The Obscure Object of Desire

By Kevin Murphy, MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with some delusion and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
When you read these lines, it is as if they were written about our most recent property boom and its subsequent collapse. Yet they were written a very long time ago, in the mid 19th century. Despite that, they are still incredibly relevant. What they tell us is that the fever that gripped this country for the ten year period up to 2008 was, in the context of history, nothing new.
The lines are taken from a book called ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’. It was written by a Scotsman called Charles Mackay when he was living in London and working as editor of the London Illustrated News. The book was published in 1841 and it is a compilation of some great historical delusions that have beset countries, nations and communities.
Now you might argue that surely there has never been an example of a bank or a small group of financiers bringing a country to its knees. Yet the very first example is from France in the 1720s when the country was almost brought to bankruptcy because of a dodgy share scheme, devised and promoted by the leader of the government with the help of Scotsman John Law. It promised riches for all from trade with Mississippi and Louisiana and thereby created a frenzy of buying and selling in the stock.
At the same time, there was a similar scheme going on in England called the South Sea Bubble*, whereby a group of high ranking politicians and businessmen promised great riches from trade with the east coast of South America, despite having nothing to back it up except hype. They sold shares in their South Sea Company that reached such heights – fuelled by greed at all levels of society - that an act of Parliament had to be brought in to put a stop to it. Needless to say the whole thing came crashing down and this too almost brought the UK to the brink of bankruptcy.
The scary part is that the pattern gets repeated over and over again in the present day. An introduction by Professor Norman Stone of Oxford University says that the UK and French delusions were the forerunner of the Great Crash in 1929. And that many other forms of mass delusion have their counterparts in the modern world. But if you want a really interesting and familiar description of what an economy looks like when things collapse you’ll find it in the book where the author describes the aftermath of the Dutch tulip boom**. Yes, there was a time in history when tulip bulbs in Holland were selling for more than diamonds.
There are many other examples in the book ranging from a craze for fortune telling, to witch mania, to The Crusades, to haunted houses, to duelling among men. They all have the same thing in common. At one point or another they gripped the public imagination and for a time became the most important issues of the day, to the exclusion of practically everything else. They were delusions that operated on a massive scale.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how this country’s obsession with property falls into this category too. For a time, the market in property rose to heights that were unsustainable but nobody cared. It was a market built on very little that could sustain it, other than hype, expectation and greed. It took over the entire thinking process of an entire nation, to the exclusion of all else. And, like the collapses in Charles Mackay’s book, when the dust settled a handful were blamed for the excesses of the many. Not everybody partied in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years, as has been suggested. For many the Celtic Tiger passed by without ever stopping at their door. But enough partied to suggest that we may have been caught up in a delusion of sorts.
It is a testament to the grip that economics has on current thinking that no-one has ever mentioned the word ‘delusion’ in the context of the Irish property experience. ‘Delusion’ may not be in the vocabulary of economists. Maybe they have other words to describe a form of madness that overtakes a nation. And yet, is there any other word for it?
The French psychoanalyst and thinker Jacques Lacan has, central to his vast and often complicated theories, a concept known simply as ‘object a’. ‘Object a’ is something we never see or touch or smell or feel or hear but it is a central part of all our lives. Its singular power is to make us want it but it does so by taking the shape of real things in the world. And not just make us want it but to desire it more than anything else. Even though it is something we can’t put a name on, it lands, much like a rare invisible butterfly, on other objects in the real world and so we believe that the thing it lands on is the thing we really want.
Property became our ‘object a’ in this country for a decade or so. Something tangible that promised riches, security, comfort, success, social status, it became the thing we most admired. The invisible butterfly of ‘object a’ landed on it turning property into the obscure object of desire.
There are two things to remember about ‘object a’, however. The first is that it emanates from deep within all of us and is a memory, an idea even, of a loss we suffer from the moment we are born. It is the lingering taste of a time when all our needs were met, when all desires were filled and all lack abolished. That is what ‘object a’ becomes for each and every one of us, a nagging memory of something lost that we seek to re-find all our lives. That’s why the real object, when we eventually fix on it, becomes so intensely important and desirable.
The second thing is that if we get too close to ‘object a’, if we get too close to the thing that will potentially quench all desire and satisfy all needs, common sense tells us but it took Dr Jacques Lacan to spell it out in his teaching, we are in danger of turning off the very fire that burns within us and drives us forward. No lack, no desire. Getting too close to our ‘object a’ therefore is a dangerous thing; it is so good it is bad for us. We see that most clearly when greed drives the citizens of a nation to clamber over one another to seek the comfort of riches. The lessons of distant and recent history are that the process ends in tears.
But ‘object a’ need not be property. Sometimes it is the opposite or same sex, sometimes it is stock market shares, or fame, or eternal youth, or the nirvana of a pain free existence through drugs. And it moves around, all the time, jumping from one thing to the next. As soon as we have captured it in one form it moves to the next thing. Faraway hills are often greener, isn’t that the old phrase?
That’s why, after the dust has settled on the property boom and its aftermath, there will be something else to take its place, hopefully after a suitable amount of time has elapsed and hopefully something that will not be as catastrophic for the economic well-being of the country. But there will be something and it will delude us into thinking that this new thing is ‘it’. Before the property boom we had the dot-com boom and after it we can reasonably expect something new that will make us forget some of the lessons of the past. Let’s hope we don’t forget all the lessons of the past. It's not that we have a problem remembering the lessons of bad experiences. But the lure of ‘object a’ simply never goes away, pushing us ever onward to re-find it in its newest form.
* The word Bubble was used in the mid-19th century to describe any scheme that grew from nowhere, had little to sustain it and could burst at any moment. The current phrase ‘property bubble’ used in connection with our economic collapse comes from this.
** Mackay, C., (1841 [1995]), ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’, Wordsworth Editions, p.95.