Inner Work Notes

Tag: fantasy

  • The Conversation You Only Had in Your Head

    Someone sends you a short message. Before long you have decided what it meant, what they think of you, what they would say if you brought it up, and how you would feel afterward. In your head the whole conversation has already happened, and all of it is settled. None of it has been checked with the person.

    Then you do not bring it up. Weeks go by, and you are just as sure as you were at the start. The only thing that changes is that the story in your head gets more detailed every week.

    You cannot find out who you are on your own

    You learn what you are like, and what other people make of you, from how they actually respond when you speak to them. On your own, your guess about what they would say never meets anything that pushes back against it, corrects it, or surprises you. And with nothing new coming in, you cannot tell the difference between what the other person really thinks and what you fear, or hope, they think.

    People often tell a story to make this point: a child raised by wolves. When he is found, he walks on all fours. He is clearly a human being, yet he takes himself for a wolf, because wolves are the ones he grew up among. Real cases like this are few and most are disputed, so take the story as an illustration, not as evidence. But you can see the point in any family: we learn what we are from how the people around us respond to us.

    When you never actually talk to the other person, your mind still supplies their answer. But it builds that answer out of what you already expected, so the answer can only confirm the fear, or the hope, you started with.

    Guessing comes easier than talking things over

    Left alone with a question about someone, a person does not stay undecided. They become more certain.

    “She likes me; that is why she said that.” “That tone was on purpose.” “They are talking about me right now.” The people involved may simply have been saying what they wanted to say and getting on with their day; it may have had nothing to do with you. Still, the guessing runs on and always reaches a verdict, because the one making the guess is also the one judging it.

    We are more practiced at imagining than at talking, because imagining came first: it is with us from the very beginning of life, while talking things over with another person is something we learn later. So when a conversation feels risky, the mind falls back on the older, easier habit. It plays both parts itself, so you never have to let the other person see what you feel, and you never hear an answer you did not make up yourself.

    Notice how comfortable this is. In your head, the other person says only the lines you give them, when you expect them to. Nothing catches you off guard. Nobody asks you a question you were not ready for. You guess, you have your feelings about it, and it ends there.

    The sentence that has to be said out loud

    Say you are fairly sure someone likes you, and you like them too. There is exactly one thing to do with that: go and tell them, in words. “I like you. Do you like me?”

    But you would probably rather not say it. You are afraid that if you do, the other person will run away.

    They might, if they do not feel the same way, and that hurts. But now you know something you could not have known before you asked. Asking out loud matters because it lets the other person give their own answer, which may not be the one you predicted. Until you ask, every new detail comes from you, and the relationship you imagine keeps growing with nothing real to correct it.

    The frustration you were avoiding is the one you needed

    When you finally speak, you may get an answer you did not want, and think, “I thought they liked me. They don’t.” That letdown is what psychologists call frustration: the disappointment of not getting what you hoped for.

    In that disappointment you feel, and not just know, that there is a real world outside your head. The other person turns out to have wishes and feelings of their own that do not follow the script you wrote for them. Frustration that is too great, or that humiliates you, can do real harm. But a disappointment you can bear teaches you two things: that you can survive an answer you did not want, and that the answer tells you something you can use. Meeting reality this way, again and again, is how you learn to live in it.

    D. W. Winnicott, an English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, wrote about the “good-enough mother.” She is not a perfect mother. At first she meets her baby’s needs almost completely. Then, as the baby becomes able to cope, she meets them a little less completely and a little later. Through those small gaps, the child faces the world a little at a time, in amounts it can manage. Heinz Kohut, another psychoanalyst, called frustration of this bearable size optimal frustration. Too much frustration makes it harder for a child to accept reality; the right amount helps the child accept it bit by bit. Neither of them saw this as a parenting failure to be apologized for. A child who is looked after perfectly, one hundred percent of the time, does not mature.

    Adults need this kind of bearable frustration too, and the way to get it is to ask. If you never ask, the guessing simply goes on, and nothing in the guessing itself will ever bring it to a stop.

    Not asking has another cost that is easy to miss. Every conversation you rehearse in your head and never actually have leaves you a little more convinced that you already know what people are like. That makes you a little less likely to try the next real conversation. So, quietly, you grow less practiced at talking with people while you grow more certain about them.

    What the avoidance costs later

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung summed up what avoiding pain costs in a sentence worth keeping: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Legitimate suffering is the pain a person simply has to go through in the course of living. Neurosis, meaning lasting anxiety and other symptoms, is what grows in its place when that pain is avoided.

    Addiction works the same way. There is a specific pain — a conversation you dread, a loss, a refusal, a limit you have to accept — and instead of going through it, you reach for something that stops the feeling for a while, the way a painkiller does. That original pain had a cause, and it could have come to an end. But each time you avoid it, new problems pile up on top of it: you come to depend on what you reach for, you start keeping secrets, and all of this causes trouble of its own. So the suffering that comes later is larger than the pain you put off.

    What you use does not have to be alcohol or a drug. The phone does it. Work does it. So does a relationship that exists only inside your own head, where the other person always behaves, is always available, and has never once said anything you did not write for them.

    Asking takes about four seconds

    There is nothing wrong with a mind that runs ahead. It is a good mind and a quick one. The only trouble is that no one ever contradicts it, and ideas that are never contradicted drift further and further from what is really happening.

    So the fix is not more rehearsal. If the other person is not someone who insults or threatens you, go to them and say one sentence, a question that leaves room for their answer, and wait to hear it: “When you said that, I thought you meant ___. Did you?” They may say yes, or they may say no. Either way, you hear something you did not write yourself, and the imagined conversation becomes a real one.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and Religion. Collected Works, Vol. 11, para. 129. — “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”
    • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — the graduated failure of adaptation.
    • Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. — optimal frustration.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • The Oedipus Complex Explained: Why Your Partner Isn’t the Problem

    Think back to the last time you were properly angry. Not irritated. Angry — ears hot, hands not quite steady, the same three sentences going round and round in your head.

    You probably knew whose fault it was before the feeling had finished arriving. He said that thing again. She rolled her eyes at exactly the wrong moment. Or you turned the whole thing inward, the way people do at two in the morning, and decided you were too sensitive, too needy, too much. Hold that scene a second, because here comes the uncomfortable part. None of those was the real cause.

    If it isn’t the other person, and it isn’t you, then what is it?

    Psychoanalysis says something that sounds almost rude the first time you hear it. The pain you feel in moments like that doesn’t come from your husband, or your wife, or your children. And it doesn’t come from you being too sensitive, too needy or too much, either. It comes from a fantasy that’s been running inside you the whole time, one you never chose and mostly can’t see.

    Not fantasy in the pleasant sense. Not the daydream you pick up on the train and put down again at your stop. In psychoanalysis, a fantasy is something older: the wishes and fears of early childhood, still at work in the way you read the people closest to you. It works away below your awareness, quietly and steadily, and it has already moved your mood before you notice anything at all.

    The fantasy decides what something means before you have looked at what actually happened. Your partner goes quiet, and you immediately read the silence as rejection. That interpretation produces anger, withdrawal, or desperate attempts to hold on. Because the interpretation feels like a fact, you react to it without checking whether your partner’s silence had another cause.

    You know the sequence even if you have never named it. Somebody says a few words, you add “I don’t matter to them,” and your whole day collapses. The words triggered the reaction, but the meaning you added determined its size.

    Why can’t you tell when you’re caught up in a fantasy?

    As an adult, you can think things through, which sounds like an advantage. You can explain yourself, point to evidence, walk anybody through exactly how you reached your conclusion. That is precisely where the trap is set. Being able to explain it all makes you certain you’re looking at plain facts, so it never occurs to you that you might be looking at a meaning you added yourself.

    The difficulty is that an unconscious fantasy does not feel like an interpretation. It feels like simply seeing clearly. You do not think, “I’m adding an old story to this moment.” You think, “Now I finally see what this person really feels about me.” So feeling certain proves nothing about whether you have read the moment correctly.

    The fantasy also started earlier than you’d think. When you were only one or two, before you had words for any of it, your mind was already staging wild, violent scenes between you and the people around you: grabbing and shoving away, swallowing and being swallowed, smashing to pieces. It sounds bizarre, but psychoanalysis says every human being starts out with fantasies like these. They don’t stop when you grow up. You are still strongly influenced by them; you just don’t know it. You may even have caught a trace of them yourself: a flash of wanting to shove somebody out of the way at a dinner table, gone before you’d registered it.

    What happens in the Oedipus story?

    Psychoanalysis has one idea that makes these hidden fantasies much easier to see: the Oedipus complex, named after an old Greek myth. While Oedipus is still a baby, too young to have done anything at all, his father is warned by a prophecy that this son will one day kill him and marry his own mother. The father panics and has the baby left outside to die, but somebody finds him, and he grows up in another household, never knowing who his real parents are.

    Years later he’s out on the road, and at a crossroads he falls into a stupid quarrel with an old man in a carriage. He kills him. He travels on to a city that has just lost its king, answers a riddle nobody else has been able to answer, and the city hands him the empty throne — and, with it, the widowed queen as his wife.

    Then the truth comes out. The old man he killed at the crossroads was that city’s king, and his own father. The woman lying beside him is his mother. Tormented by guilt, he puts out his own eyes.

    The details shift depending on who tells it — who picked the baby up, how he ended up in that particular city, how much anybody knew. The versions disagree, and none of that’s the point. The real question is why a story this ugly refused to die.

    Why do these old stories keep coming back?

    Think of a myth as a picture of the part of your mind you never get to look at directly. Psychoanalysis calls that part the unconscious: the part that had already decided whose fault it was before you had even finished getting angry. A myth is not a lesson or a warning. It is a picture of how that hidden part works. The Oedipus myth is only one such picture. The Greek myths about Zeus, Athena and Poseidon work the same way, and so do the old stories of every other culture that lasted long enough to reach us. These stories survived because they picture something that really goes on inside us, and people kept recognizing it even when they couldn’t possibly have said what it was.

    Line up the stories people never stop retelling and they start to look strangely alike. Many follow the same basic outline as the story of Oedipus. A baby is sent away. A child grows up with the wrong parents, in the wrong house. The truth about where he came from comes out only much later. Think of Moses in the basket, Superman in the rocket, Harry Potter in the cupboard under the stairs, and Luke Skywalker, told his father was dead.

    It isn’t that writers copied one another. The outline matches the way the unconscious works in all of us, so it catches hold and gets told again and again. That is why it keeps turning up in myths, in fairy tales, and in films people watch over and over without quite knowing why.

    Notice which stories catch hold of you like that. If one book or one film gets under your skin far more than it seems it should, it’s worth asking what in you it touched.

    What happens inside a three-year-old?

    At first, your world had room for only two people: your mother and you, a small closed circle. Then you began to notice a third person who belonged in that circle too, usually your father. Mother, father, child — three corners now, and one of them was you.

    From then on, the child feels several things at once, and none of them fit together: love, rivalry, and a quiet wish for somebody to disappear. Freud called this three-cornered tangle the Oedipus complex, after the son in the myth who, without knowing it, kills his father and marries his mother. It usually begins around the age of three or four, a little after the wild, violent scenes of the first two years.

    According to psychoanalysis, a child this age feels a sexual desire toward one parent that is as strong as an adult’s, even though the child’s body is far too young to hold any of it. That is what the term incestuous desire refers to. At its heart is a simple wish: that parent should be mine and nobody else’s, and the other parent, standing in the way, should go. Shame and guilt haven’t developed yet, so nothing tones the feeling down. The child feels it at full strength, draws the desired parent into its fantasies, and enjoys them.

    The words psychoanalysis uses for this stage sound brutal: killing the rival, possessing the parent, incestuous desire. That isn’t an accident. Nobody is trying to shock you. The words are harsh because the child’s feelings are that intense, and softer words would be describing something else altogether.

    And still, nothing happened. Not one of those scenes took place. Hold on to that, because everything else depends on it. All of it runs inside the child’s mind — no event, no moment anybody else could have walked in on. It’s fantasy from the first frame to the last.

    This is where most of us go wrong. We hear that something was only imagined and quietly file the whole business under harmless. For a small child, that’s not remotely how it works. The fantasy is not just a thought; it is something the child actually lives through.

    Why does something imagined leave a real mark?

    Dreams make this easy to see. Nothing in a dream is really happening. Now take the plainest example there is: a man has a sexual dream and he actually ejaculates. Crude, perhaps — and that is exactly why it works. His body never stopped to check whether any of it was true. It just reacted.

    Or take the milder version: you dream you’re arguing with somebody, and the bad mood trails you around all morning, long after you’ve remembered there was never any argument.

    A small child’s fantasies work the same way, only they run all day, for years. What the child only imagined still produces real fear, real pleasure, real jealousy and real tension in the body. That experience doesn’t simply disappear as the child grows up. Years later, in your mind, your partner can come to stand where the parent you wanted all to yourself once stood. So when your partner goes silent at the table, you may read the silence through the old triangle — “I’m being replaced” or “someone else matters more” — before you’ve even considered what is happening now.

    Is “he ignored me” something he did, or something you added?

    Separating what is happening now from the meaning the old fantasy adds to it changes what you can do. If the entire cause seems to be your partner, your only options are to change, punish, or leave them. Once you can see what you added, you have another option: examine the interpretation before acting on it.

    So here’s one thing to try, starting today. The next time a strong feeling rushes up and grips your whole chest, take a sheet of paper as soon as you can and fold it down the middle. Fill in both sides. On the left, write what the other person actually said or did — the words, the action, nothing else. No tone, no expression, no guess at what they meant by it. On the right, write the meaning you added.

    “He looked at his phone while I spoke” belongs on the left. “He ignored me because I don’t matter” belongs on the right. “She said she needed an evening alone” belongs on the left. “She’s getting ready to leave me” belongs on the right. You do not have to decide who was right. The point is to see the exact step where an event became a story and the story became a feeling.

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Why That One Person Gets Under Your Skin

    There’s one person you can’t let slide. Everybody else in the room lets it go — they roll their eyes, they move on, they’ve forgotten about it by the time they get to the parking lot. You haven’t. Something about the way that person takes credit, or opens a sentence with “no offense, but,” goes into you like a splinter and stays there. Their name comes up in conversation and your voice changes, and the strange part is you can hear it changing while it happens. Then you’re driving home and the question arrives: why did I go that hard? Nobody else did.

    That difference between your reaction and everyone else’s matters. The person may really be irritating. But when you react far harder than anyone else, it can be a sign that their behavior has touched something in you — a desire or anger of your own that you find hard to admit. So to understand why you stay angry for hours while everyone else moves on, you have to ask not only what they did, but why it hits you so hard.

    Where does your mind put a feeling it can’t stand?

    Some feelings belong to you and you still won’t look at them straight on. The small ugly jealousy when a friend gets the news you wanted for yourself. The mean, calculating thought you’d never say out loud to anybody. Anger that arrives at a size the situation obviously doesn’t deserve.

    When a feeling is too uncomfortable to admit as your own, the mind may hand it to someone else — and then find it in them. It’s a bit like tossing your own garbage over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, then looking over the next morning and complaining about how filthy their yard is. You feel competitive but accuse a colleague of turning everything into a contest. You want attention but become preoccupied with how desperately someone else seeks it. You haven’t stopped seeing the competitiveness or the hunger for attention. You just see it in them, and only in them.

    This is called projection. Your judgment of the other person feels completely true, partly because it may be true: they may really be competitive, or really hungry for attention. Projection doesn’t need you to make up something that isn’t there. It makes you stare at that trait in them, and keeps you from seeing the same thing in yourself.

    I call this an uncomfortable truth. It isn’t pleasant to hear, and there’s no gentle way to say it. But you can’t see yourself without bearing that discomfort. You can recognize the feelings you’ve been handing to other people only as far as you can stand to know they’re yours. Not an inch past that.

    What did Melanie Klein see in the first months of life?

    The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described in close detail what goes on in the mind of a very young baby. In her account, the first thing in that mind is terror.

    Not fear of something in particular — not dogs or strangers or the dark. A baby has no strength, no words, and no way of making anything at all happen. What it has instead is the raw sense that it could simply stop existing. Blink out, gone, nothing left where it used to be. Klein called this annihilation anxiety. It isn’t a fear of dying the way you or I think about dying, as something that will happen someday. A baby has no sense of “later,” so hunger doesn’t feel like a delay it can wait out. It feels like the end of everything.

    Terror like that is more than a baby can bear, and the baby’s mind finds a way to make it smaller.

    To see how, you need one more piece: there’s also destructiveness inside the baby, and it isn’t mild — hot, wrecking, wanting to smash whatever is nearest. Klein never believed infants were sweet blank pages waiting to be written on. But the baby can’t accept that this fury is its own, any more than it can bear the terror. So the fury gets thrown out, away, into the first outside thing the baby has ever met: its mother’s breast, the one that feeds it. Psychoanalysts call that first outside thing the object — their word for whoever or whatever our feelings are aimed at.

    This is how the terror gets smaller. The fury no longer seems to be inside the baby; now it seems to come at the baby from out there, from the breast. It’s a terrible bargain — the very breast that feeds it now feels threatening — but it is still easier to bear than the alternative. A baby is far too small and too new to hold the thought “this savagery is mine.”

    Why does the fault always seem to be in someone else?

    The habit of throwing out what we can’t bear stays with us into adulthood. In an adult, though, it doesn’t look like throwing anything. It looks like a confident judgment about someone, backed by a list of examples. And because you can list everything that person did, you never ask why this one fault takes up so much of your mind.

    Here’s something that sounds backwards until you check it against your own life: the more badness you find in other people, the more of it may be quietly sitting in you.

    Say “they’re all selfish” often enough, with enough conviction, and you make a rule without noticing you made it: selfishness is a thing other people have. So the next time you take the last of something without asking, the thought can’t arrive as “that was selfish of me.” It has to arrive as “I was in a hurry,” or “they didn’t really want it.” Once selfishness belongs only to other people, your own selfishness has no place to show openly, so you hide it more deeply — even from yourself. The more you hide it, the less of yourself you get to see.

    That’s the real cost of saying “they’re all selfish.” The cost isn’t that you’re being unfair to them. You may be entirely right about them — plenty of people really are selfish, and saying so isn’t a crime. The cost is that you become harder to see. To yourself.

    So who is the mature one here? Not the person with no dark side. Nobody is free of one, and anybody claiming otherwise is bluffing. The mature one is whoever can say, quietly and without making a show of it, “yeah, some of that is in me too.”

    The sentence doesn’t feel good, and saying it fixes nothing on its own — it certainly won’t make you nicer by Tuesday. Saying it takes strength, though. You have to be able to think “some of that is in me” without it flattening you for the rest of the night — and then get up and finish the dishes. When you don’t have that strength yet, the mind falls back on what the baby did: throw it out, find it in someone else, feel better for an hour or so.

    Why does a fight make you more certain instead of less?

    Projection is also why fights break out in close relationships. Two people can do this to each other at the same time: each one places their own unwanted feelings on the other, and then finds them there. Each now sees the badness in the other person, so a clash is hard to avoid.

    Now think of a fight of your own, and watch what happens to both of you as it heats up. You’d expect an argument to introduce a little doubt — more information, more of the other person’s side, more room to wonder. It does the opposite. The louder it gets, the more badly you need to prove the fault is theirs: “That’s not mine. You did this.” Every time you say it, you believe it a little more.

    That’s why an argument about something small, like the dishes, so quickly stops being about the dishes. It turns into a contest over who the bad one is, and neither of you can afford to lose it.

    By this point, each of you is treating a picture in your own head as the complete truth. Psychoanalysis calls this kind of picture a fantasy. In this sense a fantasy is not a lie you’ve made up. To you, the picture feels like plain fact, and that is what makes it so hard to shift. Your mind has arranged what happened so that the other person carries all the badness and you carry none of it. That is why nothing new gets through. Accepting even part of the other person’s side would mean admitting that some of the badness is yours, and that is exactly what the picture protects you from.

    And the firmer that picture becomes, the less you can see of what’s inside you. So the next time you’re absolutely sure about somebody, the certainty itself is worth a second look.

    Were you ever really alone, even as a newborn?

    Here’s the heart of Klein’s idea, and it starts with something almost too obvious to notice.

    Projection needs an object — someone or something to place the feeling in. You can’t throw something at someone who isn’t there. So if a newborn is already throwing its fury into the breast, then someone else is already in the baby’s world from the first weeks of life. The baby’s mind is turned toward its mother from the very beginning, long before it can recognize that the breast it knows belongs to a whole, separate person.

    Klein followed this simple point all the way through, and it led her to disagree with Freud.

    Freud had pictured the newborn as a sealed little world, wrapped up in itself, only bumping into other people later on. Klein said no. We don’t start out alone and then pick up relationships as a skill, the way we eventually pick up walking. We start out already in a relationship. The very first thing a baby ever does with its mind, it does toward somebody.

    That’s where the term object relations comes from. It names this way of understanding people: a person begins life not alone, but in a relationship with an object — someone to aim feelings at. You were never a closed room that later grew a door.

    Who got to you today?

    You know exactly who. Bring that person to mind.

    Name what you couldn’t stand about them, and keep it to a single word, because one word is more than enough. Selfish. Cold. Fake. Careless.

    Then take the word — just the word, not the person, not the history, not the list of everything they’ve done — and ask yourself one question about it: Is any of this in me?

    Now don’t try to answer it — I mean that seriously. If something surfaces on its own, fine, but don’t go hunting for it. Finding an answer matters less than the turn itself: the finger you’ve been pointing at them swings back toward you for one second. For that one second, the picture in your head — all the badness is theirs, none of it is mine — starts to crack. One crack is plenty for tonight.

    References

    • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board