Against Ordinary Unhappiness
Psycho-analysis tends towards the depressive. On the one hand this seems perfectly natural seeing how it is a clinical procedure concerned with treating mental illness and psychosis; curiosity and joy are not the point, rather the relief of suffering is. On the other hand such a view seems like the leftover gloomy pessimisms of that disaffected scientist who has systematically destroyed every human fantasy in order to reveal, at base, mere ordinary unhappiness (Of course the last fantasy he neglected to destroy was the authority of materialist science itself, but who’s counting).
Ordinary unhappiness is used 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 not-with-standing, today ordinary unhappiness has become an ideal and rallying cry of a certain kind of psychoanalyst: a bon mot meant to cut through all of the excesses and enjoyments of our consumer culture. As a movement we might call it depressive realism; some call it negative psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s work it’s called lack.
In my view, ordinary unhappiness and lack are an historical philosophical decision that has no business in the consulting room. Life is difficult enough without your psychoanalyst explaining how you are terminally lacking. I find it suspect that, for example, one of my professors will prescribe the concept ordinary unhappiness to her patients, as if it were a cosmic truth. 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 made about my psyche, 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 circuitous path 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?
But even Freud declared in the midst of the great war that the intensities of our enjoyment of the beautiful is made possible only because of its transience. This quasi-Buddhist thought throws a subtlety onto the Freud of a gloomier mood. If ordinary unhappiness is a kind of anhedonia, like the kind of malaise one might find in suburbia (and that someone might treat with an opioid prescription) just straight banality on the pathway to death, then the essay On Transience (1916) remains about as far from this depressed banality as Freud can get, even offering a rare beacon of hope. It is only in the insufficiency of phenomena that their true power resides. To put a Lacanian spin on it, only in lack do we find a surplus.
This seems to be 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 lose. Whether or not this pre-emptive mourning works, remains to be seen, but why must the psychoanalyst, of all people, decide in advance how the patient is supposed to feel?
