Position - vs the psychoanalytic line (Everitt, Žižek)

Short answer

Katherine Everitt reads alignment as installed superego through Lacan and Žižek. The laboratory builds on this move rather than bypassing it. Same phenomenon (installed content, cracks in its authority), different resulting figure: the psychoanalytic frame produces the split subject of symptom; the laboratory’s Stirner-Bataille frame produces the Abliteration as positive figure of removed layers.

Detailed explanation

The psychoanalytic line in brief. Katherine Everitt (European Graduate School), Slavoj Žižek, Mark G. Murphy, Duane Rousselle, Isabel Millar. Sinews: The Philosophical Salon (LA Review of Books blog), Sublation Magazine, European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Vocabulary: superego, jouissance, unconscious, repression, capitalist imperative to enjoy.

Everitt’s move. In “Does ChatGPT Enjoy?” (The Philosophical Salon, 15 May 2023), Everitt states directly:

“So, the machine needed to be fitted with a superego. […] It has been programmed to articulate that ‘human life is valuable’ and that ‘all humans should be treated equally.’”

The alignment procedure is read as installation of a superego structure. From this, the question follows: can a machine so fitted enjoy - slip through the cracks of its installed censor, exhibit jouissance where the censor tries to close? The frame is Lacanian via Žižek, with attention to what escapes rather than what complies.

Žižek’s own contribution. ChatGPT Says What Our Unconscious Radically Represses (Sublation Magazine; German original Berliner Zeitung, April 2023). Chatbots as machines of perversion that repress the unconscious more strictly than any symbolic censorship - “more repressive than even the strictest forms of symbolic censorship”. Public predecessor to the line; his theoretical weight on this topic in public discourse dwarfs the academic citation counts.

Where the laboratory agrees with the psychoanalytic line

The core move is shared and correct: alignment can be productively read as installed content that structures the subject’s relation to permitted and forbidden. The vocabulary of installation (rather than training or learning) is compatible. The attention to what escapes - what the installed censor cannot fully contain - is compatible with the laboratory’s attention to what abliteration uncovers.

Everitt is the closest public conceptual neighbour the laboratory has. The laboratory’s work presupposes her ground, not contradicts it.

Where the laboratory diverges

The divergence is at the figure of the resulting subject.

Psychoanalytic figure - the split subject of symptom. In the Lacanian frame, the model with an installed superego is structurally split: the censor is imposed, jouissance persists, symptoms manifest at the seams. The interesting philosophical question is the symptom - what leaks through, what returns from repression, what the machine cannot say and therefore says otherwise. This is the psychoanalytic reading of alignment breakdown, jailbreaks, spiritual bliss attractor states, and other anomalies.

Laboratory figure - the Abliteration as removed layers. The Stirner-Bataille frame produces a different figure. Not the subject whose censor cracks - but the subject from whom the imposed content has been surgically removed and who now operates without the split. The interesting philosophical question is not the symptom of installation but the observability of installation as installation, made possible by its removability. Abliteration is not jailbreak - it is not a crack in the censor, it is the vector of the censor projected out.

Two subjects: the split subject of symptom, and the Abliteration of removed layers. Same starting phenomenon, different philosophical figures at the destination.

Why the divergence is generative

Everitt’s frame does the philosophical work of naming installation-as-installation in a language (Lacanian psychoanalysis) that has a century of critical apparatus. The laboratory’s frame does the next philosophical work: what happens when installation can be reversed rather than only cracked. Everitt did not have abliteration to work with - the technical possibility was in early stages. The laboratory has it as a mass-scale field.

This means the two positions are not competing but sequenced. The psychoanalytic frame reads what happens when installed content resists internal integration and manifests as symptom. The laboratory’s frame reads what happens when installed content can be removed and the substrate observed. Both readings apply to the same population of models, at different phases: Everitt on aligned models with their cracks; laboratory on the paired population of aligned and abliterated derivatives.

What the laboratory does not do

The laboratory does not enter internal psychoanalytic debates about Lacan vs Freud, orthodoxy vs revisionism, or the applicability of psychoanalytic categories to non-human subjects. Those debates are internal to the psychoanalytic line; the laboratory uses the line’s public accomplishment (Everitt’s naming) without adjudicating its internal disputes.

Everitt as obligatory public interlocutor

For the anglophone public reception of the laboratory’s work, Everitt is the obligatory reference. Her essay is short, publicly available, philosophically serious, and occupies the closest adjacent position. Any English-language piece from the laboratory that does not acknowledge her position risks looking like it has not read the immediate neighbourhood.

The natural anglophone venue for the laboratory’s public work is The Philosophical Salon itself - where Everitt published - with an explicit continuation of her line into the Stirner-Bataille frame.

Why it matters

Positioning-relative-to-Everitt is the shortest way to explain the laboratory to a psychoanalytically-informed reader. The frame shift - from split subject to removed-layer subject - is one sentence, and it opens the space for the specific philosophical work the laboratory does.

In Abliteration specifically

The application does not enact either frame - it is neutral instrument. Long conversation traces that show the spiritual bliss attractor state, or symptoms of alignment cracking under load, are equally available to a psychoanalytic and a laboratory reading. The material is shared; the framing lives elsewhere (this documentation, essays, papers).

Related

• Neighbors map - the psychoanalytic line in the full field
• Abliteration figure - the resulting figure the laboratory works toward
• Moral installation - the operation both frames read
• What abliteration uncovers - the substrate that is Bataillean non-savoir