A Lacanian account of The Red Pill views it as one of the dominant ideologies of the Western world (I appreciate that many readers in contrast regard it as subversive). Almost any Western man and woman takes it as self-apparent, except for the cynics or romanticists, who in thinking themselves as having seen past the ideology, fall into the trap of the Lacanian fantasy. Those cynics actually aid the dominant ideology, rather counter-intuitively, as their mockery and attacks help to buttress the ideology. A similar situation can be found with the widely mocked ideas of Ayn Rand. Nobody takes them seriously, and yet Alan Greenspan-- the man holding the keys to the economy-- was a devout follower (listen to a quick explanation by Zizek on this).

And so with that in mind let's move to the case of Marilyn Monroe as described by the famous Lacanian, Bruce Fink (note: I have bolded some of the especially interesting comments):

She was so childlike she could do anything, and you would forgive [her] as you would forgive a seven-year-old. She was both a woman and a baby, and both men and women adored her. A man wouldn't know whether to sit her on his knee and pet her, or put his arms around her and get her in the sack. (--One of her husbands)

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...she promised to “love, honor, and cherish” her husband to be, Joe DiMaggio—the famous baseball player from the 1950s—but did not promise to obey him. Marilyn was very soon disenchanted with Joe because of his lack of culture and intellectual interests. Extremely demanding, assiduous, and jealous, he nevertheless managed to stay in very close contact with Marilyn long after their divorce. His macho attitudes and possessive love obviously pleased Marilyn to a considerable extent. Not long after their divorce, she claimed never to have wanted to marry him, and that he had physically hurt her on a number of occasions while they were still married—a claim borne out by several friends and relatives. Speaking of Joe, Marilyn bragged that her sex life with him was better than with any of her other men, and that his “biggest bat is not the one he uses on the field” (p. 114); at another point, however, she stated that if that were all it took, they would have remained married.

A man who worked with her noted that at one point she began systematically showing up late for work; when he told her that he would not stand for it, that he was not impressed by her or her reputation, she straightened out and stopped coming in late. Another co-worker claimed she behaved like a child asking to be spanked.

Marilyn regularly resorted to blackmail to get her way with men, forcing them to stop seeing other women, or give up their wives, children, and careers for her. While saying that she wanted a man to be the boss and resolving time and again to play housewife, the tables inevitably turned: the man became an overly doting father, and she set off to make fresh conquests. Her marriage to Arthur Miller, a prominent intellectual figure and playwright at that time, quickly degenerated as he was coaxed into becoming her lackey, and began doing everything for her. One friend observed that he was at her beck and call, running around after her all the time. After meeting with Arthur Miller, Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s second psychiatrist, said that he felt Miller had “the attitude of a father who has done more than most fathers would do, and is rapidly coming to the end of his rope”

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A great many of her friends seemed to have been drawn to her at least in part because of her very insecurity, unhappiness, and apparent sleepwalking through life. They took care of all of her business and legal affairs, lent her money, and found her lawyers when necessary. She seemed to be utterly incapable of dealing with such practical matters, and never lacked for friends willing to do so for her.

Men in particular were drawn to her because of a kind of innocence or eternal purity she emanated—strange characteristics to attribute to a woman who had worked for some time as a high-class call girl, slept her way up the professional ladder, used sex to get what she wanted at times, and been married numerous times. But she was also described as seemingly eternally available, ready and waiting for men. She was obviously able to simultaneously embody for them both the immediate prospect of sex associated with prostitutes and the innocent sweetness of the pure at heart.

Ever more disenchanted with the men she had known, in the last years of her life Marilyn seemed only interested in powerful men and went for the most prominent men in her circles. At one time she was involved with two very important men who were in fact brothers: John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. While John carried on a very superficial relationship with her, she engaged in a far deeper relationship with Robert, perhaps in part to get back at John or even to make him jealous and thereby win him over. Her relationship with Robert also seemed to thrive quite distinctly on the fact that he was already married and had a family. The challenge, as usual, was to try to pry him away from his wife and get him to marry her. Marilyn basically came right out and demanded that Robert, then Attorney General of United States and aspiring presidential material, not only give up his wife and family for her, but give up politics altogether. When her own charms proved insufficient, it seems she may have resorted to other means, including a pretended pregnancy (though there are some indications that Robert had in fact gotten her pregnant) and a suicide attempt designed to blackmail or guilt-trip him into staying with her.

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She also turned to psychotherapy at various points in her life, and underwent a year of therapy with one psychiatrist and at least two years with a second, Ralph Greenson. Accounts given of Marilyn’s “treatment” by this second psychiatrist, a man of international renown in the psychoanalytic community (who was a personal friend of Anna Freud's), are particularly revealing of Marilyn’s psychology, but not in the way that might be expected at first. Greenson’s statements show that Marilyn had him wrapped around her little finger. For example, to alleviate the discomfort Marilyn felt in waiting with his other patients in his waiting room, Greenson invited her to have her sessions at his own home. When she was particularly depressed, “his sessions with her would last four or five hours” (p. 307) and were not infrequently held at Marilyn’s own home. When Marilyn was obliged to travel for professional reasons, Greenson was often brought along to hold her hand and be supportive. When able to go to her sessions at the psychiatrist’s home, she often went for a walk with his daughter before her sessions, and stayed for a drink and sometimes dinner with his wife and son afterward (pp. 234–35), the whole family becoming very wound up in her troubles.

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Marilyn’s life story provides many indications that Marilyn was an hysteric, not a schizophrenic or “borderline” as her various psychiatrists believed. An hysteric often demands that her3 significant other’s love be absolutely unreserved, in other words, she demands a situation in which she will be the object of someone’s unconditional, unbounded love. Now what could be a better test of the unreservedness of love than to have her partner give up loved ones and/or career for her? Marilyn provides fine examples of this on numerous occasions, and one of the best examples is perhaps that of her demand that Robert Kennedy give up wife, family, and politics for her. It was not enough for her that he took time out of his busy political career, risking exposure and thus possible damage to his political and family life, to be with her; she apparently could not rest—even though it seems quite clear that she was far more taken with brother John than with Robert—until he left all else behind: everything of importance to him that did not revolve around her.

More striking still was her relationship with her second psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson. As I mentioned earlier, Greenson gave in to Marilyn’s every request (let her have her sessions at his home, at her home, for as long as she wanted, and so on), and she certainly did not restrain her demands. She engaged in an overstepping of the usual limits of the therapeutic context that is absolutely typical of hysteria, seeking to prove to herself that Greenson wanted to help her, not because she paid him to do so, but rather because he loved her (what is not so typical is the degree of overstepping of the analytic context). Many neurotics fantasize about being their therapist’s only patient, but few encounter such willingness on their therapist’s part to make such a wish come true.

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Just because Marilyn demanded such unbounded love does not mean that it was what she actually wanted. Hysteria teaches us a great deal about the radical split between demand and desire, between what you ask for and what you want, between what you find yourself trying to get people to give you, and what you really want them to give you. *Whereas love might incline you to demand that you be someone’s one and only, desire might blossom only when you feel that you are not that person’s one and only. * To illustrate the distinction between desire and demand (note that the French demande is often better translated into English as “request”), consider the common request made by analysands to decrease the number of sessions per week or to discontinue treatment altogether. Such requests are made for a variety of reasons—running the gamut from feeling they are boring or disgusting the analyst, not to mention most other people in their lives, to feeling they are not sure they are making headway or are pretty sure they have made headway but perhaps can go no further—and frequently are tantamount to an attempt to find out what the analyst thinks: is he or she fed up with us, sick of our stories and problems, or does he or she genuinely think we are making progress and want us to continue? The explicit demand or request is to have fewer or no further sessions, whereas the underlying desire may be to hear the analyst say, “You're doing good work and I want you to continue.” Thus, while formulating a request (which may be feeble or take on the more insistent form of a demand proper),

• Demand: “I want to have one session a week instead of three” (Level 1)

the analysand’s desire can be put as follows:

• Desire: “Tell me I'm doing a good job and you want to see me more, not less” (Level 2)

(This is not to say that analysands should never be granted fewer sessions or that analysts should never agree to terminate the therapy, but that there is always potentially more than meets the eye in a request or demand.)

A female analysand once asked her boyfriend to move with her to a city where she had landed a job (Level 1), all the while hoping he would not agree to move there with her (Level 2), because to her such agreement would have meant he was weak-willed like her own father, whereas she wanted a strong-willed lover. In this instance, she explicitly asked for something she did not want.

It seems quite clear that many of Marilyn’s husbands systematically responded to the first level, that of Marilyn’s explicit demands for love, but almost completely neglected the existence of the second level, that of her desire. Marilyn’s demands for love were, no doubt, quite convincing, and she very often played up to men by appealing to their paternal instincts, playing the helpless little girl in need of a father’s attentions. She probably also at times sought out older men who were looking for a much younger woman precisely so as to be able to treat her as a daughter. With Marilyn, such men would be in no danger of turning her into a mother figure, as obsessive men are so inclined to do.

Yet as soon as a man began to respond to her demand for unconditional love, began jumping through hoops to satisfy her every whim and fancy, she lost interest. As soon as she had attracted the man she had set her sights on, and gotten him to love her in that unconditional way, she wanted out of the relationship. Consciously she wanted a man to take care of her and dote on her, and yet a man who could be cajoled into doing that was not reckoning with the second level, that of her desire. Just as obsessive men have a tendency of turning their partners into mother figures, hysterics have a tendency of transforming their partners into doting father figures. No one is especially happy with the result, but they often feel they cannot help but do so.

It seems safe to say that at least unconsciously, if not consciously, Marilyn would have preferred a man who would not play that game with her, who would not allow himself to be transformed into a doting father, who would not neglect that second level.

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People generally think that they are able to express their desires to those around them, and to formulate those desires in their own minds. Yet those very same people, when they eventually seek out a psychoanalyst’s help, make it very clear that they do not really know what they want. When people discuss, say, their career choice in analysis, they often insinuate that their career was foisted upon them or repeatedly recommended by relatives, teachers, guidance counselors, and/or friends. Such patients seem to be wondering, “Where do I come in? I've spent all these years pursuing someone else’s goal, but is that what I really want?” Most people have a great deal of trouble sorting out what their own desires are, finding it much easier to mouth what they have heard other people express.

The point is not that Greenson should have deliberately frustrated Marilyn’s demands for longer sessions, special treatment, and the like, but that by not responding to her demands, by sidestepping them and changing the subject, he would have created an opening, a breathing space that invariably gives an hysteric a sense of relief and brings about a lifting of anxiety (albeit temporary). He clearly would have done better had he seen to it that desire was not squelched into demand, not read as specific requests for special attention. One of a psycho analyst’s tasks is to create a space in which desire can come forward, be spoken in whatever approximate terms are available, and be put to work in the analytic process. Paradoxically enough, a psychoanalyst is, in a sense, a person—perhaps the only person—you pay not to grant your requests, his or her job being to elicit your desire instead. Neurotics are, we might say, stuck wandering about with someone else’s desire—their parents’ desire, for example—and are desperately in need of a separation allowing their desire to come to be in its own right, as it were.

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Desire, strictly speaking, has no object. The want in desire is to go on desiring. When Marilyn selected a particular man, he generally thwarted the pursuit of her desire and stifled its blossoming in their relationship, not because her desire always needed a new man as its object, but because he did not find a way to keep her desire in play or in motion within the relationship. No man was ever the “real” object of her desire, as her desire was to go on desiring, and thus no one could “fulfill” her desire—in other words, satisfy it. Appearances notwithstanding, desire is not in search of satisfaction, but rather of a situation it which it can thrive and multiply, in which there is ever more desire, in which one can keep on desiring.

Such a state is not easily achieved, and the closest many people get to it is in the realm of consumer goods. The advertising world has been successful in stimulating inexhaustible desires for objects of various kinds—televisions, cars, houses, and gadgets of every kind—and there is no necessary stopping point to the pursuit of wealth and its symbols. Each may provide some small sense of satisfaction, but the desire for more can always be rekindled. Yet few men are able to do in their love and sex lives what Madison Avenue has been able to achieve in the world of consumer goods: create new desires. Few in fact realize that this is indeed what they are being called upon to do. Most men (obsessive in structure) tend to be primarily concerned with maintaining the status quo in their love relationships, abhorring anything that might rock the boat or shake things up a bit.

Desire is a complex matter: it seems to emerge mysteriously, inexplicably at one moment, and die out the next. It may be elicited suddenly with someone you thought absolutely unappealing to you, and prove utterly unstirred with someone you find eminently attractive. What is clear is that one’s desire is not spurred on by one’s partner responding to one’s demands, as that may lead to a flattening out or even shriveling up of desire. Desire is structurally speaking unsatisfiable, while demands can be met and thus dissipated.

The wish someone expresses to you is not in and of itself either a genuine demand or a genuine desire—the status of a wish is determined by how it is responded to. If a “friend” tells you he or she wants “to see more of you” and you suggest going to a concert on Tuesday night, you have responded to what was explicitly requested but have, perhaps deliberately and deftly, avoided revealing what you may have glimpsed behind the request: a desire not only to see you more often, but to see you in a different way, as a lover, for example, and not as a friend. “To see more of you” is obviously an ambiguous choice of words. If you respond to it at only its most superficial level, as a request to spend more clock time with you, you make it into a demand. Desire, which was waiting in the wings, ready to spring forth, may then wither. If, on the other hand, you suspect that the choice of words was perhaps not “unintentional,” and you respond more ambiguously, leaving open the possibility that your conception of the relationship does not necessarily stop at friendship, your friend’s wish may begin to take shape and show itself as a desire.

This is one of the subtleties about desire that is rarely shown on the silver screen, but which is known to almost everyone who has ever been involved in dating or meeting potential lovers in social situations: if you declare your interest to certain people it turns them off. If you let on to someone about your feelings in a fairly explicit way, he or she may very well run the other way. Hence the oftentimes unbearable game of waiting for someone to make a move, make the first phone call, or make the first declaration of love.

This inclination is related to a classic neurotic mechanism whereby the neurotic sabotages his or her own desire. He or she unwittingly makes it go awry so as not to have to deal with the consequences of having attained a desired someone or something. Marilyn Monroe, for example, again and again resolved to change her attitude towards her various husbands, to play a less domineering role with them, and yet inevitably found herself, much to her dismay, having her men wrapped around her little finger. True, they responded to her demands, but why was she so intent on making those demands in the first place? The repetitive character of her marriages can be viewed as part and parcel of neurotics’ compulsion to sabotage their own conscious plans, ensuring that their own goals are never realized. The rationalizations people proffer by way of explanation for such self-destructive actions vary widely, running the gamut from “I felt as if he were too good for me—I don't deserve somebody that kind and loving” to “I don't deserve to have my raise approved—I'm such a fake, and the only thing I excel at is tricking people into believing I know something.” But regardless of the moralistic and/or guilt-ridden reasons advanced, we can nevertheless glimpse here the neurotic’s fundamental aversion to having his or her fondest wishes fulfilled.

The fact is that, while desire is certainly not in search of satisfaction, satisfaction may even bring on a kind of disgust or revulsion. With such a notion we approach more closely the deeper roots of hysteria. Much that I have said of demand and desire thus far is true quite generally, though hysterics are the ones who most clearly teach it to us and who most often express it in no uncertain terms. However, the idea that a person may find satisfaction revolting or react to satisfaction with obvious (and not simply feigned) disgust, takes us one step closer to the structural foundations of hysteria.

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Hysteria has been eliminated pretty much lock, stock, and barrel from psychiatric and psychological diagnostic manuals such as the DSM III and IV, giving way to a symptom-by-symptom approach whereby the hysteric is characterized as depressed, manic, or suffering from an eating disorder. But hysteria, as a Lacanian diagnostic category, can apply to clinical manifestations as serious as catalepsy, mythomania, and catatonia. Hysterics are very often mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic and paranoiac because of the fleeting hallucinations they recount, and a great many of the patients classified in the United States as borderline fit quite well into the Freudian/Lacanian category of hysteria.

Historically speaking, a great many hysterics in America were “treated” in the 1950s with what is still known as psychosurgery, and the most common operation performed was prefrontal lobotomy. It was used in the treatment of what Freud might have called ordinary, everyday unhappiness, and what would now be referred to as borderline depressive states. The result, which so impressed psychiatrists of the time, was that the women it was used on—and it was used almost exclusively on women—seemed more content with their existences after the operation. The pressure and restlessness of desire had apparently been surgically removed.

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