Lacan's Janusian Observer: A New Approach to Psychoanalytical (and Ethnological) Topology

This is the first part of a two-part instructional video based on the idea of the inside or Janusian Observer who is able to insert himself inside the two dimensions of topological space, where an observer is not technically allowed. This “space invader,” like the real Janus (from Roman mythology), lands in the middle of things but, because of this central point of view, must rotate to get a full view. The parallax of this interior spectator is 2x of the ordinary Euclidean observer who always looks in the same direction from a generally fixed position. The Janusian Observer, however, can see what the Euclidean observer can see only as a gap, a blank spot, or a contradiction. This is the turn converted into a cut that separates the viewer from the viewed, either on the inside of the social world of the neurotic, in the form of alienation, or from outside, as someone who, permanently or temporarily psychotic, such as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” whose magical journey amounts to a coma induced to facilitate healing. The psychotic mirroring of friends from the inside farm life of Kansas to the radical exterior of Oz, is the mystery of the mirror itself, which in Lacanian psychoanalysis is primal and primary. Part 2 will study key paintings, where non-orientation and self-intersection directly involve an embodied Janusian Observer.