Sorry, There Is No Cure

 

We live searching for cures: for our anxieties, our failures, our endless repetitions. But Lacan reminds us—there is no cure.

The psyche, as he showed, is structured in three realms: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. This division produces the three fundamental mental structures: psychosis, perversion, and neurosis. Each is anchored in a particular constellation of fears and, once formed, is fixed. There is no cure in the sense of erasing or switching from one structure to another.

Children are not born already neurotic, perverse, or psychotic. They enter the world undifferentiated, not yet structured. It is through the family, language, and desire that the child becomes divided and positioned. As I mentioned in a previous post, a child of one psychotic parent and one neurotic parent might take up a perverse structure. Two neurotic parents often raise neurotic children. Narcissistic parents tend to produce narcissistic or otherwise neurotic offspring, obsessional, hysterical, or compulsive. As Ortega y Gasset put it: “I am I and my circumstance.” We are not born “crazy,” but as we enter the world of language and norms, our incompleteness is fixed into one of the three psychic structures.

We can see these same structures in social life. Groups also behave as neuroses, perversions, or psychoses:
• Most companies are neurotic, driven by rules, prohibitions, and guilt.
• Most religious groups are psychotic, foreclosing doubt in order to preserve absolute certainty.
• Most circles of friends are perverse, sustained by small rituals, slang, and staged scenarios.

Of course, these are broad generalizations. Very few groups ever reach for something else: a higher symbolic balance. Freemasonry stands out as one of the clearest examples, a community where different personalities and desires are bound together by a common ethical goal of self-improvement and moral responsibility. Certain social orders, with their shared vows and disciplined pursuit of virtue, and civic organizations like the Rotary, which ground their work in service and ethics, also move in this direction. Yet it is Freemasonry, with its unique blend of ritual, fraternity, and moral philosophy, that most fully embodies the search for symbolic balance.

By a higher symbolic balance I mean the effort to become what I call the symbolic man. By this I do not mean a gendered figure, but a mode of being: a subject capable of holding Law, Desire, and Lack in a mature way. The symbolic man is not an unconscious structure but a conscious stance, an ethical position. It is the possibility of stepping back from compulsive repetition, making deliberate choices about how to act, and refusing to let our structure dictate every outcome.

While Lacanian psychoanalysis does not promise a cure, it opens the space for choice. Structures reveal themselves most clearly under stress, danger, and crisis. In those moments, the masks fall and the subject’s true psychic position emerges.

There may be no cure for the psyche, but there is a path. Whoever reads this post in search of tools for their internal storms is already walking it. To recognize one’s fears, to identify one’s structure, to make decisions consciously rather than blindly repeat, that is the work.

Our sinthomes (those unique creations that knot us together) are how we live with what cannot be cured. A sinthome is not a cure, but a way of holding ourselves together, of transforming frustration into form. It is the work that sustains us when nothing else can. The truth is that no psychologist, no external authority, can perform magic for us. The work must come from within, from the subject’s own desire to orient toward the symbolic man; a position of balance, equipped with the inner and outer resources to manage both one’s own needs and the demands of others. This realization, harsh as it may be, is also liberating: it shows that dignity, responsibility, and even happiness do not come from cure, but from how we learn to live with our lack.

That work is always social. As Ortega y Gasset reminds us, “I am I and my circumstance.” Our structures emerge in relation to others, and so our work of recognition must always take into account family, society, and community.

To strive for the position of the symbolic man is not to cure ourselves, but to live with dignity, responsibility, and awareness; monsters and all. It is to live with the objet petit a, that tiny kernel of desire that can never be eliminated, and to deal with Law, Desire, and Lack without collapsing. This is the path.

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