The Language Parasite & the Symbolic Order

Toward a Post-Metaphysical Virtue Ethics

Feb 05, 2026

I. Between Lacan & RFT/ACT

In June 2025, Daniel Tutt’s Emancipations Study Collective hosted Benjamin Schoendorff for a presentation on Relational Frame Theory. Schoendorff — a clinical psychologist, ACT trainer, and founder of Montreal’s Contextual Psychology Institute — had been pressing Tutt to take RFT seriously as a contribution to Marxist psychology. Tutt, a philosopher working through Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, was receptive but unconvinced.

What interested me about the conversation was not simply that they disagreed. They repeatedly seemed to approach the same phenomenon from different directions and then lose one another precisely where the overlap became most interesting.

Schoendorff approached language through contextual behavioral science. Relational Frame Theory attempts to explain how human beings learn to relate events symbolically and how those learned relations transform what things do to us. Words, memories, identities, imagined futures, social categories, and evaluations acquire behavioral functions that no longer depend upon direct experience alone. A person can become frightened by something that has never happened, organize a life around avoiding a judgment no one has actually made, or respond to a word as though it were the thing the word names.

Tutt kept pushing from another direction. What happens to the symptom in this account? What about jouissance — the strange attachment people can develop to forms of suffering they consciously claim to want to escape? What about alienation that cannot simply be understood as bad learning or maladaptation? Most importantly, if psychotherapy aims at greater flexibility and adaptation, what prevents it from becoming another technology for producing subjects better able to tolerate conditions they ought instead to resist?

That question brought the conversation closest to the point that has stayed with me.

Freud, Lacan, and later Žižek can help us see the symbolic trap we are already in. Psychoanalysis gives us a language for recognizing how symptoms, fantasies, identifications, repetitions, and ideological formations organize our lives without our fully understanding how they do so. Lacan radicalizes the point by insisting that there is no fully formed subject standing outside language who can simply step away from the Symbolic Order once its operations have been exposed.

But seeing the trap is not the same thing as changing what we do inside it.

A person can acquire an extraordinarily sophisticated interpretation of the fantasy organizing their life and continue reproducing much the same pattern of behavior. They can understand why they desire what they desire, why a particular symptom persists, or how an ideological identification structures what appears possible while remaining no more able to respond differently when the relevant situation actually occurs. Psychoanalytic insight can certainly change people, but behavioral transformation is not specified with anything like the clarity or systematic attention it receives within ACT.

Schoendorff’s emphasis on self-determination therefore seemed important to me, even where Tutt’s criticism remained valid. ACT asks whether a person can take their history with them without allowing that history to determine every subsequent action. It does not require a clinician to specify the correct life in advance. Yet that very refusal leaves another problem unresolved: if greater psychological flexibility makes different action possible, what gives that action direction?

I came to the exchange already moving between these traditions, reading the ACT and contextual behavioral science literature alongside Lacan through Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal. What increasingly interested me was neither a victory of behavioral science over psychoanalysis nor a synthesis in which their differences disappeared. Psychoanalysis had diagnosed something real about symbolic capture: the ways language, fantasy, and identification can organize us without our fully knowing it. Contextual behavioral science, however, seemed to offer a much more developed account of how the behavioral effects of that capture might actually be altered.

But that creates a new problem. If psychological flexibility gives us more room to act, what should we do with that room? Becoming less governed by a verbal system does not by itself tell us what kinds of action are worth pursuing, what kinds of people we should become, or what kinds of institutions we should build. The problem of symbolic capture therefore leads directly into a problem of orientation.

II. Seeing the Symbolic Trap

Relational Frame Theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis are, in important respects, approaching the same human phenomenon: we become organized by symbolic relations that operate prior to conscious reflection and can come to govern perception, identity, emotion, memory, and action.

Lacan’s account is structural. Human subjectivity is constituted through language rather than merely expressed through it. The subject enters a Symbolic Order of names, laws, kinship structures, prohibitions, social meanings, and signifiers that existed before any particular individual appeared. There is no fully formed self standing outside this order and subsequently learning to use language as an instrument. The speaking subject emerges through symbolic mediation and remains divided by it.

This is one reason psychoanalysis can be so illuminating. It directs attention toward repetitions and identifications that ordinary introspection misses. Freud’s unconscious already challenged the ego’s confidence that it knows why it does what it does. Lacan relocates that problem within language itself. Žižek then extends it into ideology, showing how political and cultural formations can organize desire precisely where subjects imagine themselves to be acting freely.

There is an old joke about a man who goes into psychoanalysis because he wets the bed. Years later, a friend asks whether the analysis worked. “I still wet the bed,” he replies, “but now I know why.”

The joke is unfair to psychoanalysis, but it captures the problem I am trying to name. Insight and behavioral change are not the same thing. A person can understand a symptom, give an increasingly sophisticated account of the fantasy or repetition underlying it, and remain caught in much the same pattern. Knowing why one does something does not necessarily make another response available when the conditions that produce the behavior return.

That limitation becomes especially visible in the Lacanian and Žižekian traditions because their great strength is interpretation. They can make forms of capture visible that would otherwise remain difficult to see: how desire becomes organized around lack, how identification attaches us to particular images of ourselves, how ideology operates through enjoyment rather than simply through false belief. But the very sophistication of the interpretive machinery can become part of the difficulty. One interpretation leads to another; contradiction generates another dialectical turn; the discovery that we are caught within language produces still more language about the character of our capture.

At its best, this can deepen self-understanding and expose ideological structures that a narrower psychology might overlook. At its worst, the person becomes increasingly fluent in explaining why change is difficult without becoming substantially better able to change.

RFT reaches much of the same territory from a radically different intellectual lineage. It does not begin with the divided subject or the Symbolic Order but with learned relational behavior. Human beings acquire the capacity to respond to relations among events — same as, different from, better than, before, after, mine, yours, here, there — in ways that become increasingly independent of the physical properties of the events themselves. Once these relational networks develop, the functions of one event can be transformed through its relation to another.

The word worthless can alter behavior even though worthlessness is not a physical property one could discover in the body. A memory of humiliation can change what a future social encounter means. A political category can alter whom we trust before another person has spoken. A diagnostic label can reorganize how previous experiences are remembered and how future possibilities are imagined.

There is a genuine convergence here. Both traditions reject the picture of an autonomous rational individual transparently deciding what things mean and then acting accordingly. Both recognize that human beings become entangled in networks of symbolic relation that acquire force outside conscious intention.

The difference becomes much more significant when we ask what happens next.

Psychoanalysis asks us to understand the structure of the trap more deeply. RFT asks what the trap is doing to behavior. ACT then asks whether that behavioral relationship can be changed.

That movement from interpretation toward function and action is where the distinction becomes practical.

III. From Interpretation to Behavioral Change

For contextual behavioral science, a verbal relation matters not only because of what it signifies but because of how it changes behavior.

The thought “I am a failure” can alter what someone attends to, which memories become salient, whether they enter a relationship, whether they apply for a job, how they interpret another person’s expression, and what they do when anxiety appears. The significance of the thought lies partly in the network of relations surrounding it and in the functions those relations acquire within a particular history and context.

Cognitive fusion describes a situation in which such verbal processes exert increasingly rigid control over behavior. The thought is no longer merely something that occurs. It becomes an organizing frame through which subsequent experience is filtered.

ACT does not try to defeat the thought by arriving at a superior interpretation of its hidden meaning. Nor does it require replacing “I am a failure” with the more reassuring “I am a success.” Defusion aims instead to change the relationship between the verbal event and subsequent action. The thought may remain painful. The history that produced it does not disappear. What changes is whether its appearance determines what happens next.

This is the point at which I find ACT considerably more useful than the psychoanalytic traditions that helped identify the problem in the first place. Freud, Lacan, and Žižek can help us recognize how we have become caught within symbolic structures. ACT asks what can be done when those structures show up again tomorrow morning.

Can the thought be present without dictating the next action? Can shame be experienced without avoidance becoming the organizing principle of the day? Can a political identity remain meaningful without determining in advance which evidence will be accepted? Can a diagnostic category organize care without becoming the total explanation of the person? Can fear remain present while someone nevertheless moves toward something they value?

These are behavioral questions, and they shift the criterion of success.

The issue is no longer simply whether I understand the symbolic structure governing a pattern. The question becomes whether I can respond differently when that structure becomes active. The old thought may still appear. The anxiety may still arrive. The symbolic identification may remain important. But if my range of possible action has expanded, something consequential has changed.

The distinction should not be exaggerated into a claim that interpretation is useless or that psychoanalysis never changes anyone. Insight can alter behavior, relationships, and self-understanding, and the therapeutic relationship itself may produce forms of change that cannot be reduced to interpretation. The narrower point is that behavioral transformation is not left implicit within ACT. It is the explicit object of the work.

Psychological flexibility names that shift. It involves remaining in contact with what is happening, allowing difficult internal experience to be present, loosening the control of rigid verbal processes, taking perspective on the stories through which the self has been organized, clarifying valued directions, and behaving in ways that increasingly reflect those values.

This also distinguishes ACT from approaches that measure therapeutic success primarily through whether the unwanted thought, feeling, or symptom disappears. Psychological flexibility does not require the symbolic trap to vanish. It asks whether the person’s behavior must continue being organized by it in the same way.

There is, however, a political limit to this approach. ACT cannot solve a structural problem merely by producing more flexible individuals.

A worker can learn to relate differently to anxiety while remaining in a workplace organized around impossible demands. Someone can defuse from a stigmatizing diagnosis while still requiring the diagnosis to access treatment, insurance, or institutional support. A person can become less fused with political identity while participating in media and organizational environments whose incentives reward precisely the polarization they are learning to resist.

Language is never merely a private event occurring inside the skull. The relational networks through which people understand themselves are learned and reinforced through families, schools, clinics, workplaces, religious communities, political movements, media systems, and economic institutions.

Psychological flexibility can expand the range of responses available to a person, but political praxis also requires changing the contexts in which particular forms of behavior are repeatedly reinforced.

Tutt’s concern about adaptation therefore remains important. The aim cannot simply be to produce people better able to tolerate intolerable circumstances. Sometimes flexibility means adapting oneself to reality. Sometimes it means refusing the demands of an institution. Sometimes it means organizing with others to change the conditions under which the problem continually reappears.

That still leaves the question Schoendorff’s account cannot settle on its own: flexibility in the service of what?

IV. The Problem of Orientation

Schoendorff’s refusal to dictate the content of self-determination follows from an important ethical commitment. A therapist should be extremely cautious about deciding what another person’s life ought to mean.

Lacanian resistance to positive prescription has a related logic. Psychoanalysis becomes something quite different if the analyst already possesses the correct image of the healthy subject and treats analysis as the process of bringing the patient into conformity with it.

Both traditions therefore have good reasons to distrust a ready-made account of the Good.

But once their insights are extended beyond the clinical encounter, the normative question becomes difficult to avoid. Greater behavioral flexibility creates possibilities, but possibilities are not yet orientations. A person can become extremely flexible in the service of exploitation, domination, narcissism, or cruelty. The ability to tolerate discomfort can support civil disobedience, but it can also support a corporate executive working seventy-hour weeks. Perspective-taking can deepen solidarity, but it can also make manipulation more effective.

This is another reason diagnosis alone is insufficient. Knowing that our desires and identities are symbolically mediated does not tell us what kinds of desires should be cultivated or what forms of collective life are worth constructing. The endless revelation that every identity is incomplete, every symbolic system fails, and every political project contains contradiction can eventually become its own form of paralysis. Critique becomes exceptionally good at preventing naïveté while providing increasingly little assistance with construction.

ACT moves further because values are built into its account of psychological flexibility. Behavior becomes flexible not simply for the sake of flexibility but so that action can become more responsive to what matters.

Yet “chosen values” cannot carry the entire normative burden either. Values are never chosen in a vacuum. They are inherited, contested, revised, learned through relationships, embedded in traditions, and shaped by social conditions. Even our language for what matters reaches us through worlds we did not create.

The question therefore cannot simply be: What do I value?

It also becomes: What kinds of practices form the kinds of people we are becoming? What forms of life allow our values to be challenged and deepened rather than merely affirmed? How do commitments become durable enough to organize action without becoming another symbolic structure that settles every question in advance?

This is where I have increasingly returned to the language of virtue.

Not because virtue provides an escape from the post-metaphysical problem, but because it shifts the question away from possessing the correct interpretation and toward cultivating capacities for action.

Courage is not primarily a theory of courage. It becomes visible in what someone does when fear is present. Awareness is not a doctrine about consciousness. Love is not simply assent to the proposition that other people matter.

Virtue concerns what we become able to do.

V. Awareness, Courage, and Love

Gareth Holman’s work in contextual behavioral science gives this problem a surprisingly simple vocabulary: Awareness, Courage, and Love.

At first glance, ACL can look like another clinical mnemonic. It becomes more interesting when understood as a description of capacities cultivated through practice.

Awareness concerns the ability to notice what is occurring without immediately becoming identical to the interpretation placed upon it. It includes attention, defusion, perspective-taking, and the possibility of recognizing that a thought or feeling is present without requiring it to determine what happens next.

Courage concerns action in the presence of fear, uncertainty, discomfort, or the pull of familiar avoidance. Psychological flexibility would mean very little if it merely produced increasingly sophisticated awareness of the forces governing us while leaving us unable to behave differently when those forces appear.

Love introduces the relational dimension. A flexible person is not simply an increasingly autonomous individual capable of choosing private values more efficiently. Human beings become persons through relationships and remain dependent upon forms of recognition, care, cooperation, responsibility, and mutual vulnerability. Love, in this context, names an orientation beyond the isolated self without requiring us to settle in advance every philosophical or theological question contained in the word.

I am increasingly comfortable calling these virtues, although not in the sense that contextual behavioral science has somehow scientifically discovered the final virtues of human life. Awareness, Courage, and Love have histories extending far beyond psychotherapy, and religious and philosophical traditions have interpreted each of them in radically different ways.

The narrower claim is more useful. They can be understood as virtue-like dispositions whose significance becomes visible through practice. Awareness creates room for another response. Courage makes acting differently possible when the old response still exerts force. Love places that action within a world of other people rather than treating psychological flexibility as the private achievement of an autonomous individual.

They also develop recursively. Awareness can make courageous action more possible. Courage allows us to remain present where awareness might otherwise become another form of withdrawal. Love gives both an interpersonal orientation, while relationships of trust and solidarity make awareness and courage easier to sustain.

This returns us to something neither psychoanalysis nor individual psychotherapy can resolve by itself. People do not cultivate these capacities alone. They develop through practices, relationships, communities, and institutions.

VI. Prosocial

Prosocial, developed by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, Steven Hayes, and collaborators, extends contextual behavioral science toward collective life by bringing ACT into conversation with Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance.

Ostrom challenged a powerful assumption: that shared resources inevitably require either centralized state control or privatization to avoid collapse. Across different contexts, communities developed durable systems of cooperation through practices involving shared purpose, fair distribution of costs and benefits, participatory decision-making, monitoring, graduated responses to violations, conflict resolution, local authority, and coordination across levels.

Prosocial adapts these insights into a framework for examining how group norms and patterns of interaction support or undermine cooperation.

The point is not to turn Ostrom’s Core Design Principles into a new moral law. Empirical regularities cannot by themselves tell us everything we ought to value, and the evolutionary history of cooperation does not derive an ethics from biology.

What this literature does show is that capacities often treated as individual achievements depend profoundly upon social conditions.

Trust is easier to sustain in groups where exploitation is not continually rewarded. Courage takes different forms when dissent leads to expulsion than when disagreement can be expressed without destroying membership. Perspective-taking matters differently when decision-making structures allow another perspective to influence an actual outcome. Commitment is easier to distinguish from obedience when authority can be questioned and rules can be revised.

This brings the behavioral argument outward. ACT asks how a person’s repertoire can become less rigid. Prosocial asks how groups can be organized so that flexibility, cooperation, disagreement, and revision remain possible in the first place.

Institutions do not mechanically manufacture virtuous people, but neither do virtuous people simply appear prior to institutions and then decide what to build. People are formed through participation in social worlds, and those people in turn reproduce, contest, or transform the structures they inhabit.

Rather than imagining virtue as a private accomplishment or an eternal definition imposed from above, we can therefore begin asking what kinds of practices make people more capable of awareness, courageous action, mutual concern, perspective-taking, cooperation, and revision — and what kinds repeatedly reward conformity, domination, isolation, avoidance, or rigid identification.

That is already a movement from therapy toward politics.

VII. Integral Facticity & Enactive Fallibilism

Two ideas I have been developing — Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism — help me make sense of the relationship between symbolic mediation, behavioral change, development, and social structure.

By Integral Facticity I mean that human beings always begin within conditions they did not choose: bodies, languages, histories, relationships, institutions, economic circumstances, inherited traditions, and social positions. There is no view from nowhere from which these conditions can be suspended while we determine the correct form of life.

At the same time, no single mode of explanation exhausts them.

This matters particularly for the distinction I have been drawing between psychoanalysis and contextual behavioral science. Lacan can disclose something important about symbolic constitution without thereby giving us an adequate account of behavioral change. RFT can explain how verbal relations transform psychological functions without thereby explaining the political institutions through which those relations are socially reinforced. Structural critique can expose economic and institutional constraints without telling us what a particular person can do differently when those constraints become psychologically embodied.

These are not competing descriptions from which one winner must be selected. They disclose different aspects of a situation that remains psychological, behavioral, cultural, embodied, and institutional at once.

Wilber’s integral framework remains useful to me for precisely this reason. Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up name different dimensions of development that cannot simply be reduced to one scale. Contemplative awareness is not the same thing as moral development; psychological integration is not political transformation; sophisticated interpretation does not guarantee behavioral flexibility; behavioral flexibility does not guarantee ethical maturity.

Development also never occurs outside facticity. We grow from somewhere, through languages and institutions we inherited, in bodies with possibilities and limits, under historical conditions we did not select. Development can transform those conditions without ever beginning outside them.

Enactive Fallibilism describes the methodological attitude that follows.

Peircean fallibilism begins from the recognition that our claims remain revisable. Enactivism adds that knowing develops through embodied engagement rather than from the detached standpoint of a disembodied observer. We discover something about our frameworks by living through them.

This is another place where I depart from the interpretive recursion that can characterize psychoanalytic theory. A framework cannot protect itself indefinitely by generating another interpretation of whatever contradicts it. At some point consequences matter. Evidence matters. Other people’s accounts matter. What happens when the framework is enacted matters.

The body matters too, but not because bodily experience provides an infallible verdict. Suffering matters. Exhaustion matters. Fear, breakdown, pleasure, attachment, conflict, cooperation, and physiological consequences all provide evidence that theories of human flourishing cannot simply explain away.

But bodily experience still requires interpretation. Pain can accompany growth as well as injury. Comfort can sustain domination. Immediate relief does not prove that a practice is good, any more than suffering automatically falsifies every structure in which it appears.

Enactive Fallibilism therefore requires a more demanding movement between framework and practice. We enact interpretations, discover what they make possible, encounter what they obscure or damage, and revise them in light of consequences, new evidence, other perspectives, and conditions they did not initially know how to accommodate.

No tradition receives immunity from that process: psychoanalysis, contextual behavioral science, Marxism, integral theory, religious tradition, subjective experience, or a framework I am constructing myself.

This gives a different answer to Schoendorff’s concern that we cannot stand outside language and determine which verbal system is finally correct. We do not need such a position. We need ways of living and inquiring through which our interpretations can be changed.

It also gives a different answer to Tutt’s concern about adaptation. The relevant question is not simply whether a person becomes more functional within an existing environment. The environment must also remain available for criticism and transformation. Sometimes behavior has to change. Sometimes institutions have to change. Often each changes through engagement with the other.

Psychological flexibility becomes politically significant when it helps make that reciprocal transformation possible.

VIII. IACT & Post-Metaphysical Virtue Ethics

Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) is my attempt to organize these ideas into a working form of praxis.

It begins from a distinction that became clearer to me through the Schoendorff-Tutt exchange. Insight into symbolic capture matters. Freud, Lacan, and Žižek can show us dimensions of that capture that a purely behavioral account may overlook. But the old psychoanalytic joke remains instructive: knowing why we wet the bed is not the same thing as no longer wetting it.

ACT starts from the other side. Defusion, acceptance, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, values, and committed action are practices aimed at increasing the range of behavior available when the old symbolic relations become active. They move from understanding the pattern toward changing our participation in it.

That does not make ACT a sufficient political philosophy. Individual flexibility cannot substitute for institutions, traditions, communities, or forms of collective action. Prosocial extends the framework into groups, where behavioral possibilities depend partly upon how cooperation, authority, conflict, and participation are organized. Wilber keeps developmental differences and multiple dimensions of experience in view. Integral Facticity prevents development from becoming a fantasy of escaping history, embodiment, or social constraint. Enactive Fallibilism requires the architecture itself to remain revisable through what happens when it is practiced.

Awareness, Courage, and Love give this work a provisional language of virtue. They do not constitute a final conception of the good life. They name capacities that become increasingly important once psychological freedom is understood not simply as knowing why we are captured but as becoming able to respond differently.

Seen from here, Schoendorff and Tutt each preserve something the other risks losing.

Schoendorff is right to resist telling another person which verbal system they ought to inhabit. Psychological freedom purchased through submission to the therapist’s worldview would scarcely count as freedom. ACT is also right to insist that flexibility ultimately has to appear in what people are actually able to do.

Tutt is right that adaptation cannot become the unquestioned goal. A psychology that teaches people only to accommodate themselves to existing institutions can become an efficient technology of domination. Psychoanalysis preserves an essential suspicion toward the demand to become the properly functioning subject of a dysfunctional order.

But suspicion and interpretation cannot be the end of the work. Non-adaptation remains politically empty unless there is something we are attempting to build, protect, transform, or become.

The space between those positions is where I locate post-metaphysical virtue ethics.

“Post-metaphysical” does not mean that metaphysical or religious questions have been disproven, nor that traditions must abandon them before entering modern life. It means something narrower: practices of psychological and political formation need not wait for universal agreement about ultimate reality before they become subject to reflection, evidence, dialogue, and revision.

Likewise, virtue need not mean recovering an uncontested Aristotelian essence of the human being. It can begin with capacities cultivated through practice: the ability to notice without immediately fusing with an interpretation, to remain in contact with difficult experience, to act despite fear, to take another perspective seriously, to orient behavior toward goods that matter, and to revise our practices when their consequences betray the values through which they were justified.

None of these capacities guarantees virtue. Awareness can become manipulation. Courage can become fanaticism. Love can become possession. Psychological flexibility can serve destructive ends. Groups can cooperate around terrible purposes.

Fallibilism therefore cannot be added at the end as a methodological footnote. The virtues themselves, the institutions cultivating them, and IACT as a framework all have to remain answerable to their consequences.

IACT is not the theory that finally escapes the symbolic trap. There is no such theory. It is an attempt to move from recognizing that trap toward practices through which its behavioral consequences can become less rigid, while connecting that individual transformation to the relationships and institutions in which behavior acquires its meaning and force.

Freud, Lacan, and Žižek can help us see why we are not masters in our own symbolic house. RFT helps explain how that house continues organizing what we feel and do. ACT asks whether, without pretending that we can simply leave it behind, we can nevertheless learn to move differently within it — and eventually begin altering the structures themselves.

Post-metaphysical virtue ethics begins there: not with one more interpretation of why we remain trapped, but with the cultivation of forms of practice through which people and institutions can actually change.

The task is not merely to interpret the symbolic structures through which we understand the world, but to develop forms of praxis capable of changing both themselves and the conditions in which we live.

Integral [+] Facticity

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