“We need something that surpasses us”

Psychologies: Why is the need to “find yourself” so urgent today?

Alain Vanier: This, in my opinion, is nothing more than one of the symptoms of modern trouble. Many years ago, Sigmund Freud explained in the book Dissatisfaction with Culture¹that people feel unwell because of the sacrifices that our civilization requires of them. So, if today we feel that we need to find ourselves, it is because we feel lost, left to ourselves. Two centuries ago, no one would have asked such a question. People did not look for themselves, they did not need it: the place of each person was assigned to him from birth and forever. The origin, both social and family, established certain duties, restrictions, more or less wide opportunities determined by kinship. A European aristocratic family needed a male heir to pass on the estate and name to him. The second son was expected to devote himself to religious service, and so on. In the last century, you also did not need to “find yourself” professionally: your existence was completely determined by the work that you were doing. You came to work at 18 and spent your whole life there, gradually climbing the career ladder, and then calmly retired. The traditional way of life brought comfort, but kept in an infantile position – Freud even spoke of “serfdom.” Is modern man ready to do without this support? Now people are deprived of the guidelines that gave them a certain and assigned position in society.

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In what ways do we feel lost?

A.V.: We feel this when we lose something that was our anchor: a spouse, for example, or a job, because we live in a society in which work is the source of our identity. Or when we lose our purpose in life: we have spent many years striving to achieve something that takes various forms – it can be a woman or a man, a position in society, an object, and so on – and then when we get it, we feel empty. . One of my patients said to me, after getting what she seemed to want, “Now I have the impression that I was on the road leading straight to death.” In addition, in our time the imperative of self-realization is so strong that we always feel our inconsistency with the need to realize ourselves, which the era imposes on us. If we think that the achievement of our personal truth is possible only through ourselves, then we will always lack something. This is the same illusion as the insane desire for independence, which is offered to us as a panacea. Jacques Lacan spoke in the 1970s of the modern “nonsense of autonomy”. This is self-deception, a trap.

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So, to find ourselves, we need an intermediary?

A.V.: The modern world has the peculiarity that all phenomena of a symbolic order – God, religion, tradition, a certain world order – have been perverted in the course of technological and scientific progress. I remember that in the USSR, in order to combat the influence of the church, after the first manned flight into space, the slogan was introduced: “Gagarin flew to the sky, but did not see God.” However, we need transcendence, role models, ideals, a set of values, mentors – now living or who existed in the past. Psychoanalysis allows us to partly get rid of this need, but otherwise it is a fundamental, primordial, innate need, primarily because we, physically and mentally, came out of another person. And then another person allowed us to get out of the merge with the body of the mother: the figure of the father symbolically allowed us to gain independence, at the same time becoming a guide for us. Growing up, we build ourselves with the help of this figure, more or less overwhelming, we compare ourselves with it. It is from her that we get the meaning of our existence, hope, a cure for the hardness of life that we feel – it’s not so easy to live. Hence the success of religions in the broad sense of the word. This “other”, big or small, is embodied in various forms at different moments of our lives: the people we meet, the circle of friends, the football fan club, participation in social, political, religious life.

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In Western society, we are witnessing both a return to traditional religions and a fascination with other, more “exotic” ones. Do we need them to live?

A.V.: In 1974, Jacques Lacan announced the return of religious values, a prophecy that sounded strange at the time. But he was right. The disappearance of the religious order, in which God was something taken for granted, left people restless. The progress of science and technology has challenged our beliefs, destroyed the idea of ​​a radiant afterlife, according to which, suffering on earth, we find in paradise what we had to give up in earthly life. We then lost the worldview with which progress enriched us in the mirages of the market, because capitalism imposed on us another lie, promising that we could partially find this lost bliss here. Philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out that the logic of consumption obeys the principle of object destruction.². Fashion, novelty destroys the value of an object before it wears out: “Actually, this is not what I wanted (a)!” Thus, we again pass from one object to another. Don’t we notice that when we change smartphone or tablet, we don’t feel satisfied? In addition, as a result of the destruction of traditions, there is no longer a public ethics of desire, morality: “what is customary to do”, “what is not customary to do” no longer has any weight for people. Today, a man torn between wife, family and mistress no longer knows what he should choose. We have fewer guidelines in the field of ideals, beliefs, principles. Today it seems to us that everything is allowed, everything is possible and everything is in vain.

Therefore, we are looking for and can find a kind of way out in religions that allow us to escape from malignant materialism, to cope with the feeling of being lost. Increasingly, the loss of beliefs provokes fundamentalism, desperately wanting to silence in others the doubts that torment us ourselves. This choice is a vicious response to a deep need to believe.

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Are you talking about the need in the ideal?

A.V.: Yes, we cannot do without ideals. They organize us into society. But at the same time, it seems to me, modern man suffers from the tyranny of one ideal, the ideal of conformism. Do not go beyond the norm – this is the modern ideal! We are bombarded with numbers, reporting the average monthly frequency of sexual intercourse in couples, the frequency of divorces in large cities, and so on, and we compare ourselves with these figures: “I need to be like this, weigh this much, behave like this …” Television broadcasts a lot of mundane-pragmatic models. Even sexuality has become public, put on public display: norms of behavior, mental norms tell us about the need to experience a vaginal orgasm, to have one or another object of desire …

Love partners can also become an object of consumption. I don’t think we can find ourselves, but I do think we can find solutions to help us “fit in” with our own lives. Everyone can come up with a path or paths: start a family, cultivate a garden, go to church, write a diary, engage in politics … And this is completely unpredictable. This is the creativity of each person who is endowed with his own history, his own traumas and can invent new things with the help of his own resources.

¹ Z. Freud “Dissatisfaction with culture” (Folio, 2013).

² H. Arendt “Vita activa, or About active life” (Aletheia, 2000).