The Art of Forgetting

I have to remember things. A patient once asked me how I recall so many specific details about his life, and I told him my office is like a planetarium. When the session begins, the details of my life fade, and I begin to see people and events in the patient’s life light up and connect. Because I don’t have the same blind spots as the patient, I can make different connections and name them without hesitation. When the patient walks out, the lights go back up and the sky fades to white. Then another patient enters, the light dims, another sky emerges, and before I know it, I’m immersed in a different world.

None of this happens by effort or intention; I just let it happen. I’m aware of how psychically charged these connections may be, but because I’m not invested in the sky looking one way or another, I’m free to simply report on what I’m seeing. On my own time, back among the stars and orbits of my own memory, I have my own pain points.

Memories make me wince, just like anyone else. No matter how analyzed a person is or how many sessions one has attended, memories can hurt. All the good songs are sad songs, the best memories are bittersweet, and no one is immune from the sting of nostalgia or the pain of regret. Happy moments smuggle an aftertaste of grief because they too are gone, along with everything else that has ever happened.

We like to think remembering makes us more human. But what if it’s forgetting that makes life bearable?

Between Remembering and Living

Revisiting our own lives also happens against our will. Remembering in the presence of a psychoanalyst can liberate us from painful repetition by exposing unconscious patterns to the interpretation of a less implicated observer. But in the privacy of our own minds, we feel deeply implicated in past events, and memory can feel like a trap. Living in the past becomes an obstacle to the elusive experience of now.

Like so many human paradoxes, we want two incompatible things at once: to live in the moment, and to remember. Philosopher John Gray puts it this way:

“It seems to be natural for human beings to want incompatible things—excitement and a quiet life, freedom and security, truth and a picture of the world that flatters their existence. A conflict-free existence is impossible for humans, and wherever it is attempted the result is intolerable to them.”1

We cannot go on without forgetting, yet we’re terrified of what it might mean to forget. The tortured amnesia of Alzheimer’s disease looks like a living death, but the gift of a functional memory compels us to spend much of our time reliving, rewriting, and regretting. Memory feels like identity, even as it slowly erodes our attention and our time.

Regret and the Unlived Life

One of Freud’s most enduring insights is that those who cannot remember are doomed to repeat. Freud understood his patients’ symptoms as the “return of the repressed”2: some aspect of a past experience or relationship that can’t be consciously recalled but finds expression in a bodily symptom, repetitive action, or perplexing emotion. Usually the repression was connected to a forbidden desire that was unwelcome to the patient’s sense of self and contemporary social norms.

These days, things are a bit different. Many of the forbidden desires that wracked Freud’s patients’ bodies are more socially acceptable, and perhaps to them it might seem that today we have nothing left to hide. Yet many of us are still left wanting, in part because we want contradictory things. We self-sabotage to service both sides of a desire, and through listening and interpretation, psychoanalysts help patients articulate these paradoxes. Once they can clearly see how and why they’ve gotten in their own way, they can finally move on.

To “move on” is really to forget, and paradoxically we must fully remember in order to forget. In Freud’s day, patients didn’t remember enough, and the job of the analyst was to interpret in order to help the patient remember. Nowadays, they tend to remember too much, and the analyst’s job is to help them consciously forget.

Both in repression and in more typical recall, it is important to find ways to clearly articulate memories as straightforwardly as possible. Optimally, this work of clarified remembering can then enable us to forget what we just fought to recall, but actively and consciously this time around. To be in the next moment, we must choose to forget, again and again.

The Ethics of Conscious Forgetting

People generally believe that remembering one’s history is an ethical necessity. When patients report to me how tortured they feel by painful memories, I think otherwise. For example, many patients are plagued by “the one who got away,” the person who slipped through their fingers. The memory prevents them from engaging in their lives and insidiously undermines the real relationships they are slowly sabotaging.

We underrate the ethics of forgetting: a deliberate, conscious refusal to let the past feed future suffering. We are not disinterested archivists within our own minds, and we do not remember dispassionately. We feel profoundly implicated in our secret autobiographies, and remembering often brings up self-criticism and deep regret. To dwell in these emotions is not to live at all.

Forgetting is not easy, in part because it requires us to give up a certain pleasure echoing in the blue notes of nostalgia and regret. The psychoanalytic term for this is jouissance, a dark enjoyment attached to emotionally intense experiences, including suffering. Regret often betrays a kind of passion, accompanied by racing thoughts, a pounding heart, and damp fingertips. In the revisionist history of regret, we imagine a smarter, bolder self saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. Fantasy influences memory, and an alternate world takes shape.

This airbrushed alternate history is what Adam Phillips calls “the unlived life”3, into which most of us invest far too much time and energy. It hinges on a notion that a life well lived would carry no regrets, and its reliving is loaded with jouissance. However, given the realities of the human condition, even if we had said and done the right things and thereby created a better life, unanticipated regrets would inevitably emerge. We rarely want just one thing, and correcting one regret merely moves the blue note to the next measure. One fewer regret does not end the cycle, yet we replay the past as a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy, torturing ourselves for not having lived fully redeemed lives. Jacques Lacan writes:

“The lack of forgetting is the same thing as the lack in being, since being is nothing other than forgetting.”4

Being requires forgetting. It enables forward movement and is a condition for the possibility of love, since to love someone requires forgetting. We cannot ignore the past’s impact, but we can refuse to let every conflict carry the echoes of every past disagreement. Living with others means responding to what is happening now, not replaying what has already happened. As the Zen proverb puts it, “Let go, or be dragged.”

The analyst remembers because someone has to. But patients can, if they allow themselves, begin to forget. This may be why patients often struggle to explain exactly what occurred in a transformative analytic treatment. The ancient Greeks knew that life is best lived, not rehashed. In the underworld, souls returning to life were required to drink from the river Lethe to forget their past, so they could begin again. If the psychoanalyst works in a planetarium, this river runs through it.

The Forgiveness in Forgetting

We make meaning through memory, but the world of memory is a kind of underworld that can make life deathly. Although capital-T Trauma attracts the most cultural attention, we mostly suffer from smaller memories: the mean thing you said, the fly ball you missed, the joke you shouldn’t have told, the friend you didn’t call, the one that got away. The wounds make us wince a little bit every day, and only by forgetting these things can we live again. We cannot deny an event, but we can refuse to suffer it endlessly.

To remember is to regret, and conscious forgetting gifts us the grace that makes living possible. Memories are not actually our lives; they are the psychological constellations surrounding us, not comprising life but illuminating it. A life is not only what has happened or what will happen next, but what it is right now.

Maybe the highest form of memory is remembering what and when to forget. Letting go enables us to forgive ourselves and those who have wronged us, and to live a little more. With a clear view of all the constellations of memory twinkling above, we can choose where to look. The “one” that got away was less a person and more a moment. We weren’t paying attention, and we missed it. There will be another, and forgetting gives us a chance to meet it.

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1. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 17.

2. Sigmund Freud, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” (1896), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, pp. 157–185. The phrase “return of the repressed” also appears in later works such as Repression (SE XIV) and Moses and Monotheism (SE XXIII), and the concept runs throughout Freud’s work.

3. Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

4. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 52.

On Failing to Teach

The cashier scanned the tomatoes and placed the container upside down on the grimy conveyor belt. She had no idea it was inverted; the shape of the plastic container makes it look right-side up when it’s upside down. I had learned this the hard way myself, spilling an entire pint all over the kitchen floor.

I right-sided the container, bagged it, and offered my hard-won tomato wisdom, feeling helpful and hopeful. I even threw in a light complaint about the poor design, hoping to bond over a common enemy. The cashier paused for a beat, stared at me, and resumed scanning, acknowledging that she’d heard me and would not be joining the conversation. Silence followed.

Ready to exit a hero, I walked out in frustration and despair, ashamed to have tried. I had surely come off as condescending, and I felt demoralized. Joseph Conrad gives dramatic voice to this experience in Heart of Darkness:

“It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.”1

Bad feelings have a way of ballooning out of proportion, despite this being a comically minor tragedy in the grand scheme. And yet, can’t we transmit something, somehow? Even in circumstances like this, we must be able to communicate something of value to a stranger.

The problem with bad teachers, like me that day, is less the earnestness of intent and more the expectation of what teaching is and how it should go. The real lesson of teaching isn't about the subject matter or “learning something twice,” as the saying goes. It’s about the stakes and the dynamics of communicating something true.

The Fantasy of Transmission

We teach in order to be recognized as teachers. Teachers transmit knowledge, and the theory goes that the better the knowledge is packaged, the more frictionlessly the teacher can transmit it. Choose the right words, deliver them with care, and watch the lightbulb illuminate. This, we often say, is why we teach.

If only it were so easy. Aha moments, when they happen at all, tend to work retroactively, meaning they arrive well into the future in a narrative that begins with, “That’s when I realized…” Hindsight is 20/20, and as I wrote in a previous essay, most learning follows the logic of nachträglichkeit, Freud’s term for how meaning comes into being only after the fact.2

From a teacher’s perspective, this is maddening. You say the right thing at the right time, and it falls flat. If it does land eventually, nobody is hunting you down for congratulations. Further complicating things, every student brings their own world of projections to bear on the teacher, and these projections shape what they hear and how they hear it. Their absorption has more to do with their own psychology than whatever the teacher says, beautifully worded as it may be.

This is not the scenario we imagine when we sign up to teach, to coach, or to parent. We don’t picture blank stares and deferred comprehension. We want eurekas, not walls of negative transference. We want to play a leading role in someone’s transformation narrative, but we’re more likely just extras.

The Pain of Trying to Help

We offer up insights forged in personal experience, and often nobody cares. This undermines the apparent purpose of teaching, which feels more like ego-destroying work. If affirmation through epiphany is mostly imaginary, what’s the point?

To survive this existential concern, it’s important to question primary assumptions and consider how human communication actually works before setting any new benchmarks. Jacques Lacan elucidates a fundamental difficulty in communicating anything to anyone when he writes:

"The essence of language is not information, but misrecognition."3

Any communication, pedantic or otherwise, tends to backfire. Language is not a precision instrument, but a self-referential system of approximation. Even in the best-case scenario, we don’t fully understand what we ourselves mean. On the receiving end, we react emotionally to tone, and we mishear and interpret words in ways the speaker does not consciously intend.

Despite our best intentions, no one stands outside this failure. Everyone is caught in the same predicament—alone in our perspective, earnestly trying to share it clearly but never quite getting it across. Direct transmission of knowledge is a beautiful myth.

What the Teacher Learns

Lacan’s observation informs the quiet humility of the best teachers, who know they can’t simply hand over a truth they possess. At best, they can speak from it and trust that it might take hold in time, in ways they can’t predict or measure.

Teaching well means letting go of the fantasy of recognition. We must offer what we can and surrender to the process, trusting the truth will arrive when the time is right. This is the central pain of teaching: teachers are not in control of the outcome, and they probably won’t receive thanks for the learning they inspire.

When I was a distracted junior in high school, Mrs. Hudson assigned Heart of Darkness. My best effort wasn’t good enough, and I just couldn’t get through Conrad’s impenetrable prose and oblique narrative. Whatever she saw in the book I couldn’t find.

Thirty years later, upon rereading it, I heard Mrs. Hudson’s voice echoing through the fog of Conrad’s narration. She had been moved by its bleakness and enlivened by its dark perspective on the illusions of progress. Seventeen years after her death, she came back to me. A long lesson.

We offer our best words, hoping that someday they might find someone ready to receive them in their own voice, outside of our time, when they can finally make something of them. Bad teaching is seeking recognition; good teaching is speaking truthfully, and then simply waiting. Waiting for the perspective to shift. Waiting for the tomatoes to arrive right side up. Waiting, as Thomas Pynchon writes, “for the fog to burn off, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.”4

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References:

1. Conrad, J. (1899/2007). Heart of Darkness (p. 33). New York, NY: Penguin.

2. Freud, S., Nachträglichkeit (various essays including From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, 1918, Vol. 17, p. 120), sometimes translated as “deferred action” or “afterwardness.” In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vols. 1–24). London, England: Vintage.

3. Lacan, J. (1954–1955/1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (S. Tomaselli, Trans., p. 11). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

4. Pynchon, T. (2009). Inherent Vice (p. 369). New York, NY: Penguin Press.

I Should Have Known

On Knowing Too Late

It takes a long time to get to know someone, and nothing makes sense until it’s obvious. In the fog of everyday life, we rarely understand what we’re living through while it’s happening. Only later, after the moment has passed and the air has cleared, do we begin to figure out what hurts and why. That’s when we say the most quietly devastating thing a person can say: "I should have known."

We invoke these words after the breakup or the mistake, as if we could have received the now-obvious knowledge had we only paid better attention. Underneath this regret lurks a fantasy of mastery: if only I had seen clearly, I could have exerted control and prevented the pain. But what if that knowledge truly wasn’t available to us yet—not because we missed something, but because it hadn’t yet taken shape? What if knowing is always late?

Red Flags and Hindsight

When relationships end, we often comb our memory for clues like a detective at a crime scene. Hindsight rewrites ambiguity into evidence, as we flag early warning signs that now seem obvious in the frozen light of memory. The implication is clear: I could have avoided this pain if I’d only been smarter, more perceptive, and more honest with myself.

But this self-punishing pseudo-logic assumes we are neutral observers of reality. It posits that knowledge is always there for the taking in a free access storehouse of objective truth, and that we always have a choice to see it or to overlook it.

Psychoanalysis tells a different story: What we perceive—and thereby can know—is shaped by unconscious expectation and structured by desire along with past experience. This is not a bug in the system; it is the system. When we meet someone new, we don't see them as they are. We see them through the prism of transference: we relate to them as stand-ins for people from our past, and we attribute to them qualities that have more to do with the observer than the observed. These dynamics filter, distort, and often entirely block the very information we later claim we “should have known.”

Nachträglichkeit: When Meaning Arrives Late

Knowing someone is not like memorizing a textbook or a CV. It is an experiential, embodied process that unfolds over time, and it depends as much on our readiness to receive information as on the information itself.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan puts it plainly:

"Knowledge is the following: people present you with signifiers, and owing to the way they are presented to you, they mean nothing to you, and then there is a moment at which the fog clears, they suddenly mean something—that's the way it's always been."1

This is a crisp description of the psychoanalytic concept of nachträglichkeit, or deferred action—the structure by which meaning is produced after the fact. We don’t understand things when they happen. We comprehend them later, and in this deferred comprehension we retroactively rewrite what the past meant.

This deferred learning process requires feeling the pain of not having known something for too long. No matter how much we try to sweeten the deal, teaching is hard and learning is painful, which is why the pro-education “learning can be fun” slogan feels fake to many people. To learn anything is to acknowledge you didn’t know that thing for the entirety of your life until just a moment ago. For most people that’s not “fun."

All we have is situated understanding, constrained by what our unconscious structure allows us to perceive. What we call “mistakes” are often just moments that hadn't yet become meaningful in the context of what came later. Yet when mistakes happen and someone gets hurt, we treat the past as if it were always-already knowable. When a relationship ends and someone says, “I should have known,” what they really mean is, “I know now, and I wish I had known then.” But those are two different states of being, separated by a process we don’t control.

This is why advice rarely works. It presumes that knowledge is something one person can hand to another, like a screwdriver. But unless the recipient is ready to receive it—until the words mean something—at best they’ll orbit like a moon, always nearby, never quite arriving. Advice fails because we haven’t metabolized the experience that will make us open to it yet.

Knowing How vs. Knowing That

Most of us assume that knowledge leads to mastery, which is the kind of knowing that brings control, prediction, and prevention. This model of knowledge fits narrow, mathematically structured fields—physics, chemistry, engineering—but collapses in the complexity of the human world.

You don’t “learn” your best friend the way you learn algebra. You become familiar with what it’s like to be with them. This procedural knowledge, stored as much in the body as in the mind, is less calculation and more finesse. It’s a “knowing how,” not “knowing that.” Relationships defy mastery and depend on the slow accumulation of know-how within a field of mysterious complexity.

John Gray writes:

"If you have this negative capability [to accept uncertainty], you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need."2

Gray is echoing something psychoanalysis has long known: that real knowing often looks like not-knowing, like staying with the murkiness until the fog clears just enough. Not forcing meaning, but letting it emerge. There is something quite ordinary about this procedural knowledge. It is not fancy or intellectual, and as a result many patients struggle to intelligently communicate their accounts of profoundly transformative long-term therapies that involve a process of opening up to this new form of knowing.

The Pain of Learning

We are always telling ourselves stories about ourselves as generous, perceptive, forgiving people. We live in a first-person perspective, and we instinctively defend our main character’s integrity. However, much of that narration talks us out of the raw, bodily knowledge that experience leaves behind.

But some things leave a trace in the body that no story can fully erase—things like blindly loving the wrong person, or ignorantly failing another. When we look back, we feel the pain of a mistake and can’t square it with our life narrative. Then we make a second mistake: we apply free will to events that have already happened. We retreat to a fantasy world of prior knowingness by saying: I should have seen it. I should have acted sooner. I should have known.

Those phrases reflect the fantasy of an infinitely attentive self who is immune to transference and filled with all the facts. To linger in that fantasy is to learn nothing, because it denies the truth of what regret actually represents. Hard-won knowledge is the truest kind we have, and we often earn it through pain and regret.

Grace begins only when regret runs its course, when we recognize the pain we feel now is the knowledge we didn’t have then. We only learn what we were always going to learn the hard way.

"I should have known" is the sound of someone who knows something now, too late—which is the only time knowing ever really arrives.

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References:

1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other, trans. Bruce Fink (Polity Press, 2023), p. 173.

2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), p. 165.

Besides Happiness

Rethinking the Good Life

Happiness is slippery. We know money doesn’t buy it, yet we struggle to grasp or even define it in the present, often recognizing it more readily in the past. It is typically described as a blend of features including pleasure, peace, and self-actualization, experienced retroactively as nostalgia. Despite all our talk of happiness, we live in a society afflicted by despair and meaninglessness. Perhaps we should address this meaninglessness directly, considering the value of the human world against the backdrop of the vast universe. Given these results, is happiness worth pursuing? To answer that, we must first ask: What is happiness?

Happiness as Good Memories

To describe happiness, we often recount memories of a happier time. Nostalgia arises from the contrast between a past experience, perhaps mundane at the time, and its later idealized recollection. By romanticizing the past, we diminish the present. But was the past truly happier, or do these memories merely reflect our present dissatisfaction? We easily dismiss our grandparents’ rosy recollections as somewhat delusional, yet our own secondhand happiness is hardly more credible.

Happiness as Good Feelings

We often think of happiness as present-tense pleasures such as surprise, bliss, and joy. Yet even in moments of enjoyment, we are rarely fully present. We anticipate the next experience, and the pleasure often falls short. The pursuit of gratification can be self-destructive.

Pleasure can also manifest in overtly destructive behaviors, such as public shaming. Observe the barely suppressed joy of a social media pile-on, in which large groups of strangers righteously band together to destroy someone’s life while masking their repressed thrill beneath the guise of mob justice. In fits of public sanctimony, we project our worst qualities onto scapegoats and tap into the heart of darkness within the unconscious.

From wistful nostalgia to the titillation of public shaming, these forms of happiness reveal the destructive undercurrent that runs through our pursuit of pleasure, described by Lacan thusly: “The drive is profoundly a death drive.” Whether it's the fleeting high of immediate gratification, the perverse joy of vicarious cruelty, or the undermining of the present in favor of a supposedly better past, pleasure often becomes entangled with darker impulses.

There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying life’s simple pleasures, but emphasizing their pursuit is hardly a profound insight. Most of us are already doing this anyway. Yet given their fleeting nature and our tendency toward self-sabotage, it’s clear that a lifelong chain of simple pleasures does not reliably add up to a life well-lived.

Happiness as Self-Actualization

Another theoretical path to happiness lies in the ideal of self-actualization. The drive toward individual self-realization began at least 2,300 years ago in Greece, with Aristotle. He believed each being has a function (ergon), and happiness lies in fulfilling it through reason and rationality.

On this theory, the philosopher John Gray writes, "We think of a happy life as one that culminates in eventual fulfillment. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have encouraged us to think in this backward-looking way. But it means thinking of your life as if it had already ended, and none of us knows how we will end. Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live." 

No one can predict their life's course, and even our best-laid plans can be undone. Given our limited knowledge in youth, such a demanding and uncertain mission may be unrealistic for many.

Happiness as Tranquility

Moving beyond pleasure and self-actualization, inner peace is another common conception of happiness. Conscious thought defines us (as Descartes noted), yet we often seem happiest transcending it. Our defining feature is also the source of our deepest suffering, and in my work, I often help people quiet their minds to live more fully.

Many approaches, including meditation, the pursuit of "flow" states, and Stoicism, propose achieving happiness by suspending the thinking mind. These strategies, though promising, are difficult to sustain and often fail. None account for the power of the unconscious, which consistently undermines such strategies in pursuit of its own irrational aims.

Lacan reframes this dilemma as, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” As a psychoanalyst, he recenters the essence of our being around the unconscious, over which we have little knowledge and almost no leverage. Driven by primal urges and amoral drives, the unconscious exerts a powerful influence over our thoughts and actions, frequently undermining our best intentions. Even the most consummate rationalist is driven by unconscious forces of which they are entirely unaware.

A Good Life

Rather than pursuing a state or experience, the good life may consist of toggling between worlds, gaining awareness from this movement. We live mostly in the human world, structuring our lives around families, economies, and religions that are inscrutable to all other living creatures. Yet this human world is nestled within a universe that, as far as we can tell, is mostly not alive and is radically indifferent to human affairs.

This movement unlocks a particular wonder: contemplating an incomprehensible universe that encompasses an equally complex human world. This is not a sustained state of mental peace, but a fleeting moment of openness, in response to a sunrise, powerful music, starlight, a great book, or a cool breeze.

The pursuit of happiness can prevent this movement, trapping us in cognitive loops and fooling us into believing that the human world is the only world worth considering. As Lacan’s work suggests, the pursuit of understanding can itself be a trap, a way of avoiding the fundamental mystery at the heart of being. The crucial insight is that both the human and non-human worlds profoundly matter, yet both elude our comprehension.

These moments are not eurekas of understanding but rather of non-understanding, in which we feel the limits of human knowledge. They open us up to a richer, more meaningful existence, one that embraces the limits of our sentience. What if, instead of striving for happiness, we simply aimed to see things as they truly appear? Perhaps then we could accept the world, and ourselves, with the clarity of awe.

Never Say Never Compare

You should stop comparing yourself to other people. But you won’t stop. Because you can’t. Because nobody can.

Self-comparison just happens. Contrary to what any guru might say, nothing can stop its appearance in consciousness. However, once a self-comparative thought appears, we don’t have to follow it all the way down. There is another option.

Much of the time we reflexively follow the thought and dive into the self-critical abyss. Hopefully we snap out of it some time later, worse for the wear and even shorter on time. So much of life is wasted in these fugue states of imaginary rivalry and conflict, fueled by self-comparison. This is truly tragic because it is avoidable, at least in part.

We can’t fully eradicate self-comparison, but if we lessen the duration of the pain it causes, we win back a great deal of lost time. To do this, we have to understand what drives it.

How It Works

We all carry around a verbose narrator that is constantly recounting our autobiography to an audience of one. This chatty raconteur is known as the ego, and it interprets past and contemporary life events in the context of an ongoing saga that places each of us in the center of the universe.

For the ego, the opinions of others, both expressed and imagined, carry tremendous weight, and it depicts the individual as not only the main character in its own narrative, but also as a crucial character in other people’s internal worlds. Billions of these incompatible narratives silently dominate nearly every human mind around us, and everyone’s bespoke soap opera is thematically quite similar.

The narrative generally takes the shape of an underdog story: we harbor unrecognized gifts and talents, but circumstances prevent us from realizing our potential. Powerful forces exploit us to satisfy their needs, but we shall rise up and slay that dragon…some day.

This capillary-tightening story of struggle and redemption is very important to many of us, and we defend our narratives with a litany of specific personal adversities. But of course, literally everyone faces adversity because life is a long series of adversities, punctuated by occasional relief.

This storytelling perpetuates a process that started in infancy, and those who allow it to dominate their minds throughout adulthood slowly bleed themselves of attention and energy. To solve the problem of self-comparison, we have to insistently interrupt this narratological process.

The Wrong Way Out

Staring at curated images of perfection on the internet makes people anxious and depressed. Conventional wisdom dictates that social media is splitting us into tribal binaries and that the only way out is to delete social media and talk to people in real life. However, many of us can’t make these changes because our social lives and livelihoods require some engagement with this technology.

Not only is deleting social media not so easy, but this logic also reinforces the very tribalism it claims to critique and further contribute’s to everyone’s underdog narratives. It slots social media into the role of the proverbial dragon, and once we delete some apps and brag about it, we’ll slay it and bring peace throughout the land.

This advice ignores that these ego-based tribal binaries may slightly predate Facebook. Human history indicates that people have been competing with, hating, and scapegoating each other in the service of their own personal mythologies for some time now. Vaporizing Big Tech won’t bring us back to a natural harmony that never existed in the first place.

Additionally, this conventional wisdom addresses the symptom only at the macro level of society, and it puts unrealistic pressure on the individual to take on Big Tech. No individual can take down an entire system through psychologically hygienic personal choices. However, we can change our lives by changing our minds.

The Way Out

Rather than singlehandedly orchestrating the downfall of the tech gods, we can undermine our own ego narratives from the bottom up. Firstly, we have to accept that self-comparison is hard-wired into us. It derives from our animal ancestry, and it never goes away. If we give into it, we choose to live in a zero-sum world of rivalry that robs us of energy and attention.

Secondly, we must accept that the narrative itself is only in our heads. We all face our own adversities, and everyone from Musk and Bezos on down tends to frame their lives around theirs. But if everyone self-brands as the undermined underdog, then where are all the top dogs?

In fact, the whole narrative is a double cross, and the persecution is an inside job. The ego is the persecutor, and the call is coming from inside the house. Our narrator is the one who makes us feel less-than, and it is the only thing keeping us down.

Ultimately, any time we find ourselves drawn into any narrative about our lives, we have a choice: to follow the narrative, or to see this moment as it truly is, beyond story. All we ever have is the energy and attention available to us right now. When we choose the second option, we can channel that energy and attention into action that will both improve our mood and subvert the underdog narrative.

While the ego can never be killed, it can be starved. When we do things we care about rather than stew over various imaginary shortcomings, we rob it of narrative plot points. This feels really good in the short term, and improves our lives in the long term. The pursuit of our desire empowers us and deprives ego of its life-draining power, one choice at a time.

Against Infatuation: Love But Not In Love, Part Two

Q: I love my partner but am not in love. Is that a problem?

A: It depends. 

If you are calling this a “problem,” the true problem is likely your perspective and not the other person at all. You’ve fallen for a cultural and psychological trap, and you’ve checked out of a relationship that now feels emotionally stunted. On the other hand, if you accept the truth about love and infatuation, you will see that “love but not in love” is not the cause of your relationship problems, but the solution. 

Throughout childhood we are told that romantic love is the pinnacle of human experience. Popular media depict the “in-love” feeling as the key to self-realization and happiness. Adults tell us that this feeling will let us know we have found “The One,” and we will become our best selves in head-over-heels love. If the love is true we will stay in love forever, and the relationship will be our respite from the suffering of everyday life, happily ever after. 

This is the mainstream love mythology (MLM), the current form of the ancient romantic tradition of courtly love. Despite its minimal resemblance to actual emotional reality, most of us walk around profoundly influenced by MLM, and the consequences in real relationships can be dire. When we grow up and find ourselves problematizing the “love but not in love” situation, our resulting doubt can slowly and agonizingly disintegrate a potentially great relationship.

For happier, more sustainable relationships, we must first carefully observe the psychological mechanics of romantic love and differentiate that from commitment. Then we must examine the two sides of commitment, both internal and external. Once we move past MLM and commit to emotional honesty within, we open ourselves up to the possibility of commitment to another person.

The Story

Love for a beautiful stranger is intense. Words seem too small to express it because the huge feelings are so disproportionate to the non-context of this brand new relationship. As a result, lovers often communicate through artistic metaphor, especially via music. Infatuated lovers temporarily inhabit a technicolor universe in which past/present and self/other distinctions blur, but within a year or so these psychological phenomena fade. However, because MLM insists that “true” love never dies, we may grow uncertain as the relationship starts to feel less magical and more ordinary. This anxious uncertainty leads to doubt, which may cause us to leave the relationship. 

For those who stumble into it, falling in love is a beautiful pain/pleasure high and should be fully experienced as such. However, like any high it disappears, and it’s not for everybody. There is no problem with never falling in love. Many psychologically healthy people, due to disposition and/or circumstances, never fall head-over-heels in love, and many of them enjoy great relationships throughout their lives. 

To judge a relationship based on the presence or absence of a passive psychological phenomenon beyond anyone’s control is absurd. Furthermore, because infatuation hinges upon a complex psychological distortion, it actually hinders a couple’s ability to get to know one another. Once it’s gone only nostalgia remains, and only then can lovers truly see each other as they are.

Couples’ nostalgic origin stories (“…and the rest is history”) are endearing, but they merely add to the confusion, partially due to the statistical phenomenon known as survivorship bias. When we think of happy marriages, we think of the couples whose relationships have survived and who talk about love like it’s their job. We unconsciously omit all the bitterly divorced couples who no longer sing that song, and we forget about the countless destructive relationships that also began with head-over-heels infatuation. 

The Commitments

Time is the great equalizer. No matter how high the love fever gets, once it breaks it’s gone forever. The ecstatic pleasures of MLM have almost nothing to do with the construction and maintenance of a long-term relationship, other than sometimes being its emotional starting point. 

At some point a significant crisis in the relationship emerges, and that crisis tests the strength of the commitment. From then on the relationship will be increasingly characterized by the ebb and flow of the various challenges that life delivers. Successfully overcoming crises together creates meaning and strengthens the bond like nothing else can.

Commitment happens on two levels: internal and external. Internal commitment starts before the relationship begins. It is the complete ownership of emotion. Self-deception is the most destructive force in any relationship, and a relationship in which true feelings are denied and projected is doomed. In that situation, every conversation involves some form of lying or gaslighting. If we are in denial of our own feelings, we can’t honestly engage with anyone or fully commit to anything.

This internal commitment is also known as emotional availability, and it is the most reliable predictor of anyone’s likelihood to find a partner. Once we commit to ourselves, we open the possibility of committing to another person. This external commitment doesn’t happen once over dinner, after sex, or during a formal ceremony. It is the active form of love, or love as a verb, and it is the process of actively doing things for one person to make life better for both: showing up, prioritizing, remembering, and owning all that’s said and done. On a long enough timeline, a successful relationship is defined not by the presence or absence of a single emotion, but by the fullness of the mutual commitment.

The Doubt

The “love but not in love” dilemma seems like it’s about a lack of the “in-love” emotion, but it is not. It is about a lack of certainty. It results from anxiety around that uncertainty, rooted in leftover MLM confusion and an underlying resistance to internal commitment. 

When we remain internally uncommitted, our own feelings are obscured by ideas of how we “should” feel, and we try to solve emotional problems with rational thought. To compensate for our missing internal emotional compass, we crowdsource relationship advice and collect myriad conflicting opinions, but those external voices only amplify the confusion. The lack of internal emotional input only deepens the doubt. In this state, “love but not in love” is an existential riddle, and escape feels like the only answer.

In the face of the inherent unpredictability of relationships, it is only natural to long for a sure thing. However, uncertainty is a standard feature of all consequential relationships, and any guarantee is an illusion. Any relationship that counts also generates anxiety, and not all anxiety is bad. Ideally we can channel this anxiety into motivation to prioritize this important relationship and show up as our best selves. 80% of success is indeed just showing up, and for the 20% beyond that, there are no guarantees.

The Answer 

Loving relationships are a refuge from the burdens of everyday life, but in contrast to the MLM portrait of love, they are not leisure. Relationships are ever-changing and require active, daily attention. Internal and external commitments must be remade again and again as conflicts continually emerge. When taken seriously, relationships are not a form of leisure, but are the highest and noblest form of work. 

The work of relationships is continually seeking out and overcoming resistances to commitment and surmounting obstacles together as one. At times this work is  repetitive, routinized, and rote. At other times it feels supportive, soulful, and surprising. Over time the scrapbook of challenges faced and obstacles overcome becomes a source of profound meaning that humbles and transcends both partners. 

By then infatuation is long gone, and no one is “in love” à la MLM. A mutually committed relationship does not wrestle with the state of “love but not in love.” It actively performs that state every day not as an existential question, but as its answer. 

What Is Emotional Availability?

People often reach out to me to figure out why they can’t get into a relationship, or why their relationships all end in the same way. They often arrive full of blame. They blame the apps, social media, society’s superficiality, their narcissistic ex, men and women, the economy, and so on. Indeed these things are full of flaws, as are most things touched by humans.

However, in relationships the problem is almost never any of these things. Usually the problem is emotional availability: the person has been chronically withdrawn, and will have to become emotionally available before a substantive relationship can ever begin. So, what does it mean to be emotionally available?

First, let’s start with what it is not. Emotional availability is not reciting your psychosexual history to anyone who will listen. It is not ventilating past trauma in mixed company, nor is it weeping, yelling, or any other demonstrative display of emotion.

Emotional availability is engagement with three fundamental elements: attention, patience, and desire. With all three in play, emotional availability becomes possible. Remove any element, and the person reads as emotionally unavailable.

Attention

Emotional availability is attentional availability. When spending time with someone we want to connect with, we have to be actually paying attention to what the other person says and does. In a state of unavailability, we cannot pay attention. Our focus drifts to the noodles on the plate or the squirrel out the window. Our eyes glaze over. We wait to talk.

Many artistic people struggle with attention because in a creative context, unfocused daydreaming can generate a rich wellspring of ideas and directions. However, in the presence of another person generously sharing their mind, daydreaming signals stinginess and precludes connection. Attention requires energy, and paying attention is exhausting. But in order to reap the benefits of connection, this energy must be generously invested.

Patience

A relationship is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time. The tendency to rush in and spend weeks in a row with a new person is generally counterproductive, as is limiting contact to twice a month. The contact becomes either so intense that the relationship quickly takes over the two partners’ identities, or so minimal that the relationship never gains any momentum. After quickly confirming mutual desire, both people have to live patiently in a state of simmering tension between dependence and independence for a while.

This tension generates anxiety in everyone, and in order to grow a relationship, we have to tolerate the stress and live with the uncertainty for as long as it takes. Anxiety can provoke us to collapse this tension, either through overfeeding or starving the relationship, but unfortunately this subverts the slow growth that emotionally secure relationships require. Patiently enduring this state of tension and uncertainty is mandatory.

Desire

Emotional availability is knowing your desire and communicating what you want. People like desirous friends and partners because desire has a compounding effect. One person’s position of wanting enables the other to more openly want, and this mutual authorization compounds over time on both sides of the relationship.

In order to get what you want, you have to ask for things. I often speak with people who feel frustrated that life consistently lets them down and never gives them what they want. It often turns out that they don’t ask for what they want, or even know what they want. If you can’t put your desire into words, the search is over before it begins.

In a state of emotional availability, we exude confidence through simple expressions of desire. Confidence is not bravado or posturing; confidence is simply wanting things, openly and notoriously.

Strategy

For people who struggle with emotional availability, the quickest hack is eye contact. Eye contact strongly signals attention and desire, and builds generative tension between two minds by signaling focus and engagement. People avoid it for a host of reasons, but by forcing yourself to make eye contact, your specific struggles with emotional availability will come to the surface and will thereby become more available to observation and correction.

Another hack: do fewer drugs. Recreational drugs (including alcohol and off-label ADHD meds) simulate emotional connection in social contexts and therefore appeal to emotionally unavailable people. Many passionate partnerships have been theoretically hatched over shots and lines, but vanishingly few meaningful relationships have emerged. If emotional unavailability might be a theme in your life, slow down on the booze and drugs.

Conclusion

All this patient engagement with attention and desire can be exhausting. Emotional availability requires stamina, which must be built slowly. Getting to know someone is always an approach, never an arrival, and no one ever fully gets there. On the bright side, substantive relationships built through emotional availability never truly end, and they somehow live on and evolve in our minds and bodies even long after the partner is gone. Because such relationships continue to pay dividends throughout life, it is imperative to invest in emotional availability as soon as possible, to generate compounding emotional riches.

Jealous Love and Other Conspiracies

He startles awake. He taps his phone. 2:04am, no messages. He wonders why she didn’t reply to his goodnight text. He begins texting, knowing what he is about to do, yet unable to stop himself. 47 texts and five voicemails later, he has played out multiple breakups and reconciliations. The damage is done. She calls in the morning, saying she can’t take this anymore, and tells him it’s over. He is devastated, yet still pretty sure she was having the best sex of her life last night. Alone in her bed, she feels strangely relieved, yet hopeful that he can find a way to get over this crazy-making jealousy.

Toxic jealousy is a special kind of hell for both partners, and the fallout frequently brings at least one of them into therapy, asking why. The first therapeutic step is to identify the problem, which is often best clarified through analogy: What do the jealous lover, the conspiracy theorist, and the six year old in pajamas all have in common? They all imagine a horrific universe full of evil strangers who are hell-bent on humiliating, hoodwinking, and devouring them, respectively. Crucially, in each of their narratives about the darkness surrounding them, they are the central characters.

This fundamental belief, casually known as Main Character Syndrome, leads them into a world of psychological self-torture. Many of us drift into MCS at times, but they take this belief to cinematic heights, casting themselves as beleaguered protagonists in gripping tales of betrayal and discovery. However, they fail to recognize that (1) strangers, as a rule, do not care about our lives, (2) even loved ones are hardly ever thinking of us when we’re not right in front of them, and (3) the movie of our lives does not remotely resemble a tense psychological thriller. It looks more like a rambling, plotless nature documentary, peppered with tiny bits of action here and there.

For the vast majority of our lives, no one is watching, and no one cares. Care is curiosity about who we are and what we intend, and acceptance of our mistakes and shortcomings. Beyond a parent, partner, or therapist, very few people actually care. For most people, the only thing that has a chance of mattering is an object we make or a service we provide. They like the thing we do, not the thing we are. If we stop doing the thing they like, we fade away.

There is a cold brutality to the indifference of others, and many of us fail to soberly observe this indifference, much less integrate it into a realistic, stable worldview. Stuck on our MCS default setting, we often don’t account for indifference at all. Rather, we toggle wildly between reactive optimism or pessimism, based on emotion: one day people are great and life is beautiful, and the next day people are cruel and life is horrible. These self-centered emotional truths ignore the glaring indifference all around us that is simply part of nature, and it’s easy to forget that we humans are not at all separate from nature, despite our myriad creature comforts and glitzy technologies. Like every other element of the natural world, humans may seem either cruel or kind at times, but they’re mostly indifferent.

The grizzly bear doesn’t care whether we actually intend to threaten her cub. The rain doesn’t account for our family picnic. Death doesn’t work around our dinner plans. These natural phenomena are guided by their own processes, and those processes simply carry on without care. When other humans operate similarly, responding to motivations that are indifferent to the needs of others, it is dangerously easy to attribute cruel intentions. Such attributions make life unnecessarily painful, and over time they have a compounding effect that destroys relationships and transforms the world into a very lonely place.

All relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate, are full of indifference. Very rarely do partners in a couple think only of each other. Most of the time, neither is thinking of the other person at all. An intimate relationship is, paradoxically, an emotional arrangement that maximizes one’s ability to be indifferent, while still maintaining a deep connection. The jealous partner is troubled by any whiff of indifference and correctly intuits that when the other person is otherwise occupied, they could be really thinking about anything. Instead of observing and accepting this indifference, he refuses to perceive it and instead substitutes a fantasy of vicious carnality.

The jealous fantasy is a close cousin to both the child’s fantasies of monsters in the darkness, and the byzantine conspiracy theories of the isolated adult. In all these cases, a world that is dark and unknowable generates terror. The sense of knowing something that can never be known, however delusional, precludes this terror. A world teeming with cruel, bloodthirsty monsters relishing in the world’s destruction becomes “the devil you know.” In the paranoid mind, this deal with the devil feels like a worthwhile tradeoff and in many cases can be quite energizing.

We are all in the dark about other people. We don’t know what other people want from us, and much of the time we don’t even know what we want for ourselves. Everyone else is working with the same radically incomplete information about themselves and others around them. And like the mama bear and the rain cloud, they are motivated by obscure forces, mysterious to even themselves. They are not preoccupied with our feelings and intentions.

To live optimally, it is crucial to recognize that this movie we are all living out together is not structured like a first-person narrative. There is no plot, nor is there any grand design to keep us down. We keep ourselves down by pretending that strangers have the energy, attention, or inclination to care about us. Only by insistently dropping the thriller narrative and de-centering ourselves can we focus on what we actually want.

Making Decisions

Many patients who come to see me cannot make big decisions. They can get out of bed in the morning and work a job, but when faced with more complex life decisions like choosing a home, a career, or a mate, they balk. They pace. They lose sleep. The process of indecision shreds their nerves and irritates everyone it touches. For many people, the essential question of therapy is: how do people make decisions? Can I learn to do that?

Almost everyone has been through the pain of indecision, and we all know it feels like a form of torture. When conscious computation reaches its limit, we can get trapped in a cognitive loop governed by the notion that if we just go over it one more time, we will figure it out. Keep it up for a few days, lose some sleep, fray those nerves, and this huge decision gets made by whatever impulse is closest to the surface at the deadline. Basically a coin flip.

When faced with complex situations like creating a career or choosing a partner, we encounter a huge number of criteria with woefully incomplete data. In bouts of indecision, priorities keep shifting up and down, never settling in any one order. Indecisive people get stuck in the process of arbitrarily placing one criterion at the top of the priority pile, making an imaginary decision based on that priority, playing that decision through, and feeling settled for some number of minutes or hours. But then another criterion finds its way to the top of the pile, and the process repeats ad infinitum, until a coin flip eventually breaks the deadlock. This robotic style of cognition turns us into prisoners of our own minds.

A patient who suffers from chronic indecision once told me that "the best decision is a decision made,” which would be true if all decisions were essentially the same. However, it turns out that some decisions are much, much better than others. The quality of a decision has less to do with the actual call that was made, and much more to do with the process that led to that call. In the cognitive loop of chronic indecision, we use what looks like the smartest technology — thinking, thinking, thinking — only to arrive at the least intelligent decision-making process (the coin flip). Because the process of arriving at that decision was so arbitrary, any decision made that way will always leave us doubting, regardless of the outcome.

Many people believe that we would be much better off without feelings, since feelings seem clearly illogical. Some speculate that the human mind will eventually be downloadable, and voluminous futurist writings perpetuate these notions. These speculations are very activating for people who are invested in pure cognition, and these same people also tend to be notably uninvested in the emotional dimension of human experience. 

But in fact, the route to meaningful decision-making must run through the terrain of feeling, not around it. Liberation from indecision can only be achieved through the integration of emotion, which operates at the frontier between body and mind. The mind that only knows how to think computationally is not fully embodied. Only the embodied mind can think sensitively, and feel thoughtfully. Integrated embodiment is a particularly human power. 

We do not make meaningful decisions through pure cognition. Purely cognitive decisions strive for correctness, but correctness is not particularly meaningful. We need emotion to guide us because without emotion, there is no meaning. A decision that is arrived at through deep engagement with thought and emotion represents a striving for truth, not correctness. Meaning-making through this tension between thinking and feeling is the human superpower, and avoiding emotion renders us powerless through indecision. 

It seems almost certain that in the future, the neural circuitry of a human brain will be transferred to a hard drive. Many believe that this computer will then experience some version of human consciousness, which may be true. But the notion that it would somehow replicate the human experience profoundly misrepresents what a fully operational human actually is. Because we are embodied, feeling beings, whatever experience a downloaded brain is having inside of a computer is not a human experience. Conscious perhaps, but not human.

This notion that human essence can be reduced to pure computational cognition not only distorts reality, but it also wreaks havoc in the personal lives of those who harbor it. I have met many people who believe stone-cold rationality is the ultimate form of consciousness. They tend to have lots of trouble in romantic relationships (which are not entirely rational engagements), and they tend to be very hard on themselves for not living up to various hyper-rational personal ideals. While it may be possible to download a pattern of brain circuitry, rewiring a human mind/body into a purely rational creature from the inside is impossible. But it does not stop some of us from trying. 

On a long enough timeline, these attempts always fail to satisfy because they represent a turning away from the truth of what we are: cognitive-emotional mind-bodies comprised of stardust, somehow connected to every other bit of matter in the universe. Striving for truth from this integrated position feels like freedom, and looks like decisiveness.

Striving, Seeking, Finding

A lot of people feel oversexed. Or at least a lot of the people I talk to. Over the course of any long-term treatment, I can expect to hear something like, “I think my sex drive is much higher than most people’s.” I hear this all the time, and it’s usually admitted like a shameful secret. And assuming my patients do not self-select for depravity, I suspect a good portion of the populace feels this way too.

To be clear, I’m not a sex therapist. People come to me to explore issues that usually don’t sound specifically sexual: anxiety, depression, procrastination, lack of motivation, loneliness. But it turns out that many of the people I work with also happen to believe they live in the excessive sexual margins, outside the normal range of sexual desire.

However, a “normal” sexual drive is not a real thing. If you consider how sexuality actually manifests, the concept of a normal sex drive is nonsense. For instance, here’s a thing no one ever said after a pleasurable sexual experience: “That was neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. I was exactly the right amount of turned-on throughout. Good to be normal! ” A more typical post-coital thought sequence: “Wow, that was intense. Did I do anything too-crazy there? Hope not. Also, I’m really sweating a lot.”

Desire is not served by the ounce, and we are not driven in reasonable, titrated quantities. The tap is either on or off, and we have little control over the flow rate. When it’s on, the experience can be overwhelming to the point of making a person feel insane. If ignorance is bliss, then sexuality thrives in that ignorance, where the only meaningful thing in the universe exists in the organ, the movement, the feeling. Civilized society defines itself in opposition to such blind hedonism.

As a result, sexuality can never be fully integrated into a satisfying set of social norms for any great length of time. Humans have been running real-time experiments with sexuality and culture since the dawn of history: polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, free love, serial monogamy, classical monogamy, and countless other permutations. Some polyamorists declare a new path to sexual freedom, but jealousy and exhaustion tend to tear apart the best-laid poly plans. The byzantine regulations that eventually form in any commune or poly group often inhibit its members just as much as, if not more than, the societal norms they are theoretically escaping. In the messy weave of erotic entanglements humans have engaged in throughout history, The Oldest Profession may be sturdiest thread of them all.

Today, just about everyone is walking around at least a little sexually frustrated, and people do all sort of things that indicate society hasn’t quite gotten it right yet: they betray the ones they love, they can’t find someone to love, they blog angrily about their “incel” status, they become pick-up artists, or they perform in the parody of robotic masculinity called hookup culture. The only surefire way to achieve peace between society and sexuality would be to breed sexuality out of us.

We humans tend to assume that once we’ve had sex a bunch of times and have figured out the lay of the land, we basically understand it. This familiarity is misleading because sexuality is a kind of madness that nobody ever masters. It creates families and destroys lives. It drags people away from the ones they love after decades of stability on a promise of expression and liberation. It is the kind of madness that provokes murder, suicide, and war. And it happens all the time.

My patients who feel oversexed are both right and wrong. Right in that if sex goes well, it does feel excessive. But wrong in that excess is the rule, not the exception. In the thrall of Eros, everything about one’s usual identity — nice guy, sweet girl, great dad, responsible employee — falls away. The disparity between the social and sexual personae is stark, and the space between these identities is the bullseye that advertisers and other persuaders are constantly targeting.

We are surrounded by images of sexy bodies in luxurious poses. On sidewalks and billboards, on Instagram and Snapchat, in banner ads, clickbait thumbnails, and Hollywood blockbusters. Sexual suggestion appears wherever images are sold, usually accompanied by a message that we are liberated, that we can be anything we want to be sexually and otherwise. Keeping consumers a little turned on and a little envious does wonders in separating people from their money, but it does little to connect people to their bodies and does nothing to liberate them from social norms.

Images scream at us to enjoy the erotic, but the rules of society relentlessly restrict us. As Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, the tension between civilization and sexual love is permanent and ultimately irreconcilable: “On the one hand, love opposes the interests of culture; on the other, culture menaces love with grievous restrictions.” Sexuality and civilization don’t fit together very well, and they must be constantly recalibrated in relation to one another on a large scale. As a result, our own individual sexualities must also be perpetually reinterpreted and reconsidered, often painfully.

Again, no one understands what the driving forces behind sexuality actually are. We merely have theories, and everyone has their own. The sexual expressions we observe and experience are merely secondhand translations of whatever these mysterious theoretical forces might be. Although we don’t really understand these forces, it is clear that attempts to silence them will provoke mutiny over a long enough timeline. The more destructive flavors of sexuality usually emerge in reaction to longstanding suppression (conscious) or repression (unconscious).

Efforts to deny, deflect, or destroy direct expressions of desire merely generate other indirect, circuitous pathways of expression. However, we travel those routes at our peril. If we manage to consciously devise an ingenious workaround, the guilty secrets we must keep will generate suspicion. Anyone who has ever betrayed a lover’s promise (or has discovered such a betrayal) can confirm Freud’s observation that, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

Alternatively, if we happen upon a more unconscious strategy of expression during states of intoxication or psychological dissociation, we free ourselves of this guilt, but we also deny ourselves the living memory of embodied passion we were driven to satisfy in the first place. These bad options attempt to straddle both expression and denial, and while they can achieve a shaky equilibrium, they are not particularly happy outcomes because they represent a turning away from the truth.

There is a third option, which is the analytic one: to acknowledge what we want, think through it, find open-minded people, and talk to them about it. Putting desire into words is the first step in a lifelong pursuit of truth. No one will ever hit the bedrock truth of their sexuality, but the joy is in the seeking.

The Burden of Usefulness

Whenever a celebrity commits suicide, the process begins. The press contextualizes the death within a larger narrative about the growing popularity of suicide. Friends passionately advocate for hope. Clinicians present statistics and propose interventions. Edgy hot takes litter the op-ed pages. Morality tales abound, preaching the dangers of addiction and the limitations of money and fame. 

The loss of life is disheartening enough, without having to sort through the editorializing from chipper people who claim to know something about happiness. After our most recent celebrity suicide cluster, my depressed patients found most of the standardized hopefulness and obligatory suicide hotline info somewhere between redundant and insulting. They all know the stories about how life is worth living, and they know how to use the internet to find suicide hotline information. 

No wonder we soothe ourselves through repetition; the suicide statistics are grim. According to the CDC, 25 states have seen increases in suicide rates of more than 30% in the past 20 years. More and more people are hitting the limits of their despair and can go no further.

Despair is a feature, not a glitch, of human existence, and given a long enough time line, everybody feels it. Pain is not doled out fairly, nor is the ability to tolerate it. Some periods of life feel entirely full of pain, and contrary to certain anti-suicide sloganeering, suicide is indeed an option – at least for anybody with access to a belt or a bottle of Tylenol. 

Suicidal people are prone to feeling useless, purposeless, and numbed by the apparent indifference of the universe to their lives. Mainstream “positive psychology” would have us believe that suicidal thoughts are fundamentally negative and distorted, and must be drowned out by positive counter-thoughts. With the cognitive re-training, the formerly suicidal person can find their passion. All of this sounds good, but in many cases these ideas of positivity, negativity, and passion are terribly misleading. 

“Happiness” is not a useful goal, since no one agrees on what it actually feels like or looks like, and the fuzzy vagueness of “passion” can be dangerous. When depressed people hear talk of passion, they tend to focus on the seemingly impossible distance between their current emotional state and the passionate happiness they are supposed to acquire. Highlighting this shortfall not only makes them feel worse, but also diverts them from the truth about how to actually fight their way out of depression. 

Humans create meaning for their lives by doing some kind of useful work. If they care to pair up in their downtime, love helps too. To solve the problem of meaninglessness, it’s usually best to tackle the problem of work first; love is infinitely more complex, given that it involves at least two people rather than one. Also, people’s attempts at love are often undermined when nothing outside the relationship feels meaningful. Once a person can work purposefully and autonomously, that person tends to stop looking to relationships to manage self-esteem in unrealistic ways.

Humans work by applying attention and focus. They fuel that attention and focus with their own aggression. However, because the word “aggression” sounds hostile and antisocial, positive psychology has largely redacted it, leaving us with bland, anodyne concepts like passion and happiness. These limited concepts prevent people from thinking honestly about how minds actually function. 

Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, have been thinking about aggression for over a century, and integrated it into many robust explanatory theories. Aggression is the flow of energy that, if property tapped into, drives human culture forward. It is expressed in a huge variety of ways, most of which don’t look anything like hostility. Human aggression fuels the sustained attention required to write a novel, win a tennis match, paint a mural, draw a skyscraper, build a business, and bake banana bread. These things make life worth living, and cannot be achieved without some measure of intense focus on one task and withdrawal from others. 

On the other hand, in its most destructive form, aggression can fuel very bad things. Human history is not a story of nice guys taking it easy; it’s a story of ambition driving culture to the pinnacle of beauty and the nadir of horror. Just as Michelangelo tapped into his creative aggression to heroically paint the Sistine ceiling by hand while lying on his back, Hitler channeled his destructive aggression to fuel his terrible work. 

The aggressive forces that fuel creativity and destruction are alive in all of us, and everyone must acknowledge and contend with them, lest they make themselves known in destructive ways. Denying their existence only ensures their unplanned appearance in the most unwanted place at the worst possible time and in the most destructive form. Suicidally depressed people, for instance, tend to cycle through periods of extremely low energy, along with periods of higher energy, and this emotional cycling prevents them from applying themselves in a sustained way to constructive work. If given the right circumstances to execute a suicide plan at a high-energy point in the cycle, they will channel that free-range aggressive energy in the most self-destructive possible course. 

Suicide epitomizes the destructive danger of misdirected aggression. Closer examination of the life of a suicidal person often reveals a calcified pattern of self-sabotage. Most non-psychoanalytic versions of human psychology do not account for the motivations behind self-sabotage, such as the seductive allure to self-identify in a way that both generates sympathy and justifies passivity, i.e. “Some guys have all the luck, but it seems like I’m always a day late and a dollar short.” 

Self-sabotage is among other things an unconscious strategy for confirming uselessness, and psychoanalysis is among other things a calculated attempt to increase usefulness. Analytically questioning people’s foregone conclusions about their identities (e.g. “I’m the type of person who…”) usually reveals problematic assumptions and underpinnings, often unconsciously implemented to protect the outside world from the dangers of their own aggression. 

However, a quest to make meaning in the absence of aggression is a hopeless recipe for uselessness. Therefore, the hopelessness of a depressed mind is not in any way negative or untrue; an undriven life lacks vitality, and in order to get out of it, that depressed voice of hopelessness and uselessness must be heard, interpreted, and analyzed. 

Everyone must carry the burden of usefulness, and no amount of fame or enlightenment can free anyone from this burden. In order to feel useful, everyone has to do something that the world finds valuable. The world values people who solve problems, and in order to consistently do that, the ever-flowing channel of aggression must be accessed and applied to some form of productive work. Productive work sustains humanity, and even more importantly, it sustains the human. If we continue to deny the reality of the aggression that brought human culture to terrestrial dominance, we will continue to see more people destroy their lives and the lives of others. The way out of ever-increasing suicide and self-destruction is not around the channel of human aggression, but through it. 

The Diagnostic Trap

I rarely discuss diagnoses. Occasionally a patient asks me to tell them what they “have,” and I usually feel trapped between bad and worse options. In the past I tried many approaches to answering that question, and whatever I said always seemed like a good-enough idea, right until the words passed through my lips. From then on, the course of the session usually changed radically, and sometimes the treatment remained permanently derailed. Although directly answering the question was never particularly therapeutic, it did relieve the tension of the moment. 

Psychoanalysis can generate intense tension in session, and seductive options that might relieve that tension are always available. The problem is, tension within a therapy session is not something any psychoanalyst should be aiming to relieve. The analytic situation is valuable because it replicates tensions that take place in the real world, but in a place where those tensions can be observed and processed, rather than performed or defended against. Patients come to analysis because the defenses they have developed to relieve those tensions are now coming at too great an emotional cost. Thoughtful speech is the medium of change in psychoanalysis, and tension drives the process toward the kind of speech by which problems get worked through. 

In tense situations, we often use speech as a vehicle of action, rather than as means of thinking. For instance, when your friend tells you about her terrible breakup, you’ll caringly blend some cocktail of truth and fiction, in order to calm and reassure. You thereby relieve the immediate tension, and your friend will feel better in the moment. Of course, underneath the soothing, you both know that she will probably have to get real with herself in order to work some things out eventually, using a different kind of speech. Action speech can soothe a mind, but only thoughtful speech can grow one.  

Diagnostic discussions are particularly prone to deteriorating into action speech, particularly when a therapist feels personally attacked. When they feel devalued, inexperienced therapists tend to diagnose passionately and severely. Beginning therapists have a need to be seen as helpful and competent, and this need for affirmation can create a lot of problems early on, particularly in diagnosis. Early in my own training, I found myself reaching for labels when working with particularly grandiose patients around whom I felt useless, and over time I realized all therapeutic novices are unusually quick to unload the heavy diagnostic artillery in these frustrating situations. 

Telling the frustrating patient what he “has” in that situation is a bad idea, and an even worse idea is calling someone a narcissist, even if it seems accurate. Narcissistic diagnosis has become a kind of op-ed blood sport in American media as of late, and just as the ink-spilling diagnosticians have little to show for their emphatic efforts, therapists who call patients narcissistic can end up with no patients to help. 

When we give in to the urge to shell out weaponized diagnoses, particularly toward so-called narcissists, we open ourselves up to a darkly ironic side effect. People who make a living calling out narcissists often do so in an all-knowing, dismissive way, as if they know who all these hollow people really are. These writers tend to communicate an attitude of moral and intellectual superiority toward the toxic narcissist, and this condescending attitude mirrors the grandiose superiority that it intends to criticize. 

Unconscious self-portraiture is the diagnostic trap. When I tell a patient who he is, I may be telling him something about how I am, too. Therapists, like everyone else, first come to understand a person by paying attention to the emotions that person activates in them. When any observer describes someone, it can be quite difficult to tell where the observer ends and the observed begins. If diagnostic ideas are not communicated with the utmost discipline and tact, they can be quite hurtful and destructive. 

The good thing about being a patient is that you don’t have to worry about any of this. You don’t have to know what you “have” in order to get better, and your only real job is to use your psychoanalysis to make a better life. The esoteric shorthand of diagnosis helps me organize my thoughts and words, but diagnostic jargon is not designed to be of much use to a patient. The psychoanalytic process is not about acquiring a psychoeducation through some generic jargon; it is about using that process to discover a specific, unique way of thinking and speaking about the profound strangeness of being alive. 

Love, but not in love

“I love you, but I’m not in love with you.”

This is a very common explanation of a breakup, and many of us have heard or said this more than once. When we say this, we are generally trying to explain ourselves by appealing to the reasonable nature of a potentially heartbroken person. However, this appeal is quite unreasonable, as it is based on the unrealistic expectation of being in love forever. The statement generally explains very little about the relationship, and after hearing it, roughly zero people feel better about being dumped. Yet it persists. 

When we say, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” we communicate an expectation that we should be actively in love with our primary partner throughout the life of the relationship. “In love” is essentially synonymous with “infatuated,” and commitment without infatuation defies mainstream relationship mythology, in which infatuation and commitment are braided together into an inseparable weave. This mythology does much more harm than good, but its believers tend to defend it at all costs. Nearly every young adult I have treated is under the spell of this legend of perpetual infatuation, and many people in mid-life and beyond continue to chase the high of infatuation to their own peril, repeating destructive relationship patterns with new people who are under the same spell.

When we say, “love but not in love,” we imply that merely loving someone - as opposed to being “in love” - provides infertile ground for the seeds of a long-term relationship. However, based on my own experience both clinical and personal, the inverse is true: infatuation is a terribly unstable foundation for a long-term relationship. 

The passionate experience of being in love is not only exhilarating and enlivening; it is also confusing, disruptive, and finite. In the throes of infatuation, we often lose track of valuable friendships and career ambitions. Once the intense feelings inevitably fade, we often discover that we did a poor job of getting to know the object of our passion. While infatuation seems timeless, within 18 months or so, it disappears.

However, infatuation feels amazing. To long for this seemingly boundless connection to another person is only human, and for young, blind lovers, ignorance truly is bliss. The temporary self-esteem benefits of head-over-heels infatuation can lead us to deny its limitations, and overinvestment in infatuation often leads to profoundly misguided relationship decisions – including overcommitting in a state of infatuation, or never committing because the feeling never lasts. At the root of such mistakes is a simplistic interpretation of this overwhelming feeling. The only way out of the destructive relationship patterns that result is to work through the notion that we are missing something within ourselves, along with the fantasy that some other person can replenish this deficit. 

When we leave someone because we are not actively in love, we are running away from our own self-esteem problems. Usually at the point when these words are spoken, the initial infatuation has run its brief course, and the speaker is reacting to the anxiety brought on by a natural decrease in self-esteem. The resulting sense of missing something will drag that person into the next relationship in search of another intense boost, along with another denial of its ephemerality. 

In order to achieve a more lasting and less hormonally driven commitment in future relationships, we must carefully examine the nature of our investment in the mythology of romantic love. The unexamined expectations we bring to adult relationships are often their undoing, and therapeutic reconsideration of these expectations can lead to surprisingly different relationship outcomes. 

On Meaninglessness

“Life is inherently meaningless.”

Occasionally, a patient speaks this sentence to me as if it were a guiding ideology. However, while this statement does contain important truths, it is not a standalone philosophy. In my consulting room, patients can engage with meaninglessness either destructively, as a philosophical-ish conversation-stopper, or productively, as a starting point for the conversation of a lifetime. A person’s ability to engage productively with this truth unfailingly correlates to that person’s chances of getting something out of psychoanalysis. 

When someone cites life’s meaninglessness as some sort of deadpan philosophy, that person is often trying to shut down the conversation. In such moments I have to wonder what about this conversation might be so troubling that it needs to end so definitively. On the other hand, when someone earnestly addresses life’s inherent meaninglessness with dread, terror, bewilderment, or curiosity – and without any snide contrarianism – the conversation can truly move forward into the deeply evocative, generative territory of psychoanalysis. This territory is characterized not by a glib statement of meaninglessness, but rather a question: “So, what now?”

The choice between these two positions comes down to a decision to live a life of responsibility, or a life of blame. We all learn at an early age that assigning blame provides a quick fix to many acute problems, e.g. “I shouldn’t get in trouble for punching him, since he threw the first punch.” Although blaming may temporarily solve such a problem by keeping us out of trouble, it prevents us from addressing the root cause, e.g. “I like provoking people to take a swing at me so that I can blame them for starting it, and punch them repeatedly in the face.” Addressing the problem would first require taking responsibility for the destructive urges at its root, but many of us cannot imagine taking responsibility without also taking blame. 

Terrible things happen in life, and we are generally not to blame for the calamities that befall us, particularly during childhood. Nonetheless, after these calamities each one of us is responsible for learning something from what happened, and making something out of whatever is left of us. Although many other people may be to blame for the series of unfortunate events that shaped our early lives, we are ultimately responsible for picking up the pieces and living the rest of our lives, thoughtfully. 

For many, a terrifying adolescent encounter with life’s fundamental meaninglessness presents the first problem that blame cannot fix. When teenagers realize that the cognitive and emotional depths they are beginning to discover in themselves are fundamentally out of step with an apparently indifferent universe, they often feel overwhelmed with a sense of angry injustice. The fact that that life will simply go on without us once we die is terrifying, but no authority can truly take the blame, as everyone is in the same boat, regardless of age, wealth, or status. 

In the face of an overwhelming cult of happiness in contemporary American society, young people are often encouraged to continue explaining their unhappiness through blame. They often vacillate between blaming themselves for being too negative and selfish, and blaming various existential injustices, including life's apparent meaninglessness. When someone presents life’s meaninglessness to me as an angry conclusion, it usually becomes clear to me over time that this person has not yet assumed responsibility for making something of his life. On the other hand, for someone who is willing to take on that responsibility, inherent meaninglessness is not a conclusion, but rather a problem to work through. 

When a person decides to truly grapple with the question of existence within a framework of obvious meaninglessness, that person is likely to make something of the therapeutic experience. In psychoanalysis, as in any therapy, the point of the work is not to come out at the end of the treatment with no problems. Life itself is a series of problems, and without problems there can be no overcoming, no vitality, and no life. Regardless of our histories, we all have a responsibility to accept and understand what remains, so that we can better equip ourselves for the inevitable calamities of the future. 

Past mistakes provide powerful tools for learning, once we overcome the guilt and shame associated with those mistakes. Through careful analysis, we can eventually trade in our more basic life problems for much more generative ones. The more complex and finely tuned our problems become, the more personal meaning we can create for our own individual lives, in the face of meaninglessness. 

Eye contact is good for you [The Guardian]

[Originally published by The Guardian]

Everyone from early mesmerists to contemporary self-help gurus have understood the power of looking someone deep in the eyes. Now, compelling new research is shedding light on the powerful positive effects of eye contact.

In an age of disconnectedness, locking gazes with another person has surprising benefits. The study finds it makes us much more likely to engage in selfless, altruistic behavior. We are also more likely to remember details of the interaction with the other person and to appraise that person more positively.

So why don’t we do it more often? Eye contact can be painful because it makes us profoundly vulnerable. After all, direct eye contact creates a moment when we are both very visible, but we also have minimal control over what the other sees. Being behind a screen is much safer. That’s why many of us largely avoid eye contact by gazing at our phones – especially in awkward or intimate moments.

We are used to hiding our feelings through careful curation of social media profiles and through various digital techniques of deferral and avoidance. When scrolling through our phones and feeds, we keep our minds busy and, perhaps superficially, keep in touch with others. But in those moments we are also largely devoid of self-awareness – and that, according to this latest research, is essential to making true contact with another person.

Of course, the internet is part of our lives now. We will never be able to go back to communicating exclusively face-to-face. Indeed, it is important to squeeze the most out of our personal interactions whenever possible – and that includes catching up with old friends online. But, thinking digital communication is enough to keep a relationship going is a fantasy. Interacting with friends online grants us greater control over the way they perceive us, and that can be reassuring. But if we retreat behind Snapchat videos, WhatsApp messages and Facebook posts, we lessen the possibility of an encounter that could teach us about one another and ourselves.

The power of eye contact is intuitively obvious to most of us – any research describing the positive effects of eye contact is cleanly in line with common sense. We know we are more likely to pay attention to someone who seems to be paying attention to us. It is also no surprise that exchanging glances with someone makes us feel better about that person.

The essence of the research, however, lies in revealing how self-reference – the kind of self-awareness that arises from direct eye contact – helps us when connecting with others. In order to connect more deeply, we must be seen in ways we cannot control, and an uncomfortable jolt of self-awareness in those first moments of eye contact may scare us away.

Now that we know even more about the essential importance of a simple, unbroken gaze, we have even more reason to seek it out. Especially when meeting up with someone we care about, deep eye contact matters. And, if that feels uncomfortable that’s OK. We should stick with it and keep seeing that person, and seeing that person see us. Once we get accustomed to it again, we might find ourselves looking all kinds of people in the eye. Who knows what surprises await us when we do?

On Not Giving Advice

Friends give advice. Psychoanalysts generally do not. For patients, this can be frustrating. In the early stages of treatment, some patients interpret my lack of advice as indifference, or as part of a role I’m performing. And I understand that it can feel strange. My analytic attitude goes against every expectation of what you believe is supposed to happen when you share your problems with someone, particularly when you share them with an expert. So, why would I not give advice?

Simple Interpretation

Advice is usually a plan of action. We tend to like concrete plans of action because the world seems much simpler when there is a definite plan. We all know what happens when you ask a friend for relationship advice: You tell your friend about your relationship problems; your friend sees the problem more clearly from an outside perspective, interprets it, and provides a plan of action to solve the problem. You leave with a plan and a sense of being heard.

Then, you return to your life and your relationship, and somehow nothing changes. Functionally, the advice does nothing. Why? Because advice is based on simple (i.e. non-complex) interpretation. And if you continue to attempt to look at complex problems through simple interpretations, the complex problems will remain largely untouched. You may feel an empowered jolt of agency after receiving some affirming advice, but that feeling fades.

It is important to note that simple interpretations can be extremely useful and even life-saving in many situations involving uncomplicated problems, where everyone agrees on what is a good outcome and what is a bad outcome. For instance, if your leg is broken, you will take the advice of your orthopedist, and your leg will heal. If your car is making a strange noise, you will take your mechanic’s advice and your car will stop making that noise. These are concrete problems that require concrete solutions. We all want a functional body and a car that doesn’t make weird noises.

On the other hand, the problems that people need my help to solve are significantly more complex. None of us is in agreement on what a good or bad relationship actually looks like, because what we get out of our relationships is extremely personal and specific. As a result, complex emotional and cognitive problems are largely advice-resistant.

For instance, an intelligent, perceptive young woman in my consulting room tells me that her boyfriend of many years regularly insults, embarrasses, and humiliates her. He has been doing this for years. They have no kids, no mortgage, and they both have good jobs. Her friends say, “Listen, he treats you like dirt; he’s crazy. You’re better than that; you’re a superstar. Dump him and find a man who respects you.” She has heard this advice from dozens of people. But somehow, it is not helping.

Advice like this relies on one interpretation of events, and in this case, the interpretation is clearly flawed. This advice is tacitly constructed around unspoken, unquestioned assumptions about what she should want and how she should feel about herself. When talking to someone about what is going on inside a relationship, you cannot assume you both understand what a “relationship” is in the same way.

Put more bluntly, you’re not very good at interpreting other people’s relationships. No one on the outside is good at interpreting what’s going on inside. And when you give advice, you unconsciously superimpose your frame of reference and assumptions of what a “good” relationship looks like.

Nonetheless, people often talk to their friends about their problems, and they generally expect advice in return. Friends usually respond with the most thoughtful advice they can come up with. Once that advice remains unheeded after a few handfuls of heart-to-heart cocktail sessions, everyone feels exasperated. That’s usually when my phone rings.

Complex Interpretation

Complex interpretation more effectively addresses complex problems, but frustratingly, it definitely does not look or feel anything like traditional advice. In our earlier example, the friends of the young woman suffering in a fraught relationship have been as helpful and as useful as they can. But in the service of bolstering her self-esteem, they ignore a hugely important question: if it’s so obvious to everyone (including herself) that her boyfriend treats her horribly, then why does she stick around?

She sticks around because in some strange way, this relationship works for her, and for her boyfriend. A dynamic is alive between them, and that dynamic has a powerful function for both partners. The problems arising from this dynamic are advice-proof because her friends [understandably] are not asking questions about what is actually taking place between these two people. Friends tend to interpret based on what should be going on in a relationship, and relationship advice from a “should” perspective will always be woefully incomplete. To understand complex relationship dynamics, it is important to move beyond what should be happening and figure out what is happening, right now. And as a result, psychoanalysts tend to interpret based on what is going on in a relationship, rather than what should be.

When we look at what is actually happening within a painful relationship dynamic, we often start to find paradoxes that defy simple interpretation. For instance, we may find that this relationship brings to life both partners’ extreme ambivalence about being in an intimate relationship at all, and its moments of violent agony justify their mutual terror of depending on another person for emotional sustenance. Even though this abusive dynamic is terribly painful and may appear frighteningly unstable, it may also serve the purpose of keeping the partners at a comfortable distance from one another, all the while appearing from the outside to be much more intimate than it actually is.

In other words, this person craves intimacy and is utterly terrified of losing herself in an intimate relationship, at the same time. These dynamics clearly indicate that this relationship did not arbitrarily come into existence without rhyme or reason, and that on the contrary, something very specific is playing out between these two strangely complementary minds. And in psychoanalysis, a big part of our task is to examine both sides of paradoxes like this at the same time, in order to name and work out the conflicts leading to these relationship stalemates. 

The Problem With Closure

We all want closure sometimes. After particularly bad things happen to us, painful thoughts and feelings linger, and after some time passes, it feels like it is time to “put these things behind us,” so they say. In some cases, our memories throw us off so much that we really feel a need to set the seesaw straight, reinstate equilibrium, and perhaps even do a factory reset. And while we are trying to solve this plaguing pain, we may find this word “closure” floating around out there. Because this concept exists, many of us assume that the kind of closure we want must be an achievable thing.

As a psychoanalyst, I hear truly poignant pleas for closure all the time. However, I propose that despite its official veneer, closure is an extremely problematic goal. In my view, it is certainly not an end worth energetically pursuing.  In most cases, the road to closure is paved with radical denial, and this kind of denial can lead to a certain kind of deadness, both cognitively and emotionally. Any kind of therapy that offers “closure” on its menu is misleading at best, because closure is an artificial construction rooted in fantasy. Closure can be useful, but only as a temporary milestone on the way to a more complete understanding.

Art [Poorly] Imitates Life

Closure is an essential component in any traditional narrative structure. In most of our favorite books, plays, and movies, the story begins with conflict, escalates with rising tension, brings us through a crisis, and closes with a satisfying resolution. In most stories we expect to experience closure, and in the vast majority of stories we hear, read, or watch, we leave the drama feeling like the problem was solved. And the story thereby speaks to us about the way the world works in an intuitively satisfying way.

Now, most of us consciously know that reality is not actually structured like fiction. Indeed the truth is almost always stranger than fiction, as the saying goes. Even the most ordered life is terribly complex, messy, and subject to arbitrary intrusions and calamities at any moment. In order to make their work interesting and palatable, artists must transform life into something a little less messy. Conversely, non-transformative art that truly imitates life tends to be quite tedious [cf. Andy Warhol’s 1963 film “Sleep,” a five-hour single-take recording of a man sleeping].

Despite the clear fact that art imitates and thereby simplifies life’s inscrutable complexity, we often irrationally chase a fantasy of closure that only exists in fiction. When we seek closure, we seek to end the infinite series of cliffhangers that comprise our daily experience. In the face of the suffering that many of us face every day, such desperate measures are certainly understandable. However, our ability to fictionalize our own lives in this way is complicated by the fact that life keeps happening, whether we like it or not. The chapters we try to close seem to resist, and instead they open up again and repeat themselves through unexpected characters and plot twists.

Monuments Imitate Closure

The area formerly known as “Ground Zero” is about three blocks from my office, and it contains one of the most massive and expensive public attempts to perform closure I can think of. I saw the Twin Towers go down with my own eyes in 2001, and I avoided this monument for years. Last year I moved my office into a building just a few blocks away from it, and once I finally took the time to stroll around the site, it occurred to me that no one quite knows what to do with this tremendous slab of concretized closure.

The brutal austerity of the site has provided a sort of tabula rasa for the traumatized survivors of this horrific tragedy. However, for everyone else, the message can be perplexing. After witnessing groups of tourists performing a range of awkward tasks involving coins and selfie sticks, I recognized that as a visitor, it is quite difficult to strike an appropriate demeanor and tone of activity in this place. The site commands us to solemnly acknowledge the tragedy by never forgetting, while the surrounding panorama of even-more-impressive architectural feats screams to us that we must leave the past behind and gaze in awe at the dazzlingly futuristic present. 

And while this monument thunders commandingly alongside impressive new structures, the forces that brought the towers down continue to violently resist any resolution. Religious extremists and mass murderers do not care about reflecting pools. In other words, the WTC monument demands closure and simultaneously embodies its limitations.

The Monument Will Break

The fountains surrounding the WTC Monument’s reflecting pools are mechanical constructions, and according to their co-architect Peter Walker, "We've made them as well as we know how, but they're mechanical and usually mechanical things only last 30-40 years." They cannot survive the ceaseless beating they will take from time, weather, and the brutality of the physical world. And just as the fountains at the WTC monument will break down over time, the emotional closure that we seek in the face of loss will also crumble.

When patients express a desire to use the therapeutic process with me to achieve closure, they are asking me to build an unsustainable structure. For instance, a common crisis situation in which people seek this structure is the sudden death of a parent. Oftentimes, when a parent dies, a child of any age is overwhelmed with unpleasant feelings that contradict what the child has always thought about the parent – i.e. “I always loved my mother, but now I find myself overwhelmed with hate.” Oftentimes a person who has sustained such a loss is overwhelmed by a seemingly irresolvable ambivalence. When our defenses against hateful [or loving] feelings for a loved one break down in the face of the stress of loss, the raw emotions that emerge can cause great distress. And for the survivor, it makes sense to want to get those defenses back in order, and to once again develop a consistent representation of that loved one in their mind. But the consistent representation that closure affords us must also deny the ebbs and flows of a complex, ongoing life. Psychoanalysis invites that complexity in, rather than showing it the door.

The analytic process is often quite helpful in exploring these feelings, and the process is never about reaching some final, ultimate conclusion about a person or an event. A dead person whom we once loved always remains with us, until our own minds are gone. And despite the physical absence of the dead, the conversation with the dead never ends. Life itself seems to resist closure, as we find that over time, we often gain new perspective, and past events can suddenly appear very differently than they had for years and decades prior. As William Faulkner writes, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” Nothing is ever over.

Closure is useful, but only as a temporary measure. Optimally, we continue reconsidering the illusion of closure as we move incrementally toward a more complete understanding of the total event. As the complexity of our history reveals itself over time, it behooves us to accept its ambiguities and remain open to its as-yet-unrevealed perspectives. Ultimately, closure is not an end; it is a transition between grief and a new kind of openness to unthought unknowns. 

The Nice Guise

Do you think of yourself as a nice person?

How’s that working out for you?

My guess is, probably not as well as it should be. Many people who walk into my office for the first time think of themselves as “nice” people, and over time it often becomes apparent that these nice people have a lot of trouble wanting things for themselves and suffer terribly as a result. For these patients, and for so many of us, wanting something just because we want it -- money, sex, real estate, respect -- can stir some conflicts inside of us. Some of us solve these conflicts by attempting to shut down the desires that feed them. But when someone out there in the world guilelessly wants things “just because,” heaven help them if they actually end up getting what they desire. On any given day, you can find dozens of articles trashing high achievers like Steve Jobs, LeBron James, and Madonna, usually because they are supposedly too self-absorbed, too selfish, too narcissistic, etc.

Meanwhile, our day-to-day conflicts and denials around wanting things can be so profound that we don’t even allow ourselves to know what we want. For instance, when my patient Tom* walked into my office for the first time several years ago, he wore a strange smirk as he lamented his lack of professional opportunities, and he described himself as a victim of a series of unfortunate circumstances. He also reported that his father had been distant but his mother had “always been there” for him. As he spoke, Tom seemed unusually interested in my personal reactions, and he bore all the traits of a pathologically "nice" guy. When I noted aloud that he seemed preoccupied with the ways I might be judging him, Tom was both taken aback with my directness and fascinated with what I had seen.

Tom’s concerns regarding being judged remained a focus of the analysis for quite some time during the four years we worked together. He eventually discovered that he had disowned and projected many of his own self-judgments onto other people, and that he might have been experiencing the world as an exaggeratedly hostile place for the last 30-odd years. His worries about being harshly judged and rejected had led him to be overly accommodating, and he often silently resented these apparently needy people whom he felt so compelled to accommodate. His explorations of his excessive compliance eventually led him to revisit his oversimplified understanding of his early family relationships, and he came to realize that as a young child he had learned to accommodate his mother’s overwhelming need for reassurance and support, while denying his own need for nurturance and guidance. He also recognized that his father, faced with the same overwhelming neediness from Tom’s mother, had checked out of the marriage by investing his emotional life into his work, leaving Tom essentially alone with his mother. After spending a long series of sessions working through his anger toward his parents for encouraging him to be an adultified child at too young an age, Tom eventually let go of his righteous indignation and found ways to mourn the loss of the relationship he would never have with his parents. Only then did Tom’s needs and desires consciously emerge, and this therapeutic experience led to radical professional and personal transformations in his life.

At the outset of the treatment, Tom had complained that although he was happy that he and his girlfriend always got along and never fought, he was dismayed by his budding recognition of a sense of “deadness” in their relationship. Over time, it became clear Tom had been so focused on tending to his girlfriend’s needs that he had forgotten about his own life, friends, and hobbies. Tom eventually could not tolerate the lifelessness of this relationship and ended it, and through our analysis, an uncanny resemblance emerged between Tom’s role in this doomed relationship and his role as accommodator and emotional caretaker during childhood. He had nurtured his girlfriend to the detriment of his own life, under the illusion that his life would take up too much room in their relationship. Through further analysis, it became evident to Tom that he had managed to repeat this pattern by unconsciously assuming the role of caretaker in many of his personal and professional relationships. 

After many false starts, Tom eventually found a partner who was open to the newfound emotional presence he had been experimenting with, and who was herself emotionally open and direct. Through a series of disagreements, negotiation and reconciliation with his new partner, Tom began to experience a much more expansive sense of who he was and what kind of connection was possible for him. By the end of treatment, Tom had made several ambitious leaps forward in his career, and he expressed a newfound optimism about his future with his fiancée. He had located the strivings and desires that had formerly generated great anxiety and denial within himself, and he had found ways to expand by accepting these essential parts of himself that he had previously found so loathsome in others.  

Like Tom, many of us defend against our needs and ambitions with a belief that it is inappropriate to ask for things we might not get, and that it is at best tasteless to be seen as someone who chases after such things. Instead, many of us decide to know ourselves as nice people who should not want so much, and like Tom, we take on a persona of selfless accommodation, while believing that kind people are eventually rewarded for their kindness, somehow. As a result, we often only know that despite our best efforts to be generous and accommodating, at the end of the day we end up feeling deeply unsatisfied.

You certainly know a Nice Guy (NG) in your life, and in fact you may even be one yourself. I see a lot of NGs in my psychoanalytic practice, and in fact, I used to be a much nicer guy myself. NGs make plenty of space for other people to expand, and they simultaneously resent the people who allow themselves to take up that space, and even expand beyond it – people like Steve Jobs, LeBron James, Madonna, various CEOs, and so forth. These people are shamelessly open with themselves about whatever they are hungry for at any moment, however inappropriate it might seem to others. To the NG, all this hunger and striving can seem a bit gauche, and it seems much more appropriate to keep such strivings under wraps.

While it may seem more appropriate to compromise and accommodate to the needs of others, if it goes on too long, excessive accommodation carries powerful resentment along with it. And if you hang out with an NG long enough, you will see a few indignant outbursts that will remind you that no one is actually that nice.

When our default setting is accommodation, we restrict our own potential by robbing ourselves of any room to try things out, make a few mistakes, improve, and thereby expand. And if we find that we are preventing ourselves from taking up as much space as we care to, therapeutic exploration may enable us to make an uncomfortable but essential discovery that we are often the architects of our own house of suffering.

*to protect patient confidentiality, all names and identifying details have been changed.

Maybe Steve Jobs was an asshole -- so what's it to you?

“Believe in yourself – be big!”

“But don’t hurt anybody in the process – be nice!”

Many of us believe both of these supposed truths to be true. But if we actually try to live our lives according to these two conflicting messages, we will go crazy. Are we supposed to expand, or contract? Are we supposed to break those eggs to make that omelet, or are we supposed to nurture those eggs into little hatchlings? These incongruous messages indicate a sideways avoidance of something essential in us that we clearly find hard to accept. We want to be respected for our excellence, and we want to be connected to and liked by other people.

For example, this article on Steve Jobs epitomizes our curiously fraught relationship to these incompatible notions. According to The Atlantic, it’s great that Steve Jobs created some of the most influential technological devices of the last 50 years, many of which are in your pocket right now, but…maybe those accomplishments are forever tarnished because he was not a great father and he parked his Mercedes in a handicapped spot. This article reminds us that the value of our life accomplishments will be affirmed or negated based on whether or not we are nice.

As I hear it, in essence Steve Jobs may have been too narcissistic for us to accept his accomplishments, impressive as they may be. We love his computerized devices, and we recognize that it took a visionary and exacting approach to create these devices. And yet, when it comes down to it, we don’t like what that visionary approach actually entails.

Here are the mixed signals, implicit in this tear-down of Steve Jobs, that we get from contemporary mainstream culture about how to be:

1. Be BIG! Believe in yourself, especially when no one else will. Against all odds. Fight the odds. Be creative. Buck trends. Do it your way. Make it perfect. Work yourself to the bone. Get obsessed. Do it right. Put your mind to it. Don’t let the skeptics drag you down. Just do it. [Or else we won’t write articles about you.]
2. Be nice. Sacrifice time and energy for other people. The more time you spend with your kids, the better. Put other people’s needs first. Don’t get caught up in your ambitions. Never get angry. Don’t inconvenience anyone. Easy on the bling. And did we mention, spend more time with your kids? Spend more time with your kids. More. A greater volume of time. With the kids. [Or else we’ll judge you.]

If we’re being honest, we have to agree that these two approaches to life are at least somewhat incompatible. If you believe in yourself against all odds and you get obsessed and so forth, your singular focus will probably cause someone to feel hurt or neglected at some point in your journey. We are in a double bind, and this problem is rooted in our conflictual relationship to the universal narcissism that we all have to work out within ourselves, like it or not. This negotiation happens underground, because most of us are scared to admit that these needs exist at all. We all long to expand, to be recognized for our innate value, and to be rewarded for our hard work. We all value the opinions that others have of us, and our self-esteem improves when important people respect us. Our self-esteem is our narcissistic equilibrium, and the satisfactions that grow our self-esteem are essentially narcissistic. These satisfactions involve expanding ourselves to achieve unique goals, being rewarded for those goals, and thereby being respected in the eyes of others.

And while we all intuitively understand that the way we feel about ourselves matters and that it’s important to maintain a reasonably high self-esteem, we are also very conflicted about how we get there. We are terrified of being seen as narcissistic – which is a fundamentally narcissistic concern – and so we disown these fundamental needs. We locate them in notoriously driven people like Steve Jobs, Madonna, and LeBron James, while we simultaneously worry about being seen as too big for our britches, getting a swollen head, being full of hot air, going on an ego trip – the idiomatic clichés go on and on. We worry that too much self-expansion might make others feel worse about themselves, and we worry that we might be judged for that.

Our fears of being seen as narcissistic often inhibit us from squeezing the very things out of life that would make us feel better about ourselves. Many of us deny that we do, in fact, need things from ourselves and from other people in order to regulate our self-esteem, and we walk around feeling depleted and simultaneously powerless to ask for anything more, for fear of appearing entitled. 

In order to expand to our full potential, we have to accept and honor our narcissistic needs and vulnerability so that we can attend to those needs in a constructive way. Only then can we begin to find realistic and pleasurable ways to expand, to increase, to fill out, to be big. If we deny these needs, we also preclude the possibility of ever meeting these needs, and we either develop pathologically narcissistic character (worst option), or we don’t allow ourselves to expand, always feeling a bit depleted and diminished as a result (better option, but still not great). 

If you’re feeling like you never get what you really want, and yet you find yourself envying and resenting other people who seem to be getting everything they want, you may need some navigational help. Never getting what you want may be a way of avoiding judgments, as we all tend to judge harshly the people who know what they want and know how to get it – kind of like we want to do to Steve Jobs. These kinds of judgments help us deny our sometimes painful need to expand, but acknowledging that need will inevitably help us find more satisfying ways to achieve our full potential.  

Wait, Am I A Narcissist Too?

Or, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Loving A Narcissist

We talk about narcissism a lot these days. But we’re doing it all wrong. 

As a psychoanalyst, I love to see the psyche getting mainstream attention. However, judging by the discourse around narcissism in various public forums, the way we talk about it is one-sided at best, and the discourse often quickly veers into self-righteous witchhunting territory, leaving no room for actual thinking or insight. The way we talk about our painful relationships with narcissistic people tends to omit the most important part: how did we get ourselves into these awful relationships in the first place?

Labels Alone Don’t Help 

For instance, the other day I came across an article in the NY Times called “Divorcing A Narcissist.” This writer does a great job elaborating on the suffering that the spouses of pathologically narcissistic people go through, but she ultimately repeats the same mistake I see all the time: she presents the narcissist as a villain with a weird disorder that you couldn’t possibly relate to. Granted, the author who’s being profiled is clearly empathic in her understanding of the experience of someone who’s in a painful relationship with an essentially narcissistic person, and this empathy itself can be valuable and therapeutic, particularly for the short-term lessening of acute emotional pain. While I am not only empathic but also personally sympathetic to the difficulties of being in a painful relationship with a narcissistic partner, I believe no insight, change, or healing is possible without exploring the one question that no one seems to ask of the heartbroken love partner: so just how did you end up marrying/committing to/falling in love with this [dastardly!] narcissist in the first place?

If you’re recovering from a breakup with a pathologically narcissistic partner, the key to your healing is not the unmasking of the emotionally abusive partner as a “narcissist,” followed by a vow never to do that again. In the long term, the labels just aren’t enough. But that’s where the discourse tends to stop: you were involved with a narcissist; now that you know about this new label, you’ll be fine moving forward. 

However, from where I’m sitting, if you come out of therapy with a label and a bunch of traits to look out for, you’re likely to be seeking another course of treatment in the near future. If that’s all you’ve got to go on, you’re very likely to find your way into another uncannily and nighmarishly similar relationship.

So, how did you end up in a committed relationship with this now-unmasked narcissist in the first place? The short answer: Narcissists don’t have an exclusive contract on narcissism. We’ve all got some narcissism in us. Something in that dastardly partner of yours scratched a certain narcissistic itch in you. And that itch is part of what connected you to this person who ended up wrecking your heart and mind just a little ways down the road. 

Longer version: it’s useless to describe the problems in a two-person relationship in terms of one person’s pathology. Responsibility almost never falls on just one of the people involved in an intimate relationship. Note that I’m not talking about blame; I’m talking about responsibility. Labeling the other partner as the “narcissist,” while perhaps diagnostically true, generally functions in the real world as a blaming mechanism. We often distance ourselves from certain feelings and urges by locating all these terrifying feelings in other people who display them most notoriously. We apply labels to these notorious offenders, and we feel satisfied that those bad feelings and urges are located over there, not over here.

When you do that, you’re fooling yourself. Narcissism isn’t just this thing that some people have over there, far away from you. It’s in you. It’s in all of us. It’s a bit like The Force; it’s all around us, everywhere, all the time, and it’s part of what holds our social universe together. Your narcissism plays an integral role in motivating you to put on two matching shoes most of the time, leave more-or-less on time for work, and love the “likes” you get on your Facebook posts. 

The Beginning of the End

Now let’s go back in time, back to when you first started dating that no-good such-and-such. The first three or four months were good, I bet. Really, really good. Maybe the best trimester of your life. There was charming banter. Delicious meals. Passionate sex. In retrospect, maybe it was even too good. You felt attractive in a way that you’d always hope you’d feel. And then, all of a sudden, this person who was just heaping praise on you a second ago now thinks you’re horrible. 

So that first trimester, full of flowers in bloom and day-long orgasms, that’s where the action is, for you. That’s what you need to take a hard look at, because that’s the part of yourself that got you into this mess. During that honeymoon phase, your partner— let’s call him/her “N” — was scratching a certain itch that you never knew you had. Or never admitted to yourself you had. And maybe you have trouble admitting it now. Somehow, N made you feel so desirable, so attractive, so intelligent, so witty. It made you feel the way you’re supposed to feel in a relationship, or so you thought.

Well here’s the thing: you thought wrong. The kind of relating you experienced during the honeymoon phase with N was probably a narcissistic fusion — something to which we are all vulnerable. This fusion is very likely related to a memory/fantasy of indivisible oneness rooted in early experiences/fantasies of parental love, which we hoped was unconditional. 

This is something we have all either experienced or fantasized about, and herein lies the problem with the traditional name/blame game that goes on when talking about narcissism. A desperate need for unconditional love and acceptance is part of what motivated N to judge you so harshly when you didn’t measure up. And that desperate need is not just over there, in N. It’s in everyone. We all needed that itch scratched when we were little babies, and the painful part is that it was either scratched back then, or it wasn’t. What we do with that need as adults determines the shape of our emotional lives.

In the traditional mainstream narrative about narcissism, N has this bad thing inside that you don’t have. That’s nonsense. You got into this mess with N because the narcissistic aspect of your personality — the part that loves the “likes” on Facebook — found a [temporary] home in a fantasy of oneness that you shared with N. Unfortunately, after a while it turned out that N’s entire life was oriented towards a fantasied perfection that no one could ever live up to, yourself included. Once you started falling short of the perfection that N was seeking, N’s self-esteem couldn’t tolerate the ways in which you fell short. And the sense of being deceived by a bait-and-switch artist often drives us to characterize pathologically narcissistic people as demonic psychopaths — which they’re usually not. They’re often much more vulnerable than they are sadistic or psychopathic.

People like N are dominated by narcissistic fears and are preoccupied with protecting their image in other people’s eyes. They organize their lives and all their relationships around these fears, and they can’t really connect to other people in the ways that you strive to connect. But if you look into yourself, there’s a part of you that’s not so different from N. You just manage it differently. 

Does That Mean You’re A Narcissist?

If you fall in love with a series of narcissists, no, you are not necessarily a narcissist. However, there are probably some parts of yourself that need exploring, and the consultation room of a psychoanalyst is a good place to elaborate on the needs that led you to those toxic partners in the first place. When we choose to ignore the internal forces we don’t want to know about, they tend to show up in our relationships, usually in uncomfortable and embarrassing ways. On the topic of keeping secrets from ourselves, Sigmund Freud once wrote, “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” 

Our relationships reflect needs and vulnerabilities that have deep roots in our personal histories, and when we remain ignorant of our own histories, we are doomed to repeat them.