Where did the disappointment go? Part 1: The Unconscious

I’m still (since last post) thinking about the end of Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, in particular the appearance of cynicism in the love-disappointed student. Faced with a rejection of his love the student is quickly convinced that love is a useless entity and resolves to re-dedicate to logic and practical matters.  In doing so (my analysis) he sidesteps the experience of acute disappointment that is the natural aftermath of injury in love.

Disappointment is an emotion we don’t always allow ourselves to feel or name out loud. Mature adults aren’t supposed to easily admit to feeling disappointed—it is considered weak or child-like.  In India, philosophical and social values suggest we cultivate the quality of non-attachment to our desires, i.e. fewer hopes and expectations and consequently fewer disappointments.    

From my observation disappointment is less transcended than it is rationalized away.  There is often a general agreement that a disappointment didn’t happen so that the parties involved can “move on”.  The effect of outlawing disappointment—except among young children who may be lucky enough to get a wider berth—has, in my opinion, a parallel in the prohibition laws against alcohol that we still see in the “dry” states in India: the experience does not go away, it goes underground.  People are embarrassed to admit to feeling disappointed and reluctant to let themselves fully feel the emotion but like the desire to enjoy a cold beer in the summer it doesn’t quite magically go away.  So what happens to the feeling of disappointment when we don’t want to or refuse to feel it?

Psychoanalysis suggests that the emotions that arise in us that we do not feel or directly acknowledge get warehoused.  The black market of the emotional world as it were, the place emotions go when they are under prohibition, is termed the Unconscious. 

When a desire or an emotion goes into the unconscious instead of the conscious part of the self it has been repressed or rationalized away, it is in exile. Next post I want to deconstruct a few psychoanalytic ideas of what we do with these exiles, but for now, I’m still sitting with the problem of prohibition. I see the student’s plunging into his studies of logic and crying down love altogether as a feint, a distraction of sorts from the loss that he has experienced when the girl he adores rejects him. I think many of us are so scared of disappointment’s possible power over us to the extent that we don’t allow ourselves to endure its sensation. Your taboo may not be disappointment of course, but what I’m wondering is: what happens to unexpressed, unacknowledged emotions? Can they be counted on to eventually disappear? Or if we don’t feel them can we recorded on an emotional balance sheet that they have been transcended?

Personally I don’t think we only experience what we can name.  Feelings and desires that we deny get housed somewhere in our psyches or bodies. If there are enough of them in the same vein, the prohibited bedfellows find each other, taking up space and weight in an internal emotional Pandora’s box.  The project of a good psychotherapy might be to take out some of these items from the box and examine them together in safety and confidence.  A beautiful breakdown on the other hand occurs when for one reason or another the box bursts open shedding its contents inside and outside.  Painful though that is, I see beauty in the freeing of caged or maimed birds, the coming to light of all of that particular human’s desires, bruises and sensations that have been living thus long in captivity and in the process, the creation of a certain sense of encompassing wholeness.