Ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. This concept was discovered in the analysis of a case study of a tech entrepreneur in Colombia and elaborated with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, we draw on Jacques Lacan’s conception of the discourse of the capitalist and his distinction between repression and foreclosure ( Verwerfung). The practice of entrepreneurship, we argue, is the most perfect instantiation of what Lacan called the discourse of the capitalist. This is a discourse without limits characterised by denial of castration and lack, a discourse that at is most radical promises liberation through a break with the symbolic order, the relation to the other, and indeed with the world as such. In this particular case study, such a break is materialised in a literal belief in magic, a specifically modern and non-occult magic of deception and misdirection that promises great results from nothing. Such magical thinking, we argue, is at the heart of the entrepreneurial fantasy. To explain this broken relation to symbolic order that is characteristic of entrepreneurship, we draw on Lacanian theory and in particular Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of ‘ordinary psychosis’ to explain the structural homology between entrepreneurship discourse and the analytic category of psychosis. The structure of this discourse, we argue, brings with it not only magical and hallucinatory thinking, but moreover what we propose here to call ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis.