Jacques Lacan, in the 1920s and 30s, is up against the extremely conservative medical societies that dominate almost every aspect of psychoanalytic practice. He judges a conventional fight unwinnable.
Realizing the futility of taking on these authorities in a conventional way, Lacan developed a style that can fairly be described as terroristic.1
The instrument:
His sessions with his patients, for example, were often cut short before the usual fifty minutes were up; they could last any period of time that he saw fit and were sometimes as brief as ten minutes.1
And what that did institutionally:
This deliberate provocation to the medical establishment caused a great deal of scandal, setting off a chain reaction that shook the psychoanalytic community for years.1
Then a parenthesis that is the most interesting thing on the page:
(These sessions were also quite terrorizing for the patients, who could never be sure when Lacan would end them and so were forced to concentrate and make every moment count—all of which had great therapeutic value, according to Lacan.)1
According to Lacan. Greene marks the attribution and does not evaluate it — which is the right call, because the claim is exactly the one that cannot be checked from outside. The same intervention is either a technique for producing urgency in the work, or an unpredictable withdrawal of attention from people who came for help, and the justification is supplied by the person doing it.
The escalation:
Having gained much publicity this way, Lacan kept stirring the pot with new provocative acts, culminating in the creation of his own rival school and professional society.1
His books are written in a style to match this strategy: violent and arcane.1
It was as if he occasionally liked to throw little bombs into the world, thriving on the terror and attention they got him.1
Everything from the chapter's political material is present in miniature. Sporadic, unpredictable acts — sessions of unknowable length. A chain reaction that ran for years without further input. Publicity as the mechanism, since the scandal did the propagation. And a small actor against an entrenched institution who could not have won a direct fight.
What is missing is the thing that makes the transposition possible at all: nobody died. Which is why this page exists as a separate object — Greene is making a claim about a form that scales down, and the form is genuinely the same while the moral situation is not.
Then the transposition Greene is really interested in, and it is domestic:
People who feel weak and powerless are often tempted into outbursts of anger or irrational behavior, which keeps those around them in suspense as to when the next attack will come.1
Note the diagnosis in the first clause. Weakness is the precondition — the same precondition the chapter assigns to terror campaigns proper.
The effect:
These fits of temper, like other, more serious kinds of terror, can have a chilling effect on their targets, sapping the will to resist; when the simplest dealings with these people are potentially so unpleasant, why fight? Why not just give in?1
That is how the technique is paid for. Not by any individual outburst but by the accumulated cost of every ordinary interaction becoming a gamble — so that people concede small things in advance, permanently, to avoid the possibility.
And the concealment:
A violent temper or outlandish act, volcanic and startling, can also create the illusion of power, disguising actual weaknesses and insecurities.1
Then the countermeasure, which is short and correct:
And an emotional or out-of-control response to it just plays into the other person's hands, creating the kind of chaos and attention he or she thrives on.1
If you have to deal with a terroristic spouse or boss, it is best to fight back in a determined but dispassionate manner—the response such types least expect.1
Determined but dispassionate. Two words doing separate jobs. Dispassionate denies the chaos that is the actual objective. Determined prevents the other available failure, which is the quiet permanent conceding that the volatility is designed to produce.
The chapter's central finding applies here without modification: people adapt to what is regular and cannot adapt to what is not.
A boss who is reliably harsh is a known quantity. You can prepare, route around them, decide what is worth raising. A boss who might be anything is a permanent open question, and the open question is present in every interaction rather than in the difficult ones — which is why the cost is so much higher than the number of incidents suggests.
Which also explains the illusion of power Greene names. The volatility produces an effect wildly disproportionate to the person's actual capacity, exactly as fifty assassinations produced the impression of an omnipresent sect. The disproportion is the whole mechanism, and it works in both directions: it makes them seem more powerful than they are, and it means the underlying weakness is real.
You are dealing with someone whose reactions you cannot predict, and you have started managing your entire relationship with them around that.
Start by naming the actual cost, because it is almost never the incidents. It is the pre-emptive conceding — the things you have stopped raising, the requests you no longer make, the version of yourself you bring into the room. Those are the payment, they are continuous, and most people cannot say how much they have handed over because it happened one small avoidance at a time.
Then run the diagnosis Greene supplies, which is unglamorous and usually right: this behaviour is a marker of weakness rather than of power. Volatility is what people reach for when they cannot achieve the result any other way, and the volcanic display exists to disguise that. It does not make the person harmless and it does change what you are facing.
Then apply the dispassionate half, and understand what it costs. Any emotional response supplies exactly the chaos and attention the behaviour is generating, and the moment you match the register you are inside their preferred medium. This is genuinely difficult and it is the only part that reliably works.
Then apply the determined half, which is the part most people drop. Composure alone becomes accommodation — the quiet permanent conceding is a worse outcome than a scene, because it is invisible and it does not stop. Say the thing, flatly, and then stay.
And regularise everything you control. You cannot make them predictable. You can make your own conduct, timing and requests entirely predictable, which restores some of the ground the volatility removes and — usefully — makes any escalation on their side visibly a departure from a stable baseline rather than a move in an ongoing exchange.
Lacan's variable-length sessions are historical fact and were the proximate cause of his 1953 split from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and his 1963 exclusion from the International Psychoanalytical Association. The séance scandée was a genuine and much-debated technical innovation. [POPULAR SOURCE]
Greene's reading of it as pure institutional provocation is one position in a live argument and is presented as the fact of the matter. Lacan and his defenders held the short session to be a substantive technique — interrupting at the moment a signifier surfaces, refusing the patient's ability to pace and fill the hour, punctuating rather than terminating. Critics held it to be self-indulgence, a way of seeing more patients, or a display of analytic authority. Both readings survive the evidence, and Greene selects the one that makes it a strategy. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE on the intent.
And the patients are a parenthesis. Greene's own sentence concedes that the sessions were quite terrorizing for the patients and then supplies Lacan's justification — great therapeutic value — without comment. These were people in analysis, paying, in a dependent relationship, and the chapter's frame treats their experience as a side effect of a professional manoeuvre. That is the running SIGNAL of this build appearing in its smallest and most domestic instance, and it is worth naming precisely because the scale makes it easy to pass over.
The "terroristic" framing also flattens a real distinction. A volatile boss and a bombing campaign share a mechanism — unpredictable acts producing chronic anxiety and pre-emptive concession — and are not the same category of thing. Greene's move is to treat the form as the essential feature. It is a genuine insight about form and it makes the vocabulary do work it should not have to, and a reader who adopts it wholesale ends up describing an unpleasant manager in language built for mass violence.
One thing the page gets right and is worth keeping. Determined but dispassionate is correct, specific, and rare — most advice for handling volatile people supplies one half or the other, and each alone fails in a predictable way.
Against Strategy 33: The Chain-Reaction Strategy this is the chapter's transposition to ordinary life, and it is where Greene's claim that the strategy scales gets tested. The mechanism survives the scaling; the ethics change entirely, and the chapter's vocabulary does not.
Against The Irregularity Principle this is that principle at the interpersonal scale, and the connection is exact: a reliably harsh person can be adapted to, an unpredictable one cannot. The Blitz finding explains the volatile boss without modification.
Against Strategy 24: The Ordinary-Extraordinary Strategy and The Windigokan and Strategic Madness there is a direct line and a limit. Strategy 24's act crazy like a fox names the dosage rule — an occasional flash, because do this too much and you may be locked up — and the Windigokan page holds the threshold past which people stop modelling you and start routing around you. Lacan's escalation is the case that ran past it: he ended with his own school, which is another word for having been left.
Against Defending Against Passive Aggression the pairing is the more useful defensive object, since these are the two ways hostility arrives when it cannot be stated openly. Passive aggression is warm and deniable; this is volcanic and undeniable — and both are paid for the same way, in what the target concedes in advance to avoid an encounter.
Behavioral mechanics → The concession is pre-emptive, which is why it is invisible. Greene's mechanism is that people stop resisting because the simplest dealings with these people are potentially so unpleasant. The vault's Strategy 10: Deterrence Strategies holds the deliberate version — a reputation engineered so that engaging is not worth the cost — and John Boyd and the Porcupine the worked case.
The insight the pairing produces: deterrence and volatility produce the same behavioural output through opposite epistemics — the porcupine works because people can predict that engaging will be costly, and the volatile person works because people cannot predict anything, so they price in the worst case. Which means the second is strictly cheaper to operate and strictly worse to be near: it requires no consistency, no follow-through and no actual capability, and it extracts the same concessions. And it identifies the tell that separates them: a deterrent posture has a stated boundary you can stay outside of, and volatility does not — so if you cannot describe what would keep you safe, you are dealing with the second kind regardless of how the person explains themselves.
Psychology → Displays of volatility mark powerlessness, not power. Greene's diagnosis is that these behaviours come from people who feel weak and powerless and that the volcanic act creates the illusion of power, disguising actual weaknesses and insecurities. The vault's Grandiose Humility and the Grandiose Victim holds the general form of a self-presentation maintained at continuous cost to conceal its opposite.
Together they produce something that changes how the situation is read from inside: the intensity of the display is inversely related to the actual capacity behind it, because someone who can simply achieve the outcome has no reason to perform. This is not consoling — a person with little power and no restraint can still do considerable damage — but it corrects the specific misjudgement the display is designed to produce, which is that the person is formidable. And it explains why the dispassionate response works: it declines to supply the confirmation the performance requires, and a performance that is not being received has to escalate or stop, both of which are more legible than the state it was concealing.
The cost is never the incidents — it is the pre-emptive conceding, paid continuously in things you stopped raising, and it is invisible precisely because it accumulated one small avoidance at a time. And the display's intensity is inversely related to the capacity behind it, because someone who can simply achieve the outcome has no reason to perform.