8/07/2025

In our neoliberal culture, online trading is often presented as the ultimate expression of freedom and autonomy. It is the arena where one can prove oneself the master of one’s own fate. It’s a tempting and powerful fantasy: that of absolute self-determination and freedom. It therefore attracts lots of people. Many are drawn by success stories, but they often underestimate the risks involved,  the self-insight and the discipline required to be truly successful. Many people try to master trading by analyzing every detail of the market, hoping for a perfect system that will guarantee success. 

But they often avoid looking at what drives them to trade in the first place, their own desires, unconscious fears, and fantasies. In Lacanian terms, the market acts like the big Other: full of promise, but ultimately lacking any final truth. The trader projects hopes of certainty and control onto it, refusing to face their own uncertainty and limits. Without reflecting on this, they repeat the same mistakes, chasing an impossible sense of mastery and satisfaction that the market can never fully deliver.  In this text, I want to discuss some of the common mistakes and potential risks some traders may face. It's important to note that this doesn't apply to every trader; I will be generalizing to highlight some of the underlying dynamics and possible downsides involved in the journey toward becoming successful in the trading world. 

Let us first begin with some fictional examples that illustrate some of the possible psychological patterns and tensions behind a phenomenon like online trading:

This social demand is connected to  a fantasy, that especially could attract the obsessional, because they naturally struggle with the fundamental contradictions between control and uncertainty, between knowledge and ignorance. The obsessive structure is part of the neurotic structure in Lacanian theory. Within Lacan’s structural typology, neurosis is primarily divided into obsessive neurosis and hysteria. Obsessional neurosis is marked by defensive strategies such as isolation, intellectualization, and ritualized or repetitive thinking. These defenses aim to keep desire and anxiety under control. In Lacan’s view, obsession revolves around the question of the Other’s desire: “What does the Other want from me?” But rather than confronting this question directly, the obsessive delays, analyzes, and tries to maintain control to avoid anxiety about loss or lack.

Put simply, someone with an obsessive structure often manages anxiety and inner conflict by thinking a lot and making rules for themselves. They might get stuck in endless questions or doubts, like “What if I make the wrong choice?” or “What will others think?” Instead of acting quickly or sharing their feelings openly, they try to control things through careful planning and analysis. This way of thinking is a defense against uncertainty and the discomfort of not fully knowing what they want, or what others want from them. It’s like trying to stay safe by overthinking everything, so nothing surprising or threatening can break through. I'll devode an upcoming post about how this structure navigates through life under the section Lacan Made Simple. In this text, I'll stick to how they may navigate trading.

The obsessional subject is driven by an urgent need to impose order and certainty on the fundamental unpredictability of human existence. Rules, answers, and systems serve as a way to establish a foothold against anxiety. They aim to master not only their own desire but also the desire of others, along with the laws and structures that regulate these desires.

Trading offers an especially seductive arena for this obsessional drive. It promises the illusion of control over market chaos through rational analysis, disciplined strategies, and strict planning. By mastering these techniques, the obsessional subject believes they can neutralize uncertainty and gain mastery over an unpredictable environment.

On a conscious level, a trader might say he simply wants financial freedom, to liberate himself from the obligations and demands imposed by others (such as work responsibilities or family duties). This explicit goal frames trading as a means of achieving autonomy. However, at an unconscious level, the picture is far more complex.

Paradoxically, the obsessional trader often sabotages his own efforts precisely when success seems within reach. He may make impulsive trades, abandon well-designed plans at the last moment, or shift strategies abruptly. These patterns suggest a kind of repetition compulsion that contradicts the conscious goal of financial independence.

How do we make sense of this apparent self-sabotage? If his conscious desire is freedom and security, why does he repeatedly undermine his own progress? Why doesn’t repeated failure discourage him entirely, leading him to quit? Instead, he seems compelled to circle back and reenact the same cycle over and over.

One way to understand this dynamic is to recognize that the obsessional subject’s relation to knowledge and control is inherently ambivalent. On the one hand, the relentless pursuit of knowledge is what drives him to keep learning, refining his methods, and persevering despite setbacks, qualities essential for success in trading. On the other hand, complete success would mean confronting the limits of his own mastery: it would force him to acknowledge that no system, no plan, can guarantee absolute control over desire, over the market, or over life itself.

By sabotaging himself, he preserves the space for further analysis, further planning, further preparation. Failure can thus serve an unconscious function: it keeps the fantasy of perfect mastery alive by ensuring that it is never fully tested or disproven in reality. The obsessive subject is caught in this paradox: he cannot stop striving for control, yet he cannot allow himself to succeed entirely, because success would expose the impossibility of the very certainty he seeks.

For the obsessional trader, then, the challenge lies in recognizing and working through this dynamic. It is not enough to devise a better trading system or stricter rules. He must confront the underlying structure of his desire, the need to maintain the fantasy of mastery and explore the anxiety that emerges when he risks letting go of that fantasy.

Lacan goes further to argue that the symptom is not just a source of suffering but also of jouissance. Jouissance is a technical term that points to a paradoxical enjoyment, a kind of satisfaction that is excessive, transgressive, and often painful. Unlike ordinary pleasure, jouissance is bound up with what is repressed and prohibited; it is enjoyment in and through suffering.

Seen in this light, the trader’s repeated failure may not be a simple problem of insufficient skill, poor discipline, or bad luck. Rather, it might be doing something for him at an unconscious level. The cycle of building up hope, approaching success, and then sabotaging it can be understood as a symptom that delivers a specific kind of jouissance. It allows him to sustain the fantasy of mastery, there is always another plan to make, another analysis to perfect, while avoiding the anxiety of actually achieving success, which would confront him with the limits of his control and the uncertainty of his own desire.

Moreover, repeated failure can protect the trader from what success might demand of him. Financial freedom could bring about new obligations, new forms of responsibility, or the unsettling question of what he truly wants once the fantasy of “if only I were free” no longer shields him from confronting his desire directly. The symptom of failure allows him to keep that question at bay.

Trading as a Stage for Unconscious Conflict

If we follow this line of reasoning, we can begin to see that trading is not merely an economic activity or a test of skill. It is also a scene, a stage on which the subject enacts unconscious dramas about desire, mastery, dependence, and freedom.

Why does the market exert such a powerful fascination? Precisely because it appears to promise the fantasy of absolute autonomy. For the obsessional subject, the market represents the ideal space of freedom: no boss, no obligations to others, no externally imposed schedule, just pure, self-determined action. In this fantasy, profit becomes the sign of ultimate independence, proof that one can master reality on one’s own terms.

But psychoanalytic theory warns us that this fantasy is never “pure” or innocent. The market is not a blank canvas onto which one can freely project any desire; rather, it is structured by the Other, by shared social fantasies of wealth, success, and freedom. In pursuing the fantasy of self-mastery, the trader is responding, even if unconsciously, to ideals, values, and demands that come from outside himself.

In Lacanian terms, this is the paradox of desire: desire is always the desire of the Other. Even the desire to be radically free is conditioned by the social ideal of the self-made individual who defies authority and carves his own path. The market seduces precisely because it embodies this ideal, inviting the trader to prove himself against its impersonal logic.

Yet the trader’s repeated failures are not simply accidents or personal flaws. They can be seen as symptoms that protect him from the anxiety of actually achieving success, success that would mean submitting to the desire of the Other. After all, what would it mean to win consistently? To fully enter the market’s logic, to identify with its values, to be “taken” by it? For the obsessional subject, this threatens a loss of individuality, of safe distance, of the illusion of being outside or above the Other’s demands.

This is why failure is not simply an unwanted byproduct but an unconscious solution. It preserves the fantasy of mastery by deferring its realization. The trader remains forever “almost ready,” “almost successful,” caught in rituals of planning, back-testing, rule-making, and endless self-critique. These strategies of delay and self-sabotage maintain the possibility of freedom as an open fantasy, precisely by avoiding its realization, which would confront him with the truth of his desire and its dependence on the Other.

Failure as a Defensive Strategy

Whenever the subject’s desire threatens to bring them too close to the Other, to the possibility of recognition, dependence, or submission, anxiety arises. In response, the subject may retreat into rituals, distance, sabotage...

In trading, this takes the form of an endless oscillation between planning and avoidance, between the desire to master the market and the fear of being mastered by it. The market’s opacity and unpredictability become both a lure and a defense: they promise the possibility of total understanding while ensuring that this understanding remains forever incomplete. The trader can thus remain engaged in the fantasy of mastery without ever having to fully submit to the market’s rules.

Toward a Different Relation to Desire

If genuine change is possible, it will not come simply from learning better trading strategies or enforcing stricter discipline. Those are surface-level solutions that often miss the point. Instead, it requires recognizing and working through the unconscious dynamics that shape one’s relationship to the market, and to desire itself.

This means confronting the fantasy of absolute autonomy and acknowledging the role of the Other in structuring one’s goals and ideals. It involves asking uncomfortable questions: What would it mean to succeed? What kind of individual would I become if I accepted the Other’s demand for mastery? What am I trying to avoid by failing?

Such questions are not easily answered. They involve confronting (and accepting) one’s own enjoyment in failure, the jouissance that comes from avoiding the anxiety of ‘success’, of reaching the ‘goal’. They require exploring the symptom not simply as a problem to eradicate but as a meaningful formation that says something true about one’s desire.

Only by recognizing this logic can the trader begin to move toward a less alienated, less compulsive relation to the market, a relation not governed solely by the fantasy of mastery or the fear of submission, but capable of holding complexity, limits, and genuine choice.

The Ethics of Trading and the Question of Responsibility

Given this analysis, we can no longer view trading merely as an individual pursuit of profit or mastery over risk. Instead, it becomes necessary to interrogate the ethical dimension of this entire system: a system that capitalizes on desire and, in doing so, amplifies the very anxieties it promises to soothe. The industry does not simply sell financial products; it sells fantasies of mastery, certainty, and freedom. Yet these fantasies are designed to keep the subject perpetually caught in the cycle of loss, frustration, and renewed investment, of both money and desire.

Here emerges a profound question of responsibility: who is responsible for the subject’s entrapment? On the one hand, the trading industry constructs and sustains this seductive discourse of control, making promises it knows cannot be fulfilled. It exploits the obsessional structure’s vulnerability to the fantasy of total knowledge and self-mastery. The advertisements, seminars, and algorithmic trading platforms are not neutral tools; they are ideological apparatuses that shape the very form of desire.

On the other hand, the subject bears their own responsibility for participating in this fantasy. The trading obsessional is not merely duped by the industry's promises but is actively invested in them. The industry sells them the fantasy they want to believe, that the Real can be mastered, that loss can be eliminated, that the Other’s desire (the market’s movements) can be fully known and controlled. The subject’s complicity is evident in their refusal to recognize the impossibility at the heart of their endeavor. Instead of confronting the anxiety of uncertainty, they retreat into ever more rigid systems, rules, and predictive models.

This suggests an ethical demand not for "better" trading advertisment, but for a different relation to the Real from the trader himself. To trade ethically would mean acknowledging the irreducible uncertainty of the market and refusing the fantasy of mastery. It would mean accepting loss, recognizing that failure is not an anomaly to be eliminated but an intrinsic part of the system.

However, this demand is profoundly counter to the logic of the trading industry itself. The entire edifice depends on denying the Real. It thrives precisely because it offers subjects a way to disavow uncertainty. The more advanced the predictive tools, the more elaborate the rituals of analysis, the more the industry grows. The trader is caught in a loop of ever-increasing investments of time, money, and psychic energy, all in pursuit of a mastery that is structurally impossible.

What would it mean, then, to think of trading outside this fantasy? To confront the Real of the market without falling into the trap of mastery? It would require a radical reorientation of our relation to risk, uncertainty, and loss. Rather than treating them as enemies to be defeated, they would have to be acknowledged as constitutive. This would mean giving up the fantasy of absolute autonomy and control and recognizing our fundamental exposure to contingency.

Such an ethical position is not only psychologically challenging but structurally unwelcome within the trading industry. The industry relies on the disavowal of risk's radicality, it can only profit by offering traders the fantasy that risk is manageable, that loss is avoidable, that the future can be tamed. It cannot tolerate an ethics that would accept uncertainty without illusions.

Ultimately, the obsessional’s relation to trading reveals something fundamental about our contemporary condition. It shows how a fantasy of mastery over the Real, of reducing uncertainty to order, chaos to predictability, organizes the desires of many individuals… The trading industry is not an aberration but a paradigmatic expression of a broader cultural logic. It is where the desire for mastery meets the intractable reality of loss, where the promise of freedom becomes a mechanism of control.

In this sense, the ethical task is not simply to reform trading practices but to interrogate the very fantasy that sustains them. It is to ask how we might learn to live with uncertainty without seeking to annihilate it, how we might recognize the limits of knowledge without collapsing into despair, and how we might acknowledge loss as a necessary dimension of any relation, to the world, to others, and to ourselves.

Failure offers control

The obsessional subject is haunted by the wish to fully master and predict the movements of the market. They build elaborate systems, rules, and models in a frantic bid to render the unpredictable predictable. Yet the market, as an avatar of the Real (in Lacan’s sense), always slips through these symbolic nets. It remains elusive, capricious, beyond the reach of total systematization.

This creates a core paradox: the very thing they want to control refuses to be controlled. The result is a perpetual cycle of failure. Despite tireless refinement of their models, the market eventually exposes the limits of their approach. A sudden, catastrophic loss can wipe out days, months, or even years of careful planning.

The impact is traumatic. It is not only money that is lost but the trader’s self-image, their sense of competence and mastery. At such moments, many throw aside their carefully designed rules and act on raw impulse. Their behavior becomes chaotic and irrational, precisely the opposite of what their systems were meant to prevent.

Paradoxically, this collapse is not simply humiliating or devastating. It is also suffused with a peculiar, often disavowed enjoyment. Psychoanalysis describes this with the concept of jouissance, as said, a painful pleasure that transgresses the limits of ordinary satisfaction.

In these moments of losing control, there is a liberation from the suffocating grip of self-imposed discipline. The trader experiences a kind of release in acting impulsively, in no longer having to maintain the impossible task of perfect self-control. This is the enjoyment in failure: the pleasure of letting go precisely where one has fought hardest to hold on.

This dynamic is not just accidental or occasional. It is structural. The obsessional subject is driven by what Freud called the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang), the inexorable return to a traumatic moment in order to relive it. Each failure is not simply a mishap but a repetition of a fundamental psychic scenario: the struggle to master the unmasterable.

The symptom itself is this repeated failure. It is the demonstration of the impossibility of being the perfect Master, the one who fully knows and controls. The trader’s attempts to beat the market are doomed by the market’s very nature as unpredictable. Yet this doom is precisely what draws them back in.

In a strange way, failure offers them a kind of control. After all, they know it is coming. They can recognize its patterns. They can say, “I know why I failed,” and this explanation restores a sense of mastery even in defeat. It is a predictable failure, better, for some, than an unpredictable success.

We see this in the typical trading cycle:

• The initial confidence in the model.

• The shattering blow of failure.

• The impulsive, emotional reaction.

• The vow to be even stricter next time.

This cycle confirms the symptom. The subject is condemned to seek control, fail, suffer, and enjoy this paradoxical experience.

The Limit Experience

One might ask: why would anyone want this? Why is it enjoyable at all?

The answer lies in the limit experience. The trader inhabits a space on the border between control and chaos. On one side is the fantasy of perfect mastery: the ability to read the market flawlessly, to reduce it to symbols and rules. On the other is the unavoidable Real: the market’s radical unpredictability that forces the trader to confront their own limits.

It is precisely this border zone that is so psychically charged. In trying to balance on this razor’s edge, the trader experiences a heightened aliveness , a thrill that ordinary life, with its routines and constraints, cannot offer.

This limit experience is not about feeling good in the conventional sense. It is about pushing oneself to the brink, testing the boundary between knowing and not knowing, between mastery and surrender. In this dance, there is a sublime intensity that transcends mere profit or loss.

Trading perfectly stages the conflict between two opposing modes of being:

• Cold calculation: The trader’s models, rules, and systems, which promise rational control.

• Reckless impulsivity: The breakdown of these systems in moments of crisis, when emotion takes over.

This tension is not unique to trading. It plays out in everyday life in small transgressions:

• The rule-follower who runs a red light “just for the thrill.”

• The workaholic who parties to excess once every few months.

• The punctual employee who regularly arrives late “by accident.”

These seemingly minor infractions are unconscious strategies for discharging the unbearable tension of constant self-control. In trading, these dynamics become magnified and ritualized.

When the system fails, the trader is given permission to act out. The impulsive trade, the reckless bet, is not simply a mistake but a moment of release. It breaks the suffocating grip of discipline and allows a fleeting sense of freedom.

For the obsessional, trading is not merely a means of making money. It is a ritual that stages their deepest psychic conflicts.

In trading, they can enact the fantasy of being the Master: the one who knows, who can tame the market’s unpredictability. They can feel superior, autonomous, and in control.

But this fantasy is always undermined. Every failure is a moment of self-destruction. The trader’s stability is sabotaged not by chance alone but by their own unconscious desire to keep the tension alive.

The cycle repeats endlessly and in this repetition, the trader finds a kind of continuity, a structured way to encounter their own limits, their own incapacity, and in a sense, their own desire.

At the heart of this dynamic is the desire for absolute freedom, the fantasy of total independence and perfect self-mastery.

But the higher the bar is set, the more painful the inevitable fall. Each failure becomes a confrontation with the unreachable ideal. Instead of deterring the trader, this failure draws them back in. It is as if they believe they have not yet gone “far enough,” have not yet done it “well enough.”

This is why many observers link trading to an addiction. The behavior becomes compulsive, difficult to stop. It offers an illusion of control amid the fundamental uncertainty of life, a structured space to act out unbearable tensions without having to truly resolve them.

Deadlines, rigid routines, and endlessly revised strategies are not merely pragmatic tools, they are existential defenses against the overwhelming confrontation with the Real. For the obsessional subject, this confrontation is experienced as annihilating. As such, failure is not simply feared; it is, in a curious twist, engineered, through procrastination, avoidance, or subtle acts of self-sabotage. In those moments of failures, the trader feels defeated regarding to their self-image, but it’s nothing in comparison to what it would mean to actually achieve the goal and be confronted with desire as being impossible to be filled in.  In failing on their own terms, the obsessional preserves the fantasy that they could have succeeded, had they only tried harder or done things differently. Thus, the painful recognition of structural impossibility is deferred once again.

But this psychic economy is costly. The repetition of such patterns, failing under pressure, rebuilding ever-stricter systems, promising next time will be different, gradually erodes the subject's sense of agency and deepens their potential feelings of isolation. The fantasy of mastery becomes a prison, and the subject its own jailor.

The analytic space offers a different kind of encounter. Here, the obsessional is invited to speak, not to perform, not to deliver conclusions, but to dwell in the ambiguities of their desire, to linger near the gap rather than seal it shut. In being listened to without judgment, the obsessional begins to realize that control is not the condition for existence, but its illusion. That to be a subject is not to be whole, consistent, or coherent, but to be marked by contradiction, by incompleteness, by a desire that cannot be entirely satisfied or mastered.

This shift, from control to encounter, from mastery to meaning, is not instantaneous. It requires a gradual loosening of defenses, a toleration of doubt, and most importantly, a recognition that life does not offer a final answer. There will always be a remainder, something that escapes the system, something that cannot be known in advance. But rather than seeing this as a threat, the obsessional can begin to relate to it as a source of freedom, creativity, and even vitality.

Letting go of the fantasy of total control is not an act of resignation; it is an ethical stance. It is the moment when the subject can stop measuring themselves against an impossible standard and begin to assume responsibility for their desire, not in order to master it, but to live alongside it, to let it speak, and to let it lead.

To live with the lack is not to fall apart. It is, paradoxically, to come together, for the first time, as a subject no longer enslaved by the gaze of the Other, no longer bound to the fantasy of being the perfect, knowing master. It is to live in a world that is incomplete, unpredictable, and open. And perhaps most importantly, it is to be alive in a way that no system, no plan, no sabotage ever truly allowed.