In his book The Life We Want, Adam Phillips asks the perennial question: What is the life we want? Maybe more importantly, he asks: How do we begin to know what life we want? How do we find it, and how do we do so in a way that is true to ourselves? This question, deceptively simple on the surface, is among the deepest we face. It often becomes the subject of lifelong seeking and experimentation. Even the idea of being true to ourselves is profoundly complicated, perhaps even impossible. It raises further questions: Who are we? Why are we who we are? Is there a self that stands apart from the one shaped by family, society, desire? Is there a self at all? And if so, is that self ever fully accessible? For Phillips, psychoanalysis offers many answers.
I had the mixed fortune of being somewhat free from traditional parental influence at a young age, as my parents divorced and became fundamentally consumed in their own drama. By traditional parental influence, I mean a combination of social pressure and, in my case, a distinctly American pragmatist and exceptionalist sense of what one ought to want for one's child and what kind of life one ought to prescribe. In my case, parental influence came to be shaped more by a mother who underwent a kind of post-divorce transmutation, receding into herself, ceasing to practice ordinary forms of self-care, and slowly dissolving into suicidal ideation. This, coupled with a series of events such as the overdose of a best friend, a murder-suicide in her immediate family, and a series of confusing experiences with electroshock therapy, left my mother, and in turn me, somewhat lost.
This has shaped my sense of reality, self, and the drives I have tried to observe from a certain, though often unachievable, distance. I came of age in an environment that felt unstable, and I responded by constructing the artifice of stability through work and striving. What began as a strategy of survival eventually bore fruit, allowing me to slow down and arrive at my present position, where I have the luxury of contemplation (luxury is a profound and sad qualifier, though this is a topic for a different essay). This contemplation remains coloured by the original experience, and likely always will. There is a sort of mother-shaped hole I am trying to fill, or perhaps this is what psychoanalysis would have me think.
Indeed, at this moment in my own life, the primary object of my attention is contemplation, contemplation on the nature of life, existence, and, to the extent that it appears accessible, ultimate reality. Reading The Life We Want made me realize that the question contains many hidden layers, perhaps the least benign of which, from my perspective, is this: beneath the question of the life we want lies another, more difficult: what kind of reality are we prepared to inhabit? I’m not a relativist, but as I see it, the "life we want" unfolds against a background of assumptions or truths, whether real or supposed, that cannot be separated from life itself and are profoundly influential in shaping what we want. The reality we live in is objectively individualized. It is shaped by choice, and each of us inhabits a different version of it. The consequences of that choice, what we allow ourselves to know versus what we screen out, are inseparable from the life we end up wanting.
I find myself reaching for dogma in order to create a kind of stability. When I notice this, another wish emerges: to free myself from dogma, from the craving for stability in a fluctuating and impermanent world. At its worst, this wish threatens to become a dogma of its own. I want a cure from the desire to be cured.
My current picture of reality has been shaped by several distinct, sometimes overlapping traditions: Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism in the spirit of Meister Eckhart and St. Augustine, Spinoza's intellectual love of God, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, the more psychedelic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and perhaps most strongly, Zen and insight traditions. The question that most interests me here is: what elements of these schools of thought attract me? What kind of salvation do they appear to offer? And is their appeal only an empty promise to relieve a sort of lack, one that lives in all of us but that, in my case, feels distinctly maternal? What draws me to these traditions, I think, is less their metaphysical content than what they each point toward, the possibility of experiencing without demanding resolution. Whether that possibility is genuine, or whether it is simply the most refined form my craving for stability has taken, I cannot really say. The appeal may be another empty promise. But it is the one that feels least like a lie.
We are all born into this world against a background of lack. The existentialists understood this well. It is not entirely unreasonable to view life as an attempt to distract oneself from the primordial lack we all face, the child weaned from the breast, thrust headlong into a world of trial and tribulation, set on a path to lose everything she has ever loved, and eventually thrust into oblivion. As much as I identify with this brand of existentialism, I see within it a risk of pessimistic nihilism. Insofar as one is willing to adopt the view that the reality through which we live is, at least in part, constructed, and that one has some measure of choice over the life one wants, what use is nihilism? It would seem to me that the most reasonable choice, if some form of relief from suffering, or even its embrace, remains a goal, would be to adopt a life imbued with divinity, to see every moment as sacred and potentially transcendent. But here I find the risk of salvation, the desire to be cured, the trap. Again, I can only articulate my wish: a desire to be cured from the need for a cure. And yet the noticing continues. Perhaps that is enough.