This essay was written by an anonymous author

Introduction: Law, Authority, and a Shattered Dream

This year, a close friend of mine, a student from the MENA region, received admission to an important master’s program in the United States. Years of effort, study, and hope seemed finally to bear fruit. But within weeks, Trump’s travel ban abruptly halted the dream.

On the surface, this was a bureaucratic setback. But at the subjective level, it was something else entirely: a confrontation with a kind of authority that doesn’t argue, negotiate, or explain—authority that simply says no. Psychoanalysis offers a language for thinking about why such a “no” hits different people differently, and what those differences reveal.

Lacan argues that we don’t relate to laws or power only as citizens, but also as subjects shaped by the symbolic order—the web of language, norms, and institutions into which we are born. Lacan calls this symbolic order the big Other: not a person, but the place from which rules, legitimacy, and recognition seem to come. When the big Other speaks as law—through courts, borders, bans—it often feels absolute. Lacan names that experience the Law of the Father (also called the Name-of-the-Father): the symbolic authority that interrupts desire and reorganizes a life with a single prohibition.

People do not all meet this Law in the same way. Lacanian theory describes several recurring subject positions (or clinical structures)—not identities, and not tied to gender, but patterns of relating to authority, desire, and others. In what follows, I use four familiar positions: obsessive neurotic, hysteric, pervert, and psychotic. 

Put very plainly, these four positions are different habitual ways people deal with a powerful “no” from authority (like a state, a border, or any rule-giving system): the obsessive neurotic tries to regain control by perfecting, delaying, and endlessly rechecking—treating the rule as something that must be satisfied before life can move on; the hysteric meets the “no” by demanding an answer from authority, turning his suffering into a question and pressing the system to explain itself; the pervert (a technical term here, not a moral insult) responds by treating the rule as something to manipulate or outsmart, searching for loopholes or becoming the agent who carries out what authority seems to want; and the psychotic confronts the “no” without a stable shared trust in the rule itself, so authority can feel either unreal and meaningless or suddenly absolute and threatening, making the social world hard to rely on.

I then add a fifth stance: the analytic–activist subject, which is not a structure someone “has,” but an ethical position someone can take.

I develop this in two registers:

Descriptive – examining how different Lacanian subject positions react to the ban.

Normative – sketching what it means to occupy a different position: the analytic–activist subject.

This double movement—descriptive and normative—is not only clinical but also philosophical: it distinguishes between the is of psychic reaction and the ought of political-analytic action. To develop this, I use the four principles proposed by the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Activist: relating, seeing, making meaning, acting.

1. Relating

Every subject position implies a distinct mode of relation to the Other. The travel ban, as Law, tests these modes.

Obsessive neurotic: The obsessive relates by way of guilt and duty. When faced with the ban, he does not first reach toward others but loops inward: “Where did I go wrong? Did I miss a document? Was my CV inadequate?” His relating is not with peers or allies but with the Law itself, in an endless negotiation. Thus, even when he rewrites his application ten times, it is a relation — but a relation of submission, not solidarity. 

Hysteric: The hysteric relates by staging his wound before the Other. In this case, he takes to social media: “Look at my suffering! See how unjust this is!” Relation becomes a stage, generating sympathy or outrage, but rarely moving beyond the spectacle. The tie he builds is real—people respond, sympathize, share—but it is fragile, because it rests on recognition rather than shared commitment to act. When recognition fades, the tie risks dissolving.

Pervert: The pervert relates to others as instruments for bypassing the Law. He befriends those who can “fix” the problem — perhaps through false documents, perhaps through foreign relatives. Relation here is transactional: others are bridges or loopholes. The connection is utilitarian, not communal.

Psychotic: The psychotic often struggles with relation itself. The ban may be read as a personal conspiracy, and suddenly friends appear as collaborators with hidden motives. Here relation collapses into suspicion. The Other is not a partner but a persecutor.

Analytic–activist subject: In contrast, this subject relates by weaving networks of solidarity. Instead of turning inward, staging, using, or breaking ties, the analytic–activist builds them. They reach out to other victims of the ban, to advocacy groups, to allies abroad. Relation becomes the ground for resistance.

Thus, “relating” is not a neutral term. Each subject does relate, but in a way that either isolates or connects. Only the analytic–activist sustains relation as a basis for transformation.

2. Seeing

To “see” is more than perceiving. It is the position of gaze: what one chooses to notice, and what one screens out.

Obsessive neurotic: The obsessive sees details with painful precision. He pores over the exact wording of the executive order, imagines hidden clauses, checks every form. Yet he cannot see the larger horizon: the racialized politics of exclusion, the systemic targeting of people from the MENA region. His gaze is narrow, juridical, missing the forest for the trees.

Hysteric: The hysteric sees the injustice, but refracted through his own place in it. He wonders, “How will others perceive my story?” Seeing here is tied to the gaze of the Other upon his suffering.

Pervert: The pervert sees only weak spots. His gaze scans for cracks in the wall of Law — “Maybe Canada is possible, maybe this lawyer knows a way.” He sees strategically, not politically.

Psychotic: The psychotic may see too much — or rather, see signs where none exist. The ban may appear as a cosmic message, a targeted warning, proof of grand conspiracy. Seeing becomes hallucinated meaning.

Analytic–activist subject: This subject insists on double vision. They see the wound of the individual and the horizon of collective history. They see that this ruined dream is not an isolated tragedy but part of a longer lineage of exclusionary laws. This vision allows personal experience to connect with political critique.

Thus, “seeing” distinguishes between myopia, narcissism, opportunism, paranoia — and the clarity of linking individual pain to systemic injustice.

3. Making Meaning

Human beings cannot but interpret. The ban forces each subject to answer: What does this mean?

Obsessive neurotic: “It means I failed.” Meaning becomes personal fault. The Law is justified; the problem is me. This collapse of politics into guilt sustains the authority of the Law.

Hysteric: “It means my story is a tragedy.” The hysteric makes meaning through narrative, inviting others to witness. Yet the meaning revolves around the self as a protagonist-victim, not around the system that produces victims en masse.

Pervert: the Law of the Father is not experienced as something sacred but as something to be played with. The ban means: “Here is a challenge, a riddle to solve.” It is proof that the Law is never absolute, because it always contains loopholes to be found and exploited. Thus, meaning emerges not as suffering or guilt but as clever mastery: “If I can get a second passport, or find a legal crack, I prove the Law’s claim to universality is hollow.” Yet paradoxically, in endlessly circling around the exception, the pervert keeps the Law alive.

Psychotic: Meaning fragments. The ban may mean “I am chosen” or “They are all against me.” Meaning is private, disconnected from any shared horizon.

Analytic–activist subject: Here meaning arises from stitching together the personal and the political. “It means that the law is unjust, and my pain belongs to a wider collective wound.” Such meaning-making enables solidarity, turning trauma into testimony, and testimony into resistance.

4. Acting

Finally, how does one respond? Action is the site where relation, vision, and meaning crystallize.

Obsessive neurotic: Acts are postponed indefinitely. The obsessive waits until he has mastered every detail — and therefore, the act never truly arrives. When it does, it is not an outward intervention but an inward one: a ritual, a private gesture of reassurance, something that loops back into his own economy of guilt and certainty. The result is that what appears as preparation for action only ever produces more delay; the act is endlessly deferred or reduced to inward substitutions.

Hysteric: Acts through repetition of narrative. Each telling is a small act, but the structure remains unchanged.

Pervert: Acts by circumventing the law. New passport, fake story, hidden routes. The Law is not challenged, only sidestepped.

Psychotic: Acts may be erratic, disproportionate, detached from reality. They may protest an imagined conspiracy or retreat entirely.

Analytic–activist subject: Acts both personally and collectively. They may write about the injustice, organize with others, join protests, engage in legal battles. The act is not only for oneself but for a larger transformation.

Thus, “acting” marks the difference between paralysis, performance, bypass, breakdown — and resistance.

Conclusion: From Is to Ought

The travel ban shattered a personal dream, but it also revealed something universal: the way each subject confronts the Law.

Descriptively, the obsessive, hysteric, pervert, and psychotic show us the diversity of common psychic responses. Normatively, the analytic–activist subject shows us what is possible: to build relations, to see clearly, to create collective meaning, and to act in solidarity.

This distinction matters. The descriptive tells us what is. The normative asks what is to be done. Without the former, we misrecognize the force of psychic structure. Without the latter, we lose the ethical horizon of psychoanalysis as a practice that not only interprets suffering but also transforms it.

In a world of proliferating prohibitions and authoritarian laws, the figure of the analytic–activist is not a luxury. It is a necessity for survival, dignity, and freedom.

Coda: A Note on the Case

As I noted at the outset, this essay is about a close friend rather than about myself. When the ban was announced, they lived with its impact for days and weeks, moving through intense anxiety and helplessness; and, crucially, their responses at different moments echoed—each in its own degree—the logics I have described under the obsessive, hysteric, perverse, and psychotic positions. At times they tried to regain control by scrutinizing rules and turning the fault back on themselves for having missed something; at other times they felt compelled to stage their pain publicly and press the social order to answer for it; and at still other moments they were tempted either to outwit the prohibition or to experience it as a threatening force that made the world feel unreliable. In this sense, the analytic–activist position was not a structural destiny for them (or for me as a friend) but an ethical choice we could make in how to hold the experience and what to do with it. I now narrate this trajectory as a way of giving meaning to a suffering that can be read not only as personal misfortune but as part of a wider, more universal encounter with prohibition: the “no” is always present in our lifeworld, yet our ways of meeting it need not—and should not—remain the same.

References

Fink, B. (1999). A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press. (To support the discussion on clinical structures).

Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.

This artwork serves as a symbolic landscape of the Lacanian structures—Obsessive, Hysteric, Pervert, and Psychotic—as they encounter the absolute “No” of the Law. It invites the viewer to navigate the tension between the individual subject and the symbolic order.

Note: Image generated by Gemini based on the article’s conceptual framework.