Waiting for the anxious other
A mother brings her 12 y.o. boy to a therapist. He is a bad boy, lazy and stupid, and plays video games a lot. Teachers are not happy, no close friends in sight. The mother wants something to happen.
You're the therapist, by the way. You could agree that he is intellectually inhibited, but you don't feel like blaming him for laziness, cause you don't believe in laziness. Also his intellect is not the point here. You talk to the mother and think about the atmosphere they share. Talking to the mother and feeling what she brings to the field matters. That is the air the kid breathes.
There is no father around. No, it is not that bringing children to therapy is what mothers like to do in their free time, while fathers guard the premises. Father is a ghostly figure in this story, even under the spotlight of your questions he remains transparent. "There is no father around," the normalized tragedy of every other family.
Half-alive
The talking part begins, and the boy enjoys it here. He doesn't care about your questions, of course, but you show interest, remain with him for a whole 50 minutes each time you meet, and this amount of attention from an adult feels exciting for him. Recognition is all but absent in his life.
Your office is kinda dull, but the boy feels he is the main character here. And his pastel coloured little kingdom, which your office has turned into is waiting to become alive with fantasies. He doesn't quite know what to do with all these mental riches though.
He finds a piece of paper and starts writing down simple math problems (he is bad at math, but so are you). He hands them to you as an invitation. Is that how he wants to use his free will? Or, does he actually feel not free enough? Or, is this how he imagines the allowed form of aliveness with adults? When the session is over you think about the meaning of this. The adult world must be flooded with problems in his imagination. You could agree with him on that. Still, where does all this maths "fun" in the psychoanalytic field come from?
Few months into boy's therapy, when discussing the case, clinical director drops a remark that you are probably the child's only friend. And to your own deep sadness you realise that is most probably true.
The kid is driven to Life, but he is only half way there, psychically of course. There is something that pulls him back every time he makes one step forward, and you know that even though you meet regularly, and the hope is that therapy is at least some source of alivening, the rest of the week something is "tanatonizing" your efforts. You think about what he experiences at home, a few parent sessions with the mother offer you a glimpse.
His life at home, and at school for that matter, is like a box. The space is limited and the angles are all square. You often see rigidness as over-control and the excess of strict rules, the so-called Super-Ego in its beast form, but here you feel it rather like the lack of spontaneity. There is some routine, but nothing interesting ever really happens, except for the raw life. If the boy does not experience life as something that can be "played with" in his imagination, then his psyche does not develop the right tools for that. Events never become experience, never become dreamable inner material.
You realise that the "symptom" that irritates the mother so much, namely the boy's passion for video games, is the one thing filled with Life for him: it lets him experience having some success, and a community he readily tells you about. More importantly he starts to fantasize. Identifying with his game character he has cool abilities, he achieves. Other players in the chat room know him in a different way than his classmates. And he Plays.
There is also a curious bargain in place between him and his mother. He once told her that he was good at foreign languages, based on the fact that he is chatting with others while playing online, and declared that he is going to become an interpreter. Being a little kid he is right to imagine that and all other sorts of things, but that image is not supposed to become real. Surprisingly, the mother chooses to take it seriously. But why? What should be his own world of fiction is also her psychological support: the child clings to his omnipotence, she clings to his naivete.
All of this belongs to him, but you remember: it is placed in a virtual world, behind the looking glass of a computer monitor. Oh, and another thing. When he misbehaves, his punishment is restricting screen time.
Now that common parenting idea feels very different, doesn't it?
Living near your interests
Jack grows up in an anxious family. Again, there is no father around, and the mother has to run the family in every way. She's the one to make money, she deals with problems. Evenings, there is no relaxed talk over dinner, always some heaviness in the air. No one in the extended family has hobbies. The only books on the shelves are Christian literature, and reading serves the mother as an anxiety container.
Jack grows intellectually oriented, but the anxiety floating in the air, and the seemingly innocent yet boundary-eroding behaviour of the relatives almost never lets his mind safely fantasize. And safe fantasy is a necessary condition for any intellectual or creative process. The environment is wrong for the kind of person the child is growing to become.
The time passes, and all that Jack has absorbed in his attempts to escape the haunting family patterns (books, movies, education, talks with friends) gives some results, but they are…meh. Studying, reading, talking to feel calm is different from doing all that because of passion and genuine interest.
Later Jack's life circumstances change, of course, but the world is unstable, and stable people don't come his way either; everyone is stressed out in their own way. There is no sense in diving into the things he is interested in cause who cares about a new indie movie when you need to deal with surviving this world.
It's Saturday morning. Jack has the indie film he has wanted to watch for months. The week is finally clean. He makes coffee, sets the laptop on his knees, puts it on.
Twenty minutes in, he realises he has not registered a shot. His mind is on an email he did not answer. He pauses, sits there for a moment, then restarts. Same again.
He thinks: I have all the time in the world. The advice he has heard for years, in one variant or another, about making time for the things that matter to him is finally, technically, satisfied. He has the time. He sits with the laptop on his knees, and the film plays past him. Idiotic advice, he thinks. He has all the time in the world and he is still scared to enter it.
Permission to waste time
The two boys have different life stories, different backgrounds. Their families' atmosphere did not provide enough protected mental space for play, useless thought, curiosity, and inner wandering. (I use "useless thought" and "fantasy" as near-synonyms here, a function of the psyche that the post-Bionian tradition takes seriously.) A child can grow up intelligent, observant, verbally capable, even highly educated, and still have trouble using their mind freely. The mind that should have developed as a place for exploration becomes a place for vigilance, adaptation, pressure management. Or escapism. In that sense boredom and engagement are best friends, equally opposed to being in anticipation of the anxious other.
Normally, the adults function as containers for the child's psychic life. If they are busy managing, that rarely happens. The parent may be admirable, competent, sacrificial even, but psychically unavailable in a specific sense. When a parent cannot protect the child from their own anxiety enough for the child to metabolize experience, the child's psyche often has to become prematurely serious.
In anxious families, boundaries are psychologically violated, and inner life never feels quite private. Thoughts get filtered and labelled constantly: allowed, useful, excessive, selfish, absurd, impractical, disloyal. I bet you can imagine how draining that is.
So later in life, now adult, the person may say: "I am interested in serious things, I have read things, I have ideas, but somehow the result is meh." Because the mind has been preoccupied with emotional emergencies, and never had a chance to believe it was permitted to waste time on what matters to it.
And yes, fascination with niche indie films or collecting some obscure exonumia can begin to feel ridiculous in such a psychic economy. The interest itself starts to feel unserious, thus guilty when exposed. What you're interested in must reflect reality, and reality is heavy. Everything else feels like indulgence, or at best a luxury (maybe even entitlement?) that will be interrupted or criticized anyway.
The voices
There is also an internalized unconscious expectation here: no stable environment is coming. So the psyche starts postponing life. If it could speak directly, it would have said something like "beginning deeply is dangerous because conditions are never safe enough." Then the person lives near their interests, not inside them.
Thought has become tied to the presence or anticipation of anxious others. So when the person turns toward something personally meaningful, another voice appears almost immediately, asking: is this the right time?
or, more judgemental: how can you sink into this when practical insecurity is unresolved? how dare you have a mind of your own while everyone is carrying bricks?
or the depressive who cares?, a defence against desire dressed as judgment of it. A way of killing desire before guilt has to do it more painfully.
That voice is an internalized field saturated with psychical heaviness and "All work and no play", which, famously, makes Jack a dull boy.
The cruel part: depth requires a temporary suspension of emergency mentality, and the person experiences that suspension as unsafe. "Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right?" lands here in its loudest form. Just imagine feeling forty shades of guilty for the thing that is your core.
Loyalty
A useful analytic question: what do they feel will happen if they give themselves over to interest? Underneath the survivor and separation registers, there is often something more specific. Aliveness is felt as betrayal of the struggling family.
It might feel unsafe to sail free mentally, because the fantasy tells them they will be hated and ultimately left. "You're not one of us anymore." A miserable form of loyalty, and the loneliness it brings carries a hint of depression with it.
If the person does not fully pursue what matters to them, they suffer. If they do pursue it, they feel guilt. The cause sits deeper than time and energy, though energy can fail sometimes as a defence. A self-help book does not reach it. Their subjectivity was organized in an environment where aliveness had weak legitimacy compared to necessity.
That also explains why later "good people" do not necessarily solve it. If they are all stressed, unstable, preoccupied, the old field returns filled with minds that cannot protect a zone of psychic free play. Feels like being back in the old house, even if objectively everything is different.
A conflict between interest and an internalized atmosphere of necessity. Laziness has nothing to do with it.
Back to the child
With the analytic frame in place, the video games stop being a symptom. The console is the one territory the paralyzed psyche has been left with, the only space where having capabilities and being recognised by others is permitted. Near-autistic in its narrowness, but it is his. And hey, we all need to experience achieving something, don't we?
The world never becomes calm, and inward freedom has been moralized against. One cannot amputate an attempt at escapism from a function of being alive by force of will, and the bargain that says "first solve everything practical, only then you may think" is, by design, a sentence to never.
That is the strange shape of it. You can have all the time in the world now and still be afraid to enter it, because the anxious other is listening for the moment you do.