Against Ordinary Unhappiness
Psycho-analysis tends towards the depressive. On the one hand this is perfectly natural seeing how it is a clinical procedure concerned with treating mental pathology. On the other hand such a view can seem like the leftover gloomy pessimisms of that disaffected scientist who has rigorously destroyed every human illusion in order to reveal, at base, mere ordinary unhappiness (of course the last illusion he neglected to destroy was the authority of materialist science itself, but who’s counting).
The phrase “ordinary unhappiness" is used only once by Freud in Studies on Hysteria (1893). He concludes the essay: “much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that unhappiness.” The concluding sentence notwithstanding, ordinary unhappiness has become now the default mood of a certain kind of psychoanalyst, or the psychoanalytically informed cultural-subset: a password meant to cut through all the commands for enjoyment in our culture of consumption. As a position we might call it depressive realism; some call it negative psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s work it’s called lack, and becomes the ontological void around which his whole edifice revolves.
In my view, ordinary unhappiness and lack are historical philosophical decisions that have no business in the consulting room. Life is difficult enough without your psychoanalyst assuming that you are terminally lacking. I find it suspect that, for example, one of my professors will prescribe ordinary unhappiness to her patients, as if it were a cosmic truth, as if true reality were depressed. And likewise it remains confounding to me that the goal of Lacanian analysis is to “assume your castration.” Really? I understand that language is a form of castration, and that mastery is an illusion, but Lacan’s lack sounds too much like the doctrine of original sin—lapsed catholic that he was. Both lack and ordinary unhappiness (in its contemporary usage) seem a result of an acute lack of imagination, IMO, a bit presumptuous, not to mention contingent upon large metaphysical decisions that I do not appreciate being forced on my world-view, thank you very much. Yes, the world is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket and we are all going to die eventually, but when has this not been the case? The death-drive is nothing if not the infinitely variable and circuitous path that one wanders on their journey to death.
If psychoanalysis were to make philosophical decisions about human experience would it not be better to assume that this experience is highly subjective and therefor undecidable at any scale more than one? In other words: psychoanalysis is not in the business of prescribing how a person should be.
But even Freud declared in the midst of the great war that the intensities of the beautiful are made possible only because of their transience. This quasi-Buddhist thought throws a subtlety onto the Freud of a gloomier mood. If ordinary unhappiness has become a kind of anhedonia, like the malaise one might find in white-bread suburbia—just straight privileged banality on the pathway to death— then the essay On Transience (1916) remains about as far from this depressed banality as Freud can be, even offering rare beatitude. It is only in the insufficiency of phenomena that their true value resides. To put a Lacanian spin on it, only in lack do we find a surplus. In short: there is no unhappiness without happiness, no joy without suffering, and no boredom without curiosity.
This almost seems like a step in the direction of Buddhist detachment, as per Freud’s description of mourning that comes to a spontaneous end: “when it has renounced everything that it has lost, then it has consumed itself.” Or, as the Buddhist says, “the glass is already broken;” the buddhist renounces what they will have lost. Whether or not this pre-emptive mourning is a kind of depression itself remains to be seen; but why must the psychoanalyst, of all people, decide in advance how the patient is supposed to feel?
