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The Language Parasite and the Symbolic Order
Toward a Post-Metaphysical Virtue Ethics
I. A Dialogue That Didn’t Land
In June 2025, Daniel Tutt’s Emancipations Study Collective hosted Benjamin Schoendorff for a presentation on Relational Frame Theory. Schoendorff — clinical psychologist, ACT pioneer, founder of Montreal’s Contextual Psychology Institute — had been “badgering” Tutt for weeks, convinced that RFT offered something vital to Marxist psychology. Tutt — philosopher, Lacanian, author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family — was receptive but skeptical.
What followed was a sophisticated hour of mutual incomprehension.
Schoendorff presented RFT’s account of the emergence of language, consciousness, and the unconscious from material social processes — derived relations trained through multiple examples, giving rise to the I/here/now perspective around seventeen months of age. He argued this finally delivers what Vygotsky called for: “an as yet undeveloped but inevitable theory of psychological materialism as an intermediate science.”
Tutt pushed back with Lacanian concerns: What about the constitutive symptom? What about jouissance — the enjoyment that binds subjects to their suffering? What about alienation as structural, not merely a product of capitalist relations? And crucially: doesn’t Schoendorff’s framework reduce to adaptation, while psychoanalysis aims to produce a subject capable of non-adaptation — resistance to the reality principle that capitalism demands?
They circled. They gestured toward convergence. They acknowledged mutual respect.
And then it ended without resolution.
Schoendorff landed on “self-determination” — the person who can take their history with them without being determined by it. But he explicitly refused to give content to this: “I don’t give any content to that self-determination. I trust the person to self-determine... I’m not here to tell people what verbal system they should live inside of.”
Tutt gestured at the Lacanian subject who can bear their symptom without imaginary capture. But that’s negative definition — resistance to what? In service of what?
Neither named the orientation toward which freedom aims. Neither named the virtues. Neither provided the positive anthropology that would give “psychological freedom” actual content.
I’ve been following this territory from both sides — through the ACT/CBS literature and through Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal, whose ongoing engagement with Lacan has sharpened my sense that these traditions are circling the same questions without quite meeting. This essay builds on my previous piece, “When the Body Becomes the Laboratory,” which introduced Enactive Fallibilism — the body as empirical probe testing whether systems are sustainable. That essay focused on methodology. This one addresses the deeper question: what virtues emerge from the practice, and how do we ground them without returning to Aristotelian metaphysics?
This essay attempts what that dialogue could not complete.
II. The Convergence They Almost Saw
Let’s be precise about what RFT and Lacanian psychoanalysis share.
Both recognize that language traps us.
Schoendorff, drawing on Steven Hayes’s work, describes the “Language Parasite” — how verbal relations, once derived, transform stimulus functions outside awareness. We come to live inside verbal systems that determine what we think, feel, desire, and remember. The sound “snake” makes you recoil. The word “worthless” — attached to self through developmental history — makes you organize your entire life around avoiding its confirmation.
Lacan says the subject is “barred by the signifier” — constituted in and through language, alienated into the Symbolic order. We don’t speak language; language speaks us. The unconscious is structured like a language.
Different vocabularies. Same insight: languaging beings are captured by their languaging.
Both aim at something like defusion or destitution.
ACT’s core move is cognitive defusion — loosening the grip of verbal content so that thoughts can be experienced as thoughts rather than as reality. “I am worthless” becomes “I am having the thought that I am worthless.” The fusion breaks. Space opens.
Lacan’s “traversing the fantasy” and “subjective destitution” aim at something structurally similar — the subject no longer organized by the fundamental fantasy that has governed their desire. The imaginary capture loosens. Something else becomes possible.
Both locate consciousness in differentiation.
Schoendorff describes the emergence of the I/here/now perspective through trained distinctions: here vs. there, now vs. then, I vs. you. These “deictic relations” — learned through multiple examples in social interaction — give rise to the perspective that constitutes human consciousness.
Lacan’s “mirror stage” describes the infant’s recognition of itself as a unified image — a misrecognition that founds the ego through differentiation from the (m)other. The subject emerges through alienation into the Symbolic, constituted by its difference from other signifiers.
Different mechanisms. Same structural insight: selfhood emerges through differentiation within a relational field.
Both point to unconscious processes that govern behavior.
Schoendorff: most derived relations operate automatically, outside awareness. The verbal systems that determine our actions, feelings, and self-concepts are largely unconscious. “A lot of those relations are derived automatically, unconsciously, and because every exemplar of relating — once this perspective of I here now emerges — every exemplar of relating is done from this perspective.”
Lacan: the unconscious is not a hidden depth but a structure — the Other scene where desire and jouissance operate according to laws the ego cannot access or control.
RFT gives a materialist account of how the unconscious emerges. Lacan gives a structural account of what the unconscious does. These are not contradictory; they’re operating at different levels of description.
III. The Divergence That Blocked Them
Despite these convergences, Schoendorff and Tutt couldn’t complete the synthesis. Why?
The problem of adaptation.
Tutt’s Lacanian instinct is that any psychology oriented toward “adaptation” becomes complicit with capitalism. The well-adjusted subject is precisely what capital wants — flexible, resilient, capable of absorbing whatever the market demands without fundamental disruption. CBT’s notorious alignment with neoliberal ideology is Exhibit A.
Schoendorff tried to dodge this: “Life is about becoming adapted and adapting our environments to our own adaptation.” But this response misses the Lacanian point. The question isn’t whether organisms adapt — of course they do. The question is whether therapeutic intervention should aim at producing adapted subjects or at something else entirely.
Lacan’s answer: analysis produces a subject capable of a different relation to their symptom — one who is not captured by imaginary solutions, who can bear the Real without collapsing into fantasy. This is “non-adaptation” in a specific sense: refusing the demand to be a well-functioning unit in a dysfunctional system.
Schoendorff heard “non-adaptation” as irrational. Tutt meant it as ethical.
The problem of orientation.
This is where both fail.
Schoendorff explicitly refuses to provide content to “self-determination”: “I don’t have any outside criterion... I can’t stand outside of language and say I know everything and this languaging is right and this one is wrong.”
This is philosophically honest but practically empty. If the dismantled verbal system will simply be replaced by another verbal system — and Schoendorff admits it will — then what makes the new one better? “It makes you less unhappy” isn’t sufficient. Plenty of verbal systems reduce immediate suffering while perpetuating deeper unfreedom.
Tutt gestures at the Lacanian subject who can bear their symptom, but this too is formally empty. Bear it in service of what? Non-adaptation toward what? The Lacanian tradition is notoriously allergic to positive prescription, and for good reason — but at some point the refusal to name the good becomes its own evasion.
Both traditions lack a positive anthropology. RFT gives emergence without direction. Lacan gives structure without virtue. They’re both half-theories.
IV. The Žižekian Dead End
Before offering a resolution, we must confront a more sophisticated version of the Lacanian position — one that claims to have already transcended the limitations I’ve just described.
Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanianism presents itself as the synthesis that supersedes both naive scientism and postmodern relativism. Žižek argues that Lacan, properly read through Hegel, gives us access to the Real — that which resists symbolization — and thereby anchors psychoanalytic practice in something beyond mere linguistic play. The Hegelian dialectic, on this reading, isn’t a method imposed from outside but the movement of the thing itself.
The claim is seductive. But it doesn’t hold.
The problem of unfalsifiability.
Žižek’s “Real” functions as a conceptual wild card that can never be pinned down. It’s defined negatively — what resists the Symbolic, what escapes representation, the hard kernel that causes the system to fail. But this negative definition makes it unfalsifiable. Any phenomenon can be retroactively explained as an eruption of the Real. Any failure of the theory can be attributed to the Real’s resistance to theorization. This isn’t dialectical rigor; it’s an immunization strategy.
Compare this to Relational Frame Theory’s research program. RFT makes specific, testable predictions about derived relations — that training certain relations will produce derivation of untrained relations, that this emerges at specific developmental stages, that it can be demonstrated in laboratory conditions. These predictions have been tested, refined, and in some cases falsified and revised. That’s science. Žižek’s system permits no such testing.
The problem of perspectival imprisonment.
Žižek claims to escape postmodern relativism through Hegelian dialectics. But examine the actual argumentative structure: it’s interpretation all the way down. Žižek reads Lacan through Hegel, reads Hegel through Lacan, reads both through contemporary events, and produces endlessly proliferating commentary that circles without landing. There’s no external check on the interpretive spiral. One Žižekian reading can be countered only by another Žižekian reading.
This is perspectival madness dressed up as dialectics. It reproduces the very postmodern condition it claims to supersede — the endless play of signifiers with no ground, no adjudication, no way to determine which interpretation actually tracks reality.
The problem of linguistic idealism.
For all its materialist pretensions, Hegelian-Lacanianism remains trapped in language. The Symbolic order, the signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, jouissance — these are all linguistic or quasi-linguistic concepts. The body appears only as written upon, inscribed by the signifier. There’s no account of the living organism that isn’t already captured by language.
Enactive Fallibilism offers what Žižek cannot: the body as empirical probe that tests linguistic systems against biological reality. When a system of meaning causes suffering — actual, physiological, measurable suffering — the system is falsified. The body adjudicates. This isn’t naive empiricism; it’s the recognition that languaging beings are also living beings, and that living provides a check on languaging that pure textual analysis can never supply.
The failure to meet the post-metaphysical threshold.
Habermas identified the post-metaphysical condition: we can no longer ground normative claims in metaphysical accounts of human nature or cosmic order. Any legitimate ethical claim must be redeemable through discourse — accountable to reasons that can be examined and contested.
Žižek’s system fails this test. The Real, the objet petit a, the fundamental fantasy — these function as quasi-metaphysical entities that ground the theory but cannot themselves be examined or contested. They’re posited, not argued for. They operate exactly like the metaphysical essences that critical philosophy was supposed to have overcome.
Wilber’s developmental framework, by contrast, is grounded in empirical research on human development across cultures. The stages aren’t posited but observed. The claims are revisable in light of evidence. Habermas’s communicative rationality provides the normative framework — validity claims that can be criticized and defended in discourse. Together, they meet the post-metaphysical threshold that Žižek’s Hegelianism only pretends to reach.
Why IACT succeeds where Žižek fails.
IACT doesn’t claim access to a hidden Real beneath the Symbolic. It doesn’t offer endless interpretation without adjudication. It provides:
Evolutionary grounding: Prosocial behavior isn’t a moral aspiration but a biological fact. Cooperation emerges from natural selection. Ostrom’s CDPs are empirically observed, not philosophically deduced.
Empirical research program: RFT’s claims about derived relations are testable and have been tested. The emergence of the I/here/now perspective can be studied developmentally. This is science, not speculation.
Embodied adjudication: Enactive Fallibilism puts the living body at the center. Systems that cause suffering are falsified — not interpreted away as eruptions of the Real, but rejected as unsustainable.
Developmental rigor: Wilber’s integral framework synthesizes research across contemplative traditions, developmental psychology, and cultural evolution. Claims are accountable to evidence.
Communicative accountability: Following Habermas, normative claims in IACT are redeemable through discourse. We can give reasons for the framework that can be examined and contested.
Žižek offers brilliance without foundation. IACT offers rigor with substance.
V. The Missing Content: Awareness, Courage, Love
Enter Gareth Holman.
Holman — clinical psychologist, author, ACT trainer working in contextual behavioral science — has proposed a framework he calls ACL: Awareness, Courage, and Love. On the surface, it looks like just another clinical mnemonic. Look deeper and something more significant appears.
Awareness — not merely attention, but the quality of consciousness that notices without fusing. This is the capacity cultivated through defusion practices, mindfulness, Self-as-Context work. It’s what both Schoendorff and Lacan are pointing at when they describe the subject who is no longer captured by their verbal systems or imaginary identifications.
Courage — the nerve to act despite fear, uncertainty, and the gravitational pull of familiar suffering. This is what “self-determination” actually requires but Schoendorff doesn’t name. It’s what Lacanian “non-adaptation” demands but Tutt doesn’t specify. Courage is the virtue that makes psychological freedom practical rather than merely theoretical.
Love — the relational dimension that neither RFT nor Lacanian analysis adequately thematizes. Schoendorff’s “equal human worth” gestures at it. Lacan’s ethics of “not giving way on one’s desire” circles it. But neither provides an account of how psychological flexibility becomes prosocial — oriented toward the flourishing of self and other simultaneously.
Here’s the crucial insight: ACL aren’t techniques. They’re virtues.
They’re not things you do. They’re qualities of character that emerge from doing the work — and that make further work possible. They’re the dispositional content that fills “self-determination” and “non-adaptation” with substance.
But where do these virtues come from? Not from tradition. Not from metaphysical human nature. Not from divine command.
They emerge from practice.
VI. Virtue Without Metaphysics: The Prosocial Ground
This is where the synthesis requires genuinely new theoretical ground.
Classical virtue ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, MacIntyre — grounded the virtues in a metaphysical account of human nature. We have a telos (flourishing, eudaimonia) built into our essence, and the virtues are the qualities that enable us to realize that telos. This framework has deep appeal, but it cannot survive the Kantian critique: we have no access to the noumenal self, no unmediated knowledge of our “true nature,” no foundation outside the conditions of possible experience.
Kant gave us autonomy but emptied it of content. The moral law is formal: act only according to maxims you could will as universal laws. This preserves freedom from heteronomous determination but provides no positive guidance about what kind of person to become.
The post-Kantian task — which both Wilber and Habermas have taken up in different ways — is to recover developmental depth and substantive ethics without regressing behind the critical insight. We cannot return to pre-critical metaphysics. We must go through Kant, not around him.
Prosocial theory offers a path.
Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven Hayes — in their 2019 work Prosocial — extend ACT’s psychological flexibility to the group level by integrating it with Elinor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles. Ostrom, studying how communities actually manage shared resources without either privatization or state control, identified eight principles that characterize successful collective action: shared identity and purpose, equitable distribution of contributions and benefits, fair and inclusive decision-making, monitoring agreed behaviors, graduated responding to helpful and unhelpful behavior, fast and fair conflict resolution, authority to self-govern, and collaborative relations with other groups.
These principles aren’t derived from metaphysical speculation. They’re empirically observed regularities in groups that actually work — that sustain cooperation over time, that avoid tragedy-of-the-commons collapse, that enable individuals and collectives to flourish together.
Here’s the key move: Ostrom’s CDPs can be understood as the social conditions under which virtue emerges.
Not virtue as individual achievement. Not virtue as private cultivation. But virtue as a property of persons-in-groups — shaped by, and in turn shaping, the relational structures within which they develop.
This is virtue grounded in evolutionary mutual aid, not metaphysical human nature. Cooperation isn’t a moral ought imposed from outside; it’s a biological fact about how social species survive and flourish. The capacity for prosocial behavior is part of our evolutionary endowment — not a transcendent add-on but an immanent possibility that can be cultivated or suppressed depending on conditions.
Awareness, Courage, and Love aren’t discovered in contemplation of eternal forms. They emerge from practices enacted within prosocial structures.
A community organized around Ostrom’s principles creates the conditions for its members to develop psychological flexibility. And psychologically flexible individuals are more capable of creating and sustaining prosocial community. The relationship is recursive, not foundational.
VII. Integral Facticity: Development Within Constraint
But prosocial theory alone isn’t sufficient. It tells us about the social conditions for virtue but not about the developmental trajectory of the individual who cultivates it.
This is where Ken Wilber’s integral framework becomes essential — but only when synthesized with Jürgen Habermas’s recognition that all development happens within “factical” conditions.
Wilber’s “4 Ups” — Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up — provide a map of human development across multiple dimensions:
Wake Up: the recognition of awareness itself, the witness perspective, the capacity to observe experience without being identical to it. This is what contemplative traditions cultivate. It’s also what ACT’s Self-as-Context points toward.
Grow Up: developmental unfolding through stages of increasing complexity and perspective-taking. From egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to kosmocentric — the expanding circle of concern and capacity.
Clean Up: shadow work. Integrating disowned material. Dismantling the verbal systems (Schoendorff) or traversing the fantasy (Lacan) that constrain authentic self-expression. This is where ACT and psychoanalysis converge most directly.
Show Up: embodied engagement with the world. The body as the site of practice, not just the container for a mind. This is what Enactive Fallibilism insists on: the body as empirical probe testing whether systems are sustainable.
Habermas adds the crucial qualifier: all of this happens within facticity — the irreducible biological, psychological, and situational conditions that we don’t choose and can’t transcend.
Integral Facticity, then, is the synthesis: We Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up within facticity — not in escape from it. Development is real. Growth is possible. But it always happens under constraint, shaped by the conditions we inherit even as we work to transform them.
This is post-Kantian in the precise sense: it preserves the critical insight that we have no access to an unconditioned ground, while recovering substantive content for developmental ethics. We can speak meaningfully about growth, about virtues, about what kind of person to become — without claiming metaphysical access to an eternal human nature.
VIII. Enactive Fallibilism: The Body as Arbiter
One more piece is required.
How do we know if we’re on the right track? If virtue is emergent rather than given, if telos is discovered in practice rather than deduced from essence, how do we adjudicate competing claims about what constitutes flourishing?
Enactive Fallibilism — grounded in Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic fallibilism and Francisco Varela’s enactivism — provides the method.
Peirce’s fallibilism: all knowledge claims are provisional and subject to revision through experience. We hold our beliefs as hypotheses, not certainties, and we remain open to correction when reality pushes back.
Varela’s enactivism: cognition is embodied, enacted through organism-environment coupling. We don’t have minds that represent an external world; we have bodies that enact a world through their engagement with it.
The synthesis: the living body serves as empirical probe testing whether systems — including therapeutic systems, ethical systems, social systems — are sustainable.
When systems cause suffering, the systems are falsified — not the body. The failure is not moral; it is empirical evidence of structural incompatibility requiring revision.
This answers the Lacanian concern about adaptation. Enactive Fallibilism isn’t about adjusting the subject to fit the system. It’s about using the body’s response as data about whether the system serves life. If capitalism makes people sick, the conclusion isn’t “fix the people” but “the system is falsified.”
And it answers the RFT concern about criteria. Schoendorff worried he couldn’t stand outside language to adjudicate between verbal systems. He doesn’t need to. The body adjudicates. Workability isn’t just pragmatic convenience — it’s an empirical test run on the instrument of the living organism.
IX. IACT: The Container That Holds It All
Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) is the framework that integrates these elements into a coherent architecture.
The nested structure:
The 4 I’s — Body, Mind, Soul, Spirit — provide the integral container, mapping human experience across dimensions while acknowledging that each operates within its factical ground.
The ACT Hexaflex — Defusion, Acceptance, Self-as-Context, Present Moment, Values, Committed Action — constitutes the functional layer. These are the processes that cultivate psychological flexibility, tracked empirically through daily practice.
Prosocial — Ostrom’s CDPs integrated with ACT — extends flexibility to the group level. Individual virtue and collective governance become mutually reinforcing.
What IACT adds to the Schoendorff-Tutt dialogue:
For Schoendorff: the positive content he refused to provide. Self-determination isn’t empty — it’s oriented toward Awareness, Courage, and Love, emergent from prosocial practice, developed along integral lines, tested through enactive engagement.
For Tutt: the material account of virtue he couldn’t locate in Lacan. Non-adaptation isn’t merely negative — it’s grounded in evolutionary cooperation, enacted through the body, oriented toward flourishing that is simultaneously individual and collective.
For both: the recognition that their traditions are pointing at the same territory with different instruments. RFT and Lacanian analysis are not competitors but complementary approaches to the same fundamental human situation — beings who language, who are captured by their languaging, and who can, through practice, achieve a different relation to that capture.
X. Virtue as Emergent, Not Given
Let me now state the thesis directly.
Classical virtue ethics failed because it grounded virtue in metaphysics — an account of human nature that cannot survive critical scrutiny.
Kantian ethics failed because it preserved freedom by emptying it of content — autonomy without orientation.
Therapeutic psychology fails when it either adapts subjects to dysfunctional systems (CBT at its worst) or refuses to name the good toward which freedom aims (Lacan at his most evasive, Schoendorff at his most principled).
What’s needed is a post-metaphysical virtue ethics:
Virtue grounded not in metaphysical essence but in evolutionary mutual aid — cooperation as biological fact, not moral ought
Virtue emergent from prosocial practices organized around empirically validated principles (Ostrom’s CDPs)
Virtue developed through integral stages (Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up) while acknowledging factical constraint
Virtue tested through enactive engagement — the body as arbiter of sustainable flourishing
Virtue with positive content: Awareness, Courage, Love — the qualities that emerge from and enable psychological freedom
This is not a return to Aristotle. It is a forward movement through Kant, through Wilber and Habermas, through Hayes and Ostrom, toward something genuinely new.
The virtuous person, on this account, is:
Aware: capable of witnessing experience without fusion, operating from Self-as-Context, defused from the verbal systems that would otherwise determine them
Courageous: capable of acting toward values despite fear, discomfort, and the gravitational pull of familiar suffering — this is Lacanian “non-adaptation” given positive content
Loving: oriented toward equal human worth, embedded in prosocial relations, recognizing self-in-other and other-in-self — what Schoendorff glimpsed in his humanism but couldn’t ground
And crucially: these virtues aren’t imposed from outside. They emerge from practice. They’re what you become when you do the work — the Clean Up work of dismantling dysfunctional verbal systems, the Wake Up work of recognizing awareness, the Grow Up work of expanding perspective, the Show Up work of embodied engagement.
The direction isn’t discovered in contemplation. It’s enacted through living.
XI. Completing the Dialogue
Benjamin Schoendorff and Daniel Tutt almost had it.
Schoendorff brought the materialist account of emergence — how language, consciousness, and the unconscious arise from derived relations trained in social interaction. This solves the problem Lacan can’t solve: where does the Symbolic order come from?
Tutt brought the structural insight about capture and liberation — how subjects are constituted by and can achieve a different relation to their constitution. This preserves what RFT tends to flatten: the irreducibility of the symptom, the specificity of subjective history, the ethical dimension of analytic work.
What neither could provide was the positive content of psychological freedom — the virtues that make self-determination substantive, the orientation that makes non-adaptation coherent.
Holman’s ACL gives the dispositional qualities. Prosocial theory grounds them in evolutionary cooperation. Integral Facticity situates them in development-within-constraint. Enactive Fallibilism provides the method of adjudication.
And IACT — Integral Awareness & Commitment Training — offers the container that holds it all.
This is the synthesis that the Schoendorff-Tutt dialogue couldn’t complete. Not a compromise between traditions but a forward movement that preserves what each contributes while resolving what each lacks.
The Language Parasite and the Symbolic order are different names for the same capture. Defusion and traversing the fantasy are different methods for the same liberation. And Awareness, Courage, and Love are the virtues that emerge when the work is done — not given by nature, not imposed by tradition, but enacted through practice within prosocial community.
This is post-metaphysical virtue ethics.
This is what psychological freedom actually looks like.