations theory, exactly like the British proponents of object relations in the 1960s, the same period. It suggested that we are defined relationally. Nothing or little emanates from the inside. Little is innate. It all emerges and erupts owing to and within interactions with other people, which is one of the main claims of object relation British object relation theories.
According to Girard's theory of mimetic desire, humans desire the things that other people possess or that other people desire for precisely the same reasons that others possess or desire them. Everything, therefore, is a whole of mirrors, and it's a concept that many of you would be acquainted with from my own work. Desire is not a relationship between a subject, an individual human being, and an object, the desirable thing. It's not this. Until Girard's work, we believed that desire was directional. There's a human agent, and the human agent desires something: a laptop, a smartphone, another human being, whatever, whatever strikes your fancy. But starting with Girard, we realize the social dimension of desire. Desire is a relationship between two or more subjects, people, mediated via the object. One could even generalize and say that the desired object is an excuse to have a relationship between two people. What type of relationship? Competitive conflict, rivalry, ultimately possibly culminating in mimetic violence and the inevitable attempt to reconcile, to pacify by sacrificing someone: the scapegoat.
Girard, as you have understood by now, was exactly like me, highly critical of individualistic notions in psychology. For example, the existence of a self or an individual or a personality. He didn't believe in any of this. Neither do I. And similarly, he criticized the concept of the unconscious. And in this sense, is very reminiscent of Lacan. Lacan suggested that the unconscious is a sum total of the narratives of other minds, of other people, their voices. Similarly, Girard criticized the unconscious. He did not believe in it. He said that mimetic desire provides an occasion to revise psychoanalytic theory. Although he was a great admirer of Sigmund Freud, he recast many of Freud's ideas in terms of mimetic desire. Take, for example, the Oedipus complex. Freud's conception of the rivalry between sons and their fathers. Girard suggested that the father-son rivalry is driven not by the competition for the object, which is the mother, but it is driven by the fact that the son models himself on the father. The father becomes the role model for the son. Obviously, if the son mimics the father, if the son emulates and imitates the father, the son is also going to appropriate and annex and absorb and digest the father's desire for the mother. Their relationship is transformed into one of violent rivalry when the son imitates the father's desire for the mother. And all this culminates or leads to the epitome of Girard's work, which is the sacrifice and the scapegoat. These are very common dynamics in narcissistic families: the golden child and the scapegoat, and all this. Now you're beginning to, I hope, see the deeper layers of the mechanisms behind this.
Girard expanded the idea of mimetic desire in another book a decade later, in 1972, Violence and the Sacred. This book offered an analysis of sacrifice in ancient religions. It's amazing reading, by the way. This man was encyclopedic. It's it's it's mind-shattering to read his work, especially in the original in French. He said that when desire is intrinsically mimetic, human experience is suffused with competition, envy, rivalry, and this often leads to violence. Indeed, within narcissistic families, where authentic desire is frowned upon, castigated, chastised, criticized, and ultimately eradicated, what's left is mimetic desire. And the dynamics in narcissistic families consequently involve envy, rivalry, competition, and a lot of aggression, passive aggression, and externalized aggression. Very often, violence.
And Girard suggested that such violence terrifies everyone involved. Even violent people sometimes are shocked by their own violence. Violence has a very unsettling effect. And he said that the risk of violence, the peril of such violence, creates a challenge. How does the family unit, the community, society, the nation-state, you name it, how do human collectives, small and big, narcissistic families included, pathological human collectives and healthy human collectives, how do all of them manage the incipient, emergent, eruptive violence that is involved in mimetic desire? The way that the human impulse towards retribution could lead to a cycle of murders or other types of violence and aggression between individuals and families and communities and nation-states. Just have a look at Israel and Palestine. So if you don't harness mimetic desire, if you don't sublimate it and channel it, if you don't maybe proscribe it, make it illegal, you are at risk of encouraging all the participants to continuously engage in aggression and counter-aggression, perpetration and retribution, crime and punishment. And there's no end to this cycle. And this potential for unending violence presents a problem for people living together in a family, in society, and so on. Even in narcissistic families, aggression has to be somehow controlled, or the family will implode. Violence can even be externalized as one of the main forces affecting human experience. And so there's a lot of aggression and violence in organizational systems such as religion, nationalism, nation-state. Aggression and violence are interwoven into the narratives that govern our lives. As he wrote, violence is the heart and sacred soul of the sacred.
In order to avoid internal violence, maintain stability, and guarantee the survival of the human collective, humans, societies, human families, human communities developed a mechanism. The mechanism is like a steam valve. You know, when you cook, there's a steam valve. The mechanism is like a steam valve. It is intended to dissipate the energy, the psychic energy, the affected aggression, the tension caused by mimetic desire. And this mechanism is the sacrifice of a scapegoat. The sacrifice could be ritualistic, involving, you know, in ancient times, human sacrifice. Nowadays, canceling someone or incarcerating, imprisoning someone. These are various ways of ritually sacrificing someone. Or the sacrifice could be in the air, as part of a role, an allocated or emergent role. Someone assumes the role of a scapegoat and is constantly sacrificed time and again. Their interests, their wishes, their dreams, their hopes, everything is sacrificed, trampled upon, suppressed, repressed, mocked, ridiculed, shamed, humiliated. So the sacrifice becomes the role of the, the scapegoat. The role of a scapegoat is to be sacrificed. And this, I call it ambient sacrificing. So sacrificing could be acute, ritualistic, or ambient. The inevitable violent impulses that humans experience as a result of the structure of mimetic desire are channeled, redirected at someone or something outside the confines or structure of society, outside the pale, beyond the pale. Someone who will not be avenged. Someone who is deemed sacrificable. Someone who is characterized as a monster. Someone whose punishment is cathartic and considered moral and ethical.
Girard said that the development of such a mechanism is integral to the stability of any given human collective, any given society. And of course, one could conceive of this kind of sacrifice as a part of the implicit contract in narcissistic families, in healthy families, in societies, in nation states. We have a social contract, and there's a whole theory known as social contract theory, and it's based around fully transparent and mutual agreements in the old, in the 18th century theories. But today, we know that a lot of the social contract is submerged, a lot of it is implicit, a lot of it is unspoken. Bolas, as Bolas coined the phrase, the, um, unknown thought, uh, so, uh, the unthought none. So we have a situation here where the mimetic desire and the sacrificial mechanism are integral parts, cogs and wheels in the social contract. Girard said that scapegoating is central to the functioning of any social contract, and vice versa. Those participating in it do not recognize what they're doing as scapegoating, as a sacrifice of the innocent. They convince themselves that what they're doing is persecuting criminals, or for the greater good, or protecting the innocent, or guarding the vulnerable, or they tell themselves. They invent all kinds of narratives to explain what they're doing. Performing the killing or the eradication of an outsider, of the other, is perceived or misperceived as justly punishing someone who deserves punishment, when in fact the victim unjustly bears blame for the community's social dysfunction. Outliers, outcasts, iconoclasts, controversial figures, they are the natural scapegoats. You can pin everything on them. They're defenseless because they have excluded themselves from the social firewall, from social protection. They have made themselves available as monsters, and they inevitably end up being sacrificed or scapegoated.
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert wrote the book Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function in 1898. We're having a French video. In their work, which is an amazing piece of work, Mauss and Hubert suggested that sacrifice is not performed because there are gods. It's not like there's a god and the god demands sacrifice, but instead, the gods were created in order to justify sacrifice, in order to explain it. You see, according to Girard, mimetic desire leads to rivalry, to competition, to violence. To avoid, to prevent this violence, the energy, the aggression is redirected at scapegoats. But how do we justify scapegoating? We invent gods. We say we need to sacrifice this person because there's a god. The god could be a classical god, you know, with a beard, and the god could be, for example, the rule of law. The rule of law. That's a kind of god. It's not religion that creates the ritual; it's the ritual that generates the religion. According to Girard, Mauss and Hubert fail to fully understand the origins and functions of sacrificial ritual, but their insight, their basic insight, is essentially correct. Girard said that the killing of the scapegoat shifts the focus from the community's internal disagreements and discord and strife to something external. It's a distraction. In today's world, it's also become an form of entertainment. Through the sacrifice, political stability is restored. There's a sense of catharsis and purification. The sacrifice of the scapegoat provides a peaceful respite. And that's why we ascribe to the scapegoating process transcendental meanings: religious, national, legal.
Within the narcissistic family, scapegoating is very crucial because it allows the narcissistic parent, for example, or the narcissistic sibling to project onto the scapegoat the parts of themselves that they find unacceptable, that they reject. The pacifying effects of the sacrifice do not last, however, and so the sacrifice must be repeated regularly. And that's what I call ambient sacrificing in narcissistic families. When you look around you today in postmodern societies, you see victimhood movements, you see cancel culture, and you see moral panics: Satanism, child sexual abuse, sexual assault. These are all moral panics. We are in need of scapegoats more than ever. We are in need of human sacrifice more than ever because the world is terrifying more than ever. We need to placate, pacify, reduce our anxieties. And the only way to do this is to sacrifice human beings. We used to sacrifice them physically, cut out their hearts in the Aztec cultures, but today we sacrifice them symbolically. We incarcerate them in prisons. We cancel them so that they disappear. Effectively, we dredge up recovered memories of false memories and put hundreds of people in prison. We attribute to every single male who has ever engaged in sex, sexual assault. That's the way we sacrifice people nowadays. Initially, uh, and and so there's a congruence between victimhood, the notion of victimhood, and scapegoating, because scapegoats are often cast or described as perpetrators, and they victimize all everyone else, and so everyone else has a right to this human sacrifice.
Initially, society is dominated by the violence that is entailed by mimetic desire. Society develops the scapegoat mechanism to redirect violence in ways that are less harmful to itself, which in turn inspires the invention of religion to justify sacrifice, is how the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the situation. Ultimately, I'm continuing to quote from the Britannica. Ultimately, with the rise of the state as a political formation, the function of sacrifice is largely absorbed by the judicial systems. That's the Britannica. Capacity to discipline and punish members of the populace. I, as an aside, I will mention here, that's not the Britannica, that's me. That Foucault, Michel Foucault, working more or less at the same period, attributed the same function to inpatient psychiatry. He said psychiatry, mental health, all this apparatus of suppression, oppression, all this oppressive apparatus was intended to isolate, identify, isolate scapegoats and sacrifice as a tool of social control. Simultaneously, we had Guy Debord. It was an amazing time, the 1960s. I was born then. We had Debord was talking about the society of the spectacle. Scapegoating is a form of spectacle, a spectacle of collective purification and catharsis, a spectacle of mass projection. And so Girard paid homage, homage to this tradition of grand historical narratives of human development. And that's why he did admire Sigmund Freud, especially his work, Totem and Taboo, 1913, because it was Freud who suggested that primordial sacrificial murder lies at the foundation of society. He said that Freud suggested that we came together and created communities, and then societies, and then nation-states, and then supranational bodies. All this intended to regularize and ritualize the sacrifice of scapegoats through the legal system, through the judicial system. And Girard agreed with it. But he took Freud's notion in a different direction because he insisted that the foundational murder was not fundamentally Oedipal or sexual, but a sacrifice of a scapegoat that channeled and released pent-up tensions and aggression and potential violence in the community. And when I say community, society, nation, state, just substitute narcissistic family or narcissistic household, and you get the full picture. I gave you an insight via Girard's work and others into the scapegoating mechanism in narcissistic families. I hope you enjoyed the tour, which is in French. See you soon, whether you want to or not.