Overheard on a train. A man was talking about his experience of being in analysis to his friend. The friend asked, ‘so what do you think is the main difference that psychoanalysis has made in your life?’ The first man replied, ‘well, beforehand every day was just the same old thing.’ ‘And now? asked the friend. ‘Well now’, he perked up, ‘its just one thing after another’.
The Torah says, ‘you do not see the world as it is, you see it as you are.’ The World is moulded and filtered by the psyche; world as projection-receiving Matrix which we then fondly imagine to be an objective reality, ‘the same old thing.’ The problem is not that life keeps repeating itself but that we only have one string to our bow and thus a limited number of songs to sing about it. Much of life’s suffering is inversely proportional to the conduit through which we permit ourselves to experience it. The narrower it is, the more shielded, the more the monotonous and consuming grind of ‘the same old thing’.
This dawning awareness is distasteful to any part of the psyche habituated to the notion that experience has something to do with events themselves. Psycho (soul)- analysis (disentangling) aims itself in part at the notion that a person can discover not only their truth, and thus separate from others, but also all their many and diverse truths, their inner complexity. Beyond that, like distant peaks beyond foothills, the Spirit of the Depths (Jung), the ‘Not-I’ of the objective psyche, which has its own truth and its own point of view, often somewhat contrary to the wishes of the personality.
As diverse aspects of the Self are able to be acknowledged and related to rather than simply sources of unconscious identification people tend to get much lighter with their stories. It’s no longer the clutching at straws of the drowning. Anxiety and paranoia decrease as this internal ‘elbow room’ increases, which is why a sense of humor often indicates favorable prognosis. If a person can pull their own leg then there is a new way of experiencing the same old thing emerging alongside the time worn habit. If a person can laugh at themselves without it being humiliating then so are they liable to be able to talk to themselves, to reflect, to consider, to take in all the angles.
Humor is the relief and freedom of being able to experience the old stuff in a new way. Contrary Others can stretch themselves out across a broad swath of your inner landscape and have differences of opinion without it necessarily leading to open warfare. The problem with this growing inner multiplicity is that life then gets messy whatever your story. Suddenly things just become complicated and the narrower point of view must be sacrificed along with the identity derived from it.
When you are a kid you want to be something definite, a Fireman, a Dancer, but then you discover you also fancy being a bank robber or Wolverine from X-men, inner gremlins which don’t fit your adapted world, caught now between the suffering of expired developmental sell-by dates and the suffering of not knowing who you are anymore. Not to mention subsequent encounters with all things ‘Not-I’ which, it turns out, also have an influential point of view, though sometimes horrible to address.
The idea that you cannot change the past misses the point. The important bit is not so much what happened but what meanings are ascribed to it. This is not to say that one simply needs a different attitude but rather that having different perspectives on the same situation is what you discover if you sit with it long enough and pay it sufficient attention.
Much of life’s seemingly gratuitous suffering often proves in the end to have been necessary for something. Adversity evokes consciousness, yet being cast adrift from the known, the one and only way of seeing things, is a threatening prospect. What if there is a storm? What if you get lost? Allowing such an anxious inner conversation is to grasp the tiller, to respond, to be less at the mercy of emotional entanglements, group think, compulsive knee jerk reactions, ‘the same old thing’.
The greater freedom of experience in ‘one thing after another,’ is to do with a kind of dissolution of fixed opinions of ‘how things are’, which allows them to be what they are more or less independent of your prejudices. We all have a few, some tucked away better than others, needing to be named in order to hold them in some kind of abeyance. Judging things ahead of time is the hallmark of a psyche dominated by a single story. Where there is only one possible interpretation of events you always know what happens next.
The man on the train was describing a journey the philosopher Heidegger would describe as the transition away from having the world ‘ready-to-hand’, as the one story that a breast might be to an infant, towards a multiverse where the breast also has its own life. Things as they are in relation to me somehow also become things in themselves, things ‘present-at-hand’, ‘Not-me’ and somehow autonomous; all of which has a way of making you question and doubt stuff which used to be carved in stone. It’s all a bit unnerving.
Being at the center of things is very grand but its also tiresome and undignified, a single story which suffocates the multiplicity of soul. To experience ourselves as the ones in orbit is much more complicated, full of insecurity and yet a Copernican revolution of the psyche which turns the lead of the same old thing into the gold of one thing after another.
