Big Revolution and the Loveless Neu-erotic

“Love can only survive if wisdom has an effective voice.” - Gregory Bateson, Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art

Society requires walls.

Since the dawn of civilization, walls have been used to demarcate boundaries and establish propriety (not a misspelling of “property,” which is also established through walls). What was within the walls was “good” and what lay beyond the walls was “not good.” The walls have been around far longer than you and I have, and with the passage of time the external walls become internalized. They do so to the point that much of our current suffering may be a natural consequence of the walls themselves.

Society itself is fundamentally neurotic. This is not a pejorative statement. It’s descriptive of a particular pattern of organization. Psychologically speaking, it’s a pattern of organization that relies upon repression. Repression is the process of tucking away and out of sight of the “unmentionables,” doing away with the evidence of some situation.

We know it well enough. Somebody angers us, and instead of speaking our minds we bite our tongues because we don’t want to be seen as impolite, pushy, bitchy, and the like. We choke down our expression of anger. However, in doing so it doesn’t simply go away. Anger is information, and information exists as long as it is transmitted. If anything, the events that unfolded in the United States the last few years are indicative of a long repressed frustration that reached a boiling point.

Here lies the issue: repression has consequences. It is not a neutral act.

And yet it is the familiar strategy. The safe bet is that if you grew up within society, you too are neurotic. You’ve inherited social norms and values that have shaped you since birth (perhaps more accurately: since you developed linguistic capacity and began to fit your experience into words that could be understood by the Other). It’s a concept of Lacanian psychoanalysis to presume that, because society is neurotic, most of society’s members are neurotic — it’s simply a matter of degrees. Of course, not everybody in society is neurotic. In the Lacanian work there are two other primary diagnostic categories: “psychotic” and “pervert.”

I know, it’s a tempting set of options available to you: psychotic, pervert, neurotic.

Please bear in mind though that these are simply names given to specific patterns of relationship, specifically relating to the concept of negation. Given that this is not a piece on Lacanian analysis, let’s stick to the neurotic category for the time being.

Again, the neurotic negates through repression. The way a neurotic individual negates an experience is through sending it outside of consciousness.

However, as mentioned above, repression is not without consequences.

Before explaining those, it’s worth a moment to explore why repression is in many ways necessary for a functioning member of society.

Keep in mind that at birth we are utterly helpless, and for a long period of time we are dependent on our caregivers for the satisfaction of our needs. Food, water, and shelter were beyond our capacity for a long time relative to the animal kingdom. Our development is uniquely characterized by a prolonged period of dependency. As a result we have an obligation to act in accordance with our family’s (and by extension, society’s) wishes.

This is such a ubiquitous feature of our early experience that it becomes a bit like the air we breathe; we’re so accustomed to it that it passes out of conscious attention.

It’s worth mentioning that the word so often translated as “repressed” in Freud’s work is actually something closer in meaning to “turned away from.” It’s not so much a matter of accumulating an ever-growing collection of skeletons in the closet as it is a “turning away from” of one’s attention. Certain things simply don’t present themselves to conscious awareness after a long enough period of exposure to them. This is “repressed” material, just as much as those situations which are too painful to confront.

Developmentally repression entails turning away from those parts of ourselves that do not fit the mold given to us by our caregivers.

I’ve written elsewhere about the “sorting” process, in which it is revealed to you (implicitly or explicitly) that the world is a particular sort of place in which it is not safe/good to be a particular sort of person. Some people get the message that it’s not safe to be an “outspoken” sort of person, a “slut,” an “aggressive” sort of person, a “sissy,” or a “dumb” sort of person.”

Considering that each of these words represents a category of behaviors, it then becomes necessary to turn oneself away from those behaviors that make up those categories. Quite often we make the black-and-white distinction that the safest, surest bet is to become the opposite sort of person (note that this is rarely a conscious choice that is made). Hence a person becomes compulsively quiet, sexually inhibited, timid, manly, or smart. A whole character is constructed, by means of which we demonstrate to the world that (to cite James Carse) we are not the sort of person we think they think we are.

We turn away from aspects of ourselves that do not fit the mold, and in the process we become strangers to ourselves. We were raised in environments that indicated that those aspects of ourselves were unlovable, that the love of our caregivers did in fact have a condition: be ___________, or else.

To maintain our ability to be loved, we forfeit our ability to be what we are.

There are always strings attached.

Strangers to ourselves, disconnected from parts of ourselves, we are unable to love ourselves.

We spend most of our lives in pursuit of some experience to recapitulate that lost sense of wholeness. We seek — and are simultaneously terrified by — the oceanic feeling of love. To truly love another would require that we are what we are (rather than the role we’ve been conditioned to play). Likewise to truly be loved by another. But to truly love and be loved is to risk being swept away in that oceanic quality. The familiar structures of self would dissolve, and we would be left raw and exposed as we are.

So we maintain a safe distance. We, as neurotic, become neu-erotic.

Love is absent so long as we remain in this state. We hesitate to give of ourselves fully because we’ve experienced the pain of loss, and we yearn for a world before the wound.

But this is the challenge: the wound perpetuates itself.

Here we have another definition of neuroticism, the inability to adjust one’s behavior in changing contexts. The patterns upon which we grew to rely are those of another time and another place. When we compulsively maintain those patterns of relationship (quiet, sexually inhibited, timid, manly, or smart), turning away from other options of how we might be in the world, we recreate the historical situations that so wounded us in the first place.

Changing these patterns of relationship is the aim of most psychotherapy and embodied practice. Truly effective practices will not only change the pattern of relationship but will also develop a proficiency in the very changing of patterns.

But changing from what? And to what?

The neurotic individual is one for whom the social world is the primary compass. His actions are taken relative to the perception of the Other. When asked what he wants for dinner, he may well reply “I don’t know, what do you want?” The Other is his compass, specifically the Other’s desire. This is a state in which the social, linguistic body has overridden the biological body.

Two patterns of relationship emerge: the symmetrical and the complementary.

The symmetrical is the pattern of relationship that defines sibling rivalry, “keeping up with the Joneses,” and arms races. When A engages in behavior X, B engages with more of X. It is not hard to see that this pattern, taken to its extreme, becomes pathological. The complementary is the pattern that defines dominance and obedience. Teacher/student. Parent/child. Master/slave. This pattern can become just as pathological if carried to its extremes.

What is needed for a healthy relationship is the ability to alternate between these various modes. A person who feels insecure in his ability to shift contexts in such a way will necessarily force a rigid pattern of relationship onto others. This is the game of tyranny. This is the neurotic’s move, taken to its logical conclusions.

But it seems to me that the body knows the way.

Moving beyond this state entails not only developing an appreciation for the body’s signals and needs but making the difficult decision to acknowledge and act upon them. This is the state of a person resting when tired or eating when hungry — without the inhibitory games played relative to the Other (powering through fatigue to meet a deadline, not eating so as not to appear greedy, etc).

Of course, the question may well arise: who cares?

What’s the big deal about resting or eating?

The neu-erotic is unable to love another until he is able to love himself. He is unable to give of himself fully until he fully is in the first place (meaning comes into being as an autonomous subject). Until that point he is a facsimile of a person. At times it’s a highly functional facsimile, one who may be great at parties and seemingly well-adjusted, but until a person is able to love himself and act accordingly he is hollow.

If you’ll forgive a possible stretch, it seems to me that this is why big pushes for social reform are doomed to fail so long as we live in a neurotic (and neu-erotic) state. An equitable world must be built from the bottom up. Top down mandates that demand an individual act as if he loves another cannot succeed if the individual is unable to voluntarily love another. They will only invite blind obedience or petty rebellion in response, neurotic patterns from childhood and adolescence reenacted in the political arena. If you take a look around, it isn’t hard to find evidence of this in mainstream media.

I cannot imagine that the fights over economic reform, social equity, and the like will succeed so long as the population is frozen in the neu-erotic pattern.

The Big Revolution does not ask for the tearing down of society’s walls or the smashing of old structures; rather it asks for their obsolescence. It asks for the individuals that compose a society to come into the fullness of themselves, to learn how to love themselves, and in so doing to learn how to love another.

But that’s a tall order. Until we are able to internalize the sense of security afforded by familiar social walls we will remain in servitude to those externals.

There is much more to cover along this thread, but I will leave it here for you to tug.

Originally published on the Ecosomatics Institute blog