Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

Obsession, in which someone pretends that the other doesn't exist, they're self-contained and don't need anybody else, there's no such thing as the unconscious, and nothing can possibly go wrong.

Fink describes Ayn Rand characters as a perfect, in quotes, example, which I found helpful.

Obsessives deal with their fear of sex by focusing on a single aspect of the sex partner, for example, breasts, penis.

and desperately trying to pretend they're not a real full person.

If you doubt the utility or veracity of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Fink warns us, it probably means you're obsessive, and that's your defense mechanism.

Here's a story about an obsessive.

Quote,

Let me borrow an example from Colette Soler that nicely illustrates obsession.

An obsessive man meets a woman who attracts him greatly, seduces her, and makes love to her regularly.

He sees in her the object that causes him to desire, but he cannot stop himself from planning when they will make love and asking another woman to call him at that exact time.

does not just let the phone ring or stop making love when he answers the phone.

Instead he answers the phone and talks with the caller while making love with his lover.

His partner is thus annulled or neutralized and he does not have to consider himself dependent on her or on her desire for him in any way.

Orgasm usually leads, at least momentarily, to a cessation of thoughts and

To a brief end to thinking, but since the obsessive continues to talk on the phone with his other woman, he never allows himself to disappear as conscious thinking subject, even for so much as a second.

Desire is impossible in obsession, because the closer the obsessive comes to realising his desire, say, to have sex with someone, the more the other begins to take precedence over him, eclipsing him as a subject.

The presence of the other threatens the obsessive with what Lacan calls aphantasis, his fading or disappearance as a subject.

To avoid that presence, an extremely typical obsessive strategy is to fall in love with someone who is utterly and completely inaccessible, or alternatively, to set standards for potential lovers which are so stringent that no one could possibly measure up to them."

Hysteria is where someone tries to become the object of the other's desire, thus resolving the terrifying question of what it wants.

It wants them.