“We will always find reasons to continue to do nothing”

Psychologies: Where do you see the difference between our dreams, desires and plans?

Sophie Cadalen: We now make almost no distinction between dreams, wishes and aspirations – all these words denote what we consciously want. And to achieve this, we are making plans. But from the point of view of psychoanalysis, all our intentions and plans are based on desire, which for the most part remains unconscious. Our plans tell us our desires, and vice versa. Desires and plans constantly “grind” to each other.

We think that we are striving to realize plans for one reason or another, but along the way we can notice that they correspond to a completely different desire that had previously eluded us. In fact, we understand our desires most clearly only in hindsight, having already done something. And then we say to ourselves: “So this is what I, it turns out, wanted!”

How to recognize your desire, if it is unconscious?

S.K.: Mental effort is not enough here. Moreover, it is the least reliable way. We need to give free rein to our “gut” as much as possible, our inner life energy: we always know when it is blocked, when we feel bad and vice versa – when everything is exactly as it should be, and we are in our place. We need to learn to feel this movement in ourselves and trust it, to note what hinders us inside, responds, screams.

The royal path here is dreams: they often give odds to our mind. Another good indicator is our failures: erroneous actions, external manifestations of unconscious processes, slips of the tongue can give us valuable indications of our desires. Finally, other people’s desires sometimes show us our own or even awaken them.

What prevents us from living according to our desires?

S.K.: Very often we do not move to action because we are afraid of disappointment. In a certain sense, it’s more convenient to say to yourself: “Oh, if I only did (a) such and such!” – and not to try to realize anything that the imagination draws for us, than to find that the realization of our fantasy was not as beautiful as we thought. When we, like Alice, pass through a mirror, we inevitably find ourselves in another world about which we cannot know anything in advance. Such is life, and we are not always completely satisfied with it. We live in a world where you need to know what you want.

Meanwhile, we often draw knowledge about ourselves from what we do not want. Disillusioned with what we thought would bring us happiness, we are forced to clarify the desires that control us, and have the opportunity to know ourselves better. It’s truly life-saving to go all the way to what we thought was our dream: it’s a huge relief.

How to overcome internal barriers?

S.K.: First of all, we need to determine what we are afraid of – what, in our fantasies, are the risks that prevent us from going in this direction? Liberation does not consist in complete and unconditional victory over your fears. It is rather about coming to terms with your fears and limitations. This, for example, is often seen in our love impulses: we rarely rush to the goal at once, in one jump. We always find good reasons not to do anything or to let everything go quickly.

Jacques Lacan said about this: the best sign of desire is resistance to this desire. You need to be able to transform your anguish and anxiety into jitters: “the hamstrings are shaking from it”, but it does not interfere with moving on to action, and when the jitters are overcome, we feel pleasure.

What price do we pay to make our dreams come true?

S.K.: By listening to ourselves, we are forced to make choices and put ourselves at risk, especially the risk of discovering that the path we chose was ultimately a mistake, but as long as we live in the flow of this energy, a mistake cannot harm us. The very concept of failure changes the meaning: failure is when we cling to the idea that once we get where we want to go, everything will be fine. If, however, we look at events in constant motion and say to ourselves: “Well, it didn’t work, but why? What did I do wrong?” If we don’t think binary: “It worked/It didn’t work”, if we think more about what remains to be done and what we don’t need to do, life will start to seem better.

At the reception, I often hear: “If I really do what I dream about, won’t it be selfish, won’t I act like a capricious child?” But it’s not about that at all. We harm ourselves and others much more if we mistreat ourselves.

Why?

S.K.: Because sooner or later we will make other people pay for what we did not allow ourselves. Suppressing your desires, your dreams is probably the worst thing, because the repressed always comes back. It’s like a dam. In the end, the water will break the dam and flood everything around. The danger is in this, not in something else. Once we find the opportunity to follow our changing desire, we become much more tolerant. We become much lighter, more mobile, we are more likely to get out of the game, not to look back at others, to leave them alone, not to chase after them when their preferences do not interest us.

Could it not turn out that by making a dream come true, we will kill our desires?

S.K.: No, because desire never ends. Of course, there may be periods of some decrease in tone, even depression, when we have just implemented some kind of plan, but we will have to learn to live with this emptiness, and something will definitely be born from the emptiness. Living in accordance with your desires does not mean always being at the peak of energy. You need to allow yourself this phase of rest, the time “Now what? Well I do not know”. It’s not scary. Because the experience of your success, your mobility makes it easier to change something in life. It’s like in tennis or dancing: when we managed to combine a complex technique with freedom and joy of movement, when we began to get it beautiful, we feel it with our whole body, we know when it responds correctly, and this knowledge is now with us on all life.

The only thing we never miss in life is death. So instead of thinking about the final destination and trying to find out where we are going and how, trying to keep our lives under pseudo-control (which inevitably ends up with a complete lack of control), we should make room in our lives for adventure.