Kabbalah & Psychoanalysis

The Tree of Life
and Desire

A coincidence between the Kabbalah and the subject who oscillates

«(And) The living creatures [the Chayot, the angels bearing desire upon Jacob's Ladder] ran and returned, as the appearance of a flash of lightning.»

Sefer Yetzirah 1:6, after Ezekiel 1:14

The Kabbalah is usually read as a mystical doctrine: divine emanation, higher worlds, the light of the infinite. Yet beneath that language lies something more resistant and more portable: a set of observations about how human life works, which hold on account of their structure and not on account of the cosmogony that enfolds them. They can be taken up the way one takes up a good map, without needing to believe in the hand that drew it.

This text's question is a simple one: what relation is there between the Kabbalah and Lacan? It is not a matter of claiming that one anticipated the other, nor of translating Jewish mysticism into secular terms. It is that two languages describe, each in its own way, the same movement: a subject who desires, who oscillates, and who never quite coincides with himself.

This proposal is not a historical equivalence. It is a cartography of desire drawn with two maps at once.

The two columns

In the kabbalistic idiom, existence unfolds between two great movements. On the right stands Chesed: expansion, openness, growth, generosity. It is the force that gives, reaches, and takes in. On the left stands Gevurah: restriction, limit, judgment, form. It is the force that cuts, contains, and establishes a border.

One opens; the other bounds. But neither suffices on its own. Expansion without limit turns into invasion, excess, overflow: a person may give until he disappears, desire without measure, demand of the world an unbounded satisfaction. Restriction without openness turns into rigidity, fear, isolation. The limit ceases to protect life and begins to obstruct it.

This is why the tree contains a central line. Not a motionless point nor the average between two extremes, but a living mediation: a way of making expansion and restriction partake of one another without destroying each other. The person does not observe these forces from without. He is constituted within them.

The subject does not coincide with himself

Here the resonance with Lacan begins. The subject is not a transparent unity that knows what it wants. He is divided, barred. He says one thing and desires another. He seeks well-being and repeats conduct that makes him suffer; he lies, yet he always tells the truth (in the language of his unconscious). He affirms that he wants to move forward and does not move, or he returns to the same point of departure again and again. The unconscious manifests itself in that distance: in slips of the tongue, in dreams, in repetitions.

The subject enters language already barred, already situated at the crossing of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. He does not choose his desire from scratch: he is traversed by language, by history, and by the desire of the Other (parents, social expectation, and so on). For this reason psychic life cannot be conceived as a system that returns to a fixed center. The subject tries to organize his experience, but desire, lack, and jouissance prevent that organization from ever closing.

The center is not given in advance. The subject enters language already situated, with a coordinate on the map of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, from which he oscillates. In the cartography proposed here, that provisional point where the barred subject dwells is represented by Tiferet, which in classical Kabbalah is beauty and harmonization, a line between the two columns that flank it and not the subject itself.

The wave of desire

We may thus imagine the movement of desire as a wave oscillating between two poles. At one extreme, lack (which coincides with the column of contraction, Gevurah): the experience that something is not there, that no identity manages to complete the subject. At the other, the concrete objects onto which the promise of satisfaction is projected (the objet a, which coincides with the column of expansion, Chesed): a person, a position, a recognition, a certainty.

It is worth specifying that the objet a is not a concrete object. It is the cause of desire, that which makes each object seem to contain something capable of completing us, though it can never do so. The subject moves from lack toward an object invested with that promise. He attains it, loses it, or discovers that it does not yield the plenitude he expected. A remainder is left. Desire returns. The oscillation continues.

The kabbalistic tradition itself named this movement. Aryeh Kaplan, commenting on the Sefer Yetzirah, describes how the subject oscillates between running and returning, glimpsing for an instant and at once falling back into the habitual state. Desire has that pendular form: it flings itself out and returns, and it cannot remain at either extreme.

In this model, the amplitude of the wave expresses the distance between the encounter with lack and the flinging toward the object that promises to erase it. The frequency expresses how rapidly the subject repeats the circuit: he desires, pursues, attains or fails, is disappointed, and desires again. It is not a physical magnitude; it is a tool for observing with what intensity and with what repetition a person passes from lack to the search.

The oscillation does not occur neutrally. In each subject, the pressure between desire and lack drains through privileged channels, like a system distributing a mounting load (the channels were discussed in a previous post). When one channel is obstructed, the others become overloaded. Crisis then works as a load test: it does not create the fixation, it reveals that the subject no longer knows how to desire by any other route.

When the ground is withdrawn

A death, a separation, an illness, a migration, a betrayal, the loss of a social position. Any of these can withdraw the ground on which a person had organized his experience. Crisis produces not only pain: it disorders the very map by which the subject understood his life. The object is lost, the fantasy no longer protects, the habitual channel no longer offers its accustomed relief.

The amplitude increases because the subject is displaced with greater violence between lack and the object: from extreme hope to despair, from unbounded demand to absolute withdrawal. And the frequency increases: each object satisfies for less time, each explanation loses its force quickly, each attempt at recovery demands another repetition.

Crisis does not create the problematic structure. It makes it visible. What seemed a trait of character reveals itself as a fixation.

Not every crisis produces growth. The rupture may leave behind a new organization, but it may equally leave a traumatic fixation, a rigid defense, an inability to symbolize what has happened. The idea that all suffering contains a lesson is one more way of denying suffering.

The kabbalistic tradition seems to say the opposite: that meaninglessness does not exist, that some use is sought for tragedy. But it is worth specifying which concealment is meant. There is one reading, that of Deuteronomy, in which the hidden face of the divine, hester panim, the hiding of the face, is punishment. And there is another, the one that concerns us here, closer to Luria and to the Hasidic tradition: concealment and the breaking of the vessels are inscribed in creation itself, not sent as a personal lesson. On that reading one can honestly say «this has no meaning for me», even «perhaps I shall never understand it», without thereby asserting that reality is absurd. What the Kabbalah does not grant is that the fragment remain absolutely severed from the whole. And there lies the difference from cheap consolation: tikkun does not consist in explaining why it happened, but in deciding what relation to establish with what happened. At times it does not recover a lost meaning; it produces an orientation where there is no explanation. At bottom, the one thing the Kabbalah asks is not an explanation but emunah: the trust, distinct from certainty, that there is a meaning even though it remain hidden.

The subject (green) oscillates between the flinging toward the object, which here models the expansive pole of Chesed, and the limit that returns him to lack, which models the restrictive pole of Gevurah. The wave turns around Tiferet, understood as a dynamic center of articulation, not as repose. Before: short amplitude, low frequency. Tragedy sinks the center and sets amplitude and frequency soaring. Afterward, repose is refounded at an intermediate level.

Three times, not two

The diagram shows three times. A prior training, in which the subject has learned to oscillate with short amplitude and low frequency. A deformation, the tragedy, in which the ground gives way and the oscillation is set off. And a refounding, in which the center stabilizes once more, but at another level: it may end up higher or lower than before.

Tragedy does not create the wound. It activates it. Whoever came to it with an oscillation already wide and rapid falls from farther off. Whoever came with his center close to lack (through meditation, prayer, or submission to fate), having already accepted that the object does not complete and that the ground is not eternal, is shaken less.

Tikkun and the traversing of the fantasy

In Lurianic Kabbalah, tikkun means repair: to reorganize what has remained fragmented. It is not feeling better, nor erasing the conflict, nor eliminating the lack. It is that a force which acted in isolation should return to occupy its place within a totality. Chesed receives limit. Gevurah receives mercy. The quality ceases to present itself as sovereign and begins to relate to the others.

It may be thought through the image of a rainbow. Each color keeps its form and does not vanish in order to belong to the light. Unity is not attained by erasing the colors, but by recognizing that they all proceed from a single source. The subject need not dissolve his singularity in order to align himself with the One. He needs to stop living his particularity as an absolutely separate existence.

Lacan does not propose a return to the One. For him, lack is constitutive and is not repaired like an accidental wound. But there is a movement comparable to certain effects of tikkun: the traversing of the fantasy. The fantasy organizes the subject's relation to desire; it offers him a scene in which he believes he knows what he lacks and what object would complete him. To traverse it is not to stop fantasizing: it is to recognize the assemblage and to stop obeying it as though it were an absolute truth.

In this cartography, tikkun and the traversing of the fantasy converge in a common gesture: to stop demanding that the object guarantee the consistency of the subject, to traverse the illusion that there exists an object capable of extinguishing lack and halting desire. They do not operate on the same plane: the traversing modifies the relation to lack and to jouissance; tikkun orients that transformation toward the reintegration of the part within the whole.

The reduction of the oscillation

When the subject traverses the fantasy, the wave of desire does not disappear. Lack remains and desire keeps moving. But the relation to both changes. The object ceases to concentrate the whole promise of completeness. It no longer has to save the subject nor answer for his existence.

For this reason the oscillation can diminish in amplitude: the subject still moves between lack and the object, but he is not flung with the same violence from one extreme to the other. He can approach an object without demanding that it suppress all want. He can lose something without feeling that he loses with it the whole of his being. And it can diminish in frequency: a pause appears between the impulse and the act, between the disappointment and the new search.

The center of the wave then draws near to the acceptance of lack. But to draw near to lack is not to choose privation, nor depression, nor the renunciation of living. It is to consent that incompleteness is part of the human condition, and that no object should bear the impossible task of eliminating it. The calm that may accompany this does not come from having extinguished desire. It comes from not being wholly dragged along by it.

In Lacanian terms, this is not a displacement toward the jouissance of meaning, which can even increase the oscillation when the subject needs to interpret everything. It comes closer to a combination of three movements: the assumption of lack, the traversing of the fantasy, and a partial separation with respect to the demand of the Other. Desire is not extinguished; it ceases to be an infinite demand.

In ethical terms, this calm recalls the middle way of Aristotle and Maimonides: not the suppression of desire, but its measure. The coincidence is one of form, not of content: the classical middle way is moral virtue, and this is a position of desire. Tiferet is not the peace of one who no longer desires. It is the capacity to oscillate without being wholly dragged along.

Faith is not needed for the map to work

Psychic life reaches no definitive equilibrium. Desire sets out from lack, orients itself toward an object, meets a partial satisfaction, and moves again. During a crisis, amplitude and frequency increase; the dominant channel ceases to relieve, and the organization that sustained the subject reveals its fragility.

Lacan makes it possible to read the logic of that repetition. The Kabbalah makes it possible to locate its imbalance within a wider map and to give it an orientation. Tikkun eliminates neither lack nor desire. It modifies the relation between the two. The amplitude diminishes because the object ceases to represent an absolute completeness. The frequency diminishes because the subject no longer repeats, with the same urgency, the circuit of promise, satisfaction, and disappointment.

Like each color of the rainbow, the subject keeps his singularity. He need not dissolve into the light to recognize that he proceeds from it. One need not believe in divine emanation to use the structure as a map. The kabbalistic language adds something more, an orientation of belonging: the recognition that singularity is not wholly severed from its source. But that is a layer the reader may take or leave; the map works without it. The center is not the place where the oscillation ends. It is the dynamic point from which the subject can observe it, lessen its violence, and remember that his particular color forms part of one and the same light.

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