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.

The Hegemony of the Practical

What a silly thing Love is. It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always   telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact it is quite unpractical, and in this age to be practical is everything. . .

~The disenchanted student in Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose

Lately I am crushed by the power of Practical.  The Practical has a place certainly—we all need to consider the locations at which our internal and external reality meets and parts—but I am astounded at how our thinking short-circuits when we hear that word. Very often when someone says “but I have to do what’s practical,” they need give no further explanation than that. If we cannot sell a piece of art then our future as an artist is impractical, if we cannot make money farming organic then we have failed to be practical, if we spend all day making idli or sourdough batter from scratch when it can be purchased at the store for a fraction of the time then we are not practical.  We need give no further evidence of the need to jettison these pursuits in favor of Practical alternatives then simply using this word of great power.

The unquestioned superiority of being Practical gives it a hegemony over other possibilities, a hegemony that makes it easier for us to disbelieve in things we once believed when it is discredited it on the basis of practicality. The hegemony of the Practical is something I link to fast paced consumer culture and rapid results capitalism.  It means the valuation of all things material, measurable, saleable and concretizable over choices and things that do not have this quality. It is most evident in a snapshot, short-term analysis, which makes a future prognosis based on the immediately and obviously evident material or literal value of something.  In psychology it is seen in a result oriented (versus depth oriented) psychotherapy where action is encouraged over reflection. In those we know and even in ourselves, we can see the dominance of the practical in the way we choose or dismiss our internal emotional realities.  When I have worked at mental hospitals, I have noticed that psychiatrists and counselors often decide who is healthy and who is unhealthy based on their own sense of what is practical to think or feel.

The hegemony of the Practical shapes us into greater material efficiency, but it robs us of our imagination by over-valuing the concrete. It is the reason that we cannot understand the metaphorically rich language of the psychotic or the poetry of the sensate world. It is the word people sometimes use when they drop out of therapy for financial reasons or when they explain why they waited four years before they started talking about a great grief or loss. The unquestioned Practical is the great dismissor: it is often what facilitates authentic feelings to be discredited or passed over.  It is the voice that tells us to buck up, get going, and stop reflecting. It wields the sword that threatens us with disappointment and breakdown if we believe too deeply in lasting romance, magic or stories.