Stepping Off the Seesaw of Rivalry: An Interview with Jean-Michel Oughourlian
MŁ: What is a human being?
JMO: We imitate from birth and are inspired by different people. At first, it is our parents, then educators, teachers, and authorities. For the rest of our lives, we follow dozens more models, which are no longer just imposed on us, but we can choose them. Each such model brings us something. It gives us some part of who we are. It forms part of our personality. Just as the master becomes part of the student. We are a mosaic of all the models we have had in life.
MŁ: So there is René Girard in you . . .
JMO: He was my master, model, and friend. I devoted my life, more than half a century, to building a new psychology based on the mimetic theory he created.
MŁ: Girard’s fundamental achievement was the discovery of universal mimeticism or, as you put it, “universal mimesis” as the essence of human beings and human societies. It manifests itself in the fact that we unconsciously imitate others and repeat our practices in the form of rituals. The reproduction of our species depends on this mechanism (Oughourlian 2016: 34). In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, you referred to your project as “interdividual psychology” (1978), and you applied it to the analysis of hypnosis and possession.
JMO: I do not believe that there is such a thing as a closed individual psyche, as an identity in itself. If you accept Girard’s theory, you must recognize that the desire for an object or person is mediated by an often invisible model that has suggested to you what to desire. But you do not recognize this mechanism because our ego creates the illusion that we decide our desires. We will not admit that our choice of things, or partner, was influenced by others. We are stubborn about it. We will not let go and say: I am buying this watch because of advertising. We will say: I am buying this watch because I think it looks good and will work well. While traditional psychological theories often treat the human being as an organic, autonomous entity, the mimetic perspective shows that the subject is the result of relationships with others, whom we unconsciously copy and imitate. We believe that our desires flow from our Self. Mimetic theory shows that it is the desires of others that create our Self. Psychology, therefore, cannot be a science of individuals, but of what is in between, what happens between individuals. My friend Eugene Webb (2015) found a word to express what I mean: self between. Our Self emerges from relationships with others, it is the Self-in-between. I think he expressed very well that we are in fact always in relations, that our Self is always connected to others.
MŁ: Where does the power of models come from in our lives?
JMO: Mimeticism in the social world is like gravity in the physical world. The model is always a fixed point of reference. We can do nothing but orbit around it, just as the moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun. We can choose around whom we want to orbit, but orbit we must. We can choose our relationship to the model, but we cannot bypass the models themselves.
MŁ: Why?
JMO: Because of the structure of our brain. We have no choice because everyone’s brain has mirror neurons. This was a big discovery in neuroscience, which showed that mimeticism has a biological basis. Mirror neurons make it so that when we look at someone’s action, we not only see it, but automatically there is a readiness in us to do the same, to mirror that action. When we look at someone, we are also able to automatically reflect that person’s intention, i.e. their desire. And this desire we then duplicate in ourselves. Mirror neurons make us desire what the other person has, and when we do not get it, our model turns into an obstacle and eventually a rival.
MŁ: Girard often gave the example of children playing. When one reaches for an apple or a toy, the other immediately wants to reach for the same object. And immediately, the play turns into a fight. What consequences does this widespread imitation have for us? This explains the etiology of all mental illnesses.
JMO: I had patients who worked in a prestigious company run by a charismatic leader. Their job was to reflect and realize the desires of the boss, who himself reflected and realized the desires of the owners of the corporation. Today’s innovative corporations are based on a mimetic mechanism, the release of mimetic desire on a global scale. These people came to me because when they were fired, they could no longer function efficiently. At once, they lost the star around which they revolved.
MŁ: This is reminiscent of the story of the young schizophrenic you cite in Mimetic Brain (2016). His model was an uncle who ran a huge company with great success. The boy wanted to follow in his footsteps and be employed by him, but his uncle did not agree, which led to a mental crisis. According to Bateson’s model of schizophrenia, which you refer to, the model implies a double bind for the imitator. On the one hand, it says: be like me; and on the other: I will not let you be like me. These conflicting desires of our model lead to the breakdown of our personality.
JMO: This happens when the model becomes your enemy, which you will try to destroy. The model is a model because it has something that you do not have. It points to the object of your desire. But by doing so, it can turn into an obstacle to the realization of the desire it has suggested to you, and ultimately into a mortal rival. This is the story of Valentin and Proteus from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Because they were friends, Valentin introduced the chosen one of his heart, Sylvia, to Proteus. Unknowingly imitating Valentin’s desire, Proteus fell in love with Sylvia. And then they immediately became enemies. They both wanted the same person, who could only belong to one of them.
MŁ: The new psychology portrays the psyche as fluid and constantly forming in relationships and interactions with others.
JMO: When you talk to someone, you have a new self in a sense. You do not talk to the pope the way you talk to an ordinary priest.
MŁ: Especially in Poland!
JMO: You do not talk to your wife the way you talk to your boss. You change yourself. You change your identity. You adapt it to your interlocutor, to their desire. You imitate others who knew and showed you how to find yourself in a given context. You are not the same person. Over time, you see that when you encounter a situation, suddenly a part of you is activated that imitates one of your models. If you observe yourself carefully, you will realize when you are imitating whom in your reactions.
MŁ: At the same time, mimetic theory allows us to move away from seeing our mind as a monolith.
JMO: I will explain it through an analogy with theater. In France, we have a lot of performers who perform songs by famous stars. When you sit in Paris and watch an actor, you think he is imitating, say, Frank Sinatra. But if we listen to him in Africa, we might think that Frank Sinatra has just possessed that performer. When are we right? I think the effect of imitation is that our Self is “possessed” by someone else. In this way, countless parts are created in our psyche that imitate models. We can see this phenomenon well in the example of hypnosis. The hypnotist, through a suggestion that we are not aware of, can generate a part of our Self that will have its own desires, feelings, memory, and consciousness. Since our imitation is largely unconscious, every model is a kind of hypnotist for us.
MŁ: This experience was described by a famous Polish actor you may have known and who was very dear to Girard, Karol Wojtyła:
“Actor”
So many grew around me, through me, from my self, as it were.
I became a channel [. . .]
Did not the others crowding in, distort
the man that I am?
Being each of them, always imperfect,
myself to myself too near,
he who survives in me, can he ever
look at himself without fear?
How would you have interpreted Wojtyła’s experience had he come to your office? This poem seems to describe the experience of a scattered Self.
JMO: Pope Jean Paul II had fully understood mimetic theory and was very conscious of his role as a model. In The Mimetic Brain, I describe cases of a psychotic response to another, one of the radical manifestations of which is the breakdown, the fragmentation of the Self. If you try to destroy your model, your rival, you are in danger of schizophrenia. The personality explodes. This is a kind of diversity of pieces of personality that cannot come back together because they have exploded against an obstacle.
MŁ: The actor described by Wojtyła is torn by two contradictory fears: The first, that he was not a good performer of the role, because at the same time he remained too much himself, and the second, that in the multitude of roles he played, his Self became an empty “channel” for others and was twisted. Although it survived, it questions what it really is and whether it is at all. This raises existential anxiety. Tillich would say it is the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness. An actor may tend to play a person’s role better than he or she could live it. But he is never sure if he will succeed, so he has to try even harder. Consequently, his model to imitate becomes a rival he wants to win against. But he cannot do it. The actor is supposed to imitate the model in a perfect way, but at the same time the model eludes him all the time. His Self can therefore be shattered.
JMO: There is another possibility: neurotic reaction. If there is an obstacle to your desire, you can try to destroy it, but you can also circle around it, go around it, hoping that it will rise up and let you in to realize the desire it suggests to you. But if you go around, around, around the obstacle, such as in the works of Franz Kafka, you become obsessive-compulsive.
MŁ: A role for an actor can become an obsession. Again, this leads to a sense of alienated Self, because the actor no longer knows who he is. The better he plays a role, the more he loses himself. But choosing between neurosis and psychosis is a very pessimistic view of the human psyche!
JMO: Of course, you can face obstacles to your desires and not fall into either schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Because there is also a third possibility: it is to be normal. To maintain your mental health, you must avoid competition. Rivalry is the scariest thing that can happen to human beings. The main challenge is not to conflate the model, the obstacle, and the rival in your mind. You have to be able to separate them and know who is who. And strive every time to turn the negative rival you want to destroy back into a positive model you can learn from. When you encounter an obstacle, just try to avoid it.
This was described by Lafontaine in the fable “The Fox and the Grapes.” The fox wants to eat the grapes and cannot reach them, so he negates their value: “Sour, green, good for gluttonous people.” And it can walk away peacefully. The same mechanism is illustrated by a story about two Russian soldiers I heard during the USSR era. Popov comes to his friend and says: “You’ll never guess what happened to me! I walked into my house today and what do I see in my bed? My wife with a general. With a general!” And the other soldier says: “My poor Popov! What have you done?” “I was lucky, the general didn’t see me.” Popov circumvented the obstacle. Since he did not want to turn the general into his rival, he simply walked away unnoticed.
MŁ: Poor Popov! He did not enter the rivalry, but at the cost of deceiving himself and not noticing his own suffering. At the cost of misrecognizing that the general was, in fact, his rival. There is another, more disturbing motive for me in this humorous anecdote. Russians fail to recognize that they themselves are the victims of violence by functionaries of their own state. Like Popov, they avoid competing with those who hold the “krysha” over them, but by doing so they become all the more brutal on the outside. Are we ultimately doomed to live in an illusion about our rivals? Freedom has become a leitmotif in your recent books.
JMO: I think the first step to liberation is to become aware. Symptoms develop because you are not aware of their causes. For example, you cannot see that a person close to you is making your life very difficult, because that is the close person you love or respect. You cannot accept it intellectually. Once you see it, you will gradually be able to free yourself from it. This is what happens in families, in couples, in all kinds of situations where someone gets attached to someone else and thinks he cannot live without him.
MŁ: So Popov should see that the general is his rival, otherwise he will develop neurosis . . . How is mimetic therapy different from other types of therapy?
JMO: I believe that in a psychiatrist’s office, there are no independent, self-contained individuals. There is no patient and doctor. There are three interrelated individuals. There is the doctor, the patient and . . . the mental illness. When you see a patient, you usually ask him what is wrong with him, what his pain is. I think there is another more important question you should ask in mimetic therapy: Who is your pain (Oughourlian 2023)?
MŁ: Who is your mental illness? That is: What is your hidden model? So in your office there is a doctor, a patient, and hidden models.
JMO: If I ask you who your pain is, you will realize that the pain is your symptom, and your sister or mother or husband or cousin or someone else is responsible for creating it. Instead of recognizing the rivalry with them, you express it through a symptom: My back hurts. I cannot sleep. I have anxiety. I have a crisis. I am crying. I suffer from insomnia. You know, all kinds of things that are related to the fact that you cannot unhook from your model. Free yourself from a toxic situation.
MŁ: How do you translate mimetic theory into your psychiatric practice? You have to assume that in therapy there is a certain rivalry between the therapist and the patient, because the therapist often models the patient’s desires, for example, desires for mental health, and therefore can become an obstacle and a rival.
JMO: The whole game is to find out whether the patient is allying with the illness, i.e. his model, against the psychiatrist to prove that the psychiatrist is an idiot, or whether he is trying to ally with the psychiatrist to get rid of the illness and free himself from competing with the model. Often in my practice, I have seen people come in with a stack of files and say: “Listen, I have seen sixteen doctors, I have gone through all the tests and these are all the reports. No one has been able to cure me.” I immediately realized that such a person was trying to make me yet another victim of his neurosis. So I said: “No, I am very sorry. There is nothing I can do for you, because, you see, all those fantastic doctors you saw were unable to do anything. So what can I do? I am just a simple psychiatrist sitting at a desk in this office.” “No, you have to help me.” “No, I cannot. What would I have to do for you?” “You have to give me a cure.” “You have tried everything. I am very sorry.” “Listen, I will not leave this office until you give me some medicine.” I finally said: “OK, I will give you some medicine. But I can already tell you that it will be ineffective. You will not benefit from it, but I will give it to you, since you insist.” So I gave something light, almost a placebo. A week later he called me and said: “See, you were wrong, because this medicine helped me.”
MŁ: In mimetic terms, you did not want to emulate the desire of your patient, who intended to add you to the list of imperfect therapists. He wanted to put you in the role of a hero who could then be attacked for his ineptitude.
JMO: Yes. So I put myself in a situation where using my drugs would have made him a winner. I made him think of me as stupid, because I gave him medication that I said would not work, but it did. By getting healthy, he was winning with me.
MŁ: My first session started similarly, when the therapist told me that I knew so much about different therapies and had diagnosed myself so well that she could not help me much. Now I see that her strategy was similar to yours.
JMO: If you come to me as a psychiatrist and I give you the idea that I am more intelligent than you, there is a rivalry. No, no, no. You should never, never open the way for rivalry. It is like children on a seesaw in a playground. If one child is on top, the other is on the bottom. On a similar principle, people consumed by conflict believe that one must be up and the other must be down, that the victory of one depends on the loss of the other. One can only go up if the other falls. The one who is at the bottom can only be at the top again if the other is at the bottom. This swing is diabolical. A couple can sit on it, but also a therapist with a patient. The only thing to do is to get off it. A good therapeutic relationship is when the client tries to help himself, and I, as a therapist, am here to support him in this. I always say to patients: get off this diabolical seesaw and go play something else. There are so many other wonderful opportunities.
MŁ: For you, interdividual psychology is not only a therapeutic project, but an institutional and even political one. You claim that psychology without politics is impotent, and politics without psychology is shallow. In this way, interdividual psychology becomes, as you put it, psychopolitics.
JMO: In Psychopolitics (2012) I tried to show that nations act similarly to people. In the international arena, they are alternately models, obstacles, and rivals for each other. All people from all nations and from all continents are caught up in mimetic rivalry. Everyone wants to show that they are stronger, better, more moral, etc. Everyone competes to take the place of the victim and accuse the one who is against him of being the persecutor. No one is the aggressor. Everyone says they are defending themselves. It is a terrible problem when you mix morality and politics.
MŁ: I define it as a global struggle for moral capital.
JMO: The best way to impose your superiority is to condemn your rival. And that is why you are allowed to kill him. This is why we are close to another world war. Even Putin says he is defending the Russians in Ukraine and is only responding to NATO aggression. No one can get him to hold peace talks. Such is the psychology of men.
MŁ: I asked you about the psychological diagnosis of the Polish Pope, and would you be able to cure the modern czar, Vladimir Putin? What would you do if he showed up at your office?
JMO: I would resign and declare myself incompetent. This is too difficult for me. Since I am not a head of state or a politician, I cannot intervene in international affairs, but I see the similarity.
MŁ: How about dealing with Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow, who portrays the war with Ukraine as a war between brothers. Russians and Ukrainians are Slavic brothers, he claims. But because Ukrainians do not want to recognize this brotherhood, we have to kill them.
JMO: It is very, very, very difficult, because one would have to make Kirill realize that he is a prisoner of mimetic rivalry. Exactly so. You see, the war between brothers started at the beginning of the world with Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel because of mimetic rivalry for God’s blessing. Now Kirill is making Abel, but excusing Cain. You see this happening throughout human history.
MŁ: Why is it so difficult for us to get out of a world where brother kills brother? We know so much about the mechanisms of violence, and still we succumb to them all the time.
JMO: This is why Girard’s theory is not widely accepted. No one wants to accept that our desire is not our own.
MŁ: And you were able to accept that in your life?
JMO: I have always avoided any kind of rivalry. And this is very difficult among doctors! Let me give you an example. Three decades ago, the entire staff of the American Hospital in Paris, five hundred doctors, elected me president of their Medical Association. When I retired ten years ago, they insisted that I remain president because they could not agree on someone else. They said I never treated anyone in an aggressive or violent way. I did not come into any conflict with anyone. But when a new group of doctors appeared recently—young and ready to fight for the position—I resigned.
MŁ: Girard showed that all kings are just deferred victims.
JMO: The young would kill me without sacrificing me. They would just kill me. And you know, I am in no hurry to be killed. I am old enough (laughs).
EDITORIAL STATEMENT: A version of this interview appeared in Polish in Tygodnik Powszechny as “Jak zejść z huśtawki rywalizacji, by odzyskać spokój i zdrowie psychiczne.”
