Hysteria, Obsession, and the Progressive–Conservative Divide in a Lacanian Key

Introduction

The divide between cultural innovation and traditional stability is visible everywhere—from the arts to politics, from aesthetics to social values. Modern democracies appear almost evenly split between those who push for transformation and those who defend inherited frameworks. This tension is hardly new, yet psychoanalytic theory offers an unexpectedly revealing lens for examining it. In particular, Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the hysterical and obsessional subject, terms referring not to pathology in the colloquial sense but to enduring psychic structures, provides a subtle way to read the contemporary landscape.

Drawing from his interpretation of Freud, Jacques Lacan (as presented by Steven Z. Levine) likens the hysteric to the avant-garde artist and the obsessional subject to the academic artist. Such imagery invites a broader reflection: can these two subject positions serve as metaphors for the progressive and conservative orientations that shape cultural and political discourse today?

The answer, cautiously approached, is yes—so long as we remember the metaphorical nature of the comparison and avoid collapsing psychology into ideology. Nevertheless, the overlap is striking enough to merit exploration.

The Other and the Question of Desire

Lacan’s framework turns on the relationship between the individual and the “Other,” not a specific person, but the symbolic order itself: language, norms, expectations, institutions. Every fundamental question we pose, even when addressed to particular figures such as parents or teachers, ultimately aims at this larger, impersonal authority.

As Steven Z. Levine paraphrases Lacan: “Our questions are always addressed to the Other who is supposed by us to know the answers.”

This imagined, omniscient Other is the locus of the demands we believe govern our lives. Whether we resist or comply with these supposed demands shapes our orientation to desire and positions us within one of Lacan’s major subjective structures.

The Hysterical Subject: Refusal, Innovation, and the Avant-Garde

In Lacanian terms, the hysterical subject resists the identity offered by the symbolic order. Levine illustrates this structural position with the question: “Am I a woman or a man?,” a question that concerns not biological fact but symbolic placement, the role the Other seems to assign. This phrasing is not Lacan’s own, but it captures the hysteric’s refusal to accept the position the symbolic order offers.

“The hysterical subject responds… by resisting what she or he imagines the Other wants her or him to be” (Levine, 2008).

This pushback is not merely disobedience; it is a structural refusal to be fully captured by normative expectations. The comparison with avant-garde artists is illuminating. These creators defy the aesthetic laws of their epoch, challenge conventions, and seek alternatives. Similarly, the hysteric demands new possibilities when the available forms feel constraining.

Here we can draw a careful analogy: this stance resembles what we typically call progressive in cultural or political terms. Progressivism tends toward critique—of institutions, canons, traditions—and imagines futures in which other ways of living, thinking, or expressing might become viable.

Such an overlap is not a perfect equivalence, but the proximity is difficult to ignore. The hysterical orientation, always asking, “What else could there be?,” mirrors the progressive insistence that social, artistic, or ethical norms can and should be continually reinvented.

The Obsessional Subject: Order, Preservation, and the Academic Artist

If the hysteric questions the symbolic order, the obsessional subject clings to it. Levine summarizes the obsessional dilemma with another illustrative question: “Am I alive or am I dead?” Again, this is not Lacan’s literal phrasing, but a condensation of the obsessional’s oscillation between being and non-being, and of the anxiety that deviation from duty risks catastrophe: “The obsessional subject… responds to the imagined desire of the Other by insisting that the normal order must be maintained” (Levine, 2008).

This attitude aligns with the ethos of the academic artist, who values established technique, tradition, and continuity. The comparison here to conservative sensibilities is compelling. Conservatism, broadly understood, stresses the importance of inherited forms, incremental change, and the dangers of disorder. It insists that tradition is not merely an anchor but a repository of accumulated wisdom.

Again, the overlap is metaphorical: a conservative person is not necessarily an “obsessional subject” in the psychoanalytic sense. Yet the resemblance, especially in relation to authority, convention, and stability, is close enough to illuminate patterns in contemporary discourse.

Why the Analogy Works—Within Limits

The parallel between these psychoanalytic structures and political orientations is, by necessity, symbolic rather than literal. Lacan’s categories describe unconscious configurations of desire, not ideological commitments. Individuals of any political persuasion can exhibit either structure at the level of psychic organization.

Yet the analogy remains fruitful because both domains, clinical structure and cultural attitude, revolve around a shared axis: one pole questions norms, the other preserves them. In artistic contexts, Lacan’s imagery makes this explicit: avant-garde versus academic, innovation versus tradition. When mapped onto the social sphere, these positions help explain why democratic societies often divide into two relatively stable camps, each embodying a distinct relation to the symbolic order, one interrogative, the other preservational.

Beyond the Divide: The Psychoanalytic Message

Lacan’s ultimate point, however, is not to valorize either side but to loosen the grip of the imagined Other. Both the hysteric, who resists an authority taken to be omnipotent, and the obsessional, who follows it slavishly, remain captive to a fantasy: that the Other truly knows. Psychoanalysis attempts to show that this supposed guarantor does not exist as an all-knowing will.

When this realization dawns, the subject discovers a different possibility—neither rebellion nor obedience, but an encounter with personal desire unmoored from projected demands. Art, in its highest forms, often moves in this direction: it neither repeats conventions nor rejects them reflexively, but finds a singular path.

Bibliography

• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
• Leader, Darian. Why Do People Get Ill? London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007.
• Levine, Steven Z. Lacan Reframed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.