Let Go of the Old
In Albert Camus’s short story “The Guest,” he depicts a man who wishes to avoid all responsibility. Set in Algeria at the time of the revolution against the colonial authorities, a young schoolteacher aligns with neither side, and when he is charged with holding a rebel until the authorities arrive, he gives the prisoner the opportunity to escape, pointing out the path to the freedom of the desert versus captivity in the colonial prison. When he sees that his prisoner has taken the chance to slip away the next morning, he feels free from consequences only to find out that his prisoner has chosen the path to incarceration instead of freedom and that he himself is now the target of the retributive wrath of the revolutionaries. So there is within the lives of all of us the frequent choice to remain within the predictable, the safe, the familiar, even the miserable, thinking it preferable to the uncertainty of the unknown. How often do we look back “longing for the freedom of our chains,” rather than stepping into the opening maw of uncertainty?
Freud identified what he called “the repetition compulsion,” the drive within us to replicate the old, even if it is painful and leads us to predictable but familiar dead ends. First, we can acknowledge the power of negative programming in our lives. The examples are plentiful. How many abused children seek out, even marry, abusers? How many abusers repeat their pathologically circumscribed images of relationship? But Freud also speculated that one might repeat the traumatizing experience as somehow “safer” than the original, believing somehow that it will be better this time. So, the prisoner chooses prison rather than the abyss of open choices, the desert of unlimited freedoms. The schoolteacher “chooses” not to choose, apparently to avoid the consequences of choice, and the watchful gods bring upon him the terrible consequences of that choice.
Letting go of the old is apparently much more difficult than we think. We believe we do so by redecorating our homes, taking a different kind of vacation, even swapping relational partners, but the replicative patterns remain. The only constant presence in every scene of that long-running soap opera we call our life is us. So, undeniably, we have to bear responsibility for how this story is unfolding. And yet, why do these patterns, especially those that are harmful to us and others, have such a grip on us?
Where we find patterns, we also will likely find core, emotion-laden ideas within us, ideas that may or may not be conscious, may or may not be accurate, may not even be ours but have been part of our formative experience and the primal atmosphere we inhabited. We all internalize messages from daily life — from popular media; from our family of origin; from religious, educational, political, economic, and other cultural influences; and from the vagaries of our personal biographies. These messages tell us what to do: avoid this, engage that, perform this action; or they instruct us what not to do: be quiet, hide out, don’t reveal what you are feeling. We were not born with these messages, but we have them because we have a history and because we are sensitive beings in need of “reading” the world around us to serve our survival, get our needs met as best we can, and fit in.
Given that the most powerful and the least considered messages derive from our earliest experiences of safety, peril, and adaptive instructions, whenever they are activated in our psychic life, they have the power to usurp consciousness, take over, and execute their archaic programs. The most powerful of these messages derive from our earliest relationships and tend to accumulate as a series of reflexive responses to the stimuli of life. While they were once phenomenological, namely experiential and not conscious, over time they become “institutionalized” responses to the tasks, troubles, and turbulence of the world. No wonder we have patterns. Letting go of them proves the most difficult of our tasks because they once were, and sometimes remain, tied to our survival, our fitting in, our acceptance by others.
Old loyalties, old understandings, old commitments may very well have bound our days together in predictable ways, but these same constructs can also bind us to a disabling past or a limiting view of others. The nature of our psyche is based on change, growth, curiosity, and imagination. But there are very conservative elements within us that retain a commitment to the known, the familiar, even when it is based on constrictive perspectives. Look at the discord in our nation in the face of social evolution, change, and erosion of the old “certainties.” When I was a child, the presumptive fixities of gender role and definition; racial, ethnic, and sexual practices; and ethical categories were presumed to be given by the gods, ordained by unchallenged scriptures or venerated institutions. There is not one of these “fixities” whose ontological claim has not been deconstructed. Never in human history have individuals been freer to choose their life path, their values, and to serve what is true for them. And with this freedom comes a tremendous backlash that opportunistic politicians utilize to their advantage. Those who want the “good old days,” who “want their country back,” are really wishing (a) that their once-privileged position be ratified and reified and (b) that the anxiety of ambiguity be treated with the anodyne of “certainty,” “received authority,” and “traditional values.” What is not addressed — indeed what is most exploited, in every country, every culture, every religious or political hegemony under the onslaught of change — is how much of the blow-back is fueled by human psychopathology. That is, how much cultural tension, conflict, and frenzy arise out of the anxiety of change, of ambiguity, of evolution, of eroded “certainties.” Little do such groups realize that their normative stories are just that: stories, interpretations, which were once repressed and resented as they, too, overthrew the certainties of their age. As well, our present culture wars will be viewed by succeeding eras as laughably archaic, uninformed, and constrictive.
Former Illinois governor and US ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson once observed that the moral measure of a nation is how it treats its least advantaged citizens. So, too, we may add a corollary: the moral measure of a culture is found in the degree to which individuals and groups can tolerate ambiguity and change and how open they can be to the otherness of others. By that definition, this modern world is not doing very well. But are there values worth preserving? Of course there are: decency, toleration, respect for others. Right now, I am betting on human psychopathology to prevail, as it most often does, even though I work on the one person I can work on, myself, to try to render myself more amenable to creative living in the presence of change, ambiguity, and the erosion of those old certainties.
So, letting go of the old is not easy. It requires being able to tolerate the aroused level of anxiety that besets any of us when ego consciousness is not in control. It requires that we let go of what we thought certain and cast our lifeboats upon a tenebrous sea. The more we resist change, the more we are allied against the nature of nature and the developmental agenda of our own psyches. Being aligned against our own nature is the very definition of neurosis. One obvious, but perhaps unconscious, example of this resistance is found in our culture’s obsession with and denial of aging and mortality, the natural, evolving process within our body and our soul that is programmed in our DNA and begins unfolding from our first moment of life. How many times have people hung on to their youth, resisted growth and graceful accommodation with nature “naturing” within them? Facing his own aging, ailing, and mortal process, Yeats wrote in “Sailing to Byzantium” that the soul is obliged to “sing, and louder sing, for every tatter in its mortal dress.” In other words, for every outer diminishment, we are tasked with a summons to larger engagement with the soul within. This process alone brings us meaning, growth, and the resilience of the spirit; the alternative is a continuously fugitive life.
Life is a series of attachment and losses, beginning with our disconnect from the womb, a primal trauma from which we never wholly recover. During our journey, we link with, attach to, and also separate from others on a continuing basis. People come and go in our lives. Some of these losses are traumatic: a marriage that sinks, a child lost, a career up in smoke. These things hurt, yet not to move forward in service to life, in service to bringing more into this world, is to abrogate our reason for being here — to bring our more evolved chip to the great mosaic of being, a humbling and ennobling participation in the vast puzzle that the human venture has been adding to or subtracting from since its beginning in the African veldt many millennia ago.
Attachment and loss, attachment and loss — this is the human story. We lose parts of ourselves as we adapt to the demands of the world. Those for whom we care are often lost through death, divorce, or dysfunction. Whether we absorb those losses into our system and soldier on or remain stuck at the level of the loss is the question. For example, those who have experienced betrayal in their lives often remain attached to the wound and the implicit message of that experience. I cannot number those whom I have seen who are still hanging on to an earlier image of themselves, moments of weakness, self-betrayal, or failure, who sustain their attachment to an earlier self-image rather than learn from it and move on. And how many choose people in their lives who will repeat that pattern for them? The woman who selects loser after loser because she was never sure her father was there for her and through all this repetition compulsion blames herself, thinking, as every child does, “I am what happened to me. I am my experience. If I were worthy of love, he would have been there for me.” Her ghostly father imago gets transferred to inappropriate man after inappropriate man. And the man who feels dependent upon the woman but distances himself from her because he fears the magnitude of his own need reads her reactions to his distancing as a confirmation of her ill intentions toward him from the beginning. All of these common relational patterns in our lives arise because we are still attached to our earliest experiences of self and other. All of these patterns arise from a driving idea, with its attendant message, the defining stories fate provides us. Until we realize that we are still in relationship to that complex, that intrapsychic imago of self and other, we are doomed like the ancient mariner to wander with our repetitive story.
Letting go of the old is infinitely more difficult than we think. How difficult it is to grasp the wisdom of Samuel Beckett in Endgame: “play and lose, and have done with losing.” We have been defined by our history, our attachments, our provisional definitions of ourselves and others, and we cling to our history with tenacity precisely because to think of ourselves in other ways is either intimidating or unimaginable. But the human psyche imagines more. The problem with complexes is that they have no imagination. They can only say over and over the phenomenological message of their origins. But the psyche has a much larger perspective on our lives. It imagines much more for us than the ordinary ego can comprehend.
Ironically, psychopathology is one of the signs of the larger imagination of the psyche, or soul. If we had no soul, that is, had no organ of meaning, our adaptations would be our reality. But the soul protests and registers its protest through our body, our troubling dreams, our affective invasions, such as depression or our addictive, anesthetizing self-treatment. While most of modern psychiatry and psychotherapy prefer to work around these protests and thereby drive the internal conflict deeper, the psychodynamic understanding of symptoms, dreams, and behavioral patterns is rather to ask: Why have you come? What is it you are protesting? What is the desire of the soul (as opposed to the desires of my environment, my complexes, my history)? These questions do not bury the issue, try to bypass it, or medicate it into numbness, but rather approach the soul with dignity and ask, as we might of any stranger who knocks unbidden at our door, “Why have you come? What do you want? How might we converse?”
Only with this sort of respect for the dialogue with the psyche can we begin to leave the old behind. Much in our history is worthy of carrying forward, and much is not. Just as we periodically clean the house, go through old clothes and fashions and discard the no longer germane, so we have to go through our accumulated histories, our driving attitudes, reflexes, and responses, and discard what is no longer useful, productive, relevant, or serving growth. As Saint Paul writes in his Letter to the Corinthians, when we become adults, it is time to put away childish things. Only then may we lay claim to our cooperative journeys into that unknown, which is asking us to be brave, thoughtful, and courageous.