Boredom

“What is the fundamental state of the human individual as the being emerges out of non-being?”

This is a question posed by Winnicott in the composite text Human Nature, a posthumous collection of papers and essays containing statements like the one above which further solidify my sense of the existential trajectory of Winnicott’s thinking (despite his slight criticism of the existential movement found in his Fear of Breakdown).  His answer is something like the following:

“The psyche begins as an imaginative elaboration of physical functioning having its most important duty the binding together of past experiences, potentialities, and the present moment awareness and expectancy for the future. Thus, the self comes into existence.”

The capacity to be alone was an interest of Winnicott’s dating back to a paper of the same title published in the late 1950s.  It’s papers like these that singled Winnicott out amongst the early analysts.  Not simply interested in the binary structures of aggression and sexuality laid down by Freud, he was interested in an array of experiential conditions that extended beyond psychoanalysis’ founded territories.  In thinking about this pair of quotes and some of the theoretical directions outlined above, I want to extend this idea of being alone and our capacity to tolerate the vicissitudes of that state into an inquiry of solitude’s frequent coconspirator against most individual’s sense of an ability to be with themselves: boredom.

As always, Winnicott’s aloneness is draped in the basic Winnicottian paradox of being, at our basis, a self in relation.  A persistent concept through all his writing, and maybe the apex of psychological achievement within his theoretical framework, our ability to sit with this paradox is the crux of the trajectory from non-being to being outlined above.  We are not born a self that then must learn to relate to others.  We come into being inextricably intertwined with the world and come into selfhood so that we can more effectively relate.  The self gets created out of the gap that emerges in the relationship with the primary caretaker to facilitate the subjective process of understanding and negotiating that gap.

One’s capacity to be alone then comes down to how one was invited to be alone with others.  For Winnicott, the environment is the primary facilitating entity.  What we get becomes what we are.  Therefore, our ability to be alone is a way of being that becomes of some other nurturing being’s ability to allow us to appreciate our aloneness.  Winnicott is being very subtle here.  To emphasize that subtlety he looks closely as something like silence within a session.  Winnicott’s suggestion is that it is too narrow a conceptualization to only see silence as a kind of resistance.  That, in fact, it might be a developmental achievement within the relational dynamics of client and therapist, wherein the client feels a sense of safety in being able to retreat within themselves for periods within the therapeutic encounter.  That what that silence is meant to evoke is not always a painful holding back of intimacy and further connection, but a sense of mutual safety, trust, and a recognition of the way both client and therapist simultaneously owns and shares the mutual space.

So that is being alone, but what might this all have to do with boredom?  Boredom seems to me one of the registers on the scale of our capacity for tolerating our aloneness.  It is a mode of aloneness in which creativity and play have been numbed and neutralized. 
In part, the capacity to be alone, in the way Winnicott discusses it, has the quality of being able to generate interest in our own being.  To be willing to be with the products of the mind in the emerging self which blossoms out of the absences and openness that unfold between us and other beings, particularly when those beings exist as their absence.  And let’s be sure not to think of the mind as a disembodied process here.  Anyone who has been really bored (which is I assume at least everybody) knows that boredom can feel like something trying to burrow out of your skin.  It becomes an edgy potentiality of anything-other that can consume and squeeze every inch of muscle fiber in one’s body.

But in this feeling of being only the potentiality of being anything-other, we become consumed with and by non-being.  Boredom is a kind of curiosity, but it is a limited curiosity interested with only that which is unpleasant, which in most moments of boredom is a kind of reckoning with that which we aren’t rather than that which we are or could be in this moment.  This unpleasantness is an unpleasantness which is likely meant to cover over some other more fundamental unpleasantness that is even more off-putting and difficult to approach than the experience of being bored.  It is the struggle of being able to hold ourselves in a present that is under stimulating, droning, tedious, or challenging in some manner where we choose the preferable position of deliberately distancing ourselves from the experience with which we are being presented, with numbness coming in as a desired alternative to the shame and embarrassment of not-knowing.

This can have implications that are both personal and political.  I’ve recently been re-reading David Foster Wallace’s final (and unfinished) novel The Pale King.  It is a book which is fundamentally about the process of being bored/doing boring work.  As a writer who for much of his life was consumed by the influence on American culture of media and entertainment, the novel is clearly Wallace’s attempt at dealing with the other side of that dialectic, of trying to understand what has been stripped away from people that has allowed the unrelenting need to be entertained to become such an all-consuming presence in contemporary American culture.  Set in an IRS processing center and organized within and around the dullness of professional tax auditing, the book makes an argument for the value and existential need of being able to contend with, and indeed be interested in, the things in life that tire and bore us.  And that along with the personal implications of recognizing that being interested in that which otherwise might appear boring is a way of cultivating a richer and more meaningful existence, that politically an inability to attend to boredom is the underlying function that has allowed the political apparatus to get away from the common person (bear in mind Wallace died in 2008 and was most prolific as a writer through the 90’s and early aughts, and that the novel itself takes place in 1985, long before the hyper efficient entertainment machines of today had really had the opportunity to become what they have become).  Per the opinions of some of the characters in the text, good citizenship means engaging in dull and practical matters—understanding constitutional rights, knowing the founding principles of the philosophical position on which a democracy is built, generally informed citizenship around the complex issues that determine what it means to live in a “free country” and what actions need to come downstream of that for the individuals in a given society—that most people these days do not have the attention span to stomach.  No, we no longer read the Federalist Papers or the Constitution unless required to by school, but shouldn’t we?  Especially in a time and place where you can literally gain access to either one by the mere click of a button.

This goes for therapy as well.  I often wonder if some of the difficulty maintaining conceptual threads from one session to another for certain clients is some cost that gets expended by the fact that, at the end of the day, therapy is hard.  To do therapy “well” and to get something out of it means needing to pay attention.  To what is happening with and within you, as well as with and within the people around you, both during and between sessions.  Now of course there are plenty of ways to get something out of it otherwise, but the true benefits of therapy come from this thorough focus on intention and perception of the various ways we go about making meaning, constructing relationships, and actualizing and structuring various problems in our life.  It’s work.  It’s about probing what otherwise might feel dull or uninteresting and wondering why it might feel dull or uninteresting.  Or dismantling some of the things of which we are so certain that we dismiss any attempt to even try and talk about them. 

It's an uncommon practice for therapists that should be more common to jot some notes down after you meet with a client.  Not to frame later documentation, but to allow your mind to share some associations of what the session felt like and some of the broader themes that came up which the insurance company largely will not care about.  It’s the best way to capture the felt sense of what it is like to be with a client and can be instructive in thinking descriptively about what is happening and what we might desire to do with that; or simply maintaining one’s attention around a persistent motif in that client’s sessions.  It’s also pretty boring to commit oneself to doing that for every session one has.  It’s easy to rather be doing the note, answering emails, trying to drive more traffic to your business, or checking out in between sessions for a mini-mental break.  It’s also the thing which I have found most helpful in committing myself to and invariably improves the quality of the work I do with clients when I am diligent about writing and reviewing these notes in the 5-10 minutes before and after a session.  And it is a practice that is fundamentally rooted in learning how to be curious about what is most obvious and would be easiest to overlook.  To find a way to be curious enough with what kind of being you and the client each bring out in one another in the journey from not-being to being which is the progression of each individual session.  Taken this way, each client-therapist relationship has its own subjectivity which emerges out of the two-body relationship of each distinct pairing (or more in couples of group work) that becomes the analyzable third.  And it demands, amidst all the paradox and blurring of temporal and interpersonal boundaries, a determination to buckle down and be bored.