The Fractal Enigma
Jean Laplanche has spent the near entirety of his career formulating how the unconscious forms around the enigmatic signifier, just as the pearl is formed around its aggravating bit of sand. Laplanche is adamant, contrary to Freud—and despite the primacy of the primary process—that the child’s unconscious forms only later-on in the failed attempt to translate the strange messages that proceed from the parent. This asymmetrical relation is due to the helplessness of the child, so much so that to the perspective of the child, the influence of the parent is omnipotent and unilateral, almost as if they were god (so you can imagine why some cannot help but to believe in father god later on: especially a punishing god). In Laplanche’s view the continual attention and care given to the child by the parent carry with them messages that have been compromised by the parent’s own undreamt enigmas that bathe the child in sensations that cannot be translated, that remain mysterious, forever enigmatic. If the ego is that regulatory agency that assimilates experience into coherent narratives, then the enigmatic message is precisely that which cannot be assimilated and so is lost to time behind the repression barrier. This is the “fundamental anthropological situation:” the crucible by which any human whatsoever, whether clone or caveman, must pass through on their way to psyche; it is the formation of the stranger in us, das andere psychische; the other psychical thing and that soon assumes the shape of every alien, every illegal immigrant and every strange angel wandering the world at large. The enigma becomes isometric and scales to the size of the cosmos, forming what may as well be the model for every mystical transgression beyond the limit. Whatever indigent remainder had been leftover after philosophy attempts to explain everything, the incompleteness, the uncertainties, the indeterminacies of late-modern maths and sciences, are each a return to a foundational uncertainty: the undecidable surplus of infantile helplessness. But the precocious ego, like George W. Bush, is the decider, and each decision cleaves away whole realities.
