My Nightmare

The most terrifying nightmare I’ve ever had: I had the sudden realisation that I was not me; that I had never been me. I felt the person who I was sliding away like a layer of skin that had suddenly turned to liquid.

Whatever I was or had been was a mask or shell; whatever remained was not me but was just some entity or project whose provenance was completely unknown. I woke up wailing in despair.

What was that all about? Is it so important for me to be who I appear to be? Why should I scream like a terrified infant just because this fiction unravels?

I suppose the answer is: well, because it was my fiction! People are very attached to who they are.

Recently I have been reading Jacques Lacan. According to him, a child first forms a view of herself as a whole person when she sees herself reflected in a mirror. This is what he calls the 'Mirror Stage' of development. The reflected image is an 'ideal ego' and it is desired and projected (in the senses of imagined and worked towards) because of a number of 'outside' influences.

First, the child is in flight from the dual traumas of weaning and the Oedipal re-ordering of who is permitted to desire whom  - both of  these are primal experiences of death, or not being.

Second, fear drives the child to compensate for this perception of lack, or not being whole or integrated, and the reflected image of herself - the 'ideal ego' or 'specular' ego -  is the solution.

However, this ideal self is, like everything else, compromised from the very start. According to Lacan, the child desires to be who the mother desires her to be, and in addition,  the child learns to desire through her entry into the already alien structures of language.

Loss of integrity through weaning. Learning about one's inadequacy through Oedipal fear. Necessary alienation through choosing an imagined ideal self that is in truth the mother's imagined ideal for the child. Permanent separation from oneself through reliance on language for any projection of the self by the self.

Through life, adults continually chase/are chased by this chimera of a fully integrated, whole, ideal ego. According to Lacan's formulation this is the work of the "Imaginary" function of the unconscious.

The Imaginary seeks to hide the unavoidable fact that the self is, was, and always will be divided and multiple, and not, as it drives us to imagine ourselves to be, perfected, whole, complete.

For Lacan, the truth for us is that "Je est un autre" - "The I is an other".

How successful is the Imaginary Ego in maintaining its fictions?

For a Lacanaian, at any rate, there is nothing successful about an Imaginary ego's sweet little lies. The key truth revealed by psychoanalysis about human beings for Lacan is that we are not autonomous individuals; rather we are 'heteronomous dividua' - multiple and divided selves:

"The radical heteronomy...gaping within man can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest" (Ecrits  1966)

If dishonesty is the defining characteristic of normality it may be a small price to pay. Consider the punishments ready and waiting for 'abnormality'. The Imaginary Ego is a kind of personal incarceration that masquerades as the ultimate reward. What if, in chasing, dog - like,  the balls and sticks thrown by our Imaginary unconscious we are doing nothing more than maintaining this tyranny?

In striving for perfection we do exactly what servile, biddable proles are supposed to do. And if, every now and then we are tormented by the truth of our own non-being all the better. It's obviously a good thing for some to have large masses of people beaten down and internally tormented by their own individual perceptions of inadequacy.

What maintains this dishonesty? Why do people so enthusiastically think and feel, live and breathe and plan in ways that serve the interests of ideals of perfect, fully realised selves that betray the most fundamental truth us?

Well, it's nice to be a part of something, isn't it? It's nice and cosy to belong, to hide in the herd, to live lives of what Nietzsche called "bovine mediocrity and green meadow gregariousness". That's normality.

Day to day passes and this 'sickness unto death' goes on and on.

What does it matter if, as Thoreau reminds us: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”?

Is it really all that bad if we live by refusing life, if we continue breathing and walking, to all appearances fully alive, but in truth we have already arrived at the check in gate for death, years early, our holiday over?