Aliens Exist
There’s an iconic moment in Ridley Scott’s Alien that has haunted viewers for decades, the chestburster scene. What makes it so terrifying isn’t just the gore, but the profound violation of identity. In the scene, something has been growing inside the character, Kane, using his body as a host. When it finally emerges, it does so in the most intimate and violent way possible. This thing really knows how to make an entrance. But even though Kane appear to be himself, albeit a little off, the alien was always there inside him. Kane was Kane and yet utterly other.
That image isn’t just sci-fi horror. It is also a great illustration for what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described as the structure of the unconscious. An “other discourse” that speaks through us in dreams, slips of the tongue, and the moments when we surprise ourselves with our own actions, like maybe “spontaneously” devouring a chocolate bar… or entire box.
We have all had those moments. You snap at someone you love, and immediately think: that wasn’t me. You wake up anxious from a dream you can’t quite recall and feel like you’ve woken in the wrong skin. You hear yourself say something cruel and wonder where on earth did that come from? The usual move is to dissociate: “I don’t feel like myself today.” But what if that foreign voice isn’t foreign at all? What if it is as much you as the normal, “authentic” voice you are used to hearing? What if, like the alien, it’s the part that is always beneath the surface but that you’re not always aware of?
For Lacan, there are always two voices running in parallel. One is the voice of the ego, which is the everyday narrator that tells us we are a good and kind person, weaving our experiences into a coherent story as if we are the hero of an unfolding epic. When we contradict ourselves it tells us that we do not usually behave like this, that this isn’t really us. It is the voice that tries to keep the story coherent. Then there is the other discourse, the unconscious speaking. It emerges in dreams, in jokes we didn’t mean to make, in slips of the tongue, in tears that catch us off guard. When you hear a random song in a supermarket and start balling your eyes out for a reason you don’t understand, it’s the unconcious speaking. Crucially, this isn’t some onion-like core of authenticity waiting to be revealed and it’s not a Jekyll and Hyde scenario either. It is stranger than that. It is you, but the version of you your ego doesn’t recognise.
Think of how this alien discourse appears. It isn’t smuggled in later, it is there from the beginning. Before we even enter the world, a place in language is waiting for us. Our names are chosen, our futures imagined, our rooms painted before we can focus our eyes. William James once described an infant’s early life as,"[The baby] assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion...". We might think of those early years as pure experience without categories. Language is what cuts through that noise. When we cry, adults respond with “Are you hungry? Cold? Tired?” They assign meanings to our discomfort, training us to desire in particular ways.
That process is an implantation. Language itself, the symbolic order, enters us and begins to structure our unconscious. The voices of our parents, our culture, our teachers echo inside us. They are ours, but they are also not.
When the alien bursts out, it feels random, but it was inevitable. The same is true of the unconscious. A cruel remark you blurt out might repeat something a parent once said to you. An anxious dream might be your psyche translating the day’s fears into symbols. There is a method, but it is not the method of conscious thought. It is a different kind of logic altogether.
The true horror of Alien is the collapse of boundaries. Kane becomes both victim and mother, host and parasite. The alien is him, but it is also entirely other. That is how the unconscious works. Those “that wasn’t me” moments aren’t lapses in identity, they are reminders that identity was never as neat as we thought. We are stitched together out of discourses not fully our own, yet inseparable from us.
The the part we might find most confronting is that you can’t get rid of it. You can’t fully understand it either. The unconscious operates on its own rules but again, not in a way that is a seperate force to us and something to be counteracted. The work is learning how to live with it. To shift from “that wasn’t me” to “that was also me.”
Unlike Scott’s alien, our inner alien never leaves. It doesn’t exit dramatically, it keeps leaking out in stray words, in choices we can’t quite justify, in attractions we can’t explain. We are always both Kane and the alien, host and parasite, ego and unconscious, the story we tell ourselves and the other discourse speaking through us. Even now, as you are reading this, your unconscious is busy making associations your conscious mind hasn’t caught up with. The alien is always there, always emerging, always reminding us that we are never fully the author of our own story. The work of is not to integrate or “solve” this otherness, but to acknowledge and live with it.