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We all want to enjoy life, but often we experience frustration instead of positive emotions. What stops us from having fun? We asked psychoanalysts Andrei Rossokhin and Dominique Miller to answer this question.
Psychologies: Why do we so infrequently get to experience real pleasure?
Andrey Rossokhin: It depends on what we mean by real pleasure: if this is the dream of a Nobel Prize, then you can live your whole life feeling only disappointment. In many ways, the ability to experience pleasure is connected with the ratio in each of us of fantasies and a sense of reality: by comparing, analyzing them, we gain maturity. The pleasure of life becomes part of our existence, as natural as the difficulties.
If a person does not want to grow up, then he will not live, but will wait for “real”, all-consuming pleasure. This position is connected with the unconscious desire of an adult to return to his earliest childhood – to a state of infantile omnipotence, when all desires were immediately satisfied by the mother. Growing up, we regretfully realize that the world does not revolve around us, we are mortal and cannot get everything we want.
The ability to enjoy small things is a trait of a mature person and a sign of wisdom.
This discovery helps some of us move forward, while others continue to live in a world of illusion, in an endless pursuit of pleasure, as if they can give eternal life and save us from death.
Dominic Miller: Nothing in the world can give us pleasure all the time. And in order to experience this feeling again and again, we have to look for new “objects” that can please us, because we have already been disappointed in the former ones.
Shopping centers operate just on this principle, offering in abundance all the new objects of desire. The items we buy fill the void, the inexplicable feeling of “not enough” that we all experience, and dull the questions about the meaning of our existence in our minds.
It turns out that the cult of consumption is not as absurd as it might seem at first glance?
D. M .: Of course, it has a certain meaning. When I buy a little red dress that I saw in a magazine, I give myself the satisfaction of being able to identify with the model wearing it. I give myself not a thing, but images: I feel more beautiful, slimmer, I dream of a passionate desire that I will see in the eyes of a partner. Without these images and dreams, my little red dress is of no interest.
To accept the fact that pleasures can be different is to enrich your life with new sources of joy.
A. R .: The ability to enjoy small things is a trait of a mature person and a sign of wisdom. And vice versa, perceiving a new tie or shoes as an insignificant trifle, a person deprives himself of the joy that these things could bring him.
Following the logic of “all or nothing”, a person cannot be happy with a tie, as he suffers from the fact that the ability to feel like James Bond is not attached to it. To accept the fact that pleasures can be different: big, small, strong and not very much, means to enrich your life with new sources of joy.
Yet some of us experience life as a series of pleasures, while others experience it as a series of disappointments.
A. R .: Often this is associated with the first disappointment, with the first lack of maternal love. Then, in adulthood, a person constantly feels that he is missing something all the time: even while experiencing pleasure, he feels a lack, as if he has a hole inside that he wants, but cannot fill.
Various dramatic situations can also lead to disappointment, for example, when a beloved father leaves the family. In this case, a feeling may arise and remain that all joy is short-lived. Being sure in advance of the coming pain, such a person will immediately prepare for the worst and unconsciously provoke it, protecting himself from pleasures.
D. M .: The problem of getting pleasure from life is also connected with global issues that we think about from time to time: why do we live in the world? Each of us must find the answer to this question ourselves. It may consist in participating in social movements, thinking, creating, helping others.
Someone knows how to derive pleasure even from their own imperfections. The famous judoka David Duyet hated his body in his youth, and one of my acquaintances, suffering from asthma, became a singer. And someone – and there are more and more such people – resorts to radical means: drugs, alcohol or extreme sports. But radical solutions are fraught with disappointment…
An excerpt from the book by Philippe Delerme “The first sip of beer and other small joys of life”
“Go down to the basement. And suddenly … It smells like apples laid out for drying on overturned fruit boxes. You are taken by surprise. I did not expect and did not ask for your soul to be so overwhelmed. But it’s too late. The apple spirit, like a wave, covered my head. And it’s already incomprehensible: how could you live without this sugary astringency of childhood?
There is nothing tastier than these wrinkled slices: seemingly dry crusts, but each groove is saturated with condensed sweetness. However, they do not want to eat. So that the vague element of smell does not turn into an easily recognizable taste. To say that it smells very nice or very strong? Not in this case. And in the inner sense of smell – this is the smell of a happy time.
What is our need for thrills?
D. M .: It resonates with the desire, characteristic of our time, to constantly “get more”, including more emotions, more sensations … We live in a society where there is a cult of excesses. Even such simple pleasures as, for example, delicious food, today often turn into gluttony.
It is useless to offer a rafting fan a boat ride on the lake: he will get bored very quickly. He needs strong sensations, because only they allow him to feel himself. Until recently, psychoanalysts dealt mainly with patients who had “too little” in their lives.
The new generation of patients, on the contrary, have “too much”: in pursuit of thrills, they want to live beyond their capabilities, both mental and physical.
A. R .: It seems to me that society has nothing to do with it – the same things happen to us as in pagan times, in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance, they just look different.
In any society, a child who does not have an inner image of a strong father can feel like an extension, part of the mother. Mother for him is a synonym for life, and it seems to him that he can become free and independent only when he is on the verge of death. Extreme sports often feed on and support such illusions.
Can we say that selfishness helps to quench the thirst for pleasure?
A. R .: Selfishness and altruism are extremes, and although altruism is socially more acceptable, from the point of view of personality development, they are identical. Growing up leads to the fact that a person learns not to fall into extremes, but to develop in the space between them. Then he enjoys both “receiving” and “giving.”
For the rejection of the infantile paradise, where there was boundless happiness, but there was no choice, he receives the limitations of an adult, but along with them – the freedom of choice and the ability to experience the full range of human pleasures.
About the experts
Andrey Rossokhin — psychoanalyst, member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, head of the master’s program “Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Business Consulting” at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Dominic Miller – French psychoanalyst, psychologist, director of the Freud College, lecturer at the University of Paris-VIII.