Rebuild of Evangelion - Lacan's Rebuild of Freud, Agency, and the Sinthome of Anime - pontos fathom podcast EP15

Rebuild of Evangelion - Lacan's Rebuild of Freud, Agency, and the Sinthome of Anime 

- pontos fathom podcast EP15

Welcome to our fifteeth episode of the pontos fathom podcast - Rebuild of Evangelion - Lacan's Rebuild of Freud, Agency, and the Sinthome of Anime - pontos fathom podcast EP15. In this episode we continue our month long analysis into the Evangelion anime from the point of view of psychoanalysis. In this podcast, we discuss Lacan's Mirror Stage, The Symbolic Chain, the Real and the Imaginary, Schreiber, Sinthome, Graph of Desire, and Lacan's Freud project. Interesting insights into anime, characters, human instrumentality, and the Eva units. Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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welcome back everyone to pontos fathom press this is episode 15 of the pontos fathom podcast and it's wrapping up our month-long look into the sort of psychoanalysis of evangelion today we are moving into our final podcast talking about rebuild of avant-garde so we started out talking about uh the original neon genesis evangelion in freud and kind of looking how that psychoanalytic was one of those world-building techniques present in neon genesis evangelion and also how in a way psychoanalysis journey um mirrors the way ano used christian apocalypse as world building he also used the psychoanalytic journey there's lots of things there right and then we we moved from there into the second podcast uh podcast number uh 14 was around end of evangelion and we kind of looked at that from a point of view of of carl jung and we talked about archetypes but also some of jung's work in ion where we we looked at how um this complex nature of the self with conscious and unconscious components like the shadow animus and anima are all present in uh anno's work but also how evangelion itself was sort of that apocalyptic journey and then there's this retelling of it ended evangelion so it's almost like the uh transference in psychoanalysis uh so a lot of interesting themes came out of that one finally we're going to go to rebuild and rebuild is interesting we could probably do tons more of these but i think i just want to get my initial ideas out on rebuild and i want to frame it again in the in the structure that we started we started with freud we went to jung and i think we'll end up nicely with lacan here and so that's why i'm calling this one rebuild of evangelion lacan's rebuild the freud uh the synthome and the anime of the reel right so the here we're gonna lot a lot of lot of little areas to talk about but let's kind of place it let's place rebuild of evangelion as a whole uh and some of the fan theories around it and some of the things anno has said and some of the things that you know we notice in evangelion evangelion um rebuild of evangelion just wrapped up with thrice upon a time the fourth installment and there are four of cinematic uh rebuilds which two of which kind of parallel the beginning of neon genesis evangelion with sort of upgraded anime and some introduction of mari you know we've got some new new um characters that are invented and brought in and some of the plots are bit different but by and large it's kind of seemed everything was going business as usual there was that weird thing about the red oceans that wasn't in the original neon genesis which made people think this was you know this was a a new series right before before thrice upon a time came out there was lots of fan theories out there then by um rebuild evangelion 3.333 things went much differently right so now we had a different world shinji is in kind of an alternate timeline it's 14 years in the future you know there's yet again the threat of another um a threat of another apocalypse right another impact is coming and some new revelations on uh the characters mari has a new role in it and rey and asuka also kind of have changed a bit and shinji has changed a bit and you know we have this idea of cannot redo right and this is where it branches and a lot of fans didn't quite know what's going on here and i think this is why it's interesting where we jump into lakhan because a lot of the if you look through lacan's lectures and i think these are the best place to start i i actually started with them i know everyone says he creates start with that and start with the four fundamental concepts sure you can i just appreciate lacan's lectures and the raw the more raw the better i mean i quite like the um the you can check out the inter the uh the gallagher's online so different seminars but of course there's the jack allen miller ones but if you go across um lakan's seminars you can tell that there's a freud project going on here that's why i'm kind of calling this the rebuild of freud too because what lacan does as a theme throughout a lot of his work is if we look back to freud and we see effort made mistakes fred was wrong about a lot of things and yet freud was foundational right freud is like freud is almost like nerve right in a way he's kind of like this agency right and then the khan wants to take what's good from it but in the end you can't have freud only you have to go one step beyond it and that's why i'm calling lacan as the rebuild of freud right so freud lacan's project is let's take a look at freud and see what's different see where we where we break with freud and see some other things that are interesting and i'll kind of go through some of those topics so that's kind of one theme of this podcast today as we'll go into that but also i want to touch on some lacanian concepts that pop up in rebuild and just get the conversation going so uh it'd be great if you guys could comment below also we are just got these proof copies of august moldenhauer's artificial psychology of desiring machines very timely topic for these days and even this podcast but we have volume one is impedance in admittance in desiring machines which is very much a look at lacanian desire and you can see the graph of desire with a electro electrical engineering kind of metaphor that goes throughout it and looking at um galvanic flows in the sense of what is it that neuroscience still isn't looking at right it's not the electrical circuit but electrical circuit has a metaphor next we have psych analysis of artificial intelligence we've got the proof copy of this again looking at the memory and cinema as artificial memory and then the internet is maybe the proving ground of artificial intelligence and the differences between narrow artificial intelligence and how it's informed by our human projections of ai that we often see revealed in science fiction and cinema so that's volume two and then volume three computational complexity and psychiatric agency uh again proof copies these will be available soon so like and subscribe below and you can keep keep up on and join our patreon you can check those out or go to our bookstore and you'll see when they are available so let's jump right into it um so we see something strange happen by uh evangelion 3.3 where there's different plots coming up we're not quite sure how the narrative structure has changed shinji is different he still is sulking he doesn't talk right he's hiding the same shinji but then something happens something triggers in him and then by 3.0 plus 1.0 the narrative structure again is really shaken and we see that this redo does happen actually there is a redo at the end and even though there is an apocalypse in 3-0 uh we do see something come through so let's kind of go through some of those lacanian concepts uh i've got some things earmarked here that we could kind of jump into first off what i've got is that we'll start where we can start is with the mirror stage and i want to kind of do this in two ways uh or a layered way right everything is layered with ano right we have the neon genesis in the final episodes 25 and 26 then we have relayering of those with end of evangelion it's a redo of those and then we have 2.0 gets us up to a point 3.0 changes the script and then we have another impact and then finally 3.0 plus 1.0 where we finally get a resolution in a way right and i think there's a lot of concepts here in lacan that we can go into so let's start in with this mirror phase now the mirror stage as as uh lacan has in his accrete you can see this uh one of the collection lacan says that the the chapter is called the mirror stage as a as formative of the function of the eye as revealed in psychoanalytic experience right so the function of the eye as revealed in psychoanalytic experience and let's also just coin a phrase that i like to talk about the drifting subject uh for lacan we'll see when we when we look at the desire we'll talk about that in a little bit the subject isn't who we think the subject is right the subject is always drifting right is it shinji is it shinji's mother oh shinji's mother is actually the ava oh wait a minute rey is also shinji's mother but she's not his mother shinji is shinji's mother because he cooks for everyone right uh some of those plots that get lost also we'll talk about like um one of the ones i want to get into is uh reisiku uh and her mother and the the three wise men the central computer right so that that plot doesn't get carried to rebuild and i think that that foreclosure of that plot is very interesting we'll talk about that but in the mirror stage i'll just read a bit from the first paragraph it says the conce the conception of the mirror stage that i introduced at our last congress 13 years ago has since become more or less established as the practice of the french group however i think it's worthwhile to bring it again to your attention especially today as it sheds light on the formation of the eye as we experience it in psychoanalysis so he starts going into the idea of a child in a mirror right in the case of the monkey once the image has been mastered and found empty that means the mirror image it rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gesture he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image in the reflective environment between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates the child's own body and the person and the things around him now this is very interesting because it talks about a libidinal dynamism right and we only have to understand the mirror stage as an identification in the full sense that analysis gives to the term namely the transformations that take place of the subject as he assumes an image so what we have here is the specular image of the child in the infant stage reflected back at himself and now just talking about this i think you get some resonances to the ava ava pilot relation right certain certain kind of resonances happen with the ava and also that weirdness of mari's sort of fetish about the lcl fluid right she likes the smell of the lcl fluid right the amniotic fluid right this sort of projection of that mirror relation right but now i want to talk about another kind of mirror relation and this is la khan and freud mirrored right so the idea here is la khan always uses this term when a word comes into the language in his seminar so say hey today's the day that the word synthome comes into our vocabulary and he often talks about how language is individual language it's how we uh inhabit that language right and i wanted to just read this section where in the mirror stage writing he talks about freud and he says here uh the fact is that the total form of the body by the subject anticipates in the mirage the maturation of his power as given to him in gestalt right and that at the same time it prefigures its alienating destination it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the eye with the statue in which one projects himself with the phantoms that dominate him or with the automaton in which in an ambiguous relation the world of his own making tends to find completion and what's interesting here is that this also goes into the freudian connection right there's a freudian connection to this uh in in mimicry right there's a mimicry going on but with freud one has uh and i will move into this with if we move ahead to on the question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis oh wait one moment before i go into this i want to just talk about the mirror stage a little bit more so in uh the khan's breakdown of things he talks about three terms he talks about the symbolic the real and the imaginary right and the these three items are somewhat counter-intuitive to um uh the way we would think about these things so you have the mirror stage and you have this we'll call this symbolic order which is that relation between the um the projection of oneself right and this is almost like 18 fields right it's also the at field concept right so according to the khan the infant sees the image and believes the image in the mirror to be whole okay and we have lots of places in evangelion where uh shinji goes in the ava the avas make the pilots feel more than they they see right and this sort of cohere cohesion this mirror also we see lots of mirroring of ray clones rey and yui are a mirror um mari is a mirror with asuka in a weird way how these like marby's taking away from asuka's role a bit of when we see her in emerging in rebuilds right so asak had a different bit of a role and then her role changes because mari's introduced and rebuilt right so this is like maybe the eve lilith thing something like this so um really lacan has the three orders the imaginary the symbolic and the real and with the imaginary this is what's odd about the imaginary is it's who you think you are right it's the internalized image of yourself right so one thing is we can talk about shinji shinji thinks he's somebody else right when we first meet shinji the freudian shinji will call him in neon genesis evangelion is the scared child but by the time shinji is in rebuilt he's still scared he's still paralyzed he doesn't talk for most of 3.0 plus 1.0 right he doesn't talk and then suddenly when he talks he's a different shinji of it this is the shinji who's been through this loop enough right and i'll call that luke maybe the psychoanalytic experience right he's been through the loop of neon genesis he's been through the loop of individualian he's been through the third impact in 3.0 3.3 now he's emerges 3.0 plus 1.0 and that again we'll come back to that with the quaternary squaring the the triangle right he squares the triangle the second one is the um the symbolic right so the symbolic in contrast to the imaginary the symbolic is the all of the symbols and language that make the order of a subject right so it's a system of this unconscious and conscious and we'll talk a little bit about this in the desire book right it's it's both the things one thinks about consciously and it's our um almost hegelian history crisis reaction sort of thing to our own how we feedback into ourselves that symbolic order is the symbols and that system of symbols that manifests this endless web of uh signifiers right so this is kind of the glue between the the imaginary and the symbolic the real on the other hand is the most bizarre one and counter-intuitive i think of the khan when the khan's real is the premiere pre-imaginary pre-symbol symbolic that which cannot be symbolized it's almost like the part of the world that you can't see right so it's like if you think of it in maybe some parts of like of jung's idea of the shadow and some parts of jung's idea of the self right so we have ego we can know the ego right we have the unconscious it manifests it manifests positively and negatively we have dreams and it bubbles up right we have artistic creation and the unconscious bubbles up but we have complexes like animus possession and i'm a possession from a young point of view all of those become somewhat handled by the symbolic order right and then there's the persona at the head of it at the top of the ego is there's the persona and we'll call that in lacanian terms the persona would be the actually the imaginary it's who you project who you holify this imaginary thing what the real is for the khan is that stripped that symbolic order stripped away that imaginary order stripped away and it's sort of that's why it seems a bit like the shadow where it's the parts of you that you don't see or the parts of the self that still make up the whole but they've almost been foreclosed and i think he does talk about that for closure so in a way the real is very very it's very tied to lack i believe uh but again maybe maybe you guys have a a different way of thinking about it but it's like the things with things that are left behind right what's left behind and so you hear let's go back to anno right so here we are anno he's in a he's coming into this evangelion project through his own uh battles with personality right his own battles with depression right his own battles with um deciphering his own uh lack right his own foreclosure as lacan would call and and also just his simple you know things that we could term in sense of um likanian thought let's i mean sorry jungian thought we could talk about his his own complexes right he's dealing with animal possession in the jungian sense right he has these characters the rey mother confusion we'll go into that kind of quaternary thing when we talk about ion so let's go back into this the question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis and this is going to lead us to schrieber all right so let's just first talk about freud in this in this writing again this is in his creed lacan talks about towards freud he talks about after freud and with freud and then he talks about schreiber okay schrieber's way and this reminds me of the you cannot redo you know this all that kind of language of evangelion with the kind of pomo kind of stuff that's there you know uh thrice upon a time 3.0 plus 1.0 like it's something evocative there's something libidinal to even the naming conventions and i think that this also mirrors lacan's rebuild of freud freud's going to take a look at approaching freud he's going to take a look at what freud's left behind and what we can go forward with freud right and it's also a critique he says half a century of freudianism freudianism applied to psychosis leaves its problems still to be rethought in other words at the status quo ante it might be said that before freud discussion of psychosis did not detach itself from a theoretical background that presented itself in psychology but it was merely a layer size remainder to what we shall call the long metaphysical cohesion of science in the school with a capital s so here he's basically freud left us with more freud left us with more questions than he gave us answers right and he says after freud what has freud contributed here we began by saying that as far as the problem of psychosis was concerned this contribution had led to a falling back now again we'll stop at that and we'll just um we're going to go to with right after but i wanted to point out treeber and get to schweiber how we're going to get there so in rebuild of evangelion we have this kind of dilemma of ohno ano has gone and created end of evangelion with the apocalyptic using apocalyptic themes right it's like it's it's the classic of japanese apocalyptic anime right you've got the end of the world comes everybody dies the songs the whole thing and you also have the i mean end of evangelion you put that on top of it and this is uh you know almost like anno's first round of psychoanalysis in a way he has shinji go through this experience the fans hate the ending there's all those theories about how the endings happen we talk about those in the other two podcasts if you want to go back in depth you can check that out and we talk about end of evangelion in our last podcast but to recap briefly with rebuild anno gets a chance to end the story again right he gets it he gets to redo but not the exact same way it's like you can never go back into that path and that'll come up remember that theme that we cannot redo when we get to the desire and its interpretations the graph of desire so what happens as we move forward with the christian apocalyptic theme is again in a lot of ways psychosis is the apocalypse right the psychotic break that one may have it's kind of like an individual apocalypse it's the end of everything and you can see how that shattered ending of the original neon genesis where it's from shinji's internal minds there's um there's violence in it there's uh despair uh it's nobody's nobody is spared the despair as well right and i think anno probably after rebooting it kind of gives us mari as a as a person who is going to integrate some of those issues that person who's the integrator the person who's like the second round of psychoanalysis who's going to push through and and help to re reshape i think it's a healing element actually sort of a healing element but it's also just a shift of the attention right this is where we see ossica's role changes very much raise ray we realize rey is is not um able to leave the nerve right she's a product of that process right and it's something that anna's leaving behind right um we go on into uh with freud and um still there's something that we can take forward from freud right in the rebuild of freud in the revisiting yes there's critiques one of the big critiques and i'll pause this one here is in schrieber so let's go into freud's take of sriba so first of all who's shrieker talk about apocalyptic writing daniel paul schrieber's memoirs of my nervous illness has been written by by freud by lacan by deleuze a lot of people have written about him in the 20th century and in a nutshell he was a judge who uh began to have uh like a a psychotic break like he calls it his nervous illness but it was it was very visual and he was a very smart person he was a he's a judge he's a very organized thinker so even in his breakdowns he thought god was talking to him god wanted him to be a woman he these rays of light god wanted to impregnate him with the light it's very elaborate it's cosmic it's gnostic it's a huge if you read some of it you'll just see the the ecstatic part of his psychotic break is uh is very visual it's it's like the third impact you know it's like the second impact it's like that kind of a apocalyptic so this is an apocalypt apocalypse of a person right and he talks about the second point to which discusses the chapter and the tendency initiated in the world to unman a human being who has entered into permanent contact with the rays this is contact rey right the rays this is connected on the one hand with the nature of god's nerves rays and nerves right through the blessedness the enjoyment of this disgust is felt not exclusively at least and accompanied by a greatly increased feeling of voluptuousness on the other hand the destruction of mankind on any star whether intentional or otherwise the human race can be renewed right rebuild renew we've got ray we've got nerve god's nerves human instrumentality right when on some star moral decay or perhaps nervousness has seized the whole of mankind to such an extent that the four courts of heaven could not be expected to adequately replenish their extensively blackened nerves there was reason to fear a dangerous increase of attraction on god's nerves and that the destruction of the human race on this star could occur spontaneously so that's just a quick sample that's the kind of stuff that was going through schrieber's head when he had his mental mental breakdown right and then a lot of this other book is all of the traumatic experiences schrieber has crawling back to what we'll call health right so he was not functional and interpreting the world in the sense of rays and nerves and all of these concepts and god's plan for him and then suddenly he has to deal with his doctor and like slowly his psychosis is lessened right through this you know the institutionalization and eventually he goes through the legal problems of getting himself freed and and having his case uh uh called insane and he left and this memoirs is sort of this great chronicle this heroic quest almost like but different as epic of a quest that the evangelion series is you have something like this in here but now at the same time what did freud do what did freud do with all of this freud reads this notes and he summarizes oh he's some like oh god wanted him pregnant he must have been homosexual and it's just kind of a very cursory it's it's you know i think in the introduction they say freud himself however for all his interpretations of the case now seems so wrong-headed did the delusions that characterize madness as the real and interesting creations of a human being creating them was for freud a process a van builders van building zarbite or the works of delusion formation even more strikingly freud proposed that the idea that delusional systems are a means of keeping the patients going holding the world together right the end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe the paranoia subjective world now this is freud the paranoia subjectives world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love for it and the paranoia builds it again right rebuild again not more splendid it is true but at least so that he can once more live on lemon live in it he builds it up by the work of his delusions the delusional formation which we take to the pathological product is in reality an attempt at recovery a process of reconstruction right you can rebuild freud's point but at the same time freud sees it as a delusional structure now let's flip the script and go to what lecon sees it as so again freud gets the diagnosis a little bit wrong he sees it as a delusion mechanism and he sees it as and this is look i'm sure when you heard that things about evangelion come to mind right the the the impacts keep happening the apocalypses keep happening um uh shinji's father in human instrumentality the at fields breaking down what a human is all of these components right so let's go back to lacan now so on the same topic we're still on sriber we're still on after freud right it's immediately apparent after freud in the simplistic character of the elements invoked in conception how can the eternal be transmitted to the external right freud in his essay of interpretation of the schrieber case which is really so badly is read so badly like freud reads this lacan says freud reads schreiber so badly that is usually reduced to rehashings that followed uses of the form of grammatical deduction in order to present the switching of the relation in psychosis namely the different ways of denying the proposition i love him i hate him it is not i it is not him he hates me she loves me she loves him so this is just freud kind of stumbling through it right but lacan doesn't give up on freud lacan says and yet it's freud who kind of gives us this ability to start looking into this this is the after freud with freud right he talks about with freud what is striking is that the dimension is felt that something else in the experience that people undergo not all without thinking about them rather thinking about them but without thinking that they are thinking right desire boredom confinement revolt prayer sleeplessness i'd like to stop here since freud refers specifically to it by quoting the middle of schrieber a passage from nietzsche's zarathustra and panic are there as evidence in the dimension of that elsewhere to draw our attention to it as i would say as mere states of mind that thinking without laughing can pull back into place much more as permanent principles of collective organizations here this kind of nostalgia and this fixing of ideas comes in and he says he produces this schema he calls it the l schema right this is zigzagging you'll see okay and he also continues with the l schema and talks about the r schema so what are these schemas um it's a gap it's a gap between uh okay how do we explain this at that moment when there's a battle in evangelion let's call it right and you know how the evas will awaken the avas get triggered right the avas get triggered the power drains down shinji is beaten asaku is beaten and suddenly um the eva is destroyed right we see in the first episode of neon genesis evangelion the ava goes into berserk mode now what's weird and rebuilt is mari backdoor code the beast beast mode she can activate it right she taps into the anxiety she taps into the primal thing and she releases it now this is very different than saying one's sick this is saying oh there's some mechanisms at work here this is agency right mari has agency with asakus ava as opposed to asaka gets you know the the avas that get destroyed we see rey's ava destroyed we see asaka's abuse destroyed in earlier ones i'll get back to those schemas when we when we look at formations of the unconscious but let's just talk about shreebr's way now now now lacan's going to revisit he's going to rebuild freud in relation to shriver and he says now we re-enter the subjectivity of schreiber's delusion and he gives us this formula of the metaphor the signifying substitution and he gives us this crazy formula right and then he interprets this as the name of the father over the desire of the mother by the desire of the mother and the signified to the subject goes to the name of the father over the big other over the phallus now let's try to conceive of this circumstance of the subjective position in which the name of the father responds with the kengendo right the name of the father responds not with the absence of the real father for this absence is more than composite with the presence of the signifier it's not the absence of the real father it's the death of the symbolic father right what we see in evangelion isn't gendo dying it's gendo's pain it's gendo's pain that caused this whole thing to happen right again it's shinji's off the hook once shinji realizes oh it's the father complex this whole thing is the father complex and oh maybe had a father complex who knows right interestingly enough in the research if you look at interschriber's father and there's a whole this is a whole thing we could do gendo and tre and schrieber's father schrieber's father used to make these posture correction devices they were like leather metal things that you could strap onto your growing child to fix their posture stop all kinds of behaviors and you think about how crazy that sounds today it's like torture devices basically that was the father of shreeber so no wonder why sriber came up with some weird god complexes you know when you think of it in some way but just as an aside that could be a whole gendo and shreebo schreiber's father so so yeah so we talked a little bit about psychosis so hopefully that stuff was a little bit interesting let's kind of go into from there we talked about mirror stage let's go into desire quickly i think desire part is very interesting so so again we were talking about the um the levels of the desire right so what do i mean by this uh so there's things that happen in so let's think of it in neon genesis evangelion episodes 25 and 26 it's all inside of shinji's head kind of right this is the shinji experience of second impact right this is his feeling how it happens right and he sees all these hallucinogenic images he sees the world collapsing kind of uh but then we get to by the time we get to and then sorry end of evangelion we see what the outside world sees right so it's one is sort of like the uh one is like the symbolic and the other one is the real or no sorry the imaginary right we have the imaginary order how shinji sees himself like do you want me shinji do you want me shinji do you want me shinji right and then the real world the symbolic order we see an end of evangelion so uh earlier we were talking i said we would get to this graph of desire so we see in the in the graph of desire this is um lecon's graph and i also think it comes in with rebuild of evangelion in the sense of this is the statement that's made and this is one's desire this is your intentionality and what we see is um we cross our desire back to we're looking for something we're fishing for something right and that fishing for something makes this um quilting hook right so the idea of it is something like um uh let's say the subject will be a thief and the thief goes to confess to the police and he says i'm a thief why did he confess why does he go and say that what did he confess oh well maybe the thief actually doesn't want to steal and he's saying i'm the thief but what he really is saying is will you help me right so the subject drifts right so it starts out i'll give you the example of shinji right shinji starts out as saying i don't want to do this i don't want to do this i don't want to do this and then he sees rey and something triggers his mother's sacrifice right his mother's sacrifice is in the eva his mother is the eva and rey piloting the eva shinji wants to save the mother and he sees rey suddenly he just wants to be told what to do and who's telling him right now well it's the desire of his mother's love to save the mother right that's what's telling him what to get in the eva in a way but it manifests as oh i want to save rey and this is why shinji always saves ray shinji gives up the world for rey we talked about you know uh in our last podcast in the in the uh jung and end of evangelion podcast so what's interesting though with the graph of desire is there's the things that we say and then there's the history line this is the second line above the top which is this is where again this is kind of like the redo we watch rebuild of evangelion but in the back of our minds we remember neon genesis and we remember end of evangelion so when the first two films come out we notice things are are pretty much normal it's like oh yeah there's yeah this is the same story like shinji gets in the robot it beats the angel you know it's upgraded a little bit but when 3.0 comes this is the big break where it's like no i'm not anno says i'm not telling you that story again we're not falling into that exact same story again right and we have that same experience where we're expecting we're expecting and this is why three is the most controversial for a lot of people we're expecting something from the narrative structure right so again i mentioned it last time not only does hano anno with christian apocalypse apocalyptic um talk or um let's say in inspiration from christian apocalyptic writing to give us the the framework of you know uh how the evangelion uh system works right there's nerve there's all these atom and limits and human instrumentality and impacts or like the book of revelations kind of thing right the end is like the book of revelations but anna also was taking from maybe unconsciously or maybe through his own just through his own psycho analytic journey or his own psycho uh his own psyches healing over time he realizes you can't redo the same thing over again i have to show you something else he introduces mari and this is a balancing agent it's a changing agent it's someone who has agency right mari is never afraid to jump in the ava she she flies that first ava when we first see her that experimental unit three it's like all broken and dilapidated uh the voice actors are great who play mari right it's awesome in a way that's different than us asaka is awesome she is fighting she's animus possessed she has her own uh struggles but she doesn't come out the other side she gets crushed by her struggles like the angels destroy her and end of ava mari she's she's just like okay destroy my ava i'm going to keep going right she never stops so let's jump into uh we'll we'll jump into um this last point here but i think you guys can see there's a lot that we can talk about i want to go back to this these kind of symbols here where it's very interesting so again we were talking about the this l schema and you see it how he's got it set up here there are real words that flow around the subject notably in his childhood but the essence of the paternal metaphor which i announced to you today and which we'll talk about at greater length the next time consists of the following triangle mother father child and then we also have this schema the schema l everything that happens at s capital the subject depends on what signifiers are placed at a right which is the big other so here we'll talk we'll call the big other um this is the the ideal other you know it's like the desire of the other le con talks about right if a truly is the locus of signifiers and what he means here is lacan has a thing that he says that desire is the desire of the other right and this is kind of something that we can think about shinji always says i just want you to tell me what to do right he wants to make everybody else happy uh and then you see a lot of the characters in evangelion are doing this you know rey in the original series wanted shinji and gendo to get together right but rey also wants shinji to respect kendo because gendo's kind of a father to rey as well as she's the clone of the mother and it gets complicated and we'll get into this we jump over to aeon for a second um this zigzag is kind of like the cardinal points he calls it the oedipus complex as signifiers and he says the vertices of the triangle um but to understand the transformation of the first triad to the second you have to see that dummy as he is the subject and there is a subject gets a little reward from his efforts in this game from the unconstituted point where he is it will be necessary for him to contribute to it not with his dollars which perhaps he doesn't have yet then at least with his hide that is to say with his images his imaginary structure and all that follows this is how the fourth term the s is going to be represented in something imaginary that is opposed to the signifier of the oedipus complex and which if it is to work has to be ternary has to be ternary now now he's going to say this of course there is an entire stock the entire baggage of images to see to see this open the books of mr jung in his school and you'll see that there are no end to the images right they sprout and they vegetate everywhere there is the serpent the dragon the tongues the flaming eyes the green plant the pot of flowers the concierge they are all fundamental images incontestably stuffed with signification and you can see the images in rebuilt right we start out with images that are familiar to us you know we had nerves we had avas we had at fields we had angels we had human instrumentality we had third impact we had rey and then we had the rebirth of rey and then wait a minute something happens by 3.03 3.3 where we don't keep going this way it is just that we can do strictly nothing with them you cannot redo right if you move about at this level you will succeed in losing yourself along with your little lamp in the vegetating forest of primitive archetypes as to what interest is namely the intersubjective dialectic there are three images selected and so he'll kind of go into this a bit uh but i think that you get the idea here of right you can't you cannot redo you cannot keep drilling down that way and i i will open the book of freud like he uh of jung as he mentions but i kind of want to redeem it a bit um we we did talk about this uh this quatronary and he says it has to be a tertiary right but the quaternary here where you see there's this eve adam husband wife's brother husband sister cousin as wife you see this weird dynamics and he sets up adam eve man moses he starts to set up these quaternaries and shows that this is the um and we talked about it last time the structure of i'll give you one of them it's like shinji ava unit one shinji's mother and rey right rey's the pilot she's also the mother and the ava's the mother and now shinji is sort of stuck in this confusion between them now if you go up an octave right you have ava unit zero ava unit one ava unit eight right uh you have and and maybe you put mari there right because mari she's piloted the different avas right she's piloted a b unit two she pilots ava unit eight so mari has a different relationship what's mari's ava we don't know but whatever it is she has this agency she has a psychiatric agency right and she sort of breaks the she breaks the pattern right and i think in some ways it's a pattern of anxiety right so some of this anxiety pattern that gets broken we can see this again this is going to lead us into the symptom synthone the final part we'll talk about uh again i showed this last time this was the image of the a patient of lacans uh she had these three eyes right the eyes that she this woman was having the dream every it could see everything right it was a tree it had multi branches it's like a third impact image right or it's like the atom image all those eyes can you see right that image of adam with all the eyes in in the evangelion uh and then how that wakes up to you know the the impact and then uh something happens where the world kind of goes into that apocalyptic metaphor right and you see that this lacan starts talking about this mobius strip here right and again end of evangelion rebuild of evangelion a mobius strip it's going back on itself right it's looping back on itself we start out with a we start out with a strip we twist the strip 3.333 right a difference cannot redo we end join them together suddenly we have the mobius strip you can keep going around at the end of rebuild what is should you say thrice upon a time it's a neon genesis right he says it's a neon genesis it's a neo genesis it's a new genesis the double [ __ ] and this topology thing continues one thing i want to call out there especially with the three eyes is the plot device that gets lost so that plot device with racico's mother was the central computer right and her mom was actually one of the units right i forget the names but that plot gets totally dropped from rebuilt i mean they can only do so many things and i think that the dropping of that plot is really interesting because it's kind of another mad mother metaphor right the central computer is her mother so it's like it seems like every character mother has been repositioned by the hardware and then what we get instead of that scene though we lose that scene especially in thrice upon a time by thrice upon time that that's that's not coming back nerve is gone villa is there instead and what we get in thrice upon a time is mother earth right we get the mother earth so we get rid of that idea of melchior and balthazar uh and and and the mother is kind of in the central computer and we move to the mother is the farm and it's the the bubble of earth and the angels are ghostly outside of it right and in this scene it's also we see that i think it's in 2.2.0 where they go to the ocean side and the kids have fun we get to see the kids have fun which is maybe anno coming in and saying hey it wasn't so bad those are the moments we need to enjoy right the world without avas right the world without avas and also you know this is part of the psychoanalytic process right so to bring us around the psychoanalytic process has some symptom but it's also what lacan might term in the most madness of lacan is the synthome synthon for lacan is a word he would use it's an older french word synthome is an old way of spelling what was sub subsequently spelt as symptom right this is the spelling of it that marks a date that is the injection of greek into what i call my lalingua it's especially french so he's saying this word now synthom is going to get introduced into your vocabulary the logical use of the synthom or freud with joyce and for us it's going to be on the madness of boromian knotts or lacan with evangelion right we're going to re repurpose this so the khan goes up to the blackboard and he starts drawing these celtic knots these baromian knots they're kind of like mobius strips but with twists in them and lacon is classic for giving us these nuggets of other systems of thought like the l schema the r schema the graph of desire it gives us these graphs i mean we explore this graph of desire in our uh in uh impedance and and admits in desiring machines right there's a graph here where we go through the graphs of desire but then we said what if we appropriate like this is like think of it like this anno appropriates christian apocalyptic thinking for his world building anno also seems to mirror the psychoanalytic experience for his world building le khan appropriates a graph to explain how desire flows right how what we say is colored by our memories of things that we've experienced before so we're not just in the world now we're also in this double world in which we are asking what we want and the things we say are passing through a historical filter of all the things that we've that have happened to us before our experience colors our interactions right if we don't trust we have a little non-trusting thing if we've been traumatized we end up with rebuild of evangel and if we're traumatized we end up with end of evil evangelion a traumatic ending but then after some healing happens after some agency happens right on the end of psychoanalysis we get something like rebuild of evangelion now what i'm saying i'm not first of all i'm not a doctor i am taking this from a literary point of view so we're talking about world building here and how psycholo psychoanalytic elements exist in the evangelion's world building so that's for sure that's the first thing to come out here it's not an endorsement of a doctor it's not something that's psychoanalysts as anime but it's appropriating the world building of the psychoanalytic journey is what anno has done with rebuild of evangelion so we we talk about here um this psychiatric application of these systems we can see right here what what lacan is doing with the baromian knot is the most madness thing at all but he says here on what makes a hole the real so by removing um the central computer from the story he replaces it in revealed with the nature scene right he forecloses on this you know foreclosure uh is a different concept for the khan you know we have we think of freudian repression where it's like uh something bad happened to me i press it i force that down it creates a pressure i push down on it like shinji he suddenly explodes right the avas go into beast mode it's a repression but a foreclosure is different the foreclosure is sort of like it's a hole and then one needs to cover the hole with something like nature up pours a vacuum now somehow the khan has come up with this and it's no one understands it right but i can't go on like this there are too many of you well i hope you get to this i've been busy tonight the fourth ring the geometry forbidden in the imaginary no hope of escaping from feedable mindlessness on the art of the substantializing the symptom it's almost like lacan has come full circle with sriber right his rays his god's nerves lacan ends up with uh the circle is used for circulation it is precisely this respect that the police possess the support that's been around for some time hegel saw its function very clearly for the police it's simply a matter of keeping things turning around this form of cert certainty is not what is in question here that's simply adding an infinite straight line to the false hole should in turn split the hole and this is the fact that i'll stop on for today but then he goes on to show all of these kind of holes in different structures like he'll call this one a correct boromian link see because everything is linked together even though they're over under each other but this one one part is not extended right this part that's not extended is sort of un the circuit is not complete it's a short circuit let's call it and i'll talk about these folding circles and here you get the trinary again and what it really ends up with is uh lacan's kind of end statement or statement that i'll end on here is with joyce james joyce english author wrote ulysses when joyce writes ulysses he um he's also quite mad he's quite mad he had his own struggles right and he writes a very mad work that is his therapy right so the creation of the work uh you know we've got joyce on the cover the creation of joyce's works are actually the way he replaces that hole right you have this at field image it looks just like the at field doesn't it it's an at field it's the at field and the creation of the work is what keeps one healed right if you can transfer this is where art is a healing element right so anime becomes you know we're talking about anime as the um the real of anime right uh it's really about that imaginary order in that symbolic order it's sort of like the anime is a place where anno got to exercise his demons right and the first round he did it it was very very much left unfulfilled so he did the rebuild for multiple reasons he wanted to do a new anime studio he had lots of reasons it's not like anime is psychoanalysis but the psychoanalysis story echoes the evolution of psycho psycho psychology from freud jung and lacan right so we kind of see this a t field image finally ends up in the idea of i've made thrice upon a time the 3.0 plus 1.0 is the squaring of the quaternary like jung says and we end up finally at the point where the neon genesis loop is completed we get back to the subway station right only this time shinji is older he's got a mari is there you see the other characters around and it's no longer the world of evangelion right it's like whatever happened on that last um at the end of analysis let's call it the end of psychoanalysis that final end of psychoanalysis is almost like the end of anno's project and i think this is a really great place to end because i think the the way thrice upon a time ends is really on an up note what did you guys think did you think it was an up note did you guys like the ending did you think it was too weird uh leave comments below but i i think that this could be a number of um of uh podcasts in the future where we kind of go into different areas of this so i just wanted to get these ideas out hope this was enjoyable for you guys um please by all means i will read all the comments below uh definitely a little hot miking here did my research and got the bookmarks ready but lots of uh first steps for this one and would like to come back to this topic because i think there's a lot of things that we could apply to not only this anime but to other ones and it's a great way to position things like lacanian philosophy jungian complexes and jungian archetypes and even freudian just the talking cure the idea of psychoanalysis from the father of psychoanalysis i think it's a great way to communicate it in the language of anime or in the aim in the language of uh movies as well we could do it for movies and books so please leave your comments i'll read them all and we can uh come up with a live podcast at some point where we can do this interactively uh please like and subscribe share it with uh like-minded people and we'll get a community going out of this and really appreciate everyone who's made it this far and thanks a lot for your time and talk to you soon bye