After articulating my understanding of “PDA,” I started to notice how frequently each day we are (or believe ourselves to be) coerced. Coercion, which we can treat literally as “the constraint by force of law or authority,” appears in many guises, the most quotidian of which is the should. Neurodiverse people feel the shoulds quite strongly, though all people are constrained by them. I say “constrained” because these shoulds impose themselves upon us as though they were natural features of our environment. When they impose themselves, we are done to. If we think of human agency as our subjective capacity in the world, then social custom exists as the objective counterforce. In these cases of imposition and constraint, however, the “Objective” force of social custom (nomos) acts, thereby flipping the script. Subject becomes object, object becomes agent.


An example that comes up regularly in my practice is that of passing a stranger on the sidewalk. You are out for a walk. You see a person, out on their own walk, coming toward you along the sidewalk. You sense—for reasons you can’t articulate but feel like orders—that either you or that person should do something, or maybe that you should not do something. Ought you acknowledge the passing-by in some way? Is speech appropriate? A specific head-nodding gesture, or, god forbid, eye contact? The expectation is nebulous but palpable. Anxiety mounts. You and the Other come close. Quickly, as though no longer in control of your body, you avert your eyes, mumble a hum or something, and quicken your pace slightly to carry yourself through the encounter to the other side, and, once free of the entanglement, you commence to judge your performance. Who knows. You might even think about it as you try to fall asleep later that night.


Though this type of encounter is but a passing thought when considered alongside the full span of daily interactions, it contains all the evidence we need of daily life’s coercions and impositions. All that is required to start the mechanism is the presence of another. Somebody appears, and now we become aware of a social script or choreography. Our temporary solipsism gives way to a bifurcated self, one that we think we are and one that we imagine the other sees. The two selves are incommensurate. Something isn’t adding up. We feel we should be some certain way, but we can’t perform the role precisely. Though logically we know that nobody is grading our performance, many people still feel that they have failed in some way. Yet the entire scene, including the judging and grading, only exists because of authorless shoulds dwelling beyond us while also somehow paradoxically speaking with authority in our minds.


Various theoretical apparatuses attempt to explain what’s happening in this situation. John Dall’Aglio forwards a neuropsychoanalytical framework that attempts to unify neuroscience and Lacanian psychoanalysis through what Mark Solms (via Spinoza) calls “dual-aspect monism.” Think of both characters in the street scene: you and the other. Each has a “mental apparatus” in action, a nebulous but actual complex of processes that coordinate the physical, emotional, and psychological encounter in the scene. According to Dall’Aglio et al., we can get two good looks at this apparatus. One view comes from neuroscience. That is, if we could monitor brain activity for both you and your scene partner, we would be able to isolate the regions of the brain that produce the reactions you experience as you awkwardly pass the other. With this information, we could prescribe medication or utilize neurofeedback to overcome the awkwardness and produce a stress-free sidewalk encounter. The psychological view, however, provides a second perspective, one that Dall’Aglio calls “subjective.” We could talk to you after the street scene and listen as you explain your lived experience of the event. This subjective account would give a different view of your mental apparatus, one that a purely objective brain image cannot provide. Neither the brain scan nor your subjective report provides the complete picture. Rather, your mental apparatus appears in the exchange between the two, between the objective and subjective aspects of the total experience. By taking both into account and developing each in great depth, we can explain what’s happening and make changes (if changes are wanted).


Dialecticians, by contrast, see things differently. For starters, folks like Adorno would say that the separation of object and subject into stand-alone entities is wrong straight out of the gate. Nothing is either objective or subjective. Dialectical entanglement shows up through even the most basic of analysis. For example, the “objective” brain is thoroughly mediated, not only by epigenetics, social and historical conditions, and reactions to the environment, but also by the imagining technology required to “see” the activated brain regions as well as the ways of seeing that permit neurologists to “read” what they “see.” Similarly, the “subjective” narrative provided by the individual with the lived experience relies on language and conceptual structures that are objective in the sense of existing prior to the subject who utilizes them for conversations. As such, what we see in the street scene is a microcosm of social contradiction and alienation more broadly. The other who is walking toward me comes to stand in for the Other, the social totality, the embodiment of norms and shoulds. As soon as I see the Other, I begin to doubt my competence as a member of society. I feel myself to be somehow outside of the totality that makes up sociality, and I feel that way because I do not believe that I possess the authority to determine the norms. I don’t know what I should do here, but I am pretty confident that guy does. Not only does he know, but he’s going to know that I don’t know. Let me try to get out of this. But of course, there is “out of this.” I am both a part of and apart from the social totality at all times, even when I’m not doing this sidewalk dance. To remedy the situation, we’d have to start by re-thinking of the “self” as something thoroughly mediated by others and the Other, which is to say the supposed totality of the social world in which I take part.


At present, I can’t support the thinking of Dall’Aglio because it lacks dialectical entanglement. My journey with philosophy has led me through post-structuralism to negative dialectics, which, in an uncommon way, prepared me to read the latent quasi-Hegelianism of Lacan’s psychoanalysis. I can explain what that means by walking through one thread of Lacan’s thought. We are born, he explains, as a natural body, “natural” in the sense of “material,” of matter and energy. As soon as language enters our world, typically at the moment when, as babies, we learn that we must make demands (through crying) to have our needs met, this natural body flees from us, leaving a hole where it once was. What’s left is the social body, with a hole in it. The now-absconded natural self becomes a myth for which we will quest but to which we will never return. What Lacan calls the Real forms as the rime around the hole in the core of our being. It will burst forth whenever language (what he calls the Symbolic) order can’t produce a signifier to frame its expression. The unconscious, which Lacan defines as the discourse of the Other, responds to the Real. We have access to the unconscious through the friction between the ego’s imaginings (what we believe we see and experience) and the Symbolic order, but this “access” is one-way. The unconscious can erupt through cracks in language (slips, jokes, odd sounds we make when we pass each other) but we can’t communicate back to it. In this way: sociality imposes itself on us. We are imposed upon and we feel obliged to accept the imposition.


Imposition has at least two meanings. While society does layer itself upon the person like a film projection upon a screen or a second skin laminated upon the first, it also charges a duty. Duty, like tax, is an obligatory service (the should) that ought to be done. Consider again the scenario of passing strangers on the street. Do you not feel that you have some unnamed duty, almost as if you owe it to ___?____ to do…something? Or in the situation of OCD, can we understand the compulsion to repeat a gesture as a glitch, a moment of visceral incongruence between the Real and the imposition of various (societally constructed) shoulds? Or back in the orbit of “PDA,” when a child refuses to comply, are we not witnessing the emergence of the Real for the child, the impossible truth of being a subject who is demanded to act in accordance with objective rules for being? From very early on in our lives, we sense the tax levied upon us, the duty we ought to perform according to an objective—also conflicted, heteronomous—morality that coerces compliance. What’s actually unnerving is not the rageful refusal of the child, the repetitive ritual behavior of the obsessional, or the awkwardness of the sidewalk dance; what’s unnerving is that these situations are marked as abnormal. Given the imposition and coercion of daily life, why do more people not appear to register the discomfort?


My interpretation of the sidewalk dance emerges from this line of thinking. We who feel caught in the gaze of the other as they walk toward us have produced a neurotic response to protect ourselves from an inconvenient truth. The traditional understanding of neurosis is at play here; namely, neurosis is what protects against psychosis, which is to say a complete break with the agreements that stitch together consensus reality. The neurotic behavior in this case is the squirming, the “dying inside,” the aversion of the eyes. We wriggle about because to wriggle is preferable to admitting that we have no “authentic” way to relate to this stranger, no chance of developing an emergent, previously unheard of mode of erotic connection. What we have, instead, is a short list of societally sanctioned norms for behavior that never quite square with our desires.


The treatment that follows from this interpretation is quite different from the treatments that dominate the therapeutic setting. The social-materialist, modified Lacanian approach to “mental health” requires treating the ways of relating currently governing or conducting our daily maneuvers through the social field. Instead of looking for cognitive distortions or undertaking a vagus nerve reset, we have to come to acknowledge the ways that coercion and imposition shape our sense of self and our capacities. The goal is not to cease coercion and imposition. The goal, rather, is to plot a course through the gauntlet toward that which we desire.