Trust in the big Other for the psychotic, neurotic and perverted sturctures

 

I: INTRODUCTION

 

            NOTE: This article is a piece that summarizes both Jacques Lacan’s own ideas, as well as my own original opinions and contributions, and hence it’s not “strictly Lacanian” (for example, by the discussion of the persona, etc.).

The big Other is the locus of all possible combinations of letters, sounds, and other means of communication. All possible words and sentences that have ever been said or written are found inside it. It is the set of all signifiers and it is fundamentally infinite.

            The big Other is disorganized and “nonsensical” without the intervention of a separate archetype – the name of the father. The name of the father is the mathematical function that maps signifiers to signifieds (for example, a word to its meaning). The name of the father includes all rules for interpreting meaning (for example: a dictionary with definitions, the set of rules of grammar, syntax rules of a programming language, etc.). The name of the father is that function which organizes or “structures” the inherently disorganized nature of the signifiers in the big Other.

            Each Lacanian clinical structure (psychotic, neurotic, perverted) has a certain relation to both the big Other and the name of the father that determines their level of trust in the big Other. Let us take each of them one by one and analyze them in order from “most trust” to “least trust”.

 

II: THE PSYCHOTIC – “THE BIG OTHER KNOWS!”

 

            The psychotic forecloses the name of the father: that means that the mathematical function which produces meaning and structures language is absent. Hence, their paradigm of understanding intersubjectivity is meaninglessness. For the psychotic, the gap between appearance (ex: signifier) and essence (ex: signified) is absent – they are one and the same. We could say, with a little exaggeration, that psychotics do not even understand what we most commonly call “signifiers” (ex: words, sentences) – for the psychotic, these are just flows of subjective perception, they are images (Bruce Fink once said, in his book “Lacan on Love”, that the psychotic “imaginarizes” the symbolic, and I think that’s a great way to put it). For the psychotic, a word like “hate” does not have any meaning behind it, the word is simply the subjective flow of perceptions, of sense-impressions, of hearing that word said to me with my ears (or the subjective experience of reading it, in the case of written communication).

            Each signifier, even though it does not have meaning for the psychotic, has an affective charge or emotional attachment to it (an “object-cathexis”, to use fancier words). In other words, the psychotic has funny-sounding “nice words” that they like to hear said to them, and “bad words” that they do not like to hear.

            This has a certain impact on the psychotic’s understanding of language. For the psychotic, truth exists only in the case of “material” or “organic” aspect. For example, a psychotic father who hears their child tell them “I got an A+ today at the test” can understand the possibility that their son may lie to him because it is verifiable (for example, they can check with the professor to see if they are lying or not). The psychotic, on the other hand, does not understand the truth of the other’s imaginary order (thoughts, beliefs, emotions, feelings, perceptions). If the psychotic hears another person confess their beliefs or feelings to them, the psychotic will never suspect them of lying (as is explained in this video as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXsYPhpBkY – the gap between subject and truth that we understand as “lie” is foreclosed in psychosis).

            This has certain implications in the way in which they relate to others. The psychotic has a fundamental trust in the big Other – if someone says something about their own subjective experience (beliefs, feelings, etc.) then it is true or it will become true. Hence, the psychotic (unlike the doubtful neurotic) has confidence in words – if someone says that they love me, or if someone says that they believe in this and that, then the psychotic never doubts it, they assume it at face value.

            For the psychotic, a confession about someone else’s feelings (being told “I love you”) or about beliefs (being told “I like Hitler”) is never true or false, the psychotic does not understand the other person’s subjective truth (feelings, beliefs, emotions, etc.), they only understand the objective truth of material reality. However, such a confession of the other’s subjective truth through signifiers (i.e.: through the mediation of the big Other) always has an affective charge – there are “good words” and “bad words”, there are “nice things to say” and “mean things to say”.

            In relations with others, the psychotic does not become doubtful in the case of contradictory confessions of the other’s subjective experience. When a psychotic hears their spouse confess “I hate you, you are horrible!”, the psychotic will never ask themselves “Do they really mean it, or are they lying?”, like the neurotic would ask themselves. Instead, the psychotic will simply feel hurt by such words. But, if 10 minutes later, they hear their spouse say, “Actually you know what, I changed my mind, you are a good husband and I love you”, the psychotic will also not doubt their wife’s speech, they will simply take it at face value (“the big Other knows!”). That does not mean that the psychotic will trust their wife that she is always telling the truth about her love, the psychotic simply does not understand the difference between someone lying about being in love and someone telling the truth about being in love, they do not believe that you can either tell the true or lie about such a thing, for the psychotic, they are just magical-sounding words.

            The psychotic will experience those conversations in terms of affective charge – she said one mean thing to me, then she said one nice thing to me, now we are even. Neither of them are “true” or “false” for the psychotic, it is one mean sentence and one nice sentence. To a neurotic, this may seem like the psychotic has trust in the small other (do they actually trust their wife about anything she says in regards to her feelings?), but the psychotic’s trust is actually in the big Other – in the words “I love you” and “I hate you” themselves, regardless of whom they are coming from. For a psychotic, words have a certain magical function, as if something becomes true just by saying it. That’s why a lot of psychotics believe in “the law of attraction”, that if you want something to happen, you just have to repeat to yourself that it will happen (“I will get the promotion, I will definitely get the promotion!!”).

            For another example, if a psychotic liberal hears their friend say “I like Trump”, they will perceive those words as “bad words that you shouldn’t say out loud”, but if ten minutes later their friend says “you know what, actually I hate Trump”, the psychotic will forgive them. The psychotic will never ask themselves, like the neurotic (“Does he actually mean what he says or is he saying it just to make me feel nice?”), for the psychotic, such a distinction is irrelevant, the psychotic will feel the former words (I love Trump) as “something that makes me feel bad when I hear it” and the latter words (I hate Trump) as “something that makes me feel good when I hear it”, and the psychotic will never even ask themselves the question of the truth behind the signifiers – they said one “bad thing” and one “good thing” and now we’re even.

            The master-signifier for the psychotic is the imaginary phallus. The master-signifier is “the first signifier” (the answer to the question “How did this all start?” or “Why am I doing this, what is the purpose or meaning of my actions, or life in general?”), while the phallus is “the last signifier” (the answer to the question “When do I know that this ends?”, "What is the destination?" or “What am I trying to obtain?”, in other words, the partial-object of desire, the goal, the “treasure at the end”).

This makes sense, as the psychotic forecloses the name of the father which creates meaning. For the psychotic, every signification chain stops as soon as it starts (the first signifier = the last signifier), there are no “arrows” connecting different signifiers to create meaning. If you imagine each node as a signifier and each line as “meaning”, then you can visualize how meaning works for both neurotics and perverts in Fig. 1 and how it works for psychotics in Fig. 2:

 

 

The analogy with the imaginary phallus is a very descriptive one. In the case of male biology, the genital organ (the phallus) is the most sensitive organ of the body in regards to both pain and pleasure (which is not the same for female biology, where the most erogenous zones are different from the parts most sensitive to pain). This makes the psychotic visualize themselves as “one big phallus”, metaphorically speaking. The human penis does not have truth, it only has pleasure and pain. When the psychotic hears words like “I hate you” or “I like Trump”, it feels like someone kicking them in the balls. When the psychotic hears words like “I love you” or “I hate Trump”, it feels like someone giving them a handjob. Since the kick and the handjob are “psychological”, we are not dealing with the real, literal penis, but the imaginary phallus – as if each of us has a mental/imaginary penis inside our minds that can be stroked (when we hear “nice words”) or kicked (when we hear “mean words”). Thus, if you are dealing with a psychotic person, you can confess to them one truth about your subjective experience that hurts them (a belief they disagree with, a negative feeling about them) and later tell them the exact opposite, and they will take it as face-value, because for them it feels like “Okay, this person first kicked me in the balls by telling me they like Trump, now they compensated by giving me a psychological handjob by saying they hate Trump, they cancelled each other out, we are even”. The question of truth, of whether another person actually means what they say, is never asked in the first place.

You can notice that his mode of thinking objectifies other people. For the psychotic, other people are just like a bunch of complex robots or AIs – they do not have “true” or “authentic” feelings, thoughts, beliefs. For the psychotic, the difference between a human and ChatGPT is complexity. This means that all psychotics unconsciously believe in solipsism. This means that, even though not all of them will say that they believe in solipsism, from a theoretical/philosophical perspective, all of them will behave like how you would expect a solipsist to behave (disregard for social norms, other people are just objects who say nice or mean stuff, other people’s speech has no deeper meaning, my lover is just an “extension” of myself, etc.). There are more variants of psychosis (that Lacanians rarely discuss, they focus more on the three variants of neurosis (obsession, hysteria, phobia) and they usually leave psychosis as “one big structure without multiple subtypes” unfortunately) that all show such a certain belief in solipsism.

In my opinion, narcissism (what is today known as “narcissist personality disorder”) is one variant of psychosis. Here, the solipsistic belief is “I am the best person in the world”.

Schizophrenia is another form of psychosis (obviously). Here, the solipsistic belief is “I am the most important person in the world” in the sense of duty or responsibility. Many schizophrenics have delusions that God, Jesus or some very important figure (ex: the president of USA) sent them on a mission and that they are “the chosen one” who must sacrifice themselves in order to save humanity.

Paranoia is another form of psychosis. The paranoid solipsistic belief is “I am the most important person in the world”, but not in the sense of “best” (like the narcissist) or in the sense of duty (like the schizophrenic), but in the sense that “everyone is out to get me”. The paranoid person thinks that they have something of value that no one else in the world has, and thus, everyone is their enemy, they are suspicious of everyone: “People are plotting behind my back to kill me! They are putting poison on my food! I have cameras installed in my apartment because the CIA and FBI are out to get me! Everyone is my enemy!”. Again, thinking that everyone hates you is another form of thinking that you are the most important person in the world (the imaginary phallus), that everyone is always watching you, thinking about you, etc… Paranoia can be constituted as a form of “reversed narcissism”, because if the narcissistic belief is “Everyone loves me – hence, I am the most important person in the world”, the paranoid belief is “Everyone hates me – hence, I am the most important person in the world”.

Manic-depression is another variant of psychosis, in my opinion. It is the first (“most primitive”) stage of psychosis, the most “undifferentiated” one, to use Jungian terminology. In the delusions of a manic episode, paranoid delusions (“Everyone is out to get me”), narcissistic delusions (“I am the best, I am a God”) and schizophrenic delusions (“I am being sent on a mission”) are all mixed and matched up, experienced either simultaneously or one after another.

 

III: THE NEUROTIC – “DOES THE BIG OTHER KNOW? I’M NOT SURE…”

 

The neurotic, like Lacanians often say, is paralyzed by doubt. The neurotic’s symptom appears through the form of a question (not an action, like the psychotic, or an answer, like the pervert). Lacan said (when presenting the graphs of desire, and in many other sources as well) that the neurotic’s question is always a transformed version of “Che voui?”, that is, “What does the Other want?” (desire). I partially disagree with him here, I think the neurotic’s question is more general and all-encompassing, and instead should be stated as “What does the other person mean?”. The “truth” behind someone else’s desire (ex: “Does my crush like me back?”) is simply one facet of the larger truth of meaning that the neurotic is interested in. But the neurotic may also ask themselves “Does the other person actually believe what they say?” or “Does the other person actually feel what they say?”. In other person, whenever someone confesses to a neurotic the truth of their subjective experience (desires, thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs), the neurotic will question whether they are being lied to or not, always being unsure. This uncertainty creates anxiety. The uncertainty does not necessarily need to be about the other’s desire (“Do they want what they say they want?”), it may as well be about belief, for example.

The neurotic is convinced the most by internal consistency of such confessions. The neurotic is interested first and foremost for the other person’s confessions (of love, of desire, of belief, of intention, etc…) to be consistent. The more consistent they are, the less anxiety they have and the more satisfied they will be. This makes them more skeptical than the psychotic but less skeptical than the pervert. We can return to our hypothetical social scenarios to ask ourselves how would a neurotic react.

If the neurotic hears their wife confess their hate to the neurotic, and one day later, confess their love to them, the neurotic will be confused and uncertain: “Her confessions do not match up, yesterday she said one thing, now she says the opposite. Does she actually love me now, or is she lying just to make me feel nice? Or did she lie yesterday, when she told me she hates me, and now she is saying the truth? Or did she say the truth both times and she just changed her mind like that?”.

Similarly enough, if the neurotic hears their friend say “I love Trump”, witness their neurotic friend get angry, and one hour later confess “You know what, actually, I think I hate Trump”, the neurotic will be skeptical and questioning: “Does he actually hate Trump now, or is he lying just to stop seeing me angry? Does he say that he hates Trump only when I’m around, or does he actually mean it?”.

Paralyzed by the frightening anxiety of the uncertainty of whether someone means what they say or not (i.e.: the possibility of lying), the neurotic will look externally for some sort of way of figuring out which signifier maps to which signified. The neurotic does not trust that a signifier means what it means, like the psychotic seems to do, the neurotic knows that people can lie. Thus, they will look for some sort of system of rules to figure out when people are lying and when people are saying the truth about their own subjective experiences (desires, intentions, feelings, beliefs, etc.). That system of rules that maps certain signifiers (appearances) to certain signifieds (meanings) is called, like I previously said, the name of the father. Zizek gives many examples of the gap between the content of the enunciation and the act of enunciation per se:

 

What we are dealing with here is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation that is proper to human speech. In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleague's intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say: 'It was interesting. ' So if instead we tell our colleague openly: 'It was boring and stupid', he will be fully entitled to feel surprised and to ask: 'But if you found it boring and stupid, why didn't you simply say that it was interesting?' The unfortunate colleague is right to take the direct statement as involving something more, not only a comment about the quality of his paper but an attack on his very person.”

(Slavoj Zizek, “How to read Lacan”, Chapter 1: Empty gestures and performatives: Lacan confronts the CIA plot)

 

            In this case, the name of the father includes the rule that says “When a person calls your intervention interesting, it means that they think it’s boring and stupid”. The entirety of neurosis can be viewed as an eternal attempt at figuring out such a complex system of rules to figure out what other people mean by what they say.

The neurotic looks for an external “fair” and “impartial” authority, a name of the father to tell them what each signifier means. Hence the eternal neurotic questions, such as “What do you want?”, “Che voui?”, or even better, “What do you mean?”. If I could summarize all neurotic symptoms in the form of one question, it would be the latter one: “What does this other person mean?”.

The master-signifier for the neurotic is not the imaginary phallus, like for the psychotic, but the persona (and now I recommend the reading of this article as well). Of course, Lacan never talked about the persona, and Jung never talked about Lacan’s clinical structure of neurosis, so this is my own personal contribution (yes, this is a crossover episode!). The persona is what gives us a stable sense of self, it is our identity. Identification is also a function of the persona and is acquired in the mirror stage. The persona is the appearance, the way we present ourselves at face-value (for example, the literal interpretation of our words, that your intervention actually was “interesting” and not boring and stupid). What Lacan called the “ideal-ego” is, in my opinion, simply the persona for a psychotic (the psychotic idealizes appearances, as seen in the previous chapter… also think of Lacan’s first patient, Aimee, who was a paranoidpsychotic who idealized the persona/identity of a famous singer). For the neurotic, the persona is not only the ideal-ego, it is the master-signifier, it is that which structures their entire experience. The persona is the answer to “Why am I doing all this? What is the meaning of life?” to the neurotic. The object of desire, what they are trying to obtain, is still the imaginary phallus (for all clinical structures). In the case of social interactions, the imaginary phallus is what I humorously called “nice words”. Hence, in a social interaction, the neurotic is still trying to obtain “nice words” (that is where signification ends for all structures).

But the neurotic is not interested in obtaining whatever they want to hear (only the psychotic, since for them, the master signifier and the imaginary phallus are one and the same). Instead, for the neurotic and the pervert, the purpose of social interaction (“Why am I even doing this?”) is not simply “making the other person say nice words to me” (the imaginary phallus, the object of desire, what we like to hear). The neurotic and the pervert are not simply trying to obtain other people who say stuff that they like to hear. For the neurotic, the purpose of interaction is the development of a coherent, stable persona. If the other person’s identity is coherent, as well as my own, then I am good. This is why neurotics are harder to convince than psychotics but easier to convince than perverts. If you tell a neurotic what you feel/desire/intend/believe/etc., they will be skeptical, but you just have to insist a lot, and if you have done it in a consistent and predictable way for longer periods of time, they will start believing you, akin to a psychotic with higher standards, so to speak. So a neurotic who hears their spouse say “I hate you” once and “I love you” 50 times might actually be convinced that their wife loves them. However, the neurotic is not very interested in concrete proofs of love outside the symbolic function of speech. Hence, just like the psychotic, they still have a certain trust of the big Other – “the way you prove to me that you love me is by saying it”: this applies to both neurotics and psychotics, it is just that with neurotics you have to do it more and be more consistent over time.

It is the same with the examples about political beliefs. With a neurotic, if you tell him all the time that you like Joe Biden, and only once or twice that you hate him, they might end up believing that you like him (and vice-versa). But their aim is beyond achieving the pleasure of hearing another person say that they support the same things they support, they actually want to find out what you “genuinely” believe (neurotics are obsessed with “authenticity”).

Despite their increased skepticism of the big Other, the neurotic still needs one. They are less dependent on the big Other than the psychotic but more dependent on it than the pervert. This is because the neurotic seeks to replace the current “unreliable” master (authority figure) with a new, better one. The neurotic will not take up the place of that authority figure, like the pervert, but will not take the current one at face value either, like the psychotic.

 

IV: THE PERVERT – “THE BIG OTHER DOES NOT KNOW… BUT I DO!”

 

The pervert’s master-signifier is the name of the father. This means that they themselves will take up the task of “assigning meaning” into their own hands. The purpose of social interaction, for the pervert, is not a truth-judgment (like for the neurotic), but an ethical value-judgment. The pervert views social interaction like a task of figuring out the best “configuration” of how to map each signifier to each signified. The pervert himself assumes this position of the name of the father for others (“I know! I know what this means better than anyone.”).

The pervert’s task is not to “find out” a pre-existing truth about reality (like the neurotic does), they do not care about what the other person means (like the neurotic who, in an essence, wants to find the answer to this question – “What would I see if I could read the other person’s mind?”). Instead, the pervert wants to find out the answer to a different question “What should this signifier mean? Would society be better if everyone treated the meaning of this word in this way? Would society be better off if this word’s definition was this?”. The pervert will not conform to the conventional rules of language that everyone else does, instead, proposing their new, better system of how to interpret language, trying to replace the current one. In other words, the pervert is unsatisfied with the current “master” (like the neurotic is), but will not look for a new master, they will become that master themselves.

Modern Lacanians who love to demonize perversion, such as Zizek and Paul Verhaghe, correctly noticed this, and came to the (correct!) conclusion that perverts are the most dangerous clinical structure, that they have the highest capacity for doing evil. Just consider this (in my opinion, ridiculously exaggerated) paragraph from Paul Verhaghe’s book, “On being normal and other disorders”:

 

Given the defense mechanism of disavowal, one can predict how every perverse symptom construction will possess a yes-and-no structure. Clinical experience testifies to this: in perverse speech, yes and no are always exchangeable, hence the notorious untrustworthiness of the perverse subject. This takes us to a characteristic that belongs to each of the subjective structures: the structural relation toward the Symbolic, and toward language. Human language rests on conventions agreed upon by members of the community who accept and believe in it (de Saussure 1976). The pervert refuses to do this, putting himself beyond it and becoming the champion of imposture and make-believe, assisted in this by the inherent qualities of language itself. If a fetish can represent the mother’s phallus, anything can represent anything. This is how the perverse subject positions itself in language: the speech act itself is perverted, and the conventions according to which signification and communication operate are constantly undermined.”

(Paul Verhaghe, “On being normal and other disorders”, Chapter 14: Perverse structure versus perverse traits)

 

Where I disagree with them is that I also think that they have the highest capacity for doing good. They are the most powerful, and with great power comes great responsibility – so while they are more “charming, fascinating and convincing” (like Verhaghe puts it), they can use this charm to convince others to do good or to do harm. That does not make perverts “untrustworthy”, nor “champions of imposture and make-believe”. Perverts are simply the most powerful, so actual social change and progress, in my opinion, can also only come from perverts, and not from anxiety-ridden doubtful neurotics, nor from psychotics detached from reality who have no idea where they are and on what world they live in.

Coming back to our main topic, this makes perverts, naturally, even more suspicious of the big Other than the neurotic (the conventions of interpreting language literally, etc.). However, in a seemingly-paradoxical way, they have less doubt than neurotics, they have just as much confidence as a psychotic. How can this happen?

We can make an analogy with what is known in computer science as “integer overflow”. The pervert seeks to “push the limits” of the pleasure principle and to go beyond the pleasure principle in order to not sacrifice that sweet jouissance that comes with it. This can be compared to how, if you have in a computer a variable that can store any value from, say, 0 to 4000000000, then if you try to insert something even bigger than the maximum value, say, 4000000001, the computer will simply convert that to the first value. Hence, the max_value + 1 will be recorded as the min_value, the max_value+2 will be recorded as the min_value+1, etc. In our case, 4000000001 and 0 will be both recorded the same, just as the computer will record 4000000002 as “1”, etc. You can metaphorically think of this as “the horseshoe theory of computer science – the two extremes converge”. In precisely this way, the pervert seeks to go “beyond the limit” of neurosis, being so doubtful about the big Other that they lose all doubt entirely.

This strategy of becoming the master of language who decides what means what makes the pervert have a certain approach towards intersubjectivity: “I know what I mean by what you said”. To a neurotic, such a statement does not make sense. For the neurotic, only I know what I mean by what I said, and you know what you mean by what you said, and I can only attempt to guess what you meant, and you can only attempt to guess what I meant. The pervert reverses this relationship, because the pervert is not interested in finding out the truth, but in ethical judgments: what should your words mean? If the pervert decides that society would be better off if everyone treated your speech as to mean a certain thing, they will act like it means that, not caring what was actually going in your mind a few seconds before you said it (the pervert, unlike the neurotic, does not care about the answer to the question “What would I see if I could read your mind right now?”). Thus, intersubjectivity for the pervert works like this: “I say something, and you tell me what it means to you, and you say something, and I say what it means to me”. If I’m a pervert, I don’t care what you mean by what you said, but I care what you mean by what I said, and I will also try to convince you that you shouldn’t care what I mean by what I said but instead care about what I mean by what you said.

Perversion, thus, can be summarized by the following formula: “I know you better than you know yourself”.

Let us return again to our examples from the previous sections and see how a pervert might possibly react. The pervert will be the hardest to convince that you are in love with him. They will require concrete proofs of love. You can confess your love to them all you want, in the most consistent and predictable way that would even convince a neurotic – as long as you do not conform to their own conception of “how a person who is in love should behave” they will not believe you. Instead, the pervert will actually try to convince you that you are deceiving yourself: “You may think you love, but you do not actually love me, a person who would love me would actually be there when I need them, would actually listen to what I say, would actually support me in my creative endeavors…”.

We can apply the same perverted logic to the examples about political beliefs. You can tell a pervert “I like Bernie Sanders”, and if the pervert does not see concrete proof, in action, that you truly want him to win, he may try to convince you that you are deluded: “You think you like Bernie Sanders, but if that were really the case, why didn’t you donate to his campaign? What are you actually doing to try to make him win? I don’t think you really support him as much as you think”. The opposite may happen too, the pervert can be just as distrustful of “bad words that I don’t like to hear” as well: you can tell the pervert “Dude, I love Hitler!”, and the pervert may try to convince you that “Actually, I think you’re saying that just to be edgy. A person who would actually support Hitler would behave like this and like this and like this…”.

Perverts may seem to many neurotics that they are trying to read other people’s minds. But actually, whenever a pervert accuses you of meaning/desiring/believing something that you don’t say out loud, the pervert is never right and the pervert is never wrong either. You have to understand that what the pervert is doing here is a value-judgment, not a truth-judgment. When a pervert says: “You do not truly love me even if you think you do”, what they said is neither right or wrong, neither true or false, instead it is an ethical/value judgment, what the pervert actually means is “Society would be better if we wouldn’t consider what you do ‘love’ “; and such a statement can be neither true nor false, since it is not a truth-judgment, it is a judgment about good and evil.

 

V: CONCLUSION – FINK’S VENN DIAGRAMS

 

Bruce Fink, in his book “A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis”, has a diagram that I think complements my article quite well:

I think Figure 9.2 is quite compatible with my article. Even though Fink was trying to explain something a bit different in the context that he drew this diagram in, if we replace “a” with “what you say out loud” and “Other” with “who you really are”, then this is basically the summary of my article.

For the psychotic, subject = other, so a person who loves you is simply “a person who says they love you out loud”, regardless of whether you bribed them to say that or not, for instance.

For the neurotic, you can never know for sure what a person meant, whether they are authentic or not, or whether they are lying, but they have to be consistent. What they say out loud is simply the intersection of who they are and who they pretend to be (this should be read as: people say the truth about their subjective experience only sometimes, the two intersect only partially).

With the pervert, as you can see in the diagram, we are not dealing with a relationship of mathematical intersection but with one of mathematical inclusion. Lower case “a” is included in the larger “Other”. This should be read (only in the context of this article, obviously, as it can have many interpretations) as: “What someone says is part of what they do”. The pervert is oriented by the following catchphrase: “Actions speak louder than words”. The pervert lives by the principle that actions speak louder than words. Therefore, “a person who loves me”, “a person who supports Hitler”, “a person who supports Joe Biden”, “a person who believes in capitalism” and other such subjective experiences are defined in terms of a person’s behavior: “A person who loves me behaves like this and like this, a person who supports Hitler behaves like this and like this…”. Someone’s words/speech is only part of what they do, and thus, only part of their identity.