Beyond the Sad Passions – Miguel Benasayag
As therapists know, one of the classic causes of a person’s psychological suffering is being trapped in a “past that does not pass,” which burdens any possibility of acting freely in the present. Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: “I suffer, therefore I am.”
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Generally, the patient comes with “too much knowledge.” He knows why he suffers and why every change seems impossible to him. The therapist must then invite him not to relate to a supposed “doctoral” knowledge, but to gradually embark on a journey towards a shared non-knowledge.
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It may be legitimately objected that the person, given what he is, often prefers to remain in the enjoyment of repetition. However, a belief of the situational therapist is that the inherent power of living of which Spinoza spoke is nothing other than what is subtracted from repetition and which is always present. Even when this power is quite reduced, the work consists in seeking together with the patient with whom or with what he can associate so that this weak power becomes capable of participating in something different from his egocentric symptom.
This is why situational therapy focuses on the search for possible tangents: “Except for repeating, what else can the patient do?” And the answer is that he can, as we have seen, allow himself to be “thrilled” by the combinatorics of life (see the previous chapter).
For the patient, the difficulty in avoiding repetition is often related to the difficulty in resisting the power of normalized models of happiness, which demand living in a couple (preferably heterosexual), having children, and accessing a certain level of consumerism. The therapist must then help him to emancipate himself from those identifying images of happiness, so that he can find his own way to joy and power. A certain patient, given his characteristics and overdeterminations, is not, for example, suitable for living in a couple, having a large car, or a mortgage. The first part of the work therefore consists in allowing him to break the chains that bind him to that disciplinary normality. Because every repetition is in some way linked to a programmed failure in relation to dominant images. Situational therapy consists in this sense much less in finding out how one can live in the norm of the relationship overcoming repetition that drives him to failure, but rather in helping him to renounce that normalizing image to navigate according to his own inner geography. This also implies that the patient be helped to tolerate a certain dose of anxiety that necessarily accompanies every emancipatory development. In short, if in the past we had to fight to free the mad from confinement in the psychiatric hospital, today we need to help people free themselves from the tyranny of the norm.
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Therefore, the issue of the supposed role of the patient’s “awareness” in treatment arises: this awareness actually becomes a problem when it is understood that being aware of the origins of psychological suffering rarely leads to “improvement.” From this it follows that consciousness is not an instance capable of initiating action. On the contrary, every conscious decision is a narcissistic way of stating the fact that one was doing this rather than that.
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Often, patients confuse what one could call a relationship with a label. For example, they say: “I am a friend of Paul”; or: “I’m with Lea.” And, once this statement is made, everything happens as if they were saying: “Full stop.” The label is applied.
It reminds me of some stories for children that my mother used to read to me. At the end of a series of adventures, the boy married the girl and their future was summarized in a sentence: “They lived happily and had many children.” I remember the anxiety this caused me: “What happens after that?” The somewhat nightmarish image I had in my head was that they were all put in the fridge and that life was over. It was only with time that I understood that friendship, love, and relationships are nothing but some of the names for the conflictual relationships driven by a permanent need.