To continue my series on this issue by referring to the previous post, what is the predicament that humans tend to deny and ignore, but with which only other humans can truly identify and empathize?
Well…first some baseline things about how we come to the feeling that our situation is a predicament:
First –
We have innate physical and attachment needs. A true need leads to physical death or serious psychological trauma if it is never met.
Second –
We also have peculiar desires we each learned from somewhere. One problem element is that these desires get linked up to, and confused with, needs. We learn desires from imitating what other humans seem to want and why they seem to want it. (thank you, Girard and mimetic theory…I understand Lacan had things to say here, too, but I’m not as familiar with that)
Machines have no needs or desires in the way we do and will not for a long time…if ever.
Third-
We mistakenly take our desires to come solely from the spontaneous intuition and inspiration of our singular selves. It’s a partial ruse; eventually, if we look into ourselves enough, we end up wondering and trying to explain where these desires came from!
One of the most disliked implications of psychological and human sciences theories is the realization that we are partly influenced into what to want and what is ‘bad’. We are not the creators of desires. Instead, we attach to desires that are suggested or presented to us and then take them as ‘ours’ in terms of origin and total autonomy.
Why one particular desire or anxiety / anti-desire? We get the impression that someone or something else has the one thing or the things that finally end our search and create joy, or that will allow us to avoid all the things that will lead to pain. By ‘thing(s)’ I also mean situation, attitude, and so on. The flip-side of this is how we are influenced to try to compensate for ‘lack’; see Lack and Transcendence, by David Loy; also, again, Lacan discussed lack…
The origin, maintenance, and management of desire is right in front of our faces and yet becomes one of the most deeply unconscious things about which we deceive ourselves. It is therefore therapeutically effective when desires (and their origins) are unearthed, examined, understood, accepted, and then, for the future, considered our responsibility to consciously address.
Fourth –
We have anxieties about needs and desires not getting met. We basically use blame schemes to explain who or what is to blame when some needs or desires do not get met. Sometimes we blame others, life, ourselves, the world, and so on. To me, such anxieties and pieces of blame form another chunk of what is sometimes called unconscious.
Fifth –
Our needs and desires are ultimately powered by concerns of physical and psychological life-and-death, including the need to belong and be attached to other organic beings. Those concerns form another chunk of what often goes unconscious. Attachment is itself expansive and vibrant…or sometimes burdensome. But, in the realm of help and healing, attachment does loop back into avoiding body-mind death.
Sixth –
Needs and desires are brought into psychological and social reality by way of imitation, identification, and imagination.
That’s all I can do for today! A second segment on the human predicament will be coming soon…