This was originally written on May 25, 2021.
I told Tom that something had dawned on me, although it probably seemed obvious to everyone else: the dominant phenomenon coloring my experience is anxiety. So many things, from mundane to not, make me almost cripplingly anxious. And in turn, all of my little quirks, all the idiosyncratic actions I perform, all the symptoms I’ve described during the course of my analysis, involve me either avoiding anxiety altogether or doing everything I possibly can to get rid of it quickly. I have a sense that anxiety isn’t terribly pleasant for anyone, and we all deal with it, but I don’t know for sure if I can say that it’s really the prevailing force in everyone’s life. Maybe it is.
In any case, I also associated to a few different things:
- I’ve been reading Freud’s account of the Rat-Man case, and from that, I have gleaned an idea that the obsessions and compulsions evident in neurosis come with an implied “or else…” In the Rat-Man’s case that could be formulated as “You will pay back Lieutenant A. or else your father will die,” among other things. For me, of all things, what I associated to was keeping my socks in good condition. “Keep your socks nice or else…”
- I’ve also been reading Lacan’s Seminar X on anxiety over the last nine months or so. In this work Lacan describes anxiety a number of different ways. One of those ways is as “signal of desire.” This is what I relayed to Tom; that if my experience is colored by anxiety, what desire is that anxiety signaling?
These two things come together to form a knot, so let’s tighten it. What I ultimately came to, especially via the socks (which makes me shake my head at the mundanity), is that my desire is for the love of the Other in all its myriad forms. The implied “or else…” in my compulsions ends with “the Other will cease to love you.”
It’s beautiful, really, at least I think so. Let me take you through all the formulations that occurred to me after the session.
I love the Other much more than myself. I haven’t written about this much, so it needs some explanation. There is one particular instance that comes to mind that I think most clearly demonstrates what I’m getting at. My mom is a teacher. She likes watching my daughter but during the school year that’s basically impossible for her. In the summers, though, she’s much more available to do that. Last summer I desperately wanted to make sure that she got this opportunity, so I took it upon myself (even though my mom said I didn’t have to) to drive an hour into the city to drop off my daughter, an hour out of the city to get to work, and then again at the end of the day. It was crazy, but it really gets at this idea of loving the Other. I was perfectly willing to go to insane lengths to make sure the Other was happy. (Bear in mind that even though my mom herself is an incarnation of the Other, like an avatar, the Other at stake here is the edifice of her I’ve built up in my own head.)
The funny thing about this is that, try as hard as I might, I end up hurting the other people (not the Other, of course) that get in the way of my capitulation to the Other, or that get in the way of me assuaging of my anxiety. And, this is especially funny I think, the Other is insatiable. There is no way to fully satisfy it; the Other demands more and more and more.
This brings me to my next point, which is the lack of a guarantee. There is no guarantee that fulfilling my compulsions will make my dad love me the way I want(ed), or that they will ensure my mom or my wife or my daughter will always love me. I can, however, make sure that the Other loves me, even at the expense of my close friends and family. These things have the potential to fall apart. It happened between my parents and their own…
On the flip side of this are all the things I do to escape the vice grip of the Other. I’ve written before about the space of the exception: my car, my garage, my late nights when everyone is asleep. In all these spaces and others I get to escape the Other and take something for myself. What I think makes it most poignant is that the things I do in the space of the exception are all terrible for me and my body: I smoke, I eat garbage, I stay up for days without sleep, and so on. This was kind of a mystery to me, at least in part, until today’s session. Why do I do these things? So that the Other can’t have it all.
The last thing, strongly related to the above point, is my refusal to give up too much to the Other. The clearest way to consider this I think is in my extreme difficulty talking about myself (although this blog where I write about myself all the time is an interesting exception…). By refusing to give up too much to the Other in not talking about myself, in struggling to talk to other people, in declining to own my desire, the aim is to preserve the Other’s love and to alleviate the anxiety that I might not possess that love.