You Can’t Know Everything

Nathan Fielder and Psychoanalysis

I’m working on another essay about AI and Marx, but I saw the Nathan Fielder Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything and found it to be very stimulating, so I wanted to quickly get some thoughts down about it.

If you haven’t seen it, I’m gonna talk pretty generally, but there are some spoilers. I also must admit this is more an interpretation of the film than these people’s actual lives.

The movie lends itself very easily to psychoanalytic categories since it’s basically about deception and self-deception. Here’s what I think is going on with Elizabeth Holmes: She has an extremely severe form of the defense mechanism that Melanie Klein called splitting—dividing self and world into unambiguous “good” or “bad.” She cannot admit that she has any bad qualities: any aggression, any selfishness, any tendency to deceive others, or even any of the more positive forms of aggressiveness like ambition. On her account, her motivations are all benevolent, idealistic, and noble. She even says she never lies! Now, I believe a consciously deceptive person would admit that they, like everyone else, lie casually from time to time to avoid hurting others or to get out of inconvenient situations, but they avoid lying in serious issues or have a strong ethical aversion to lying. A total denial of lying immediately raises red flags: It is not an effective strategy for building trust. Usually, hearing something like that is a sign of someone being a little bit crazy. She cannot face or integrate that aggressive part of herself. Most mature adults with healthy psyches can admit to themselves and others that they have some less than stellar qualities—that they can be selfish or even destructive at times—although they balance that behavior out with nice qualities, for example, the capacity for love and kindness, and the ability to make amends when they do wrong.

What’s interesting then is Holmes’s choice of partners. Both her present husband and Sunny Bulwani are manifestly aggressive and controlling. Balwani was known as “the enforcer” at Theranos. (Both are even preoccupied with weapons.) Holmes described Balwani as abusive in her testimony. There are points in the film where Evans’s behavior could be interpreted as abusive control—and other people certainly look at it that way, with good reason. But I think it’s too simple to present Holmes as the victim of predatory men—again, this would be a form of splitting—instead, I think the men in her life embody aggressive qualities she cannot acknowledge or integrate in herself. Her entire identity is organized around an idealized image of herself as a benevolent visionary, while aggression, destructiveness, and guilt are split off, disavowed, and projected onto others. This is how she preserves the fiction of her own innocence.

I don’t think the distinction between conscious deception and sincere delusion quite captures Elizabeth Holmes’s psychology. I suspect that she’s not fully conscious of her own deception because she has constructed an elaborate system of defenses against recognizing the truth. I think she is psychotic, not in our ordinary sense of the term, meaning hallucinations or elaborate paranoid fantasies, but in having a fractured relationship to what Jacques Lacan called the symbolic order. She doesn’t relate to language, and therefore truth and falsity, in a normal way. Signifiers don’t have the same function for her: she can manipulate them, repeat them, and identify with them, but seems strangely unable to recognize the distance between words and reality. Rather than seeing things as metaphors or metonyms, she’s super literal. She fully identifies with her imaginary ideal, even dressing up like Steve Jobs. She thinks that assertion alone can alter reality. She described an almost religious mission. At one point, Fielder picks up that she doesn’t see the ambiguity that others see in the signifiers she uses and tries to illustrate it with Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First routine, which she can’t understand. Her husband Evans says it’s evidence that she just “thinks differently.” So, she isn’t really lying so much as inhabiting a totally different symbolic universe. (I really don’t think a person would be able to fake this kind of disordered relationship to language as an elaborate ruse.)

In Lacan’s terminology, psychosis results from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father: the failure of a fundamental paternal signifier to become integrated into the symbolic order. In ordinary psychic development, the father functions not merely as an actual person but as a symbolic authority, introducing a mediating principle that allows the child to differentiate itself from others and establish a relatively normal relationship to language, law, and desire. You bear your father’s name; you are like him in some way, but you know you are not exactly him. Your relationship to him is mediated by metaphor: you can take his place without being him. This distance allows you to become your own person. But in psychosis, this symbolic function is absent or disturbed, and the subject may instead rely on more immediate, imaginary identifications.

Holmes’s relationship with her father becomes especially interesting in light of this. At one point, she reads aloud a strange piece of her creative writing where she imagines becoming engulfed or identical with her father. There’s also a remarkable biographical parallel: her father worked at Enron, a company destroyed by a notorious corporate fraud, while also pursuing humanitarian ambitions—he worked as the head of green energy there. Holmes appears to have reproduced this peculiar combination of corporate ambition and philanthropic idealism almost literally. It’s as if, rather than relating to her father through a symbolic identification, she attempts to be him, to repeat and rescue what he was trying to accomplish. Her father recounted that during the Enron crisis, when she was a senior in high school, their relationship became especially close and caring. “During that time, Elizabeth was not just my daughter; she was my wise friend and helper,” he wrote. It’s almost as if she is enacting an enormous reparative fantasy: accomplishing what her father could not, but, of course, ironically reproducing the fraud as well. Her father, too, wants to act as her protector: at one point in the film, he attributes her strange behavior to her rape in college.

If Holmes is psychotic, then you can apply the other Lacanian subject positions to the other major figures in the film: Nathan Fielder is neurotic, while Billy Evans is perverse.

Fielder’s characteristic predicament is that he can never be certain what another person wants, what they really mean, or whether he has behaved appropriately. His relationship to the symbolic order is uncertain and anxious. His method consists of endlessly interrogating the implicit rules of social interaction. He cannot simply occupy a position without being conscious of its artificiality and becoming uncomfortable. This is especially reminiscent of obsessional neurosis: the attempt to master uncertainty through elaborate procedures, rehearsals, repetitions, and investigations. Fielder wants to know what the Other wants from him. But every answer raises another question. He’s constantly asking, “How do you know?” His own efforts to eliminate uncertainty tend to reproduce it, which is why his art is so funny and compelling.

Evans, however, is a classic pervert. In Lacanian terms, a pervert is not typified only by sadism or cruelty, although there clearly is some evidence of that in Evans’s personality. Rather, it’s also a particular kind of relationship to the symbolic order and desire. The classic perverse statement is “I know what you really want.” They claim to know what the other really enjoys or needs. (He even claims special talent at providing sexual gratification—enjoyment— which is not something a normal person boasts of without fear of inviting ridicule. Amanda Seyfried points out the neurotic rejoinder: “Of course you don’t actually know that.”) Evans authorizes himself to speak on behalf of Holmes as her protector and even to be her true voice, able to articulate things she cannot.

So we have psychotic, neurotic, pervert—what a trio! Most people are a little bit neurotic, which is why we identify with Nathan’s uncertainty and questioning, especially in the face of people whose relationship to language is so evidently bizarre and apparently incorrigible. It makes sense that a neurotic person would become so fascinated with those who seem to be extremely certain about everything, because that’s exactly what they lack and seek. But neurotic people are healthier in the sense that they may seem to suffer more, but come to realize there is no final answer, that there is always ambiguity about ourselves and others, and you have to learn to tolerate that—and even to make a joke out of it.