Working with me in therapy often includes discussion of existential issues like what this post talks about. It can be hard to find a therapist who can engage with you on deep issues and get closer to big questions. If this resonates with you, call me today for an appointment: 917-873-0292.

A celebrated psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) opined:

We are, after all, ephemeral creatures living on an insignificant spot of earth that circles (according to the astronomers) round an ordinary star occupying a somewhat peripheral position in a particular nebula. So the idea that the universe obeys the laws in such a way that it becomes comprehensible to us is sheer nonsense; it seems to me to be an expression of omnipotence or omniscience (7/4/1977, Tavistock Seminars, p. 28).

This idea is intended to be refreshing—like Socrates’ inconvenient reminders that humans know nothing compared to the Gods—-and to wake us from the trance of our daily affairs. But suppose we have heard this before. Suppose it has not had the intended liberating effect, but has become a reach for power, whereby we in the audience are supposedly hypnotized by commerce and culture (Wordsworth’s “getting and spending”), whereas Bion and others like him are awake. It’s as if Bion thinks this is news to us; that we have been lingering in the medieval past, waiting for a Copernicus to set us free. Announcing that humans live “on an insignificant spot” is, I suggest, “an expression of omnipotence or omniscience.”

All of the “significance” or “meaning” to which we have any access is centered here, on the only green world we know. “Earth’s the place for love,” wrote Robert Frost, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” When Socrates reported that the Delphic Oracle had said “No human being is wiser than Socrates,” it was clear that Apollo meant human wisdom is worthless compared to the wisdom of the Gods. To get exuberant about the “vastness of human ignorance,” as Bion and others have done so often, is an expression of omniscience which pretends to have exited from that state and looked back on it with fond pity—as if the whole life of mankind were a provincial illusion, except for this very humble bit of it where a thinker notices the surrounding universe. Experience says that our “merely” human action creates real relationships, real suffering and losses, real nurturance, connection and love, creativity and damage, joy and pain. Of course the scale of our actions is a match for our own size and longevity, not those of a galaxy or a mouse.

When people play this “human insignificance” card, or sagely announce that all people are somehow 100% ignorant, or that life is meaningless—just ask them: compared to what?

They are adopting a stance, making a gesture, offering a corrective to somebody’s dogmatic slumber. But no matter how often they adopt a Socratic pose, they still conduct their own affairs as if those were plenty significant to them, because making meaning is what human beings do. Socrates himself claimed to know nothing, but he introduced that speech (his courtroom oration in his own defense) with very little doubt: πιστεύω γὰρ δίκαια εἶναι ἃ λέγω. “For I am confident that what I say is just.”

Since we ephemeral creatures acquired, say, the Pythagorean theorem, and that theorem is not nothing, human beings do know something. We don’t know what the Gods know, or what the unconscious knows, or what another person knows of their own body and life experience—but we do know something. We are tiny compared with a whale, and huge compared with a fly—not merely tiny-compared-to-anything. It is, perhaps, “sheer nonsense” to speak as if the telescope has been invented, but the microscope has not. If human beings are “insignificant,” then what is significant? And to whom?

Perhaps this impulse—to lament our utter insignificance, our total ignorance, our ephemeral brevity, our powerlessness in a cold universe—is an unconscious repetition of very early feelings. A baby, after all, is overwhelmingly lacking in power, knowledge, size, and ability compared to the adult(s) on whom the baby is totally dependent. Similarly, a grownup’s grandiose disillusion with all of human culture echoes the teenager’s outraged discovery that our lives are mediated by socially constructed stuff, not eternal verities. The parents who once seemed all-knowing and all-powerful are deflated in our estimation, an experience that gets repeated in other domains later on.

Followers of psychoanalytic mystical monists like Bion and Jung and Lacan often need reminding: it is hubristic to boast of one’s own humility, intellectual or otherwise. The young Martin Luther was praying in his cell one day, whipping himself in his ascetic devotions, when the Devil appeared to him, saying: “Very good, Martin. Soon you’ll be more pious than God.” The cure, it seems, is to accept that everything contains a seed of its opposite; that altruism need not be “pure,” or else it may never happen; and that meaning is its own reward, neither absolute nor entirely empty. “Ephemeral” in Ancient Greek means “of a day.” We are indeed fleeting, temporary, evanescent. A day is an instant for a mountain—a lifetime for a mayfly, an aeon for an evanescent neutrino; and for a timeless photon, eternity. But we are not mountains, nor may-flies. Your life is meaningful, because meaning can only happen in a life, just as location can only happen in the universe. Life is meaning.

Working with me in therapy often includes existential issues like what this post talks about. It can be hard to find a therapist who can engage with you on deep issues and help you orient yourself to big questions. If this resonates with you, you can call me today for an appointment: 917-873-0292.

Whatever your age, you are also all the ages you’ve been before. Part of your psyche is an infant, because past selves remain as parts of an increasingly complex self-system. Younger parts of self, with unhealed wounds and unmet needs, can interfere with adult life, until they get the necessary loving care from the most adult parts of self.

Now, without an awareness that the self has parts, we are likely to feel crazy the moment our feelings do not agree with one another. I want to eat the cake, but I also want to be in a caloric deficit. I want to keep playing in the snow, but I also want to go inside and warm up. Knowing it's impossible to do both, I might well feel crazy whenever a pair of incompatible desires assails me. 

Unless, of course, I have an understanding of the self as a dynamic composite, in which case it all makes sense. A more ancient version of this same fact can be found in the distinction between monotheism, and the polytheism it replaced. If there are many Gods, as Plato pointed out in his Euthyphro, their desires can be in conflict with one another. But the God of a monotheist cannot do this, for lack of any opposing competitor. In the work of making sense of a dangerous world, each had its advantages. And it was Plato who first discovered (or at least, first mentioned) the inner child, in the Phaedo. But I digress. Let’s return to the self. 

Think of a moment when your behavior seemed to you to be immature for your age, or otherwise irrational--procrastination, for example. What tasks are you avoiding? Part of you wants to complete these tasks and enjoy the sense of accomplishment and relief that comes from a job well done --but part of you prefers to keep deferring the inevitable. When you catch yourself engaged in this pattern, perhaps you are harsh and punitive with yourself. Perhaps both the avoidance and the punishment feel somewhat alien—-as if you were not quite in charge of either of those inner and outer goings-on.

Where, then, do they come from? Whenever anything just doesn't fit with the present reality, we can ask ourselves what it might fit with from the past. The mind doesn't randomly generate errors, so much as it displaces significant, meaningful things from one context to another, where their meaning is far less evident. 

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for procrastinating is an overwhelmed five or six year-old kid who is genuinely frightened of adult tasks, and concerned that completing them would result in abandonment. That is, if he shows he can take care of himself, nobody will ever take care of him again—so he procrastinates, instead. Or rather, he forces you to procrastinate. The purpose of his boycott is to make sure that he, the inner child, gets the loving attention he needs, as a matter of (what feels like) life and death.

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for the punitive attack on the procrastinating, needy child is an embarrassed, rageful adolescent. The inner teenager is, after all, disgusted and repulsed by the frank, naive, primitive neediness of the defenseless child. The teenager’s whole existence is about escaping from childhood, parting company with it, and often marshaling a bitter contempt for it in order to bear the terror and loss of saying farewell to childhood forever. This explains the savagery of the “super-ego” when it punishes that lost little kid for the sin of imposing inconvenient delays on the whole (inner) family.

The inner adult, the most adult self, is the part who is best able to nurture, respect, protect, and educate all the younger parts of self whose difficult states of mind sometimes rise to the fore and feel intractable. Instead, your most mature self, the parts of your personality that are most intact and best developed, can be encouraged and equipped by psychotherapy to re-parent the rest yourself. Freud taught long ago that each of us is all the ages we have ever been. Like ancient Rome, the psyche is a many-layered thing, in which deeper levels from long ago persist beneath contemporary layers with more life and less history. Conversely, being young involves more strength and less wisdom, so that the middle-age we so long dreaded becomes a domain of awareness, rather than mere lost youth.

Enjoy this performance of Book One of Homer's Iliad, most of it produced in quarantine as an effort to keep the crisis creative. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the clinical value of this story lies in its viscerally felt linkage between rage and misery; competition and bitterness; loss, and the revelation that there are things far more important than being right, or vindication, or even victory. For this wisdom, the tragic drama of ancient Athens is among the best sources in the world (though King Lear, for example, teaches some of the same lessons about shame). 

Homer's epic poem, or "made thing," is among the deepest works of our species. It represents the collective labors of over four centuries of bards, who span the gap between the Trojan War itself (c.1185-1175 BCE), and the emergence of a vast epic tradition that has kept its human images alive. Those labors were woven together, and presumably linked by improvised poetic transitions, by the mind of an individual blind genius, touched by poetry's Divine origin. 

Iliad I (traditionally, the "books" or chapters of the Iliad are noted in capital Roman numerals; those of the Odyssey, lowercase) includes a Divinely sent opportunity to put aside anger. Though Achilles' reprieve from his own rage proves all too brief, each of us may be more free than we suspect; free, for example, to let go of old resentments, of old yearnings for retributive justice, or for a great day of reckoning. 

The non-tragic outcome is surely still possible for you and me, in part because the tragic consciousness is already is still available to us---only (or as I prefer to think, especially) if, as Nietzsche said, we still have some connection to the past and the ancient world.
I made the first portion (lines 1-92) in 2013; the rest in the Spring of 2020. It was a great experience----a real reward for playing hooky from the daily regime of anxiety about wasting time; or about being too expressive; or about failing to monetize every minute of each day, or meet other American expectations that are levied daily at the expense of each human spirit who buys into them for lack of support. The latter includes love (rather than isolation), as well as connection--not only to a partner and the community, but to the to the past and the cosmos.

Art exists to help us live our lives---as everybody says, in a chorus that includes Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer; Shelley and Nietzsche ("hey, those are my guys"). Living with the help of art does not make you Don Quixote. It can put you in touch with much more of reality, and not (usually) less.
Sure a Poet is a sage, a humanist, physician to all mankind.--John Keats. Enjoy some Homer, today.

When a young person presents with both addiction and failure to launch, there is almost always a pressured tension between the patient and his or her family, especially those who control the pursestrings and pay for the therapy. The twenty-something’s journey (out of addiction and deferral, and into adulthood) should be distinct from his relational process with his family. In fact, it may even be psychologically necessary for him to move forward without having reached a stable accord with them. That way, he can be sure that his progress is not mere compliance. As that progress yield concrete results---especially, paying more of his own bills---he can be more confident that it isn't mere defiance, either. 

Compliance and defiance typically have been the poles between which the patient has been running back and forth for years, inside a family system which is stuck in that pattern. His compliance seems to be movement forward into adulthood, so long as most of what he complies with happens to be good advice, and reasonable rules, that come from exasperated elders who may well love him. But compliance is never really as good as it looks, because it's not autonomous, so it is not sustainable; it builds resentment that comes out sooner or later.  His defiance appears to be much worse, of course, because it's often full of hostility, self-destructive, anti-social, risky, and debilitating. 

Part of the reason this pattern is so terribly stable and hard to break up, is that the family's response to the young addict's defiance is usually a call for a return to compliance, this time a new-and-improved compliance that will last. That never works, because even if he does produce a good lengthy chunk of compliance, it's still mere compliance.  The solution is, in most such cases, to bring in a therapist whose client is not the family, but the patient himself. That way, the patient can continue doing the only two things he knows how to do, but in a whole new way which will permit him to learn new skills: he defies the family, and complies with the therapist in a genuine, collaborative search for what the patient (himself/herself/theirself) actually wants from life.

Why is that compliance somehow better? Well, between the patient and the therapist there is no personal history of being hurt, or betrayed, or robbed, or worried half to death. The professional is not burdened with guilt or regret about the past of the patient and his family. So she or he can afford to keep the patient's interests central, striving to collaborate with him on a viable path to a good-enough life (good-enough in the patient's own terms), at the heart of which must be a kind of guarded friendship between the struggling young patient and Reality. 

This is the same Reality which he has avoided for so long, languishing in addiction and the related un(der)employment. For him, Reality has been a place of failure, shame, and fear. Changing that is not easy, even with professional help. By the time such a patient arrives in the therapy office, he may have been to rehab, only once or many times. Depending on the nature of the addiction involved, recovery might be the first order of business; sometimes it has to come second or third. The choice (or the cycle) between abstinence and harm reduction should be respected, in accord with the specifics of the case and the values of both patient and therapist.

When something has been stable---even something toxic and annoyingly stable, such as a particular dynamic in a family system; a particular role for a particular person; any ongoing relational process that's been around for a while, even if it's one that truly sucks---its replacement by something better is still a big change. And all big changes, good or bad, are losses of the familiar. The good big changes are also gains, sometimes far bigger gains than the loss involved. So when a young person is coping with addiction and "failure to launch," and he or she manages to change and become successful-enough, sometimes the family gets upset---even though this good development is exactly what they've been pulling for all those years. It's new and it feels strange and people aren't sure how to respond to it.

And from the patient's side, as the therapy gains traction his capacity to manage his own affairs may be growing at a different rate than his capacity to deal with his family in ways that remain timely, kind, and effective for the pursuit of his own interest. Again: the patient's ability to cope with reality may be growing somewhat faster than his ability to deal with parents or other attachment figures in good-enough ways, enough of the time. Those older adults should try to keep these two capacities distinct in their minds, even though they are closely linked. Yes indeed, a guy who can keep a job ought to have the relational skills to manage his family elders without too much emotional noise-making. But as a therapist I can report it's extremely common for people of all ages to regress into childhood self-states when they deal with their parents---especially when purse strings are involved; or when there has been a divorce; or when there has been bereavement in the early death of a parent; and when addiction has been the main coping mechanism for a long time. If the patient acts messy with his folks, it doesn't necessarily mean he's still being messy out in the world.

In general, as far as good things go---things that might flow from the family to the patient, in recognition of his recent achievements---timing is important. It may be fine, and even lovely, for his family to use words and gifts to celebrate him for going straight after he manages to do so. But such things should never be mentioned beforehand, nor set up as an incentive. It has to be a free gift, at the right time, not too soon and without any strings attached. Of course, when therapy has just begun and addiction is still active, that's still a distant concern.

Compliance and defiance look and feel very different. Ultimately, both are forms of captivity to the cycle they form together. The way out is a genuine alliance between patient and therapist, in which it's made clear that there is a world---vital, interesting, unpredictable, sometimes friendly, and not impossible to join---beyond the one that has proven so painful and boring. Sometimes, the first hint of this lies with something outside the problem which can illuminate it: literature, or religion, or science and nature, or politics---it doesn't matter what the source is, so long as the patient gets the news (eventually, and as soon as possible) that, as Shakespeare's Coriolanus says when he leaves his mother: There is a world elsewhere.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.