The Cybernetic Unconscious (2)
The second installment of a five-part thesis.
1A: Phobias
“It’s gonna be too hot to breathe today
But everybody is out here on the streets
Somebody’s opened up a fire hydrant
Cold water rushing out in sheets”1
I hate insects without intending to. I do not truly believe flies are evil, yet, regardless of how mature I am expected to act in a given circumstance2, if I see a fly, I will get up and try to kill it. The same goes for any insects, especially bees, which I crush beneath my heel if I see them limping on the sidewalk, or run from if I see them buzzing around flowers. Rationally, I realize bees are vital pollinators, under threat from climate collapse and pesticides3, but my reaction is not a rational one based on data, but an unconscious one based on significance4. For me, a bee signifies “danger” or “stinger,” and excludes “pollinator,” “thorax,” “yellow,” “honey,” and all other neutral denotations. In psychiatry, this kind of symbol is called a mania or a phobia, “governed by the laws of prelogical rationality and affectivity,”5 maximizing significance while minimizing meaning. It is the basic unit of the unconscious.
At the start of a horror story, horror manifests as phobias, impossible to consciously rationalize, yet equally impossible to ignore. These disruptions are uncanny, juxtaposing the unknown against the familiar6, like the videos Casey finds documenting the effects of “The World’s Fair Challenge.”7 Such effects include finding ticket stubs inside one’s arms, growing angel wings, or turning into plastic. Neither Casey nor the audience can tell which are real and which staged; the most disturbing randomly appears on their feed as they attempt to fall asleep.
Casey at least knows they are playing a game; Lain has no explanation for the auditory and visual hallucinations she suffers, or the email she gets from a dead classmate8. Yet the aesthetic similarity of the phobias alludes to a unifying gestalt horror while refusing to explain them through familiar, simple axioms. Both Casey and Lain treat phobic symbols as evidence of paranormal forces contradicting the normal model of reality. By seeking and experiencing these forces, not evading and rationalizing them, they discard the failed model without forcing the evidence to fit a new one.
Psychiatry approaches phobias in the opposite way, encouraging patients to preserve familiar models of reality and reject all phobias that contradict them. It operates through Jean Baudrillard’s model of deterrence as the postponement of a threshold via simulation: nuclear deterrence conceals the horror of atomic weapons with “the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike,”9 political deterrence conceals the horror of state violence through cultural spaces “sanctioned by the blackmail to security,”10 and psychiatric deterrence conceals an indefinite array of horrors through etiology and treatment. Exposure therapy, a standard treatment for phobias11, functions on the principle of deterrence via simulation. The patient approaches a substitute for the phobia, never one with the potential to inflict real harm, “substituting the signs of the real for the real.”12 For example, as a child, I worried incessantly, and vocally, about “getting fat,” losing games, or falling asleep. In therapy, I sat in a dark room pretending to fall asleep, played card games with other children, and debated nutrition science with my therapist. I interacted with symbols signifying phobias, anxiety, and coping skills, but only interacted with what those signs represented outside of therapy—real food, real games, my real bedroom—and, invariably, performed worse than I did in the simulations.
Exposure therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy, of which it is a subtype, not only follows the assumption that phobias originate in an immaterial plane “that functions as a double of reality;”13 it deters their material causes and effects from conscious attention. The physical reaction changes from unacceptable to acceptable, but the significance of the reaction remains static and unconscious.
1B. Symptoms
“Who makes the call, what’s a symptom, what’s a flaw
Can it be both? Well, I suppose that’s an answer”14
Both unconscious nodes and conscious nodes share symbols, seeking “similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.”15 The only difference is that unconscious models do not continuously receive and produce complicated data. The more significant, the fewer elements of material, sensory data they reference, and the less effect reference has on the models synthesized from phobias. The simplest unconscious models produce what psychology terms symptoms, such as rituals or intrusive thoughts.
Symptoms produce consistent behavior in alignment with unreal models without the need for a consistent external stimulus. Thus, the psychiatric project depends on symptoms to prove the internality of disorder, to “produce regulated people with regulated identifications of their own deficiencies.”16 Using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, psychiatrists “record the presence or absence of a given set of symptoms,” corresponding to “a particular diagnostic label.”17 Such labels establish a binary of sanity and displace the very symptoms that determine the labels. Either a patient has enough symptoms to qualify as “insane,” reducing the symptoms to surface signs of deeper instability, or they have too few and stay “sane,” reducing the symptoms to character flaws. Even if sane people can have symptoms of insanity, they assume this means only that “everyone has a little schizophrenia,”18 not that “schizophrenia” may be just the simultaneous activation of multiple symptoms.
James Hillman claimed that depression is endemic to modern life19, while Andrew Scull calls it the “common cold of psychiatry.”20 Yet the symptoms of depression are “wildly variable”21—Bo Burnham describes “[waking] up every morning at a quarter to ten,”22 “Staring at the ceiling and waiting for this feeling to go away,”23 and wanting to kill himself once he turns 4024. In opinion pieces and podcasts, pundits and politicians blame everything from vaccines and social media to video games and climate change for a crisis in American mental health25. Regardless of the effects of any of the alleged causes, reporters measure mental illness by measuring diagnoses, which can only provably measure symptoms, not discrete disorders. An explosion in diagnoses proves only an explosion of symptoms, the displacement of said symptoms from psychiatric analysis, and the centering of neurosis in their place.
1C. Neurosis
“Your imagination
Is in an awful place
Don’t believe in manifestation
Your heart will break”26
If phobias are stocks of significance and symptoms are flows of compulsions, neuroses are complete systems, self-organizing feedback loops27. This means that, despite neurosis lacking the subjectivity of consciousness28, both belong to the same order of simulacra29. Like a self-aware individual subject, neurosis is complex, unpredictable, and adaptable; in both Inside and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the protagonists exhaustively document what happens during a depressive or dissociative episode, but the shift from drama to horror happens when they lose control: when Bo Burnham attacks the audience with his camera30, or when Casey destroys their beloved doll31. Neurosis does not feel like a part of the self, but like an alien entity.
The phenomenological model of neurosis and psychosis as entities connects those who share it as strongly as diagnostic identities disconnect them from the sane majority32. Will Wood, who has been in treatment for addiction, bipolar disorder, and other conditions for years, sings, “Well, this disease is/defined by its treatment/you people make me sick.”33 Following the retraction of her diagnosis, Janet Frame complained, “they robbed me of my schizophrenia,”34 despite having spent eight years institutionalized and narrowly escaped a lobotomy35. An entire counterintuitive mindset emerges after diagnosis, one in which treatment defines the disease36, illness is still real “even if performed, or especially when performed,”37 and it is simultaneously true that nothing feels better than the certainty of being ill and nothing feels worse than having an illness.
By rejecting the phenomenology of neurosis, the social institutions that produce diagnoses reduce diagnostic reliability in the act of production. Patient perception has effectively no bearing on clinical perception, leading Eugen Bleuler and Bruno Betelheim to classify autism as schizophrenia, perceiving both as “the complete withdrawal from the outside world,”38 and modern clinicians to confuse autism with OCD, as both manifest in repetition and ritual39. The mechanics of autism, OCD, and schizophrenia differ vastly, being labels for neurodivergence, neurosis, and psychosis, respectively, yet the external social perception of psychiatrists always negates the internal experience of patients. This internality brings differences as much as comorbidities into question. No one would want to conflate the neuroses of Anorexia or OCD with Dementia or Schizophrenia. Yet both anorexics and a hallucinating Esme Weijun Wang are haunted by imaginary excesses of flesh40, and Wouter Kusters believes, while psychotic, “that the earth [is] flat and that flying [is] an illusion, the work of a widespread conspiracy”41, as obsessive-compulsives believe their actions integral to an insidious, yet conveniently vague mechanism of doom. The neurotic just believes in their thoughts less than the psychotic.
Literal and visual descriptions of neurosis represent it more like expansionist psychotic systems than constrained neurotic ones, as though neurotics literally saw clouds of static42, swarms of shadowy dragons43, or darkness “choking out the sun.”44 In classical psychoanalysis, neurosis and psychosis have an inverse relationship where “the ego obeys the requirements of reality” in the former and is “ready to break with reality” in the latter45. In practice, they are simply different orders of the same phenomenon, the former finite in scope, the latter indefinite: pure unconscious chaos.
1D. Psychosis
“It’s not enough to love the unreal
I am inseparable from the impossible
My soul yearns for a fugitive
from the laws of nature”46
In psychosis, the significance that neurosis ascribes to a limited network of symbols and symptoms explodes across the larger network. Neurosis remains confined to molar models—the body in anorexia, hair in trichotillomania, personal failings in depression—but the wrongness of psychosis “isn’t limited to the grotesqueries mutating inside, but is also true of the world at large.”47 The conscious ego does not disappear, but it perceives internal simulacra with equivalent intensity, in the same context, as external stimuli.
Psychosis is a process. Its victims still experience psychosis through referential symbols, and the symbols psychosis makes significant still reflect some reference. Neil Stephenson illustrates his experiences with sea monsters and tentacles48, symbols drawn from the reality of the ocean and marine life, while Esmé Weijun Wang knows to avoid movies and TV while psychotic for fear of confusing them with reality49. At the end of Videodrome, Max Renn has lost most of his sense of reality, but he has enough contact with reality left to fire a gun50. Even schizophrenia does not cause pure psychosis; it just approaches it.
The concept of psychosis individualizes that of the unconscious. As the nodes of the brain are part of a larger, self-perceiving network, so are individuals parts of larger social networks that define who “counts” as psychotic. Lain Iwakura sees the hallucinations tormenting her the same way her classmates see her: essentially unreal, weird at best, dangerous at worst. Alienated from her peers, Lain turns to The Knights of the Eastern Calculus, an online network that treats her not as a psychotic, but as a messiah51.
John Darnielle, “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” by The Mountain Goats, track 8 on Heretic Pride, released 19 Feb. 2008, 4AD, Vinyl LP.
Such incidents have occurred in classrooms and at funeral receptions in my adult life.
“Bees,” National Wildlife Federation, accessed 14 Apr. 2025, https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Invertebrates/Bees.
Note that, while phobias are unconscious, their effects are conscious. What I mean when I write that my reaction is unconscious is not that I am not aware of it or bear no responsibility for it, but that I cannot discern a cause.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Atlantic: 10 Sep. 2008), 133.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. Alix Strachey, Imago (1919): 297-324.
Schoenbrun, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
Konaka, Lain.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), 39.
Baudrillard, 62.
“What is Exposure Therapy?”, American Psychological Association, Accessed 14 Apr. 2025, https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exposure-therapy.
Baudrillard, 2.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 25.
Will Wood, “Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave,” by Will Wood, Track 8 on The Normal Album, released 10 July 2020, Say-10 Records, vinyl LP.
Jaynes, 53.
Acid Horizon, Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape, (London: Repeater Books, 2023), 83.
Andrew Scull, Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, From the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Princeton University Press, 2016), Chapter 12. Libby.
What Did I Do?: The Making of The Normal Album, directed by Will Wood (Youtube, 2021), streaming video.
Craig, “On Melancholy and Mania: James Hillman and Gilles Deleuze meet Nosferatu,” LEPHT HAND, 22 Jan. 2025. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2374135/episodes/16468047-on-melancholy-and-mania-james-hillman-and-gilles-deleuze-meet-nosferatu.
Andrew Scull, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Harvard University Press: 2022), The Complexities of Psychopharmacology. Libby.
Suzanne Scanlon, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen. (New York, Vintage Books, 2024), “Toward a Theory of My Illness (II).” Apple Books.
Bo Burnham, “The Future,” Track 2 on The Inside Outtakes, released 3 June 2022, Spotify, streaming audio.
Bo Burnham, “Shit,” Track 13 on Inside: The Songs, released 10 June 2021, Spotify, streaming audio.
Bo Burnham, “30,” Track 11 on Inside: The Songs, released 10 June 2021, Spotify, streaming audio.
Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, “The Anxious Generation,” 8 Aug. 2024, in If Books Could Kill. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation/id1651876897?i=1000664706439.
Matt Berninger, “Your Mind is Not Your Friend,” by The National, Track 10 on First Two Pages of Frankenstein, released 12 Apr. 2023, 4AD, Vinyl LP.
Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing: 2008).
By definition, subjectivity requires consciousness of an external “other.” The moment neurosis achieves subjectivity is the moment it passes into a conscious system of external perception and stops being neurosis.
Namely, the second, the productive order based on metaphor models. See Baudrillard, Simulacra, 121.
Inside, directed by Bo Burnham (Netflix, 2021), streaming video.
Schoenbrun, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
Note that I include examples of psychosis as well as neurosis because my concern here is not the distinction between these forms of disorder, but the effects of diagnosis as they apply to both.
Will Wood, “Outliars and Hippocrates: a fun fact about apples,” by Will Wood, track 6 on The Normal Album, released 10 July 2020, Say-10 Records, vinyl LP.
Sasha Warren, Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt (Common Notions, 2024), 274.
Scanlon, Committed, “The Homelessness of Self.”
Wood, “Outliars.”
Scanlon, Committed, “My Insanities and All the Rest.”
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 23.
Katelyn M. Dyason et al., ‘Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders in Autism Spectrum Disorder’, in Susan W. White, Brenna B. Maddox, and Carla A. Mazefsky (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Autism and Co-Occurring Psychiatric Conditions, Oxford Library of Psychology (Oxford Academic: 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190910761.013.6.
Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias.
Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking, trans. Nancy Forest-Flier (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 3.
Katie Green, Lighter Than My Shadow (Jonathan Cape, 2013).
Debi Gliori, Night Shift (Razorbill, 2017).
Berninger, “Your Mind is Not Your Friend.”
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 122.
Will Toledo, “Beach Life-in-Death,” by Car Seat Headrest, Track 2 on Twin Fantasy, released 2 Nov. 2011, Bandcamp, streaming audio.
Wang, 126.
Neil Stephenson, “Pin,” I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand, Substack, 2 Aug. 2022, https://www.imfineimfine.com/p/pin?utm_source=publication-search.
Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias.
Cronenberg, Videodrome.
Konaka, Lain.