In Ideologies of Experience, Matthew H.

Bowker is onto an idea of profound sig-

nificance. His concept of an ideology of experience may very well hold a key
insight into the contemporary psychological processes behind our politics of fan-
tasy over reality, and false attributions and assertions over valid information. Once
we as individual selves are taught to mistrust our own capacity for reality testing
and knowing good from bad, stripped of critical thinking we forfeit the essence
of citizenship in a democratic society.
Michael A. Diamond, Professor and Director, Center of the Study of Organizational
Change, Harry S. Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri

A critical and provocative interdisciplinary inquiry into experience, and the ways
it might be manipulated, Matthew H. Bowker challenges us to question basic
assumptions we make about our society and our lives. Ideologies of Experience is a
work from which all of us can profit.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Board of Governors Professor of
Political Science, Rutgers University, USA

Bowker explores a fascinating array of ideas dealing with the self and the impact
of what he calls ‘ideologies of experience’ on the self. This is a fascinating and
stimulating excursion through philosophy and psychoanalytic theory that enriches
our understanding of how the self relates to itself, to others, to the community
and to the often difficult and traumatic ways experience attacks and engages the
very foundations of our being.
James M. Glass, Distinguished Scholar/Teacher and Professor,
University of Maryland, College Park, USA

In the aftermath of radical changes to traditional assumptions about subjectivity,

and selfhood, this book offers a useful and original re-interpretation of key contested
concepts—experience, ideology, trauma, solitude
Marshall Alcorn, George Washington University, USA, author of
Changing the Subject in English Class
IDEOLOGIES OF EXPERIENCE

Matthew H. Bowker offers a novel analysis of ‘experience’: the vast and influ-
ential concept that has shaped Western social theory and political practice for the
past half-millennium.
While it is difficult to find a branch of modern thought, science, industry, or
art that has not relied in some way on the notion of ‘experience’ in defining its
assumptions or aims, no study has yet applied a politically-conscious and psy-
chologically sensitive critique to the construct of experience. Doing so reveals
that most of the qualities that have been attributed to experience over the
centuries – particularly its unthinkability, its correspondence with suffering, and
its occlusion of the self – are part of unlikely fantasies or ideologies. By analyzing a
series of related cases, including the experiential education movement, the ascen-
dency of trauma theory, the philosophy of the social contract, and the psycholo-
gical study of social isolation, the book builds a convincing case that ideologies of
experience are invoked not to keep us close to lived realities and ‘things-in-
themselves,’ but, rather, to distort and destroy true knowledge of ourselves and
others.
In spite of enduring admiration for those who may be called champions of
experience, such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others
treated throughout the work, ideologies of experience ultimately discourage
individuals and groups from creating, resisting, and changing our experience,
urging us instead to embrace trauma, failure, deprivation, and self-abandonment.

Matthew H. Bowker is Visiting Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Medaille

College in Buffalo, NY. His work applies psychoanalytic and literary-critical
approaches to topics in political philosophy.
 IDEOLOGIES OF
EXPERIENCE
Trauma, Failure, Deprivation, and
the Abandonment of the Self

Matthew H. Bowker
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First published 2016
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For Julie and Zoe, my beloveds
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments x

1 Introduction 1
2 Experience, failure, and thinking 21
3 The incorporation and transmission of traumatic experience 44
4 Misunderstood and repeated experience in Le Malentendu 63
5 Experience and control in higher education 78
6 Aloneness and its opposites 103
7 Hikikomori: deprived, isolated, and disfigured selves 121
8 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 144

Index 167
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Levine, once my teacher, still my teacher, read substantial portions of this
manuscript and offered deeply thoughtful critiques. Our correspondence and
collaborations, even on subjects having little to do with ‘experience,’ have been
extraordinarily helpful and have surely influenced the shape of this book. I regularly
find myself turning to David’s published work for the depth of his understanding
and the seemingly effortless clarity he brings to each of his topics.
I am truly fortunate that Fred Alford, my former doctoral advisor and mentor
at the University of Maryland, College Park, continues to teach me through our
conversations, correspondence, and occasional conference panels, as well as through
his published work, to whose riches I feel, quite irrationally, I retain some sort of
privileged access. Fred read early portions of this manuscript, asked provocative
questions, and offered sage advice.
Marshall Alcorn, Julie Bowker, Jim Butters, Patrick Fazioli, and Lynne Layton
read portions of this manuscript at various stages of its development. I am grateful
for their helpful comments and appraisals.
An early version of Chapter 3 was presented at the 2014 Annual Conference of
the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, NJ. An early version of Chapter 8 was presented
at the 2015 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association
(MPSA) in Chicago, IL. An early version of Chapter 7 was published in the
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies 9(1). This portion of the present work benefited
enormously from the wisdom of Helen Lucey and the anonymous reviewers.
For the second time, I have been blessed by the expertise, insight, and con-
fidence of Taylor and Francis’ Senior Editor of Political Science Research, Natalja
Mortensen. Lillian Rand’s thoughtful guidance through all stages of this book’s
development and Justin Dyer’s astute editorial assistance have likewise been
essential to the completion of this work.
1
INTRODUCTION

In this book, I try to make sense of discourses and attitudes that emphasize the
importance of trauma, failure, and deprivation. I believe it is fair to call these
discourses and attitudes, if not a single ideology, at least a family of ideologies.
Because what unites these ideologies is an identifiable set of presumptions con-
cerning the value of certain kinds of experiences and our relation to them, I refer
to them collectively as ‘ideologies of experience.’
The ideologies of experience discussed here share an intellectual history that
begins in the modern era and is remarkable throughout the Protestant Reforma-
tion, the European Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the early
Romantic movement, for instance, in the work of Martin Luther, Michel de
Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and the young J.W. Goethe, among many others.
Some have argued that the ancient Greeks and early Christians, too, upheld ideals
of experience (see Jay 2005, 13–19; Lloyd 1979), citing Aristotle, the Hellenistic
Skeptics and Cynics, and Augustine. Yet, while it is inadvisable to generalize
about intellectual history, and while there are certainly exceptions to the rule, it is
not the classical but the modern era that truly enshrines empeiria, scientia, and
individualism, from whose influences arise the need to locate moral and epis-
temic authority in experience. In the modern era, Francis Bacon would
recommend experientia literata (learned experiences) as a first “step to essential
knowledge” ( Jay 2005, 31), and Michel de Montaigne would claim that “in the
experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise” (1993, 354). In the
classical era, by contrast, Plato’s cave-dwellers would be condemned to their
shadowy existence not primarily by the bonds restraining their legs and necks
(1987, 317–318), but by the shackles of experience, custom, and conventional
wisdom, tightened daily.
2 Introduction

Regardless of their point of origin, ideologies of experience exert tremendous

influence over contemporary intellectual, social, and political life: They shape and
guide popular epistemologies, approaches to both personal and collective traumas,
definitions of the purpose of higher learning, orientations toward citizens and civil
institutions, and much more. The basic premise uniting ideologies of experience
is that experience is a privileged means of accessing reality. Of course, from
this premise a variety of secondary postulates have been advanced, many of
which carry normative force, and most of which are surprisingly antithetical to
the self-liberatory aims of experience’s early champions.
I strive to show that ideologies of experience endorse immediate identification
with and incorporation of experience’s objects, the splitting of experience from
thinking, the repetition and transmission of experience in unthought forms, and
the over-reliance upon the psychic mechanisms of projection and introjection.
An important consequence of the ascendency of experience in its ideological
form has been the putative demonstration of the artificiality, undesirability, and
even impossibility of mature selves and groups. Instead, ideologies of experience
recommend that we regenerate and preserve what are thought to be ‘natural’
experiences of psychic devastation in our private and civil lives.
To ideologies of experience, I oppose an ideal of selfhood, which values the
mediation of experience via thinking and knowing, the potential for creative action,
and the capacity to be alone, which entails the possibility of ethical relatedness with
others. A critic of ideals of selfhood might object that I am merely opposing
ideologies of experience with an ideology of the self. There is no way to defeat
this objection. There are, however, reasons to suspect it. The best reason is that
such objections deny the value of preserving a distinction between ideal and
ideology. If all ideals – and perhaps, by extension, all ideas – are, at bottom,
ideologies, then we find ourselves already entangled with a woeful ideology in
which no idea, proposition, or claim of value can express more than coercive
force. Such a condition would be, of course, quite inimical to the development
of thinking, willing, acting selves. Although not treated in this book as thor-
oughly as in my earlier work (see, e.g., Bowker 2014), the refusal to distinguish
ideal from ideology, reasoning from rationalization, and self from selfishness may
be among the most dangerous of contemporary intellectual pathologies. Under-
taken in the name of defending the victimized and the oppressed, such a view
lamentably undermines investment in the very capacities by which mature, secure
selves and ethical, non-oppressive groups are formed.
I hope the reader will not be disappointed that in this book I leave aside not
only the rich intellectual history of the concept of experience, but what I consider
to be the unanswerable question, ‘What is experience, itself ?,’ not to mention the
equally unanswerable question Richard Kuhns calls “the philosophical question”
(1970, 53–55): ‘How is experience possible?’ These questions, which concern the
foundations of empiricism, idealism, skepticism, phenomenology, pragmatism, and
existentialism, have been treated exhaustively in the works of Baruch Spinoza,
 Introduction 3

John Locke, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, William
James, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, and in the secondary and
tertiary literatures surrounding them.
Several comprehensive volumes have already been dedicated either to parsing the
idea of experience, such as Michael Oakeshott’s seminal Experience and Its Modes
(1933), or to retracing the intellectual history of the concept of experience, itself,
such as Martin Jay’s truly exceptional Songs of Experience (2005). These works
permit us to dispense with laborious enumerations of past and present ideas of
experience and, instead, to explicate some subtler dynamics that unite conceptions
of experience across a wide range of intellectual, political, and popular discourses.
This work, then, explores a rather limited set of questions regarding experi-
ence, conceived as a psycho-social construct with normative force: ‘How have
our approaches to certain types of experience shaped contemporary thinking
about the self?,’ ‘What conscious and unconscious aims are served by valorizing
experience, especially experiences of disaster?,’ and ‘Against what, if anything,
does the construct of experience, so construed, defend?’ Since ‘experience’ has
been invoked in hundreds of different ways by philosophers, theologians, psy-
chologists, scientists, poets, teachers, advertisers, and many others, it should be
clarified at the outset that this book is concerned with but one strain – although it
will be recognized by the reader as a dominant strain – of both scholarly and
popular orientations to experience.
The term ‘experience’ has no suitable synonym in any language of which I am
aware, and retains the quality of a ‘slippery signifier,’ capable of referring to almost
anything. An adequate illustration of both the slipperiness of the concept and the
necessity of my approach comes from an excerpt of Alfred North Whitehead’s
defense of his event- and process-oriented philosophy. Whitehead argues:

In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can clas-
sify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evi-
dence relating to every variety of occasion … experience drunk and
experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience
drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experi-
ence self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experi-
ence religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience
care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience
happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and
experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the
dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.
(1933, 226)

Of course, the irony of Whitehead’s attempt to display the myriad components of

experience is that with each new mode, with each item on his list, we find our-
selves increasingly perplexed about what “experience” could possibly denote. In
4 Introduction

the end, it seems an unnecessary word, or, alternatively, a super-word, capable of

signifying a temporary condition (“drunk”), a mode of being (“physical”), an
attitude (“skeptical”), a psychological state (“grieving”), a circumstantial environmental
condition (“in the dark”), a moral or ethical self-relation (“under self-restraint”),
and a relation to a group (“abnormal”).
Perhaps the only way to make sense of Whitehead’s usage is to imagine that
experiencers hold these varieties of experience together, making them into
something more than chaos. But that is not Whitehead’s point. It is, in part, my
point, as I hope to show that modern and contemporary ideologies of experience
routinely eclipse an ideal type of experiencer – a self – in favor of less capable, less
integrated experiencers, wedded in less mature ways to their experiences and their
experiences’ objects. In so doing, ideologies of experience misconstrue what a self
does, what it needs, what it offers, and how its relation to experience can become
either fortifying or oppressive.
Although one might imagine that an exhaustive study of the great phenom-
enologists, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, would permit us to pin down the meaning of experience, we find that,
despite their ‘bracketing’ (Einklammerung) of assumptions about the noumenal
world, and despite their attention to the properties of human experience – its
directedness, its embeddedness, its ‘qualia’ – phenomenologists rarely inspect the
concept of experience in its own right. Indeed, for many phenomenologists, as
for Whitehead, ‘experience’ may refer to almost anything, from actions to thoughts to
sensations to dreams, just as ‘experience’ may occur in active or passive modes
and upon conscious or unconscious registers.
It may be unfair to ask phenomenologists, dedicated to a ‘first-person’ orien-
tation to phenomena, to impose a definition of experience upon experience.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to find a cogent defense, from within the schools of
phenomenology, of the assumption that individuals ‘experience’ anything at all,
or that ‘experience’ is more than a catch-all term for anything human beings may
see, feel, sense, think, encounter, or do.
Perhaps the best-known philosophical debate concerning experience involved
David Hume and Immanuel Kant. To vastly simplify their argument, Hume
argued that experience – as in the impressions given to the human senses – was
both the only ground, and yet also a limited ground, upon which knowledge
could rest (1993, 2001). Kant claimed that experience (Erfahrung) included both
the sensory perceptions that give rise to cognitions and the a priori concepts and
categories, including the faculties of intuition, understanding, and reason, that
made experience meaningful (1998). At least half of Kant’s vision – his defense of
the a priori claim or concept – has been questioned by some of today’s empirically
oriented philosophers. At the same time, Kant’s argument that we cannot directly
know things-in-themselves, like his related reflections on what might be called
the aesthetic ‘limit-experience’ of the sublime, has given rise to a good deal of
postmodern theorizing about experience (2001).
 Introduction 5

Indeed, the question of the ‘sublimity’ we afford to experience is not entirely

beyond the scope of this inquiry. If Martin Luther was able to challenge a mil-
lennium of Church authority by claiming that “experience alone makes a theo-
logian” (quoted in Gerrish 1993, 186), it is curious that the experience he
defended would so quickly come to resemble the mysterious and overpowering
Church he opposed. Consider, for instance, how individual experiences of the
sacred often take on the qualities of precarity and supplice – ‘precarity’ comes from
the Latin prex, meaning begging or prayer, while supplice, the French word for
torture derived from the Latin supplicare, was famously praised by Georges Bataille
as a paradoxically liberating and self-destructive vulnerability (1988, 33–61; see
also Bowker 2014, 60–63).
American mystic Andrew Jackson Davis offers an illustrative example. Davis
contends that abstract thought :

bears the same relation to the Real Truth … that a dream sustains to the
substantial events of wakeful experience,” for when the “hour of real prayer
comes over the throbbing soul … inexorable experience steps in, prescribes
its own remedies, its own penalties; and becomes, at last, the only ‘divinity
school’ from which the mind can derive its imperishable education.
(1869, 33)

For Davis, “inexorable” experience is the only “school” capable of saving our
“throbbing soul[s]” by prescribing “its own remedies … [and] penalties” upon us;
if, that is, we are desperate enough to offer ourselves up in “real prayer.” The
“imperishable education” tendered by experience is quite often, as we shall see in
the following chapters, a lesson in the necessity of submitting to experiences of
suffering, deemed necessary and good.
Without being overly naïve about it, we might imagine that our experience,
even our experience of the sacred, ought to make us feel at home, alive, and
whole, but these feelings are quite at odds with the “numinous dread,” “aweful-
ness,” and quality of mysterium tremendum et fascinans (overwhelming and fascinat-
ing mystery before which we tremble) that have continued to mark off sacred
experience from the banal and the ordinary (Otto 1992, 78–85). Thus, in his
book on The Throe of Wonder, Jerome Miller writes of the foolishness of removing
ourselves from crisis, horror, and death. Miller recommends, instead, “allow[ing] the
experience of horror, and specifically horror in the face of death, to shatter the
accepted understanding of ourselves both as selves and as philosophers” (1992, 124).
Emmanuel Levinas, the famous Lithuanian-French philosopher and Talmudic
scholar, has advanced an extremely influential spiritually sponsored philosophy in
which our experience of others must be non-relational in order to be ethical (see
Levinas 1996, 1998). The other must beset us like a god, must invade us, and
must put “into question” the self’s very existence (Levinas 1969, 43). What this
means, for Levinasians and even for more judicious social theorists like Judith
6 Introduction

Butler, is that our selves must be “gripped and undone” by our experiences with
others, in order that we be instructed, or at least reminded, of our essential pre-
cariousness, of “the thrall in which our relations with others hold us … in ways
that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves as autonomous and in
control” (Butler 2004, 23).
Our experience with others must shatter our autonomy, must “clutter [our]
speech with signs of its undoing,” must leave us “throbbing,” “disrupted,” and
perhaps “awefully” attuned to those experiences that make attempts at self-
awareness and self-narration absurd (see Bowker 2014, 64–65). “My narrative
falters, as it must,” writes Butler. “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And
if we’re not, we’re missing something” (2004, 23). If we are not undone, what we
are missing is not our selves but their opposites: experiences of self-destruction,
experiences taken to be natural, inevitable, and ethically and politically necessary.
We must undo our selves in order to become not more human but “posthuman,” as
Lauro and Embry propose in their “Zombie Manifesto”:

Posthumanity can only really be attained when we pull the trigger on the
ego. To kill the zombie, you must destroy the brain, and to move posthuman,
to lay humanism and its legacy of power and oppression in the grave, we
have to undo our primary systems of differentiation: subject/object, me/you.
(2008, 107)

Thus, “the only way to truly get posthuman is to become antisubject” (87).
Such orientations to subject and self are not distinct from less apocalyptic
efforts to “discern our suffering’s productive worth” (Davies 2012, 49). Recent
works such as Norman Rosenthal’s The Gift of Adversity (2013) and James Davies’
The Importance of Suffering (2012) carry on the tradition of scholarly approbation
for the experience of suffering, where the object supplicated in our supplice is not
a god but an other. Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni, in their In Defense of Shame
(2012), and Christina Tarnopolsky, in Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias
and the Politics of Shame (2010), have also recently espoused the value of self-effacement,
arguing that socio-cultural degeneration can be corrected by shame, conceived as
a sort of psychic civil service, undertaken for the good of others.

Experience as ideology
We are tempted, in a neo-liberal era, to imagine that any extreme, radical, or
even stringent idea is, by definition, ‘ideological.’ But extremity, radicalism, and
stringency do not an ideology make. Rather, while ideas and ideologies are the-
oretically inseparable, to use the term ‘ideology’ is to draw attention to the fan-
tastical and coercive aspects of ideas. The primary function of any ideology is to
defend against knowledge of reality by replacing it with a mythical or fantastical
(i.e., wished-for) reality that better supports the ideologists’ objectives.
 Introduction 7

A Marxist, for instance, might argue that the ideology of individual freedom
functions to legitimize certain institutions and practices of contemporary capital-
ism, institutions and practices that often undermine the genuine freedom of
human beings around the world. To the extent that this ideology of freedom
functions as intended, the positive value attached to ‘freedom’ is applied to the
practices of capitalism, say, in the discourse of the ‘free market,’ just as criticism of
or resistance to the practices and impacts of capitalism is coercively suppressed as if
it were an attack on ‘freedom.’
In approaching experience, trauma, failure, and deprivation as ideologies, my
aim is not, of course, to connect these constructs to a Marxist critique of capit-
alism, but to reference the coercive force of our attitudes toward them. It is also
my intention to show that ideologies of experience play a considerable role in
shaping power-relations between citizens, groups, and institutions by framing the
terms by which civil relationships are formed and by defining influential cultural,
moral, and political ideals.
As Charles Taylor claims, and as his well-known debates with Michael Sandel
imply, “if we are to do political philosophy intelligently,” not only must we
consider governments, institutions, laws, and groups, but we “must write about
the self” (Alford 1991, 9). Why? Because the self’s development, its relationships
with others, and its status vis-à-vis civil institutions is one way – but not the only
way – of defining and assessing psychological, political, and ethical achievement,
a way that is particularly persuasive if we take seriously the values of individual
freedom, human flourishing, and both privacy and publicity. If we do, then it is
worthwhile to clarify how ideologies of experience may undermine the self and
to examine what is lost, what is gained, and whether this exchange is in keeping
with the values we espouse.
The fact that ideologies of experience are hardly recognized and rarely dis-
cussed in standard political-theoretical debates, such as those between liberals and
communitarians, moderns and postmoderns (and post-postmoderns), or the Left
and the Right, demonstrates not their apolitical nature but that, like all truly
potent ideologies, ideologies of experience transcend such divisions. In keeping
with current trends, it might be tempting to write of micro-ideologies, just as we
now write of ‘micro-democracy,’ ‘micro-socialism,’ and even ‘micro-revolution.’
But ideologies, like genuine instantiations of democracy, socialism, and revolu-
tion, are always both micro- and macro-. Both intimate and ubiquitous, ideolo-
gies of experience are transmitted not just between leaders and citizens, but
between parents and children, teachers and students, employers and employees,
writers and readers. We find traces of their influence not only in political philo-
sophies but in popular films, television shows, and common jokes. Ideologies of
experience may be held to dearly and propagated enthusiastically by those who
have never heard of the term ‘ideology’ nor involved themselves with politics in
any substantial way. In my view, this makes ideologies of experience pressingly
‘political.’
8 Introduction

Given how profoundly our experiences are held to impact our lives, it might
be equally tempting to imagine that, since ideologies of experience seem to
transcend political divisions, experience must transcend ideology. In other words,
we might speculate that no ideology is needed to impart experience’s lessons or
to instill respect for its importance. David Smail is right, and perhaps understates
the case, when he notes that “there is something about the lessons they draw
from their experience of life which human beings are reluctant – indeed, often
almost unable – to abandon” (1984, 93).
But asserting that the lessons of experience mysteriously adhere to or inscribe
themselves upon us is already to have ceded ground to ideology, already to have
invested experience with that indefinable quality that differentiates ‘things-in-
themselves’ from ‘mere ideas’ about them. In what follows, I do not attempt to
untangle the philosophical question of whether experiences or their objects may
be considered ‘things-in-themselves.’ More important is to reflect upon what we
intend, what we gain, and what we lose when we conceive of experiences and
their objects in this way. That is, while the notion of ‘things-in-themselves’ is
philosophically troubling, more troubling is the manner of relating to experiences
and objects as if they were ‘things-in-themselves.’
Celebrants of experience often argue that experience is our last remaining
antidote to ideology, making the matter of critiquing ideologies of experience
rather complicated. Their argument proceeds by equating ideas with ideologies,
then, by equating thinking with the cognitive distortions that result from ideo-
logical pressure. The ideologists of experience I discuss in this book generally
insist that the reality accessible by experience is valuable precisely because it cannot
be thought, cannot be transformed into an idea, cannot be interfered with by the
self, because experience is incommensurate with and superior to the self. Of
course, the notion of idea-proof, thought-proof, self-proof experience is, itself,
mythical and ideological: It is the mythology and ideology of the in-itself-ness of
experience.
In conversing with colleagues and students about this book, I have been asked,
more than once: “Do we really need to think this much about experience?” It is a
telling objection, and an ideological one. If we do not need to think about
experience, it must be because we already know enough, or because no good can
come from trying to know more. In either case, we confront more than a worry
that we will waste time. We confront a fear that in thinking about experience,
we will lose touch with experience, that our experiences may lose their special-
ness and value. This attitude implies that experience must be kept away from
thought and its concomitants: analysis, questioning, and doubt. If thought, ana-
lysis, questioning, or doubt is brought into contact with our experience, then it
may threaten our relationships to our experiences, relationships to which we may
be more committed than we know.
To be clear, if ideologies of experience held merely that experiences were
special and valuable, or that we should not like to lose touch with them, there
 Introduction 9

would be no need to undertake the sort of ideology-critique pursued in this

book. Experience is special: If one wishes to experience a roller-coaster, no amount
of talking or thinking about a roller-coaster will do. And experience is valuable:
Without experience, human beings could not experiment – ‘experiment’ is
rooted in the Latin experiri and cognate with ‘experience’ – develop, learn,
change, or sustain the vitality of selves and groups.
In this book, I do not argue that experience is bad, nor that an alternative to
experience – if there could be such a thing – is superior to it. On the contrary,
the value we place on experience is likely born of healthy desires, such as the
desire to feel real, to express curiosity, and to be creative. We may seek experi-
ence to expand our horizons, to test our limits, or to reach out and find others
and the world in new ways. And experience frequently serves these aims. But
ideologies of experience go further, insisting not only that experiencing is the
ultimate mode of human being, but that the most valuable types of experiences
are those in which the self and its distinctive capacities are eclipsed or destroyed
by experience’s objects, as they are in trauma, failure, and deprivation.
Therein lies the problem. While experiences do form special and valuable parts
of human lives, the most venerated experiences too often become those in which
the qualities of selfhood are negated or lost, in which the experiencer finds,
instead, an ambivalently attractive and agonizing – tremendum et fascinans –
connection with an overwhelming object. If ideologies of experience exhort us
to cherish such connections and to repeat such self-occlusive experiences, then,
contrary to their stated aims, they may substantially limit the range and depth of
experience available to human beings.

The ideal of selfhood

There are likely as many definitions of ‘self’ as there are of ‘experience.’ And
selfhood, unfortunately, cannot be distilled to a single criterion. Rather, selfhood
is a constellation of capacities and qualities, all inter-related. Since ‘self,’ like
‘experience,’ is a term thrown around hastily, it is desirable to explore very briefly
some of the meanings and aspects of selfhood, not to pronounce with any finality
upon what a self is or may be, but merely to clarify my intended usage of the
concept in this work.
My approach to the self is derived largely from the – sometimes contrasting –
premises of select schools of psychoanalytic object-relations theory and self psy-
chology (see, e.g., Bion 1962, 1967, 1988; Klein 1975a, 1975b; Kohut 1971,
1977; Winnicott 1965, 1971, 1984, 1986, 1989). While others working within
and around these traditions disagree, I believe it is clear that to write of the self is
to invoke a value, not a substance. The ideal of selfhood pays homage to a set of
psychological, political, and ethical norms that may not – and that need not – be
convincing to all and that likely would not have arisen in different times and
places than those in which they did. Although several advances in psychoanalytic
10 Introduction

psychology have resulted from direct observation and other forms of empirical
inquiry, the theories of self that have arisen alongside them do not necessarily
make the self a ‘real thing’ (whatever that may mean), nor do they contain ‘facts’
about human existence.
There is a respectable case to be made that the self does not ‘exist,’ but not
precisely for the reasons that others offer (see, e.g., Derrida 1991, 1998; Lyotard
1984; Rorty 1987). More of those who write about the self might admit the self’s
non-existence if some agreement could be reached about what it means for
something to ‘exist,’ for, even if the self does not ‘exist,’ its ideals may never-
theless inform the thoughts, feelings, activities, and experiences of real human
beings. I agree with Christopher Bollas in this respect, when he writes that:

there is no one unified mental phenomenon that we can term self,

although … it is true to say that all of us live within the realm of illusion and
within this realm the concept of self has a particularly relevant meaning.
(1987, 9)

Put another way, even if the self is an illusion, it is a usable illusion; usable, that is,
unless it is felt to be intolerably threatening to one’s cherished objects, or to
experience, or to others, or to groups. When the illusion of the self is threatening,
it becomes necessary to evacuate the illusion and incapacitate those who would
use it (Bowker 2014, 59).
Although the self may not ‘exist,’ there are real differences between human
beings who feel, act, and think like selves and those who do not. A good many
conversations between psychotherapists and clients – and teachers and students,
and parents and children, and legislators and constituents – carry in their subtext a
struggle over who is feeling, acting, or thinking like a self and who is not, over
who can be a self and who cannot. While the presence of self in any encounter,
even a solitary one, may be perceptible, it is hardly objectifiable or quantifiable.
Indeed, that selfhood is not empirically verifiable, quantifiable, nor objectively
resolvable in any ultimate sense, turns out to be a pivotal insight for those who
seek to enliven and integrate their selves, particularly for those who pursue such
aims via psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Most ideas of self rely upon the imagination of a boundary, a porous psychic
“membrane” (see, e.g., Grey 2008, 85), that permits the self both to separate itself
from and to make contact with others and the environment. The metaphorical
boundary of the self, then, delineates the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. This meta-
phor is as useful as it is dangerous, for it tempts us to reify the self’s boundaries, to
think of them as material substances or psychic infrastructures. This is particu-
larly the case in contemporary trauma theorizing, where the medical definition of
trauma – the piercing of the body’s boundary by a foreign object – has subtly
informed contemporary conceptions of self. That psychic trauma could be
thought to violate or puncture the self’s boundary and shatter its integrity reveals
 Introduction 11

an error in overly objectifying and concretizing the psyche. This error, among
others, has made it difficult for those participating in these discourses to distinguish
the agony of an intrusive trauma from the ideal of an indelible truth.
It is more helpful to imagine the self and its boundaries as capacities, dynamics,
and tendencies that come and go. Our selfhood is never settled, such that, in Melanie
Klein’s language, the individual in the “depressive position” lives with or alongside –
and not above or free from – a “paranoid-schizoid” orientation to self and others,
which may exert its influence at any time (see Klein 1975b, 64; Minsky 1998,
33–34; Segal 1964, xii–xiii). If we can remember that the “paranoid-schizoid”
and “depressive” positions are not mileposts achieved along a developmental tra-
jectory but, rather, are paradigms or perspectives that co-exist throughout life,
then we may see what is so inspired about Klein’s understanding of human psy-
chic experience: the primacy she affords to the struggle between (a) projecting
hate, destructiveness, and threats of annihilation outward while internalizing and
identifying with split-off aspects of nurturing forces (the paranoid-schizoid posi-
tion) and (b) recognizing and taking in whole objects, combinations of good and
bad, and, in doing so, confronting the ego’s own capacity for sadism and violence
(the depressive position) (see Klein 1975a, 272–273, 286–289; Segal 1964, 55–57).
In the paranoid-schizoid position, there can be no self, only forces of good and
bad, shuttled inside and out in an attempt to safeguard the good and neutralize
the bad. In the depressive position, there is a possibility of selfhood because there
is a possibility of thinking and knowing another as a whole self and, therefore, of
knowing and of being known as a whole self. Needless to say, selfhood is never a
fait accompli but a life’s work, as we strive, sometimes successfully, sometimes not,
to tolerate, understand, and integrate aspects of ourselves and others.
While I do not always use Kleinian language, borrowing equally from Bion,
Freud, Kohut, Winnicott, and others, it would not be wrong to characterize my
view as one in which our orientation toward experience drives our tendency to
favor either a paranoid-schizoid or depressive posture, not, again, as a stepping-
stone by which we advance from one position to another, but as a compass that
positions us in relation to the objects in our inner and outer worlds. Ideologies of
experience, I will argue, turn and return us to something not unlike a paranoid-
schizoid orientation in which the project of developing the self is abandoned.
There need be no self, ideologies of experience teach us, so long as we have
‘good’ experience. Indeed, the self that we are ‘given’ – what is typically construed
as a ‘bad’ self – is presupposed, even hypostatized, primarily to be overcome,
gotten rid of. If it is not gotten rid of, it gets in the way.
I hope to differentiate the self described in this book from the self imagined in
so much contemporary theorizing, from the much-maligned Kantian “dis-
embodied subject” (see, e.g. Sandel 1998), to the absolutist of Reason (see, e.g.,
Horkheimer 2002), to the “I think as substantial as a stone” (Levinas 1998, 71), to
the “rational murderer” (Camus 1991, 253) who combines destructive impulse
with Hegelian logic to negate the other. The vision of selfhood advanced here is
12 Introduction

meant to be distinguishable from the creature driven by biological impulse as well

as from the rational egoist whose “supercelestial thoughts” lead only to “sub-
terrestrial conduct” (Montaigne 1993, 405). The self I and others have imagined
need not act out every impulse, need not react with excessive fear or violence to the
demands of others, need not compulsively defend against perceived threats of
annihilation, and need not deny the realities of dependence to escape narcissistic injury.
There remain important distinctions between various criteria of selfhood that
should not be glossed over, especially for the reader who wishes to consider more
deeply the meaning of the self. I have found it helpful to consider the idea of
selfhood along three main axes: feeling, acting, and thinking. Because selfhood is
a constellation and not a singular achievement, these axes inter-relate and overlap.
Winnicott famously writes of the “feeling of real” (1971, 80), a feeling that
belongs presumably to the “vital moment[s] of being” in which we express our
selves – or even express our “protoselves” – spontaneously (Levine 2011, 16–20).
What Winnicott refers to as a “feeling of existing … as a basic place to operate
from” (1986, 39) and as “feeling real” (1971, 117) may be considered a relatively
primitive “sense of self” (Stern 1985, 7), one that is nonetheless crucial to sustaining
more complex feelings, such as the feeling of “ontological security” (Laing 1969, 39),
as well as the more complex activities and thoughts appropriate to selves.
For R.D. Laing, “ontological security” is a feeling of the self’s reality, an
experience of the self as “real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous
person” (1969, 39). “Ontological security” implies, we might say, a personal his-
tory of “feeling real,” a history of connection with one’s body, one’s sensations,
and one’s emotions, and, most importantly, a capacity to hold that history in a sort
of psychic trust upon which the self can rely. From this secure self-feeling, one may
“live out into the world and meet others … encounter[ing] all the hazards of life,
social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of [one’s] own and
other people’s reality and identity” (39). Although Laing here makes an unfor-
tunate leap from the feeling of existing to the formation of an identity that is
unique and self-conscious as such, his point is not entirely distinct from Winnicott’s
well-known assertion that the activities (the “doing”) appropriate to selves must
arise from their sense of themselves (from their “being”) (1986, 39).
From the feeling of reality there may arise at least two sorts of activities appro-
priate to selves: spontaneous gestures and willful, purposive acts. Clearly, the latter
involve a higher degree of cognitive complexity than the former. That is, willful,
purposive action requires thought, and is therefore related to the third axis of
thinking, to be discussed momentarily. Nevertheless, if the self may be said to act
in a meaningful sense, it must do so as “a unit, cohesive in space and enduring in
time” (Kohut 1977, 99), as a being that has, even momentarily, achieved “unit
status” (Winnicott 1971, 70). “Unit status” implies not only a measure of inte-
gration and cohesiveness but, perhaps more importantly, differentiation from,
negation of, and tolerance of tension with others and the environment. The
ability to act as a self requires a degree of freedom from both biological impulse
 Introduction 13

and external determination such that the active self can function as the “orga-
nizing center of the ego’s activities” (Kohut 1971, 120), making the self a creative
force (Winnicott 1986, 39–70), or “a center of initiative” (Kohut 1977, 99), in
the world.
The thinking appropriate to the self is not primarily a Cartesian “cogito ergo sum”
(Descartes 1985), but is, rather, a thinking that entails the refusal of experience as
a given and the willingness to engage experience creatively and interactively.
The thinking of the self is perhaps the most difficult aspect of selfhood to
tackle, not least because of the considerable recent emphasis on the relationship
between subjectivity, the unconscious, and language made possible by the work
of Jacques Lacan (1977). It is fair to say that Lacanian psychoanalysis and philo-
sophy afford no place for the self. Indeed, to the extent that there is a self or
subject for Lacan, the ego is its symptom. This is what Lacan means when he
writes, famously, that the ego lies “at the heart of the subject … a privileged
symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental malady of man”
(1988, 16).
Lacan’s critique is far-reaching. For Lacan, all “desire is desire of the Other”
(1998, 235), and this desire is essentially enigmatic and impossible to fulfill, leaving us
with an inescapable lack (manque) instead of a self. Even if this desire, this lack, were
fulfillable, it would have nothing to do with the creation of a self but would
more closely resemble its opposite: perfect union or fusion with the other,
making the self into the ‘thing’ of the other, a pure object of desire. What is worse,
this drama of desire has been structured in fantasy according to the pressure of
the “traumatic impossibility” of its symbolization (Žižek 1989, 123), meaning that the
unconscious, which lies closest to what is unique or special about any human
being, chez Lacan, holds mainly “a traumatic truth” (Žižek 2007, 3).
The symbolic order to which we turn in hope and despair does not permit of
genuine expression but of what Žižek memorably compares to a Mexican soap
opera in which the actors “wear tiny receivers in their ears that tell them what to
do … ‘Now slap him and tell him you hate him! Then embrace him!’.” Our
participation, that is, in thinking and symbolizing, our life in the realm of ideas,
symbols, and language, which is “the second nature of every speaking being … is
here, directing and controlling my acts; it is the sea I swim in, yet it remains
ultimately impenetrable” (2007, 8). Thus, for Lacan, the process by which the
subject is inevitably alienated from himself – by the enigmatic and impossible
desire of the Other – occurs in language, so that Lacanians would say that lan-
guage is both what destroys the self and what constitutes modern subjects, since
language is impossible to refuse, or is refused only in madness.
Like all psychoanalytic theories, one might subject Lacan’s to analytic critique and
wonder why it is impossible, why it must be impossible, for human beings to achieve
the degree of authenticity, separateness, and creativity appropriate to selfhood. For,
while is it certainly possible to over-estimate the self’s capacity to free itself from
embeddedness, language, and unthought influences, it is also possible to over-estimate
14 Introduction

the “automatic, deterministic effects of language,” making it seem as if “language

lived itself in man and the reverse were not at all true” (Sass 1988, 604).
If the self, to Lacan, is an illusion, it is the same for the purposes of this book,
although I see no reason to regard the capacities to feel, act, and think like a self
as symptoms, defenses, or denials of reality. On the contrary, the type of activity,
referred to above, that permits the self to function as the “organizing center of
the ego’s activities” has a correlate along the axis of thinking, whereby the self
operates as a pattern- and meaning-maker of its experience. If the self includes
the sum of “positions or points of view from which and through which we sense,
feel, observe, and reflect on distinct and separate experiences in our being” (Bollas
1987, 9–10), then the ability to ‘think,’ described in more detail in the following
chapter, involves the self’s ability to remove itself from “the sea [we] swim in,” to
gather up and look upon its experience, upon others, and even upon itself. It
is typically this ability to remove the self from its experience that is most
objectionable to those who doubt or disdain the ideal of selfhood or subjectivity.
Put more plainly, to advance an ideal of self, it is necessary to proceed by
defining the thinking appropriate to the self as the thinking that resists or negates
given desires, given experiences, and given orders of things in favor of ideas that
begin as possibilities and that may be realized through creative action. This sort of
thinking means that the self is capable of relating to itself, to others, to objects in
the environment, and to its own projects not as inevitabilities but as potentialities
(see Levine 2011, 21–24), not as ‘things-in-themselves,’ but as things-that-may-
or-may-not-be. Of course, a Lacanian might reply that this argument is only so
much fantasy. At that point, it may only be sensible to admit to paradigmatic
differences and move on.
In this book, I focus primarily on three related aspects of selfhood, which are
not identical to – but, rather, cut across – the three axes of selfhood sketched out
above. I argue, first, that ideologies of experience contravene the project of self-
hood with respect to the self’s capacity to think and know itself and its own
experience in a special sense informed by Bion’s theory of thinking, which also
entails the internalization of feelings of reality and security within the self. This process is
elaborated primarily in Chapters 2 and 3, but taken up again in Chapters 5 and 8. I
strive to show that ideologies of experience discourage creative and purposeful
action and recommend, instead, the kinds of compulsive and repetitive behaviors
depicted in Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and, to some degree, Chapter 7. Finally, I
contend that ideologies of experience interfere with the self’s capacity to be alone, a
complex capacity that involves feeling, acting, and thinking like a self. The problem
of aloneness and its opposites is explored throughout Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Outline of this work

What follows is an evocative depiction and analysis of several ideologies of
experience across what may rightly seem to be quite diverse settings. The chapters
 Introduction 15

are arranged so as to gradually bring into relief the meaning and purpose of
ideologies that valorize experiences of psychic devastation and the abandonment
of the project of self-development. And while the examples most amenable to
this theme range from the work of Michel de Montaigne to that of contemporary
trauma theorists, from Enlightenment visions of the state of nature to Albert
Camus’ play about mistaken identity and murder, from the work of American
pragmatist and pedagogue John Dewey to the experience of Japanese shut-ins, this
somewhat unusual grouping of topics highlights the complex patterns concerning
experience and its relationship to the self.
For instance, we will find that the individuals in hikikomori and those who
study and treat them, described in Chapter 7, share a misguided aspiration with
those who indulge in the fantasy of the state of nature, considered in Chapter 8.
We will see how the protagonist of Albert Camus’ well-known play Le Mal-
entendu, analyzed in Chapter 4, mistakes the repetition of traumatic loss for the
discovery of a home and an identity, an error explained in some detail in Chapters 2
and 3. And we will note how contemporary experience-based pedagogies investigated
in Chapter 5 thwart the achievement of being alone set out in Chapter 6.
When possible, I strive to undertake immanent critique: to expose the flaws,
contradictions, and self-defeating consequences inherent in the logic of ideologies
of experience. This turns out to be a tricky endeavor, not only because advocates
of experience claim that experience cannot be thought about or analyzed without
doing injustice to it, but because – what amounts to nearly the same thing –
ideologies of experience ask us to believe that the failures of thought generated by
experience are, themselves, of great value, and so only affirm experience’s worth.
In the following chapter, I set out a basic paradigm for understanding experi-
ence, one related to a witticism offered in Freud’s book on Jokes and Their Rela-
tion to the Unconscious (1960). If experience, as we shall see, requires the
conversion of the bad into the good, then it is not through the faculty of thought
that this transformation is accomplished. I define what is meant by ‘thinking’ and
‘knowing’ in a psychoanalytic sense, and argue that the protection or ‘fortifica-
tion’ of experience against intrusion is actually a defense against the internal threat
of thinking.
In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that the relation imagined between trauma victim
and traumatizing object is reminiscent of a relationship idealized in modern Eur-
opean and American literary traditions celebrating experience, traditions repre-
sented in the work of Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Georges
Bataille, and others. In the relationship between self and object depicted in
accounts of both trauma and experience, we find fantasies of failure, deprivation,
and self-abandonment, in which confirmations of the putative impossibility of
realizing a self in the world is imagined to liberate human beings from thought
and guilt. This attitude toward experience endorses not only the incorporation of
trauma as an organizing principle of the psyche but the transmission of trauma to
others.
16 Introduction

Chapter 4 analyzes one of Albert Camus’ best known-plays, Le Malentendu

(The Misunderstanding) (1958), to display in detail the fantasy that repeated
experiences of trauma will reunite the individual with experience’s object. This
chapter engages in an extended literary analysis of a well-known, although poorly
understood, play and, with it, an even more popular moral narrative. It specifi-
cally concerns itself with the contest between, on one hand, thinking about
experience in ways that can be managed and integrated by the self and by others,
and, on the other hand, transmitting experience in unmitigated and unthought
forms.
Chapter 5 focuses on John Dewey’s famous work Experience and Education
(1997), and its powerful legacy in pedagogical theory and practice in the United
States and, now, around the world. As it has been conceived, the ideal of
experience in education leads not to the development of creativity and intellec-
tual autonomy in students but to attitudes of compliance with social organiza-
tions, norms, and ideals that are taken to be unchanging and inevitable. While
ostensibly training students to serve socially redeeming ends by mastering the
objects of their experience, pedagogies of experience actually coerce students to
serve the narcissistic needs of educators and community members.
Most ideologies of experience link aloneness and solitude with anxieties about
the self’s destructive capacities, as if the separateness of the self risked the survival
of the human being and the human group. Since selfhood does entail separation
from the group – and, in some sense, from the ‘human being’ – the question
taken up in Chapter 6 is how we conceive of this separation in the context of
experience: Is solitary self-experience healthy or unhealthy, ethically necessary or
morally and politically threatening? Advocates of experience sometimes appear to
defend solitary experience, but are really defending a false form of aloneness that
preserves self-effacing connections to experience’s objects and to the groups and
communal bodies that represent and house them.
In Chapter 7, I examine hikikomori, the experience of severe self-incarceration,
often lasting several years, most commonly studied in Japan. According to some
estimates, well over one million Japanese citizens, approximately twenty-five
percent of Japanese young people, will experience hikikomori in their lifetimes. In
spite of the surge in clinical and scholarly interest in the phenomenon, there
remains a great degree of confusion regarding the phenomenon. I argue that
difficulties in understanding hikikomori derive from resistances and defensive mys-
tifications in which both individuals in hikikomori and those who study and treat
these individuals participate, and that these defenses disguise the desire at the heart
of the experience: a desire to return to a more indulgent self-experience that has
been lost, leaving the individual incapable of psychically surviving contact with
the self or others.
The state-of-nature theories analyzed in Chapter 8 are among the most influ-
ential ideologies of experience to date, having informed contract- and consent-
oriented philosophies of modern government. To preserve the fantasy to which
 Introduction 17

the state of nature refers, which is akin to the infantile illusion of omnipotence,
the self must not only deny or misrecognize its dependence upon others, but
must seek out experiences of ‘natural’ psychic devastation in private and civil life.
Accomplishing this means celebrating the defeat of the ‘bad’ self as a means of
turning ‘bad’ experience into ‘good.’ Repressed guilt and ideologically influenced
fantasies of ‘the real’ resurface in the form of paranoid-schizoid orientations
toward the self and its place in civil institutions and groups.

A note on terminology
Finally, it is worth a moment to clarify a terminological matter with epistemolo-
gical and metapsychological implications. Words like ‘self,’ ‘person,’ ‘ego,’ ‘sub-
ject,’ and ‘individual’ are notoriously imprecise. They are often used haphazardly,
and sometimes interchangeably, even by the best of thinkers. Typically, unless
one wishes to devote oneself entirely to the clarification of these terms, one must
make concessions to a degree of imprecision for the sake of analyzing something
else one takes to be important. Because of the precise meaning I associate with
the terms ‘self’ and ‘selves,’ I seek wherever possible to restrict their use to an,
admittedly ideal, psychological and social achievement. One could, of course,
substitute the terms ‘person’ and ‘personhood,’ or even ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’
for ‘self,’ without being in any way incorrect. To avoid confusion, I do not.
I employ the term ‘individual’ in discussions of the social contract, of the years-
long self-incarceration that defines hikikomori, and of citizens of modern democratic
societies such as the American society Tocqueville described. For the purposes of
this book, an ‘individual’ is a legal individual who lacks some or all of the capacities
that make up a self, or, at least, whose possession of said capacities is in doubt.
I use the terms ‘family member,’ ‘group member,’ and ‘community member’
to distinguish the ideal of self from the human being whose psychic existence
depends largely or entirely upon shared experiences, compliance with group
norms, and acquiescence to the demands of belonging.
I use the term ‘human being’ as a sort of baseline, or when no other term will
do, as in discussions of the state of nature, where the creatures imagined by most
social contract theorists are neither legal individuals, nor community members,
nor family members, nor selves.
Of course, it is not only in imaginary states of nature, the locked bedrooms of
hikikomori, or rigidly conformist groups that one encounters human beings, indi-
viduals, or group members who are not selves. The world is full of not-selves.
Ideologies of experience are an important part of the reason why.

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and R. Bernasconi, 79–96. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Levinas, E. 1998. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated by B. Bergo. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Levine, D.P. 2011. The Capacity for Civic Engagement: Public and Private Worlds of the Self.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lloyd, G. 1979. Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek
Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G.
Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Miller, J. 1992. In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Minsky, R. 1998. Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary States of Mind. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Montaigne, M. de 1993. Essays, edited and translated by J. Cohen. London: Penguin.
Oakeshott, M. 1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Otto, R. 1992. “On Numinous Experience as Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans.” In
Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the Phenomenology of Religion, edited by S. Twiss and
W. Conser, Jr., 77–85. Hanover, NH: Brown University Press.
Plato 1987. The Republic. Second Revised Edition. Translated by D. Lee. London: Penguin
Books.
Rorty, A. 1987. “Persons as Rhetorical Categories.” Social Research 54: 55–72.
Rosenthal, N. 2013. The Gift of the Adversity: The Unexpected Benefits of Life’s Difficulties,
Setbacks and Imperfections. New York: Tarcher.
Sandel, M. 1998. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sass, L. 1988. “The Self and Its Vicissitudes: An ‘Archaeological’ Study of the Psycho-
analytic Avant-Garde.” Social Research 55: 551–608.
20 Introduction

Segal, H. 1964. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. New York: Basic Books.
Smail, D. 1984. Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent and Sons
Ltd.
Stern, D.N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and
Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Tarnopolsky, C. 2010. Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Whitehead, A.N. 1933. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press.
Winnicott, D.W. 1965. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in
the Theory of Emotional Development, edited by M. Khan. London: Hogarth and the
Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.
Winnicott, D.W. 1984. Deprivation and Delinquency, edited by C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd,
and M. Davis. London and New York: Routledge.
Winnicott, D.W. 1986. Home Is Where We Start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, edited
by C. Winnicott, R. Shepard, and M. Davis. New York: W.W. Norton.
Winnicott, D.W. 1989. Psychoanalytic Explorations, edited by C. Winnicott, R. Shepard,
and M. Davis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Žižek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso.
Žižek, S. 2007. How to Read Lacan. First American Edition. New York: W.W. Norton.
2
EXPERIENCE, FAILURE,
AND THINKING

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud relates G.C. Lich-
tenberg’s witticism that “experience means experiencing what one does not wish
to experience.” Freud praises the form of the joke, what he calls the “joking
envelope,” for deceiving us about its content. On first hearing, “we are bewil-
dered and think we have learnt a new truth,” but in time we realize that the joke
merely disguises the familiar sayings: “Injury makes one wise,” and, “Adversity is
the best teacher” (1960, 109–110).
In order for Freud to transliterate the joke as he does, he splits the idea of
“experience,” rendering it as a self-contradictory term. The first instance of
“experience” is taken to refer to something self-evidently good, something
desirable, something valuable. It is the kind of experience we want. On the other
hand, “what one does not wish to experience” suggests “injury,” “adversity,”
pain, or suffering. This is experience we do not want. What seems to be funny
about the joke is that, if it is correct, what we want and what we do not want are
the same.
If there is truth concealed in the joke, or in the adages refashioned by the joke,
then enduring what is antithetical to our wishes yields wisdom, makes us learned,
offers something of value. The joke tells us that what might be thought of as
‘bad’ experience (i.e., adverse, injurious, or painful experience) is actually ‘good’
(i.e., desirable, redeeming, valuable experience). The joke implies that we have
been, at least at certain moments, utterly mistaken about what is truly good and
what is truly bad, since we did not wish to experience that which we ought to
have wished to experience.
To be more precise, the joke directs our attention to those moments when our
understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ undergoes a radical change. At first, what
we wanted or did not want, what was ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ might have seemed
22 Experience, failure, and thinking

straight-forward enough, perhaps referring simply to what was pleasing or dis-

pleasing. But then, rather abruptly, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ come to refer to a perspec-
tive that is more complicated, one that is “beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud
1920), to say the least, such as when “the best teacher” delivers adverse and
injurious experience that also makes us “wise.” The supposedly ‘good’ experience
that is delivered is experienced as ‘bad’ until the experiencer identifies more fully
with the perspective of the “teacher” than with her original estimation of her
own experience.
It is this shift, this process of psychological and ethical realignment, that the
joke condenses into a single phrase and a single instant. Although Freud makes no
such observation, it is likely that part of the humor of the joke derives from the
ambivalence we feel about this ‘learning process,’ which is, ultimately, a collision
of two moral worlds: In the first world, the bad is bad; in the second world, the
bad is good. This collision may be reminiscent of adverse childhood experiences
involving parents, caretakers, or other authorities, especially if those authorities
injured, deprived, or abandoned the child while telling him that such adversity,
injury, deprivation, or victimization were actually ‘for his own good.’
The sort of experience being described here is relational: It is experience
between, and typically between those unequal in power, such that one (for
instance, a parent) may say to the other (for instance, a child) that what she is
experiencing as neglect and abuse is actually care and love. A child put into this
position will very quickly lose touch with her ability to sense what is desirable or
undesirable, needed or unnecessary, good or bad, on her own terms. What is
more, she will quickly lose the ability even to perceive that there is a coercive
bargain in place by which she has been asked to transform her ‘bad’ experiences
into ‘good’ experiences at the cost of contact with her (potential) self.
It is true that, in order for children to mature into adults, they must contend
with the “reality principle,” which involves the recognition that, in addition to a
subjective inner world, we inhabit a world of objects, a social world.1 Acceptance
of the reality principle, however, need not overturn our authentic estimations of
the good. Rather, as D.W. Winnicott reminds us, while the reality principle is a
disappointment and even a terrible “insult” to the child’s belief that his wishes
determine reality (1986, 40), if the child’s caretakers have helped him to ‘know’
his inner world – in the sense described below – then he may navigate the chal-
lenges and obstacles associated with reality without losing all connection with
himself. The adversities sometimes presented by natural and social realities, that is,
need not obliterate the self, nor need they be transfigured from adversities into
illuminations in order for a shred of self to survive. Rather, given ‘good-enough’
circumstances, the self may cope with the introduction of reality as an “insult,”
and need not internalize it as a permanent “injury.”
If, however, the caretaking environment and subsequent influential environ-
ments force a child to choose between (a) preserving contact with authentic
impulses, desires, and feelings and (b) relating in the objective world, then the
 Experience, failure, and thinking 23

child’s experience will be, by definition, adverse and injurious, since losing con-
tact with her self will appear to be the only means of relating, which, for a child,
is a matter of life and death. That is, her self will have to die in order for others to
return to her a vestige of her life according to their schedule. In order not to be
utterly destroyed by reality – and in order not to destroy others out of rage at
their apparent assault – such children are forced to internalize the most injurious
lesson that could ever be ‘taught’: that authentic impulses, desires, and estimations
of experience must be suppressed in order to be ‘good.’
The displacement of authentic early experience and judgment with an alien
standard of evaluation is, typically, a coerced collusion by which the child accepts
the imposition of harsh restrictions upon itself. It may be understood in Winni-
cott’s language of the replacement of the “true self” with a “false self” (1965),
where the false self is compliant, attuned primarily to the needs of others. The
false self system involves an implicit social contract or bargain by which the self
gives itself up in order to receive from others a modicum of safety, attention,
approval, and a refracted sense of its value.
If “adversity” and “injury” are “teachers,” what precisely do they teach? Do we
not call adversity and injury teachers primarily because they teach us how to
endure adversity and injury? Adversity and injury teach us that adversity and
injury are inevitable, and therefore must be endured by ‘learning’ to see our ‘bad’
experience as ‘good.’ If adversity and injury ask us to change our orientation
toward the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ they do so by ‘teaching’ us that if we do not
accept the ‘bad’ as ‘good,’ we cannot survive in a relational reality, which is to
say, we can never be ‘good.’ What is more, the teachings of adversity and injury
include the lesson that without adverse, injurious, painful experience, we would
be naïve, empty, and foolish, hence: ‘bad.’ The ability to experience “injury” and
“adversity” as ‘good’ betokens the ability to maintain more extensive relational
and social contracts in which the greatest ‘good’ would be complete identification
with ‘reality’ and its teachings, meaning the complete abandonment of the self.
The dark side of Lichtenberg’s joke, then, is not merely its advocacy of travail
and injury, but its gallows humor regarding the self: The self seems doomed to
have experiences that destroy the self, doomed to learn to embrace its own
inevitable destruction. Although we may learn from our mistakes, and although
many worthwhile experiences do involve hardship, it is fair to say that Lichten-
berg’s is a cruel joke, a joke whose delight involves elements of violence, sadism,
and masochism, qualities Freud remarked at the heart of several types of joking.
The compromise offered by joking is to disguise forbidden thoughts and
impulses within permissible forms, allowing us to avoid rebuke from others and
from our own critical faculties, while the “joke work,” as Freud called it, reshapes
the unacceptable material into the form of a joke, permitting the joke-maker
and the joke-audience to share in experiences otherwise unattainable owing to
the threat of internal (or external) punishment. Beneath the most conscious layer
of the joke, we find aggression and cruelty directed at the self – both the self
24 Experience, failure, and thinking

within and the self in others. The degree to which this aggression and cruelty
“works” in the joke to produce humor depends upon the extent to which we have
already suffered the kinds of experiences that have inured us to the necessity of
self-loss, experiences in which the ‘bad’ was mystified and misrepresented as the
‘good,’ in which the self’s authentic impulses, desires, feelings, and judgments were
displaced by alien objects or organizing principles. These losses and displacements,
of course, may be acknowledged more safely in jokes or other guises, where they
are to some degree removed from the emotions that might otherwise attend them.
The truly forbidden material of the joke, if we are to be precise, is the recog-
nition of the cruelty implicit in delivering and receiving injurious experience
while presenting it as good. This is a cruelty with which some are already well
acquainted, a cruelty that re-transmits itself in the telling of the joke, and perhaps
even in a chapter of a book analyzing the telling of the joke. The joke permits
the teller and the audience to share and re-experience, for a moment, the pain of
such adverse and mystifying experience.2 There may be, in the sharing of the
joke, a discovery of sadistic pleasure, since the joke recalls experiences of injury
and self-loss, while at the same time presenting this recollection as socially valu-
able, as a ‘good’ joke. It may even be that in sharing his suffering with others in a
joke or anecdote, the ‘student’ of adversity solidifies his identification with the
‘teacher,’ who would undoubtedly approve of the joke.
Finally, we see in Freud’s interpretation of Lichtenberg’s joke a fantasy that
Freud himself never remarks. The fantasy is that if we remove wishing and will-
ing from our experience, then, in return, a ‘good’ thing will be provided. The
fantasy suggests that real and valuable experiences happen to us, only passively,
only in opposition to our wills, only in ways that we cannot desire or create for
ourselves. If we wish them, will them, design them, or create them, then we
cannot ‘experience’ them fully, cannot profit from their wisdom, cannot come to
possess their goodness, or, perhaps, cannot even count them unto our experience.
This strange logic would imply that she who creates her own experience is
actually empty of experience, or is empty, at least, of the sort of experience that
has value. Experience is only worthwhile, on such a view, if it involves self-absence,
displacement, or abandonment of the self, relinquishment of the authorship of
experience to an alien force. In many ways, what is celebrated about experience is
the failure of the self not only to authentically desire, feel, or judge its own
experience, but to initiate, design, and realize its own experience.
To express it more simply: Many of our most venerated experiences would
seem to be experiences of failure. ‘Failure,’ here, means the failure of the self to
retain contact with itself in its experience, the failure of the self to hold onto its
authentic estimations of what is meaningful and valuable – to insist, for example,
that a ‘bad’ experience was actually ‘bad’ – and the failure of the self to create,
contribute to, change, or resist its experience. Nietzsche’s famous maxim in Twi-
light of the Idols, that “what does not kill me makes me stronger” (1990, 33),
makes him something of an ideologist of experience in this regard. That is, while
 Experience, failure, and thinking 25

perhaps a comforting thought, many who have suffered injury or illness against
their wills find the opposite to be true: that these experiences have made them
weaker.3 What is more, this lesson Nietzsche claims to have assimilated “from the
military school of life,” from life conceived as a ‘school’ of war, and from
experiences of non-lethal defeat conceived as its ‘teachings.’
The late Randy Pausch’s best-selling book and widely broadcast talk entitled
The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams derived much of its
popularity by returning to Nietzsche in so many words, echoing the widespread
belief in the value of agonizing experience and of the failure to resist or overcome
it. Pausch, a beloved computer science professor suffering from terminal pan-
creatic cancer, concluded: “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what
you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer”
(2008, 157).

The fortification of experience

Michael Oakeshott once cautioned that since “‘experience,’ of all the words in
the philosophic vocabulary, is the most difficult to manage,” those “reckless
enough to use the word” must make it their primary aspiration to “escape the
ambiguities it contains” (1933, 9). While Oakeshott’s warning was partly aimed at
himself, it is indicative of a sense of danger surrounding investigations of experi-
ence, as if a misstep in this domain might bring disaster. Since it is difficult to
think critically and creatively amid such fear and caution, one of the unconscious
objectives of expressing trepidation about examining experience is to make
thinking about experience treacherous, less frequent, and less successful.
Similarly, it is not uncommon in the classroom or in the course of conversation
to hear someone say, ‘If you have never experienced what I have experienced,
then you can’t understand.’4 This claim is not merely intended to inform the
listener about the limits of her knowledge. It is meant to admonish the listener
for attempting to think about the speaker’s experience. When such a statement is
made, we may infer that the experience in question involves something central to
the speaker’s sense of identity. Not coincidentally, it often relates to the speaker’s
sense of deprivation or victimization, past, present, or future. The listener is urged
to stand back and to abandon attempts at thinking, because doing otherwise is
perceived to be a potentially destabilizing assault on the speaker’s inner world, a
world where the experience in question has come to play a central role.
Of course, what is transmitted to the listener in the speaker’s refusal to communicate
is an experience of exclusion, rejection, and suppression: The listener is silenced,
denied, shot down. And exclusion, rejection, and suppression often form impor-
tant parts of the very experiences of deprivation or victimization that the speaker
seeks to hide. Thus, as in so many cases involving experiences of trauma, failure,
and deprivation, the refusal of conscious communication succeeds in transmitting
something of the painful experience in question. The experience is not communicated
26 Experience, failure, and thinking

but, rather, is both hidden and shared, a dynamic we will encounter again in the
following two chapters, on traumatic experience and repetition, respectively, and
in Chapter 7, on the deprived and depriving isolation of hikikomori.
While threats to our experience may seem to arise from the world outside, it is
really our precarious hold on our experience that is highlighted when we defend
it so rigidly. The fear of having one’s experience thought or comprehended –
‘comprehend’ comes from the Latin com + prehendere, meaning to grasp or seize –
by others derives from a confusion by which we imagine that others may seize
our experience and destroy it with thought, leaving us with nothing. More likely,
we struggle with an internal dilemma in which our own thinking is feared to
destroy our own connection to experience and its objects, in which we fear our
own thoughts and must project them outward into a world perceived to assault
us with thoughts but where we must not think if our experience is to survive.
Thinking about experience must be avoided if thinking leads to questioning or
doubt of experience’s necessity, inevitability, and goodness. To question or doubt
would be to risk upsetting the bargain whereby the self replaced its own estima-
tions of what was ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with injurious and adverse experience. To
control the threat posed by thinking about experience, the act of thinking is split
off both from the self and from its relationship to its experience. It is projected onto
others, particularly onto easy or at least “suitable targets of externalization” (Volkan
1985), which include knowledge- and expertise-based institutions and groups,
which are imagined to be interested in greedily devouring individuals’ experience.
As we shall continue to see in the chapters that follow, the psychic projection of
repressed doubts, authentic estimations of experience, and genuine needs and desires
often results in exaggerated perceptions of the power and destructiveness of such
others, institutions, and groups.
Consider American poet and essayist Bill Holm’s summary of the relationship
between experience and power in his book The Music of Failure :

Sacredness is unveiled through your own experience, and lives in you to the
degree that you accept that experience as your teacher, mother, state,
church. … One of power’s unconscious functions is to rob you of your own
experience by saying: we know better, whatever you may have seen or
heard. … We are principle, and if experience contradicts us, why then you
must be guilty of something. Power – whether church, school, state, or
family – usually does this at first in a charming way while feeding you
chocolate cake, bread and wine, advanced degrees, tax shelters, grant pro-
grams, and a strong national defense. Only when contradicted does it show
its true face, and try to kill you. Instead, kill it inside you fast, and do it
whatever damage seems practical in the outer world. Next, put your arms
around everything that has ever happened to you, and give it an affectionate
squeeze.
(2010, 15–16)
 Experience, failure, and thinking 27

According to Holm and his intellectual forebears, powerful institutions “rob” us

of our experience, threaten us with the authority of “principle,” and bribe us to
collude in our own deprivation. If these methods fail to loosen our grip on our
experience, “power” shows “its true face” – one of persecutory violence – and
tries “to kill” us. Therefore, our survival, which here means the survival of our
experience in our inner worlds, requires that we destroy not primarily external
powerful institutions but their internal psychic representative: knowledge. It is
knowledge that we must “kill inside [us] fast.”
Without conversing directly with the post-structuralist tradition, Holm’s argu-
ment is not entirely dissimilar to Michel Foucault’s well-known concept of
“power/knowledge,” the alignment of normalizing, disciplinary, and technocratic
knowledge with political power spread in “capillary” fashion throughout society
(1975; 1980). To kill power/knowledge “inside [us] fast,” we make a substitu-
tion: Any authority originating in institutions such as the “church, school, state,
or family” must be replaced with a consecration of our experience, that is:
“everything that has ever happened to [us].” We must “put [our] arms around”
our experience as our new “teacher, mother, state, church.” Institutions and their
authority must be remade not exactly in our own images but in the images of our
past and passive experiences (i.e., “everything that has ever happened to [us]”).
These past and passive experiences must become our new internal “sacred”
objects, if we hope to escape destruction by the “power” of knowledge.
Christopher Bollas has famously suggested the category of “the unthought
known” to describe that which is never cognitively processed but nevertheless
becomes an individual’s basic orientation to self and to life, referring specifically
to the internalized operational logic of parents and even the introduction of the
reality principle (1987, 277–283). It may be more appropriate to name it the
“unthought experienced,” since Bollas does not intend to invoke the usual
understanding of “knowledge” as a product of conscious, mental representation.5
Using the example of a child forced to bear a family’s grief and loss, Bollas writes:
“Containing the other’s projective identification seems life-defining; grief, in this
last example, feels like the essence of the person; it is not to be thought – it
cannot be; it is lived” (1987, 281, emphasis added). The child Bollas describes
is forced to live grief because thinking about it would be to doubt it, and to doubt
it would be to challenge it, just as experiencing himself or being a self, as opposed
to being a container for the family’s grief, would be to challenge his role and
provoke chaos, punishment, or catastrophe.
Georges Bataille, famed, radical French philosopher and “father of post-
modernism” (see Drury 1994, 123), would agree that, instead of thinking, “one
must live experience” (Bataille 1988, 8, emphasis in original). Indeed, this simple
yet consequential assertion has resounded in academic and conventional wisdom
for centuries, where what has been lived, particularly when what has been lived
involves suffering, must never be thought or known, lest it lose its connection to
reality, its normative force, or its historical importance.
28 Experience, failure, and thinking

Claude Lanzmann has rather famously declared that “there is an absolute

obscenity in the very project of understanding” the Holocaust (1995, 204), for
reasons which are not fundamentally different from Albert Camus’ disparagement
of “the sin of wanting to know” (1955, 49). What is threatening about thinking
about experience to these men is that if we were to understand experiences of
horror, or even of ‘absurdity,’ we might become incapable of living out the roles
that such experiences demand of us, roles deemed politically and morally neces-
sary. In this light, we see how emphasizing lived experiences reflects not an
interest in knowing how experiences are actually lived, but the opposite: an
interest in not knowing experience, so that individuals, groups, or institutions
whose psychic survival has come to depend upon the unthought, unquestioned
living out – and re-living out – of experience can continue to perform.
Many public commemorations of atrocity or disaster, such as the memorial of
the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11 and the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., are designed to be interactive,
‘living’ experiences for visitors, some of whom find them moving, others of whom
find them overwhelming and intolerable. Visitors to such memorials are typically
encouraged to identify with victimizers while sharing in the experience of the
victim (see Levine 2003), an ambivalent and uncomfortable set of demands that gen-
erates psychic tension most readily relieved in fantasies of redeeming the victims
by victimizing the victimizers and all that resembles them in visitors’ inner and
outer worlds.
The effort to generate in visitors powerfully ambivalent identifications with both
victims and victimizers, along with emotions of shame and rage, is effective in
displacing thought while binding visitors to the experience of suffering in question.
Such commemorations make thinking about, learning about, and communicating
about such events psychically threatening and significantly more difficult, which may
imply that the stated purposes of education, reflection, and contemplation which
these memorials often advertise as their missions may be at least partly dishonest.
It is no coincidence that the kind of extreme and traumatic experiences with
which postmodern cultural, political, and literary theorists have been preoccupied
of late have been declared both “literally” true and inherently “unknowable”
(Caruth 1996, 57–62). Even some of the sagest commentators find themselves
surrendering to the imperative to defend experiences, and the roles to which
experiences assign us, as sacred things, by protecting them from the reach of
thought. Martin Jay, for instance, holds that experience is:

both a collective linguistic concept, a signifier that yokes together a class of het-
erogeneous signifieds in a diacritical force field, and a reminder that such concepts
always leave a remainder that escapes their homogenizing group … at the nodal
point of the intersection between public language and private subjectivity,
between expressible commonalities and the ineffability of the individual interior.
(2005, 6–7)
 Experience, failure, and thinking 29

If human experiences are, by definition, “ineffab[le],” “unformulated,” or “slip-

pery” (Stern 1997, 35), always leaving an unknowable “remainder,” then
experience becomes an unthinkable ‘thing-in-itself.’ The combination of the
unquestioned “truth-value of experience” (Gadamer 1989, 357) and the putative
“obscenity” and “sin” of attempting to intellectually access experience suggests
that many champions of experience have built walls around cherished experiences,
if you will, walls from which such experiences are not intended to escape.
If attempts to think about experience are imagined to be doomed to fail, then
ideologists of experience insist upon and create conditions that assure the inevit-
ability of this failure. This failure, in turn, transmits an experience of its own, an
experience of intellectual failure, which, by a circular sort of logic, confirms the
original presupposition that thinking about experience is futile. Put more simply:
The failure of thinking about experience is a self-fulfilling prophesy. We may
surmise, then, that the experience of the failure of thinking is a desired or desir-
able experience, an experience that we wish to repeat and share. Why should
anyone wish to repeat or share the experience of failure? Only if this failure
meant a kind of success, which is precisely the arrangement described by Lich-
tenberg’s joke about experience. The failure to feel, think, and authentically
judge experience is necessary for the self to imagine that its ‘bad’ experience is
‘good.’ And, as we shall see in several subsequent chapters, particularly in Chapter
8, on the state of nature, champions of experience explicitly advocate the trans-
mission of failed thought and the failed self as a source of (regressive) psychic
liberation and (regressive) political cohesion.
If we must work to protect experience from thought so as to protect and share
failure, then it would seem that, contrary to its characterization as powerful, solid,
and “sturdy” (Emerson 2009, 314), our relationship to experience is fragile,
something that can be dissolved, emptied, destroyed. Cognate with peril, the
word ‘experience’ refers, etymologically, to a trial, a danger through which
one passes. Now this perilous passage, itself, appears to be imperiled. Indeed, if
we believe André Malraux, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Theodor
Adorno, R.D. Laing, and others, we modern and contemporary citizens have
already suffered an extraordinary “impoverish[ment]” of our experience (Benja-
min 1999, 735), “an almost unbelievable devastation of our experience” (Laing
1967, 11).
In his short essay “Erfahrung und Armut” (Experience and Poverty), Walter
Benjamin famously claims that experience itself has “fallen in value,” specifically
for the generation of 1914–1918, who “had to experience some of the most
monstrous events in the history of the world” (1999, 731). Never before, writes
Benjamin, “have experiences been punished [gestraft] more severely by lies than
strategic experience by the lie of the war of position (trench warfare), economic
experience by the lie of inflation, corporeal experience by hunger, ethical
experience by those with power” (quoted in Leslie 2000, 84):
30 Experience, failure, and thinking

A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in

the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the
clouds and, at its center, in a forcefield of destructive forces and explosions,
the tiny, fragile, human body.
(Benjamin 1999, 732)

What Benjamin describes is akin to trauma on a collective scale: traumatic

experience that leaves us naked, without a recognizable self or world, without the
ability to narrate our lives from past to present or to make connections with those
before or after us, without the capacity to make meaning or to teach lessons that
carry authority. “Where has it all gone?,” Benjamin asks. “Where do you still
hear words from the dying that last, and that pass from one generation to the next
like a precious ring?” (1999, 731). If the war has left a generation unable to
communicate, this, for Benjamin, is only a part of the “new … barbarism” that
threatens to engulf all of “human experience” (1999, 732).
What is fascinating about such accounts is that it is experience, itself, that has
“been punished … severely” by world events. Much of the critical-theoretical
tradition begins with this very presumption that we must recognize the degree to
which our experience has been impoverished, or to which our “experience
has … been expropriated” (Agamben 1993, 16). By this, of course, Benjamin and
Agamben mean that “we have been “deprived of effective experience” and have
been even “bereft of the capacity for experience” (Agamben 1993, 16), but here,
again, if it is not experience itself that suffers, then the human being has been
robbed of experience in the most passive of ways. If we have been “stripped of
experience,” “bereft of humanity,” and “stripped of our deeds,” these vital pos-
sessions have been “taken out of our hands like toys from the hands of children”
(Laing 1967, 13). Thus, modern painters like Klee and Loos are said to have
rejected “the traditional, solemn, noble image of man,” to “turn instead to the naked
man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the
dirty diapers of the present” (Benjamin 1999, 733).
Benjamin’s explicitly infantilized depiction of the contemporary human,
Laing’s allusion to the snatching away of a child’s toy, and the passive construc-
tion of phrases describing the deprivation of our experience all suggest that
experiences of psychic devastation have left us in a confused condition, where the
relationship between experience and experiencer is muddled and often tilted
toward the former, and in a childlike condition, precarious and vulnerable before
obscure and almighty forces that can return us to desolation at their will.
Benjamin and Agamben, for their parts, do also write of a more active
“rejection of experience,” particularly among the young (Agamben 1993, 14–16),
but this seemingly active repudiation turns out to be little more than the last
remaining “legitimate defense” against the prior, utter destruction of experience
in society, suggesting that this “rejection” is not active or creative but reactive and
defensive.
 Experience, failure, and thinking 31

If, as I have proposed, the powerful, terrible, yet nebulous agents of our
devastation may be understood as external representations of the internal process
of thinking, which is perceived to be destructive to the experiences we have had
and must live and re-live without thinking, in order not to foment crisis in our
inner worlds, then the alternative to destruction, which is also the alternative to
thinking about experience, is the “hypertrophic development of the apparatus for
projective identification” (Bion 1988a, 112). Fear, badness, anxiety, and the threat
posed by thinking must be contended with by turning to an “evacuative dis-
charge” of internal elements (Grinberg, Sor, and de Bianchedi 1977, 58).6
Thinking, itself, is specifically avoided in projective discharges because the objects
of experience must become ‘unthinkable,’ larger than life, “indistinguishable
from … thing[s]-in-[themselves]” (Bion 1988, 112). For this reason, projects
undertaken in the name of experience, protected from thought or rational
inspection and addressed to incomprehensibly lived moments, create conditions
averse to the kinds of thinking, relating, and communicating required for the
development and sustenance of mature selves and groups.

Thinking and selfhood

The orientation described above may be contrasted with an ideal of selfhood, an
ideal which is perhaps never absolutely attainable, but which, for the purposes of
this book, consists of at least three significant elements, as outlined in Chapter 1:
the capacity to think in the sense defined here, the capacity to act creatively and
not compulsively or compliantly, and the capacity to be alone, which is also the
capacity to relate ethically with others. These three aspects of self may be found
in the enjoyably non-technical language of Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay on
liberty:

I wish to be a subject, not an object, to be moved by reasons, by conscious

purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from
the outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not
being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by
other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a
human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing
them. … I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing,
active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain them
by references to my own ideas and purposes.
(1969, 131)

To be a self means to be not a ‘given’ thing, just as it means to be not ‘given’ to

others as their property, nor to be ‘given over’ either to instinctual reactivity or to
the pressures of conformity in one’s thoughts, feelings, and activities. To be a self
is not to be determined by causes or forces arising from outside the metaphorical
32 Experience, failure, and thinking

‘area’ delineated by the self, which includes both the human being’s biological
impulses and forces exerted by others.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the idea of a self requires the (sometimes misleading but
nonetheless necessary) imagination of a boundary. Along with this boundary, selfhood
requires the ability to control the borders, to be able to “limit access” to internal
experience, for instance, so as to safeguard an inner world that is one’s own (Levine
2003, 60–61). For similar reasons, selfhood also requires the ability to “control …
the initiation, maintenance, termination, and avoidance of social contact” (Stern
1985, 21–22). Certainly, individuals are profoundly influenced by others, by
groups, by institutions, and their internal complements. The literatures of critical
theory and social construction, not to mention psychoanalysis, attest to this fact.
But the extent to which we may speak about selves and not automata or slaves is
precisely the extent to which we may speak about the freedom with which a self
can think its own thoughts, create and act upon its own designs, and even retreat
into itself to be alone.
In this chapter, I am particularly concerned with the first of these three aspects
of selfhood: the way that the capacity to be a self derives from the activities of “think-
ing,” “knowing,” and “being known” by a nurturing parent or caretaker. “Thinking,”
for Wilfred Bion, a student of Melanie Klein, means approaching experiences and
objects, even those that frustrate or enrage us, as “problem[s] to be solved” (1988a),
which requires resources in the nascent self and in the environment that facilitate
frustration-tolerance and containment. The development of these resources, in
turn, depends upon “knowing” and “being known,” which refer here not to intellec-
tual knowledge but to communications between parent and child in which one
contains and ameliorates the experiences of the other. A parent’s ability to “know”
her child involves the ability to recognize anxiety in the child, to moderate it by psy-
chologically containing it, and to successfully convert it into something less fearsome: a
word, a smile, a gesture of sympathy, a touch, a feeding, some form of relief.
In this process, the child is permitted to “know,” by internalizing the actions
and affects of his caretakers, a manageable version of himself and his own feelings,
initially by “reintroject[ing] a mitigated or modified emotional experience” pro-
vided by the parent (Grinberg, Sor, and de Bianchedi 1977, 57). If all goes rea-
sonably well, eventually the child develops the ability to take on the role of both
child and parent, mitigating and moderating his own experiences by “thinking”
through them, by “knowing” and “being known” by his self, which is to say: by
tolerating, relating to, and maintaining contact with his self. From repeated
experiences of thinking, knowing, and being known in this way, the child is able
to construct a psychological landscape containing a whole, safe, and valued self as
well as whole, safe, and valued others (see Bion 1988b).
Thinking, then – as in its more standard usage – describes an attempt to know.
But, in a more profound sense, thinking describes the attempt to be, to be a self in
a world of others selves who are. We may recognize, in the above description, an
apparent similarity to the conversion of ‘bad’ experience into ‘good’ experience,
 Experience, failure, and thinking 33

discussed in the context of Freud’s re-telling of Lichtenberg’s joke. But, really, the
two processes are radically opposed. In the relationship described immediately above,
‘bad’ experience is contained and modified within dyadic relationships and then within
the self, through the processes of thinking, knowing, and being known. In
Lichtenberg’s joke, ‘bad’ experience must become ‘good’ immediately, without
ever having been mediated or moderated by thinking or knowing. It must be
swallowed tout entier, accepted without question, just as it is. In fact, in something
of a frustrating contradiction, the ‘bad’ experience referred to in Lichtenberg’s
joke must be internalized as if it were ‘good,’ which is to say, it must be accepted
both just as it is and as if it were not just as it is.
The only way to manage this dilemma is to turn to the “apparatus for projec-
tive identification,” which means an “evacuative discharge” of elements that
threaten to disrupt the precarious state of not thinking and not being. Just as the
child of an abusive or narcissistic parent may find her self de-centered, with a false
and compliant self in its stead, both projections of threatening forces and repetitions
of ‘bad’ experiences may come to hold more central and more powerful places in
the inner world than they might if the mediating and moderating influences of
thinking, knowing, and being known had not been thwarted.
Since the child cannot be, and yet cannot avail herself of the most appropriate
target for her rage, rage at not being is turned inward, just as the object of ‘bad’
experience is imagined to be the ‘teacher’ of a valuable experience. Here, we see
part of the emotional logic that results in the reification of experience, affording
experience the status of an independent and powerful subject, while reducing the
self to an object. There is a dynamic here partly reminiscent of Ronald Fairbairn’s
notion of “moral defense,” articulated in his paper “The Repression and the
Return of Bad Objects” (1952). Also named “the defense of the super-ego” and
“the defense of guilt,” Fairbairn argues that the moral defense is driven by
experiences that signal that the objects on which the child depends are not good
but bad. The moral defense splits off the bad experiences from the good object,
taking responsibility for them by internalizing them, and so attempting to
assure that the object remains ‘good,’ such that “outer security is thus purchased
at the price of inner insecurity” (65). The aim of the moral defense is, of course,
“the conversion of an original situation in which the child is surrounded by bad
objects into a situation in which his objects are good and he himself is bad” (68).
But, although, as Fairbairn famously writes, “it is better to be a sinner in a
world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil” (67), the inter-
nalization of badness is not the end-point of the defense, for the bargain at the heart of
the moral defense hinges on the transformation of unconditional badness into condi-
tional badness, which can be later expelled through self-punishment, merging
with ‘good’ objects purged of their bad aspects, or finding external targets into which to
project bad qualities. These latter processes may be explained by mixing psycho-
analytic metaphors and turning briefly to Heinz Kohut’s notion of “selfobjects”
(1971).
34 Experience, failure, and thinking

A selfobject, for Kohut, is an object put in the service of holding part of the
self that, for one reason or another, the self cannot contain. A selfobject may be a
security blanket, a parent, a god, or a psychoanalyst who comes to hold alienated
aspects of the self. Kohut posited various types of selfobject transference, of
varying degrees of importance, but all of which are means of forging connections
to narcissistic ideals. The idealization of a selfobject may be the first step to mer-
ging with that object, so as to partake in its greatness and perfection. For instance,
a mirroring selfobject may be used to reflect an idealized version of the self, and is
likely subjected to the demand that the object affirm grandiose aspects and
fantasies about the self.
Imagining some of experience’s favored objects – such as ‘Fate,’ ‘the People,’
‘Nature,’ or even, as we shall see momentarily, ‘Plague’ – as selfobjects may help
us better understand the type of relationship undertaken with objects of experience,
even or especially with the vast and amorphous objects that so readily contain
grandiose aspects and fantasies. If Nature, for instance, comes to serve as an idealizing
selfobject, then one finds in Nature all of one’s “ambitions and ideals” (Alford 1991,
26). One strives to merge with Nature in experiences that endow one with a por-
tion of Nature’s perfection. If Nature is a mirroring selfobject, then Nature will be
the subject/object in whose presence the self feels affirmed and recognized in its
loftiest ambitions: Here, Nature may reflect the ideal of naturalness, natural perfec-
tion, or natural innocence, such that only in the experience of Nature is it possible
to hold on to positive estimations of the self. We return specifically to the idealization
of Nature in the following chapter, and I take up one significant permutation of
this problem again in Chapter 8, on the idea of the state of nature.
It is important to note that there is nothing inherently pathological about
making moderate use of either the moral defense or selfobjects. On the contrary,
projection, identification, internalization, and externalization involved are neces-
sary parts of self-development, parts of the process of coming to “know” the self,
in the sense described above. Their health or unhealth, maturity or immaturity, is
a matter of degree. The important questions are: “Do we seek to merge com-
pletely with our ideal selfobject so that nothing is left of the self? Or do we learn
to choose and use those idealizable selfobjects that support our chosen projects?”
(Alford 1991, 26). The answers to these questions determine the health or
pathology of our relationships with experiences and their objects. Are experiences
and their objects called upon to replace parts of our selves, to hold all that is
valuable such that we can only partake in the good when we are immersed in, or
subsumed by, experience? Or can we use experience to think, to act, to relate,
and to craft an authentic self in the world?

Failures of thought and the body politic

Bill Holm strives to articulate what is “sacred” about the “failures” of struggling indivi-
duals and communities, praises his own “immigrant culture that … succeeded at
 Experience, failure, and thinking 35

failure” (2010, 96), and imagines a glorious history of failure that, instead of the
history told by the victors, would be a more ‘real’ and ‘honest’ history of human
defeat. Holm argues that, “since 1945, self-building has become a matter of life
and death for the whole planet. We have now reached the point in human his-
tory where some cure is absolutely necessary, some embracing of wholesome
failure” (100–101).
Holm’s fear of “self-building” and his insistence that the history of the failed is
more real than the history of the successful links him to the extensive tradition of
anti-subjective contemporary ethical theory. The fear and rejection of the self or
subject as dishonest and dangerous has everything to do with the contention,
supposedly confirmed in the terrors of the twentieth century, that subjectivity
cannot be maintained as an ideal without also idealizing an unacceptable level of
real and symbolic violence.
The modern and contemporary subject is supposed to have an innate desire for
recognition or a désir d’être tout (desire to be all), an inability to stop himself from
abusing, incorporating, or consuming others. Thus, a central project of con-
temporary and postmodern ethical thought has been to dismember the subject as
a “self-identical substance” (see Blackman et al. 2008), and to find respite from
fear and shame about the dangers subjects pose. Of course, those who embrace
the discourse of the “death of the subject” hope that, once the subject is dis-
pensed with, our “self-differential selves” will flourish: For Jean-François Lyotard,
among others, subjective death means nothing less than the possibility of the
revival of genuine experience (see Terada 2001; 2010, 151).
In Georges Bataille’s celebration of supplice, the experience of vulnerability to a
superior affirms one’s powerlessness and precariousness, negating one’s will to be
and do. Supplice preserves the human being’s exposure to an overwhelming object
of experience that continually ruptures, dominates, and violates, in a way that
presages our understanding of traumatic violation (see Bataille 1988, 33–61). For
Bataille, that we fail to achieve autonomy, integrity, and self-sufficiency, that we break
down and dysfunction, that we become inoperative (inoperosità) – to use Giorgio
Agamben’s language (2005) – is key to achieving the fullest human experience.
Bataille expresses the fantasy that experiences of vulnerability, incapacitation,
boundary-loss, and trauma are pre-eminently real, and are, therefore, the only
real foundations for social being. If all are thoroughly traumatized, violated, and
penetrated in a torturous, Sade-istic communion, no member of a community
could possess autonomy, agency, identity, or any other correlate of subjectivity or
selfhood, and without these qualities, this argument goes, no one would be cap-
able of abusing anyone or doing anyone any harm. Of course, faced with
Bataille’s “strange ethics of horror” (Botting and Wilson 1997, 27), we may rea-
sonably ask: If each is so traumatized and incapacitated that no harm can befall
any other, what harm would be left to be done?
It is important not to mistake the destructive aims of this discourse of anti-
subjectivity: The self must fail, must fail to think, must fail to be, in order for the
36 Experience, failure, and thinking

experience of failure to take up a central place and organizing function in the

outer life of the community and in the inner lives of its members. A moral
community founded upon failure is permitted only by breaking open the would-
be self, by uniting human beings via experiences of trauma, and by developing a
shared “point of identification with suffering itself” (Butler 2004, 30; see also
Haraway 1990; Jay 1993; Lauro and Embry 2008; Levinas 1998).
Bill Holm’s prose is simpler than Bataille’s, yet similar in its objectives. Holm
claims:

There is a certain pleasure that comes from swallowing your own failure. …
[H]umor grows out of these indigestible lumps of history. Nothing that is
itself can conceivably be termed a failure by the transcendental definition.
But things must acknowledge and live up to their selfness. This is fairly
effortless for a horse or a cow, more difficult for a human being. … When it
happens occasionally, as I argue that it did in the case of the Icelanders, it
creates a rare wonder, a community that has eaten its own failures so completely
that it has no need to be other than itself.
(2010, 100)

So, we must first fail, and then swallow our failures, to become ourselves, where
becoming ourselves means becoming our failures. Holm’s phrase, “nothing that is
itself can conceivably be termed a failure,” is absolutely inconsistent with his
overall argument, which is really, on the contrary, that ‘nothing that fails com-
pletely can conceivably be termed itself.’ To eat or swallow failure, within
Holm’s logic, means to embrace it, and, although it is “indigestible,” to attempt
to sustain oneself upon it.
To swallow failure is to internalize failure, supplanting other objects and aspects
of the inner world. It is to establish failure as a locus of identity, primarily, for
Holm, a locus of the community’s identity, in which all community members
partake. When all community members have swallowed their individual and
collective failures, then the community “has no need to be other than itself.”
Another way to say this would be: ‘The community is the collective result of all
members’ failed attempts at being selves. The community has no need to be
anything other than this, since the community understands its function not to be
that of redeeming individual selves but, rather, that of assuring members of their
place in a community of equally failed selves.’
It is by this investment of value in the idea of failure that we arrive at the
curious idea that internalizing self-failure both destroys and returns to us our lost
selves. As in the self hypostatized in Caruth’s and others’ theories of trauma, dis-
cussed in the following chapter, the premise of Holm’s notion is that the self
is necessarily unreal and, in that respect, ‘bad.’ The self that fails and the self that is
lost must have been unreal because they were incapable of containing the
unquestionable reality imputed to experience. In other words, on this line of
 Experience, failure, and thinking 37

thought, experiences that incapacitate or destroy the self prove the self’s unreality.
At the same time, the experience of failure binds one to the failures of others and
to the community of failed selves that remains in contact with its collective failure as
a matter of solidarity or community-identity. While accepting such an attitude
toward self-failure is, in its own way, traumatic, it represents another piece of the
psychic social contract by which a self-destructive attitude toward experience is
the price of entry into the moral community.
A common interpretation of Albert Camus’ famous allegorical novel The Plague
is helpful in illustrating this perspective. In Camus’ novel, the plague is not
merely a disease but a representation of a trauma inflicted upon the body politic of
Oran. Indeed, interpretations of plagues as metaphors for breakdowns of political
bodies or communities have often, and rightly, been applied to the earlier literary
plagues of Thucydides and Defoe, among others. But what Camus and his late
modern and postmodern readers, particularly those influenced by the well-known
commentaries of Shoshana Felman, make of the plague in Oran is unique.
For Camus and Felman, what is good about the plague, if we may so speak, is
that it is impossible to conceive of it as an individual disease. The plague trans-
forms individual cases of disease into a collective, shared disease, thereby transforming
individual bodies into sites of moral and political collapse for the entire community
(see Bowker 2014). Just as one individual does not contract the plague without
sharing the disease with others, one cannot combat the plague without sharing
what might be called the ‘plague experience’ with the community, a community
now united by a “shared vulnerability to tragedy” (Irwin 2002, 24).
“We all have plague,” Jean Tarrou tells Bernard Rieux, in one of the most
important dialogues in the novel. Thus, “we can’t stir a finger in this world
without the risk of bringing death to somebody” (Camus 1991, 252). In times of
plague, one person’s symptoms may affect others, such that a stir of a finger may
indeed infect or kill. But Tarrou speaks of plague not literally, but as a metaphor
for thinking and knowing, a plague that, he argues, tempts us to legitimize and
participate in violence as “rational murderer[s]” (253). In a grim irony, the actual
plague epidemic presents the citizens of Oran with the opportunity to rid themselves of
the plagues of thinking and selfhood. Instead, they must internalize the plague as a
lesson in the failure of thinking and selfhood, and must learn to experience the
plague and its attendant failures as members of a shared, traumatized body.
The people of Oran must resist the temptation to think, for thought or
“abstraction” is defined as the most cowardly means of escaping the reality of the
‘plague experience,’ contravening one’s duties to the suffering communal body.
Even physical departure would be more acceptable than intellectual abstraction,
for Camus finds the latter incompatible with the necessary moral identification
with the community, while the former need not be. Throughout the novel, one
character charges another with “abstraction” the way one might accuse a crim-
inal: “You can’t understand,” Raymond Rambert alleges of Dr. Rieux, “you’re
using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions”
38 Experience, failure, and thinking

(1991, 87). And Rieux, for his part, declares his primary mission to be to “fight
abstraction” (91). This mission is especially important when “an abstraction sets to
killing you” (83), which is how Camus seems to interpret not the plague but
what the plague represents: ideologies of conquest, authoritarianism, Nazism.
Jennifer Cooke is correct to claim that, for Camus, “abstraction is not … just a
matter of language … but in fact a sort of parasitic state of mind which must be
resisted and fought off, much as Rieux talks heroically about fighting plague”
(2008, 31). The problem with abstraction seems to be that it comprehends vio-
lence, whereas the body (and the shared body), as unthinking organs, can only
experience and endure it. When Camus has Father Paneloux preach to his con-
gregation that the plague is a punishment for sin, these words are meant to be as
scandalous to the reader as the actual disease. When later, Father Paneloux dies
from a “doubtful case” of plague, it represents not so much a defeat of his faith or
of God but of abstraction, an inevitable failure to think the plague, and, therefore,
a sort of victory for the shared suffering body that has endured and even preserved
the ‘plague experience,’ never turning away from it toward intellectualization or
abstraction.
Tarrou joins in the fight against the plague, just as he claims to refuse abstrac-
tion and therefore to refuse to “join forces with the pestilences” (1991, 254). But
in order to avoid being a “rational murderer,” Tarrou also refuses for himself “a
place in the world of today.” By quarantining himself in a metaphorical “exile
that can never end,” by “leav[ing] it to others to make history,” Tarrou spends a
good deal of his energy fighting not the plague disease but the possibility that the
plague of thinking and selfhood will infect his moral center. Instead, he has
resolved only to say that:

there are pestilences and there are victims; no more than that. If by making
this statement, I, too, become a carrier of the plague-germ, at least I don’t do
it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I’ve no great
ambitions.
(253–254)

Tarrou’s preoccupation with rationalized murder and his assumption of personal

responsibility for even the most distant acts of violence derive, he confesses, from
the experience of witnessing his father prosecute a defendant in a capital case, in
which his once kindly father suddenly “spewed out long, turgid phrases like an
endless stream of snakes” (1991, 248), culminating in “that foul procedure
whereby dirty mouths stinking of plague told a fettered man that he was going to
die” (252). Of course, judges, revolutionaries, military commanders, political
leaders, even doctors also participate in uttering “death sentences,” and this rea-
lization causes Tarrou to become obsessed with the notion that the entire “social
order … was based on the death sentence” (252). For Tarrou, any form of action
grounded in thought or reasoned calculation, as opposed to experience, is
 Experience, failure, and thinking 39

tantamount to uttering a “death sentence,” a phrase that conveniently unites the

act of killing with the acts of thinking, speaking, and writing.
The real danger of the plague, we learn, is not that it will return, for its return
is inevitable. In a sort of encomium to the plague, the final lines of Camus’ novel
read: “Joy is always imperiled” for “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for
good.” Eventually, “the day would come when, for the bane and the enlight-
enment of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a
happy city” (1991, 308). The plague is not just our bane but our enlightenment,
and the repetition of its trauma is inevitable. Whatever lessons may be learned are
lessons given through experience, the experience of uniting with the shared suf-
fering body of the town of Oran. That is, we must accept the inevitability of the
plague, and what it represents – the necessary failure of the self to escape through
thought and abstraction, the return to immediate experience, and the moral
orientation to the group – in order to profit from it.
Shoshana Felman claims:

What there is to witness urgently in the human world … is always funda-

mentally, in one way or another, the scandal of an illness, of a metaphorical
or literal disease; and that the imperative of bearing witness, which here
proceeds from the contagion of the Plague – from the eruption of an evil
that is radically incurable – is itself somehow a philosophical and ethical
correlative of a situation with no cure, and of a radical human condition of
exposure and vulnerability.
(1995, 16)

For Felman, what the novel teaches is that what is most important to experience,
witness, and testify to in the world is evil, illness, and disease, suggesting, along
the lines of Judith Herman’s argument, that every instance of traumatic injury “is
a standing challenge to the rightness of the social order” (quoted in Shay 1995, 3).
As we will discuss more extensively in the following chapter, on this line of thought,
what the plague teaches us is that the scandalous, evil, and traumatic condition of
the plague is in fact the human condition, a condition with “no cure,” and, there-
fore, a condition that must be experienced, witnessed, shared, and even preserved as
part of our heritage, and not reasoned away.
Since, for Felman, to witness is not to analyze or understand but to transmit
that which is not entirely communicable by thought and language, a real danger
presented by plagues is that we will cease witnessing them and start thinking
about them, that we will yield to the “sin of wanting to know,” which would
mean becoming morally infected by the plague of abstraction, rather than preser-
ving the incomprehensible experience of plague in our bodies, in our communal
bodies, and in the shared corpus of human history.
Instead of being ideologists of reason, we are urged to be ideologists of illness,
plague, and evil, insisting that inexorable, “incurable,” experiences of horror stand
40 Experience, failure, and thinking

at the center of human life and must remain there. They must not be abstracted,
thought about, or known, lest we diffuse or dislodge their necessary badness,
necessary perhaps so that we may continue to adopt a posture of scandalized
outrage, which, somewhat conveniently, leaves us morally unaccountable for evil
in the world while permitting us to transmit our traumatic experiences to others
under the aegis of “bearing witness” (see Bowker 2014). Perhaps we may now
see why popular cultural entertainments are so replete with fantasies of seemingly
horrifying experiences of persecution, victimization, apocalypse, inhuman mon-
sters, and supernatural evils: because these scenarios reinforce the psychic organi-
zation demanded by the ideologies of experience in which the destruction of the
self is inevitable and thinking otherwise is the real outrage.

Notes
1 Here, and throughout this book, I employ the word ‘object’ in its psychoanalytic sense,
to refer to other persons and to internal representations of persons, groups, and
abstractions, including even a “country, liberty, [or] an ideal” (Freud 1957, 243) with
which one may relate. My use of the term is guided by object-relations theory, but the
term itself arose out of Freud’s terminology of drives and their ‘objects.’ For object-
relations theorists, objects are others, internal representations of others, and even parts of
others and of the self. “People react to and interact with not only an actual other but
also an internal other, a psychic representation of a person which in itself has the power
to influence both the individual’s affective states and his overt behavioral reactions”
(Greenberg and Mitchell 1983, 10). The history, dynamics, and patterns of an indivi-
dual’s relationships with internal and external objects are, in some sense, the very
content of the individual’s psychic experience of her inner and outer worlds.
2 The masking work of the joke is accomplished via the repetition of the word ‘experi-
ence,’ a repetition which de-familiarizes the term (see Bowker 2012; Brecht and Bent-
ley 1961; Shklovsky 1991), distracting us from the fact that we are already familiar,
although perhaps not consciously, with the perspectival shift from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ that it
implies and with the cruel bargain at its core. The repetition of the word “experience”
is confounding enough that we chuckle at the semantic puzzle set before us, even as the
material of the joke may call up memories of suffering and self-abandonment.
3 The testimonies of survivors of atrocity, such as those recorded in the Fortunoff Archive
for Holocaust Testimonies, analyzed to powerful effect by Fred Alford (2009), should
be enough to at least cast doubt upon Nietzsche’s claim. Upon returning from a period
of relatively dangerous and unsanitary work in Benin, West Africa (Bowker 2015), I
myself met casually with others who worked in equally difficult conditions, at home
and abroad, some of whom had suffered, or continued to suffer, the effects of physical
and psychic trauma, physical injury, heightened anxiety and depression, and fears both
general and specific about the body’s fragility. We shared a joke – it is important to
recognize that this, too, was a ‘joke’ – that, contra Nietzsche, ‘What didn’t kill us made
us much, much weaker.’
4 I am grateful to David Levine for relating some memorable examples of this phenomenon
from his own teaching experience.
5 For one thing, this would avoid some confusing phrasing, i.e., “How will [the analy-
sand] know what he knows?” (Bollas 1987, 281). For another, it would permit us to see
more clearly why “lived” experience can seem more profound, more essential to the
person than anything thought or known.
 Experience, failure, and thinking 41

6 Although derived from a different domain of the psychoanalytic tradition, that asso-
ciated with the work of Melanie Klein, projective identification may be considered in
terms commensurable with Kohut’s idea of selfobject transference, in that what is
sought is not communication or relation between a whole self and whole objects but an
unconscious transmission of psychic material across the boundaries of self and other, a
process which, precisely because it is unthought, leads individuals and groups to expel,
exaggerate, identify, and merge with objects in a nearly automatic fashion.

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3
THE INCORPORATION AND
TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMATIC
EXPERIENCE

The construct of psychic trauma and the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Dis-
order (PTSD) have been profoundly influential in shaping contemporary ideas
about the nature and extent of psychological injury. Trauma has come to signify a
diverse range of human experiences of suffering, loss, victimization, and both
physical and psychological violence. At least within certain fields, the idea of
trauma has undoubtedly impacted the way we conceive of the possibility and
meaning of subjectivity, the relationship between psyche and soma, and the place
of the individual in society. In spite of areas of disagreement, contemporary
trauma discourses offer a relatively stable normative foundation for the recogni-
tion of trauma victims (see, e.g., Fassin and Rechtman 2009). That is, trauma
victims, along with non-victims’ relations to them, are invested with moral and
epistemic meaning, meaning related to ideological assumptions about the experience
of trauma.

Trauma as truth
Primary among the qualities attributed to the experience of trauma is its putative
ability to grant privileged access to truth. It is the “truth of traumatic experience,” writes
the best-known trauma theorist in the humanities, Cathy Caruth, “that forms the
center of its pathology or symptoms.” The “overwhelming occurrence” of trauma
returns insistently to the traumatized individual, although in delayed and incom-
plete forms, yet remains “absolutely true to the event.” Therefore, the pathology
of trauma “is not a pathology … of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of
history itself.” Trauma is “a symptom of history,” and “the traumatized … carry
an impossible [yet true] history within them, or they become themselves the
symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (1995, 5).
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 45

The marriage of cognitive neuroscience with literary and cultural studies in the
1990s and 2000s has produced an ideology of trauma that both laments and
celebrates some of the most extreme, violent, and destructive moments of human
life and human history. As will be discussed below, it has resulted in some curious
conceptions of the body, its affects, and their relation to the psyche and the self. In
speaking of the ‘literal truth’ and ‘historical reality’ of traumatic experience, our
discourses of trauma resemble those valorizations of injurious and adverse experi-
ences discussed in the previous chapter, in which bad experiences were incorporated
without mediation or moderation, and in which the attainment and preservation
of their ‘goodness’ or value relied upon the deployment of primitive and defensive
stratagems aimed at suppressing the self.
Widespread agreement about the truth and reality of traumatic experience
seems difficult to distinguish from acceptance of trauma victims’ understandings of
events, particularly of the events held responsible for generating post-traumatic symp-
toms, which are often considered to contain a “literal” truth. Caruth, for instance,
understands trauma as inherently “unknowable” (1996, 57–62) and inherently
“latent” (1995, 4–11), while at the same time defining post-traumatic experience
as “absolutely literal” (1995, 4) and “the literal return of the event” (1996, 59).
In her meticulous genealogy, Ruth Leys describes the dramatic shift in trauma
theory that compelled researchers to reject the construct’s murky intellectual
origins and the “mimetic dimension” of trauma symptoms (2000, 40). Since the
end of the Vietnam War, and in light of the psychiatric ratification of PTSD in
the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition) in
1980, clinical, medical, literary, and philosophical communities have located the
traumatic quality of trauma, as it were, in the experience of an overwhelming
thing-in-itself that leaves an uncognizable imprint on an increasingly physical
conception of the psyche, piercing its boundaries, shattering its integrity, dis-
rupting contact with itself, and precluding its capacity to function, attach, and
relate. Leys describes this conceptual shift in language that is, itself, reminiscent of
the well-known trauma symptom of exteriorization:

The antimimetic turn … is simultaneously the moment when emphasis tends

to shift from the notion of trauma as involving a mimetic yielding of identity
to identification to a notion of trauma as a purely external cause or event that
comes to an already constituted ego to shatter its autonomy and integrity.
Passionate identifications are thereby transformed into claims of identity, and
the negativity and violence that according to hypothesis inhere in the
mimetic breaching of the boundaries between the internal and the external
are violently expelled into the external world, from where they return to the
fully constituted, autonomous subject in the form of an absolute exteriority.
The result is a rigid dichotomy between internal and external such that
violence is imagined as coming to the subject entirely from the outside.
(2000, 37)
46 Incorporation of traumatic experience

The turn Leys helpfully describes involves our understanding not merely of the
nature or process of traumatization, but of the status of a self that must have existed
in order to be traumatized. That is, the corollary of the process of exteriorization
is the creation of an ‘inside’ undertaken in bad faith. Contemporary notions of
trauma create a self, a ‘straw self,’ if you will, that is inevitably lost, constituted in
order to be destroyed at the moment of trauma. “In trauma,” writes Caruth:

the outside has gone inside without any mediation. … There is an incom-
prehensible outside of the self that has already gone inside without the self’s
mediation, hence without any relation to the self, and this consequently
becomes a threat to any understanding of what a self might be in this
context.
(1996, 59, 132n)

There must be an “inside,” a self, and a boundary in order for there to be an

obliteration of the same in a traumatic experience that occurs “without any relation
to the self.”
Henry Krystal has wisely noted that the traumatized experience life as originating
almost entirely from the outside, from the not-self:

Much of the psychic representation of the “enemy” or “oppressor” or even

impersonal elements such as “fate” and clearly personal attributes like one’s
own emotions come to be experienced as outside the self-representation.
Thus, the post-traumatic state is characterized by an impoverishment of the
areas of one’s mind to which the “I” feeling of self-sameness is extended, and
a hypertrophy of the “not-I” alienated areas.
(1995, 85)

Recent trauma theory, in this sense, recapitulates trauma symptomology, and may
even be thought to involve theorists, writers, and intellectuals in dynamics similar
to those undergone by the traumatized. That contemporary theories of trauma
presuppose a self, then assert trauma’s activity to be that of penetrating, dis-
integrating, and taking up residence where the self lives no longer, makes trau-
matic experience a curious thing, a kind of experience without an experiencer,
arising from an absolute outside, yet left indelibly “inside,” lodged somewhere
between the (lost) self and the (lost) world. Trauma is present, all-too-present, for
the traumatized, yet, as it is deemed unthinkable and unknowable, can only be
expected to find its place in the body, such that the body that expresses trauma’s
paradoxically “literal” presence has become trauma’s privileged locale.
‘Body studies,’ the sociological and anthropological ‘turns to corporeality,’ and
the ‘affective turn’ have all problematized the idea of ‘molar bodies,’ such that
bodies are no longer conceived as simple, material things, but as ‘processes’ and
even ‘organizers’ of “diverse practices and areas of experience.” Bodies are “open,
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 47

relational, human and non-human, material and immaterial, multiple, sentient,

and processual” (Blackman 2008, 2849–2851; see also Clough 2007).
On one hand, the psyche has been physicalized in psychological and philoso-
phical discourses over the past several decades, in no small part due to the influ-
ence of trauma theory. Teresa Brennan’s work on the “transmission of affect”
(2004) goes so far as to declare that:

the psyche is, of course, also a physical or embodied thing. This has to be so
if one accepts the premise that the psychical actually gets into the flesh,
whether it is manifest as the inertia of depression, or as an actual psychoso-
matic illness, or in other ways, such as anger. It is these embodied psychical
urges, these constellations of affects, that lead us to eat the wrong way, do
the wrong things, push ourselves for the wrong reason, and so forth.
(156)

On the other hand, the body seems to be no longer a thing at all, but an ironically
abstract ‘organizing process.’ In order to understand bodies, we must not “start with
bodies as a key focus,” but with “concerns about lived experience, sleep, marching,
dance, identity, eating disorders, technologies, the placebo effect, communication,
body language, performance, emotion, twinning and cloning, the senses, the
mouth and health and illness” (Blackman 2008, 2847–2849). Amid this odd
assortment of experiences and phenomena, the body is always:

in process and is assembled and made up from the diverse relays, connections
and relationships between artefacts, technologies, practices and matter which
temporarily form it as a particular kind of object. However, even the term
“it” implies a form or shape that can be easily recognizable as a body. What
is clear … is that talk of the body extends to talk of body assemblages that
might not resemble the molar body in any shape or form.
(2849–2855, emphasis in original)

Contemporary bodies, apparently, may not resemble bodies at all, not only
because bodies are now imagined as organizers and processes, but because bodies
“always extend and connect to other bodies, human and non-human, to prac-
tices, techniques, technologies and objects which produce different kinds of
bodies” (Blackman 2012, ix–x). That is, parallel to the endeavor to demonstrate
the permeability and inter-dependence of subjects, the body, too, has become that
which is not individually possessed but shared, ever exposed to experiences
transmitted and disseminated by or through other bodies. Since “bodies are pro-
cesses,” bodies are “articulated and articulate through their connections with
others, human and non-human” (Blackman 2008, 2857–2858). What truly
defines bodies, then, is their “capacity to affect and be affected” (Blackman
2012, x).
48 Incorporation of traumatic experience

Perhaps the physicalization of trauma is not entirely surprising, for if traumatic

experience cannot be thought or known, neither can the body. If what defines
the body is its constant contact with other bodies, then it may be imagined to
receive and transmit truth more reliably than other human faculties. ‘Body lan-
guage,’ to take a rather mundane example, is often taken to be more a real and
‘honest’ form of expression than the spoken or written word (see Csordas 2008).
As the renowned American dancer Martha Graham averred, “the body never
lies” (see Burt 1988, 34). Later, Alice Miller (2006) would borrow her famous
dictum to title her study of the physical manifestations of childhood abuse. To
suggest that “the body never lies” is to suggest not only that the body can hold
the unknowable truths of experience, but that the body can safeguard experience
from the distortions of thought.
Indeed, it may be fruitful to conceive of the contemporary understanding of
the body as that which is not material but real, or, more precisely, real only because
of its connections with other bodies, only because of its “capacity to affect and be
affected.” If this is true, then the body is real because the body is not thought or
known.1 In several ideologies of experience, the unthinkability of the body is equated
with its reality, with the sum of “artefacts, technologies, practices and matter” that form
reality, which can only be reliably incorporated and transmitted through the
body’s experience.
R.D. Laing has objected that scientific authorities often dismiss experience by
regarding it as a “psychosis of matter … another countable aberration in the
universe that knows nothing of it, and gets on its own way apparently without it”
(Laing and Kirsner 2013, 367). On the face of it, Laing’s objection seems to be
that scientists (and presumably clinicians) unfairly dismiss experiences that should be
recognized as real and significant (i.e., as things that “matter”) in “the universe.” But
what is interesting about Laing’s argument is his presumption that even those
who discount or ignore experience would agree that experience is material, that
experience is a type of “matter,” albeit ‘psychotic matter.’ It would seem more likely
that those whom Laing targets would reply that experience is not “matter” at all.
Ironically, of course, Laing’s jab at the scientific outlook borrows something of
its humor from the fact that, according to the same scientific paradigm he cri-
tiques, “matter” is incapable of behaving psychotically. If “psychosis” refers to a
loss of contact with shared reality, most of us find it difficult if not impossible to
imagine a “psychosis of matter” precisely because, to the modern and con-
temporary mind, matter – that ill-defined term that nevertheless signifies the most
fundamental property shared by physical objects – is reality. In this way, Laing’s
defense of the materiality of experience also indirectly accuses those who disagree
with his perspective of being, themselves, ‘psychotic,’ since it is they, he argues,
who ignore the material ‘reality’ of experience and retreat into an insular universe
that “gets on its own way … without it.”
In a related metaphor, for Bill Holm, “the divine” is an example of something
that is “entirely abstract, a series of slogans said but not believed in. … Since the
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 49

divine has no body, it needs no place to live.” On the other hand, “the world is
only real estate, and can be filed at the court house” (Holm 2010, 162–163,
emphasis added). What Holm means, of course, is that, having no body, the
divine cannot be experienced, and therefore cannot be trusted to be real. On the
contrary, things of “the world,” by which Holm means not merely physical
objects but bodies, experiences, failures, and the like, make themselves ‘at home’
in reality, in “real estate.” These real things with bodies and earthly homes are
what can be “believed in.” Here, we might expect that Holm intends to refer not
to the sort of belief that requires thought or imagination, but to one that may be
located in the body, perhaps in our ‘gut feelings.’
Both Caruth’s and Leys’ accounts imply that theorists’ location of the violence
of trauma “outside” the self intends to protect something of the self’s constitu-
tion, perhaps even to protect the traumatized self from irremediable harm. But if
trauma has come to be defined as the intrusion of an overwhelmingly violent and
overwhelmingly real ‘thing-in-itself,’ it is not, as Leys claims, because we inhabit
a culture in which “the therapist demand[s] that the patient be a subject” (2000,
37). Rather, this understanding of trauma identifies traumatic experience as the
experience that can only be experienced in the body, which, again, is conceived
to be not the same kind of body as it once was, but, rather, a body whose reality
is established and realized in its connection with other bodies. This body, or these
bodies, come to hold a moral and epistemic authority that serves primarily to
protect not selves from traumatic experience, but traumatic experience from
selves, from distortion by the self’s immaterial and unreal thinking. This discourse
of trauma is reminiscent of earlier philosophical and literary discourses of experi-
ence, in which an intellectual submission to overwhelming experiences and their
objects is conceived to be the surest path to a physical, unknowing truth and
wisdom that even the most gifted of writers found it (not surprisingly) difficult to
articulate.
At a collective level, the vision of trauma with which we live suggests that we
inhabit, or that we ought to inhabit, a “post-traumatic century” (Felman 1995,
13), which means that our historical truths are preserved not in thoughts or
writings but in bodies and their experiences. If this is so, then some have exten-
ded the argument so far as to claim that we must “understand history [itself] as
the history of trauma” (Caruth 1996, 60), that “history,” itself, “is precisely the
way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24), and that we must approach
all “history as holocaust” (Felman and Laub 1992, 95). While some, like Reinhart
Koselleck (2002), have merely challenged the conventional wisdom that history is
written by the victors by claiming that “historical gains in knowledge stem in the
long run from the vanquished,” because “the history of the vanquished … offers
a more truthful expression of ‘the experience of history’” (Fassin and Rechtman
2009, 16), others have returned to orientations guided by a fascination with
physical violence and terror, such as Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that “to
articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really
50 Incorporation of traumatic experience

was’,” but rather “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of

danger” (2003, 391). Benjamin’s assertions seems prima facie absurd, yet the ideo-
logical proposition of the unquestionable and unknowable truth of traumatic
experience remains in force, and, as I now hope to show, has been in force in
philosophical treatments of experience undertaken well before trauma’s heyday.

Humility, self-occlusion, and failure

Our contemporary approach to trauma is linked not only to anti-subjective trends
in postmodern philosophy and contemporary literature, but to longstanding and
widespread ideologies of experience that reflect a sustained effort to locate moral,
cultural, and epistemological authority in a state of unthinking self-occlusion.

Michel de Montaigne
For the celebrated Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne, the great virtue of
experience is its humbling quality. Experience, for Montaigne, is the antidote to
overreaching, to the sin of pride. The learned and inexperienced reach for “lofty
and inaccessible heights,” thinking “supercelestial thoughts” and indulging in
“transcendental humours” which, of course, lead only to “subterrestrial conduct.”
The humble path of experience, on the contrary, does not so tempt its followers
“to get out of themselves and to escape from the man” (1993, 405).
Pride, according to Montaigne, persuades us that we are superior to experi-
ence. Much of his famed “Apology for Raymond Seybond” is dedicated to
recounting the danger of this idea. In the section entitled “Man’s Knowledge
Cannot Make Him Good,” Montaigne writes:

The simple and ignorant, says Saint Paul, raise themselves to heaven, and
take possession of it; and we, with all our learning, plunge ourselves into the
infernal abyss. … The urge to increase in wisdom and knowledge was the
first downfall of the human race; it was the way by which man hurled
himself into eternal damnation. Pride is his ruin and his corruption; it is pride
that casts man aside from the common ways, that makes him embrace
novelties and prefer to be the leader of an erring troop that has strayed into
the path of perdition, prefer to be a teacher and tutor of error and falsehood,
rather than to be a disciple in the school of truth, led and guided by
another’s hand, on the straight and beaten path.
(1965, 367–368)

Montaigne, although learned enough to quote Quintilian in saying “learning

makes difficulties” (1965, 816), offers his own essays as “simple,” “natural,” and
“naked” accounts of life (1993, 23), “present[ed] … pure, not at all corrupted or
altered by art or theorizing” (1965, 826). Setting himself up as a disciple of the
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 51

“common ways,” Montaigne relies on his own experience and occasionally, and
perhaps ironically, upon the testimony of others, when those others are clearly
artless (1993, 151–152; see also Frisch 2009, 182). If there is one over-arching
theme of his entire collection of essays, it is the theme of rejecting intellectual
pride, and, along with it, trust in one’s ideas about the world.
The specific danger of the intellect, for Montaigne, is the mind’s tendency to
distort reality to suit its own preferences. The mind treats each of its objects “not
according to the nature of the thing, but in accordance with itself. Things in
themselves perhaps have their own weights, measures, and states; but inwardly, when
they enter into us, the mind cuts them to its own conceptions” (1993, 131). For
Montaigne, the prideful, vain mind, like Narcissus, falls in love with its own
reflection and drowns in its own image. Finding nothing so engaging as its own
reflection, in attempting to possess itself the mind is emptied of reality.
Montaigne’s metaphors for the mind’s activity typically emphasize this inward,
draining, drowning quality. For instance:

The mind … does nothing but ferret and search, and is all the time turning,
contriving, and entangling itself in its own work, like a silk-worm; and there
it suffocates, “a mouse in pitch.” … Its case is much like that of Aesop’s dogs
who, seeing something like a dead body floating in the sea, and being unable
to get near it, set about drinking up the water to make a dry passage, and
choked themselves.
(1993, 347–348)

Here, the mouse suffocates in its own activity, just as Aesop’s dogs choke to
death, not only in pursuit of something lifeless, but by attempting to drink up the
sea, an exercise in futility.
If we are to humble the mind and to resist its morbid temptations, to what
resource shall we turn for truth about ‘things-in-themselves?’ For Montaigne,
“events and outcomes depend, for the most part … on Fortune, who will not fall
in line and subject herself to our reason and foresight.” Indeed, Montaigne declares
that “our counsels and deliberations depend just as much on Fortune” as on
reason, for “[Fortune] involves our reason also in her confusion and uncertainty”
(1965, 209).
Although Montaigne is perhaps best known as a champion of “individual
experience” (see, e.g., Gossin 2002, 289), it is not the experience that belongs to
the individual that Montaigne truly celebrates. Rather, the individual’s experience
is false if she refuses to recognize the exteriority and superiority of the objects that
shape our experience, such as Fortune, and, more importantly, Nature. Nature
and Fortune, Montaigne’s primary idealized (self)objects, which work in tandem,
are to be revered as “great and mighty” (1965, 109), mysterious, lying “beyond”
our awareness, and nevertheless in a position to command and rule, “bend[ing] us
to [their] laws” (209).
52 Incorporation of traumatic experience

Learning from experience, for Montaigne, means quieting the mind and
attending, instead, to experience’s objects. Put another way, attending to experi-
ence’s objects means humbling ourselves before them. According to Montaigne,
“to learn [from experience] that one has said or done a foolish thing … is noth-
ing.” Rather, “one must learn that one is nothing but a fool, a much more
comprehensive and important lesson” (1993, 355). To learn that one is “nothing
but a fool” is crucial because internalizing the self-attribution of fundamental
nothingness cements a self-occlusive relationship with experience’s objects, in
which the mind will not dare to pridefully “cut” things “into its own conceptions”
but will accede to the given reality of ‘things in themselves.’
The “lesson” we learn by humbling ourselves in this way is that we are empty,
powerless, and, in a sense, unreal, at least when we are not attached to an object
of experience. The truth Montaigne is after is the truth of our utter foolishness,
our inevitable nothingness. Learning from experience, therefore, demands that
we pay particular attention to experiences that highlight this truth: experiences of
failure. These experiences directly demonstrate the impotence of the mind. They
assist us in accepting our humble place vis-à-vis Nature and Fortune, which we
must refrain from resisting, just as we must learn not to “kick against natural
necessity” if we are to avoid “the foolishness of Ctesiphon, who tried a kicking
match with his mule” (1993, 374).
When, in “On Experience,” Montaigne famously describes the kidney stones
that plagued his later years, he details his physical suffering, his eating, sleeping,
and defecatory habits, and his experience of his body, using his personal example
to inveigh against medical, legal, and political authorities and their prescriptions.
Although he cites Plato’s argument that doctors ought to personally suffer from
any illnesses they would treat, he radically departs from Plato’s teaching by using
medicine as a metaphor for the danger of relying on reason to address what ails
our bodies and bodies politic.
Instead, Montaigne emphasizes the necessity of habituating himself to whatever
afflictions come his way, all of which must be “quietly put up with” (1993, 373),
for “we must learn to endure what we cannot avoid” (1965, 835). Montaigne is
especially content that his ailment asks him mainly to endure, without engaging
his mind, for like Camus’ protagonists in The Plague (1991), he strives to resist the
temptation to think about his illness. He resolutely rejects “medical consultation
and diagnosis,” speculation about the “causes, states, and progress” of his condi-
tion, and the urge to “follow so many different arguments and opinions” like
those whom “the imagination plagues … when the body is sound” (1993, 380–381).
Consider the following remarkable passage:

It has happened again that the slightest movements force the pure blood out
of my kidneys. What of it? … It is some big stone that is crushing and con-
suming the substance of my kidneys, and my life that I am letting out little
by little, not without some natural pleasure, as an excrement that is
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 53

henceforth superfluous and a nuisance. Do I feel something crumbling? Do

not expect me to go and amuse myself testing my pulse and my urine so as
to take some bothersome precaution. … I judge of myself only by actual
sensations, not by reasoning. What would be the use, since I intend to apply
only waiting and endurance.
(1965, 831–840)

Montaigne’s experience of his illness seems to have convinced him that the blood
from his kidneys, along with his life, itself, are excrements, waste products to be let
out little by little, and “not without some natural pleasure.” Montaigne’s way of
embracing his experience demands judgment without “reasoning,” and includes,
instead, thanking “Fortune” for teaching him how not to protest his pain, by
“assailing me so often with the same kind of weapons. She fashions and trains me
against them by use, hardens and accustoms me” (1965, 837). In this spirit,
Montaigne also praises “the first lesson” Mexican parents purportedly give their
children: “When they come forth from the mother’s womb, their elders greet
them with these words: ‘Child, you have come into the world to endure.
Endure, suffer, and be silent’” (1993, 373).
This capacity for “suffering,” “waiting and endurance,” for resisting reason,
protest, and even action, becomes, for Montaigne, a central virtue. It is a central
virtue because suffering is taken to be inevitable, and its inevitability is mistaken
for an essence. That is, suffering is not merely incidental to the purpose of human
life: It is its essence. A child is not merely born into a world that incidentally
includes suffering and demands endurance, but she is born in order to suffer and
endure. Suffering, enduring, and effacing the self become the human being’s
raison d’être. This odd philosophy may be applied to the life of the individual, as
well as to political communities, in which “humility, fear, obedience, and affabi-
lity, which are the principal things that support and maintain human society,
require an empty and docile soul, and little presuming upon itself” (1887, 12).
But why should human beings accept such a state? Why should they give up,
at birth, the hope of achieving their own aims and ends? Is it the will of God, of
Nature, of Fortune? While Montaigne never answers these questions directly, his
dedication to, and identification with, the self-negating objects of experience are
starkly revealed in his short essay “On Democritus and Heraclitus,” where we
encounter a surprising advocacy of self-loathing, scorn, and shame.
Although the two ancient Greek philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus
agreed that the human condition was “vain and ridiculous,” Heraclitus is said to
have wept unceasingly at this misfortune, while Democritus “never appeared in
public except with a mocking and ribald expression.” In considering these two
responses, Montaigne declares that he prefers Democritus’ attitude:

not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses

more contempt and is more condemnatory of us than the other. I do not
54 Incorporation of traumatic experience

think we can ever be despised as much as we deserve. Wailing and com-

miseration imply some valuation of the object bewailed; what we mock at
we consider worthless.
(1993, 132–133)

For Heraclitus, our inadequacies and relative powerlessness in relation to Nature

and Fortune are agonizing. They drive him to despair. For Democritus and for
Montaigne, however, our condition is only lamentable if we value ourselves. If
we embrace our worthlessness, then reflection upon our condition occasions only
the (emotionally dissociative) responses of self-mockery and laughter. What is
truly ridiculous, according to Democritus and Montaigne, is that we should
somehow think ourselves worthy of not suffering, that we should think of or ima-
gine an alternative to experiences of failure or pain. Instead, we are asked to find
pleasure in scorning ourselves and in ridiculing our vain thoughts and wishes.
Ironically, we rediscover in Montaigne’s and Democritus’ emotionally distant,
self-scornful laughter a departure from the experience of the genuinely suffering
human being and an identification with the object or objects of experience that
cause suffering. As in the final lines of the Book of Job, the restoration of the
relationship between God and Job, which is hardly a relationship at all, owing to
their absolute incommensurability – this incommensurability being very much the
point of the Book – is consummated only when Job “abhors himself in dust and
ashes” (42:6, AV; see also Bowker 2014, 28–34). Likewise, for Montaigne, self-
devaluation is a necessary part of the reconciliation between the human being and
almighty Nature and Fortune, who have seen fit to make human beings ludi-
crous. Indeed, Montaigne compares Job to one of his primary heroes, Socrates,
whose famously humble declaration of ignorance Montaigne takes as evidence of
human absurdity and emptiness:

At last [Socrates] concluded that he was not distinguished from others, nor
wise, but only because he did not think himself so. … The sacred word
declares those miserable among us who have an opinion of themselves: “Dust
and ashes,” says it to such, “what hast thou wherein to glorify thyself?” And,
in another place, “God has made man like unto a shadow,” of whom who
can judge, when by removing the light it shall be vanished! Man is a thing of
nothing.
(1887, 12)

Contrary to all critical interpretations of Montaigne of which I am aware, it is

possible to understand his oeuvre as an attempt – an essai – to buttress the experi-
ential devaluation of the self, to explore, indulge, and even insist upon the self’s
failure in order to secure a more self-effacing relationship to experience’s objects.
Much as the early mimetic theories of trauma conceived of trauma as an identi-
fication with a traumatizing object or scene, Montaigne conceives of suffering,
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 55

self-failure, and even the physical trauma of deadly illness as pathways to unite
with, perhaps to belong to, experience’s objects: Nature and Fortune.
Montaigne’s well-known idiosyncrasies, his willingness to portray his ‘person-
ality,’ his self-contradictions, factual errors, and repeated failures to arrive at rea-
soned treatments of his subjects, too, may be more than marks of his undeniable
charm, intellect, and wit.2 They may represent a ritual of intellectual failure,
consciously or unconsciously intended to realize the futility of thinking about or
resisting the overwhelming forces imagined to drive experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Almost three centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay “Experience”
would recapitulate Montaigne’s fundamental teaching: “If we will take the good
we find, asking no questions,” Emerson declares, “we shall have heaping mea-
sures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway”
(2009, 315). If Montaigne’s mind was “a mouse in pitch,” a dog choking on sea
water to satisfy a morbid curiosity, for the Emerson of “Experience,” contemplation
is a form of suicide: “If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece
of bread down his throat, he would starve” (313).
Emerson and Montaigne both accuse mental activities of interfering with the
unreflective and self-effacing attitude required to ‘take in’ or ‘swallow’ experi-
ence. Our ability to sustain ourselves via experience, then, relies on a mini-
malization of, or even disappearance of, the self, in order to give place to
experience’s object. Emerson urges:

Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.
Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed
people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates
peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, “Children, eat
your victuals, and say no more of it.” To fill the hour, – that is happiness; to
fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.
(2009, 314)

For Emerson, it is not that we fill ourselves with experience’s object, nor that we
take in or enjoy “the hour.” Rather, experience’s object must be filled by us, and,
more precisely, by our emptiness. Here, time or “the hour” represents experience’s
object, and “to fill the hour” means “to fill” the object by emptying the self. To
fill the object, and then to partake secondarily or vicariously in the object’s ple-
nitude, requires that we give ourselves to the object fully, without leaving the
slightest “crevice for a repentance or an approval.”
How odd it is that repentances and approvals are figured not as subjective
additions to experience but as destructive subtractions, “crevices,” cuts or gashes
in the object, as if our expressions of thought, feeling, or spontaneity might tear,
56 Incorporation of traumatic experience

break, or empty the object that contains the ‘good.’ To avoid tearing, breaking,
or emptying the object, of course, we must tear, break, and empty ourselves.
Thinking, for Emerson, disrupts the process of finding and taking in experi-
ence, which is ‘the good.’ Thinking – and with it ‘peeping’ and questioning and
doubting and other activities associated with curiosity, reflection, and being a
self – represent withholding the self from experience’s object, failing to give the
self ‘fully’ to the object of experience. This withholding, in turn, contains the
forbidden suggestion that the self possesses some of ‘the good’ in itself, and
therefore is not completely empty in the absence of the object. This suggestion is
what Montaigne would call “pride.”
Thinking – and related activities that healthy selves engage in – can only starve
the human being by denying absolute power and goodness to an object of
experience that might have nourished us. Activities appropriate to selves, on this
account, might even be imagined to offend or outrage the object of experience,
by implying that the self possesses something of worth on its own. Since being
our selves is abhorrent to the objects of experience that nourish us, our selves
must appear to us as ‘bad.’ Apparently, the self’s relationship to experience’s
objects is similar to a child’s relationship to a narcissistic parent, in which the child
may receive only unpredictable and transitory experiences of ‘the good,’ not
according to her needs or designs but only in passing or “on the highway,” and
only if the parent is attended to first and fully, such that the parent’s value, reality,
and autonomy are upheld in the same instant that these qualities in the child are
dismissed or repudiated.
To be commanded to “eat your victuals” while being forbidden to speak may
be to be physically nourished, but it is to be emotionally and intellectually
starved. To accept this starvation of self as ‘the good’ that life bestows, to return
once again to Holm’s metaphor, is one way ‘to swallow our failure.’ It is also one
way to be traumatized.
Let us push further and say that to advocate for a kind of nourishment that is
actually an evacuation of the self is to become a center of trauma or a “site of
trauma” (Caruth 1995, 11), rather than a “center of initiative” (Kohut 1977, 99)
or site of authentic being and doing, thinking, creating, or relating. The trauma-
tized individual may be said to be engaged in an object-relationship that involves
emptying his self and incorporating, instead, the traumatic experience that has
been suffered. Of course, since unthought or unthinkable experience cannot be
contained within the self, and since the self, itself, has been devastated by its
overwhelming encounter with experience’s object, attempts to ‘hold onto’ or
‘possess’ such experience can only be physical and affective, and can only mean
repeating and returning to the experience and its object again and again.
Perhaps this is what Caruth means when she suggests that, while, on one hand,
the traumatized carry “the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely pos-
sess,” on the other hand, “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an
image or event” (1995, 4–5): that an experience may possess the traumatized
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 57

human being by usurping the self’s place in the inner world. But Caruth does not
seem to argue, as I am arguing, that the goal for the traumatized should be for the
self to recapture its place. Absent this objective, it would seem that repeated
moments of traumatic experience, or repeated expressions of one’s possession by
trauma, are mistaken for a connection to truth and reality.

Traumatic transmission
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells of a mourning father, whose recently
deceased son comes to him in a dream and asks, “Father, don’t you see I’m
burning?” Upon waking, the father sees a glare in the child’s room and rushes in
to find that the body of his deceased child has been burned by a fallen candle.
Freud’s explanation of the dream is that the father is able, in the dream, to
experience the child as alive once again, and therefore, even given the horrible
circumstances, the dream represents a wish. Indeed, Freud writes that:

here we have the most general and the most striking psychological char-
acteristic of the process of dreaming: a thought, and as a rule a thought of
something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a
scene, or, as it seems to us, is experienced.
(1950, 534)

Caruth, following Lacan, sees in the dream, instead, a traumatic repetition and a
“traumatic awakening” in which the father finds that his self “is bound up with,
or founded in, the death that he survives” (1996, 92). In fact, Caruth claims that:

what the father cannot grasp in the death of his child … becomes the foun-
dation of his very identity as a father. In thus relating trauma to the very
identity of the self and to one’s relation to another … the shock of traumatic
sight reveals at the heart of human subjectivity not so much an epistemological,
but rather what can be defined as an ethical relation to the real.
(1996, 92)

By this logic, since the death of his child is a trauma, and since the self is not,
according to Caruth, present in trauma, then the father could not have been
present to witness his child’s death: The father failed to see it. For a father to
dream that his living child demands that he see the child burning, for Caruth,
becomes an insistence that the father see his own failure to see, to see his own
“repeated failure to respond” (103).
“The awakening” that results from the dream and that occurs, on a metapho-
rical level, within the dream, “embodies an appointment with the real,” writes
Caruth, again echoing Lacan. And “the real” here is identical to the “awakening
[that] is itself the site of trauma, the trauma of the necessity and impossibility of
58 Incorporation of traumatic experience

responding to another’s death” (1996, 100). That is, “the real” is always “the site
of trauma,” which escapes us. On this line of thought, ‘real’ experiences and
traumatic experiences can never be experiences of the self’s reality, only of the
self’s “inevitable” yet “necessary” failures to be, to think, to see, and to act in
reality. Caruth claims that it is these experiences of failed being, thinking, seeing,
and doing that cannot be imagined or represented but that also “demand” to be
shared or transmitted, meaning that, in their sharing, the witness or listener also
must fail to be present. “The repeated failure to have seen in time,” Caruth
continues, “can be transformed into the imperative of a speaking that awakens
others”; awakens them, no doubt, to “the appointment with the real” that consists
not of the trauma itself but of the “missing” of it (108).
There are only minor differences between such claims and ontological-existential
claims that conceive of “failure as ‘the Real’” (Oprisko 2014; see also Žižek 1989,
2008), where the Real is “a kind of ontological ‘collateral damage’ of symbolic
operations: the process of symbolization is inherently thwarted, doomed to fail,
and the Real is this immanent failure of the symbolic” (Žižek 2012, 959).3 Both
of these types of claims, as Žižek himself admits, are difficult to distinguish from
moral demands that elements of trauma ought to remain central parts of our shared
experience. Thus, within debates about witnessing and representing trauma, and in
spite of the well-known difficulties in communicating traumatic narratives, one often
discovers the assumption that trauma should be transmitted and shared.
“In order to be diffused,” Nossery and Hubbell argue, “trauma must move
beyond isolation and be shared with participants willing to engage in the victim’s
torment. … The [transmissive] encounter could be beneficial for both the victim
and the addressee, as it merges the two parties’ experiences” (2013, 11, emphasis
added). The assumption that a merger of experience is desirable, and perhaps
even superior to a relationship between selves and a communication of experi-
ences, is discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters. A substantial part of the
logic of such an assumption is derived from the belief that experience, even
vicarious experience, can rescue selves from their inevitable isolation, vanity, and
destructiveness.
If, in Shoshana Felman’s words, we are obliged by “the imperative of bearing
witness” (1995, 16), if it is necessary to share our traumatic history, this sharing
remains problematic, since trauma must remain “referential precisely to the extent
that it is not fully perceived as it occurs … grasped only in the very inaccessibility
of its occurrence” (Caruth 1996, 18). In spite of the urgency with which we are
exhorted to transmit trauma, what can be transmitted is only a confounding
experience, an experience of incomprehension, perhaps even an experience of not
being, not being in relation to the individual bearing witness, not being in contact
with the self, not being in relation to the not-self of the traumatized. A malformed
missive, a message that ‘self-destructs’ upon arrival, traumatic experience occludes
thinking about trauma, just as transmitting trauma seems to involve a traumatic
failure of thinking, communicating, and being.
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 59

Dori Laub claims that the witness to trauma or traumatic narrative:

come[s] to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through

his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself. The
relation of the victim to the event of the trauma, therefore, impacts on the
relation of the listener to it, and the latter comes to feel the bewilderment,
injury, confusion, dread and conflicts that the trauma victim feels.
(1992, 57–58, emphasis added)

If what must be transmitted, according to Walter Benn Michaels, is “not the

normalizing knowledge of the horror but the horror itself,” then this “horror
itself” is not even the horror of the traumatic event but the horror of failing to be
in its presence (quoted in Leys 2000, 268).
Since we cannot – and must not – think or know experience, we can only
share traumatic experience in the breakdown of language and reason, in the
“failure of witnessing or representation,” which is to say: in the active destruction
of the knowledge of experience and of our presence of being in experience.
Attempts at thinking, relating, communicating, or other expressions of self-being
would distort the traumatic truth, for if trauma is a “symptom of history,” then
“it is a symptom which must not … be cured but simply transmitted, passed on”
(Leys 2000, 268–269).
Discourses of trauma, literatures of atrocity and the Holocaust, ‘traumatized
texts’ of contemporary literature, and insistences that we protect traumatic objects
from corruption by thought form the core of an ideology of trauma. This ideol-
ogy sets forth an ethical demand that we surmount our ‘crisis of truth’ by
undertaking a deliberate “infection,” “contaminat[ion]” (Leys 2000, 268), and
“contagion” (Caruth 1995, 10; Terr 1988) of traumatic material across persons
and groups. To blend our discussion of Camus from the last chapter with our
discussion of Felman and Caruth here, we might say that the ethical imperative
yielded by the ideology of trauma is to transmit a homeopathic ‘plague experience’
in order to inoculate the population against the plagues of thinking and selfhood.
It is likely that the valorization of transmitting trauma both eases the burden of the
traumatized victim – by making use of projective identification to witness one’s
trauma in others – and sustains the fantasy of a future community of victims in
which the self has “depart[ed],” a community united by trauma, strengthened by
immediate connections to traumatizing objects and experiences. “In a catastrophic age,”
Caruth writes, “trauma may provide the very link between cultures … as our
ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves” (1995, 11).
In his short paper entitled “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading
to a Study of Certain Opposites,” Winnicott discusses an “incommunicado element” of
self, a “secret self” or sacred core that must be protected from the world of objects,
lest it be adjusted or altered (1965, 187). But if we are possessed by an ideology of
trauma, then instead of generating the feeling of reality in the self by making
60 Incorporation of traumatic experience

contact with this secret incommunicado element, we may turn to traumatizing

objects to replace non-communicative elements of the self.
The dynamic I have in mind is not precisely the “mimetic dimension” of
trauma to which Leys draws our attention (2000, 18–40), but one in which
experiences of trauma, failure, and deprivation, along with the objects that are
imagined to deliver such experiences – be they Nature, Fortune, God, Chance,
the Law, the Nation, or the Community – supplant a part of the self. Now it is
the traumatic experience and its object that must be protected, just as if they were the
“secret self,” and it is the traumatic experience and its object that must be nour-
ished and contacted in order to find feelings of aliveness and reality. The attri-
butions of unknowability and unthinkability we ascribe to both experience and
trauma, then, reflect the same need to protect what are taken to be the most
sacred elements of our psyches against being found or altered.
Of course, in spite of what we are told by celebrants of trauma and experience,
the internalization of objects of traumatizing experience cannot succeed in pro-
viding sought-after feelings of reality and aliveness. Ambivalent desires to both
hide and transmit our experiences derive from this failure. Traumatic experiences
are hidden because they are confused with the secret, non-communicative ele-
ment of self, having substituted an identity with an identification. They are
transmitted and re-transmitted because, having failed to issue in the feelings of
value, vitality, and reality for which we had hoped, we mistake our task to be
that of confirming our inner traumatic experience in the world outside, by pro-
voking or instilling it in others. In the following chapters, I discuss how both of
these tendencies may become repetitive, compulsive, and profoundly destructive.
Early in this chapter, I suggested that our current discourse of trauma recapi-
tulated fundamental dynamics of traumatic experience, itself. Specifically, a ‘straw
self’ is presupposed in order to be traumatized, making the self an inevitably lost object.
This lost self, however, was fundamentally flawed, false, morbid, even dangerous, at
least if we are persuaded by ideologists of experience such as Montaigne and Emerson,
who teach us that the activities appropriate to selves, such as thinking and
knowing, interfere with the natural process of experiencing to which we ought to
be entirely attuned. Thus, to lose this flawed self is no great loss, for what is
gained is experience, its devastating wisdom, and the opportunity to identify with
experience’s objects, which, even if injurious, are grander than the self could ever be.
At this point, it is possible to advance the thesis that our preoccupation with
trauma, and with experiences of failure, deprivation, and suffering in general, may
represent a need to demonstrate to ourselves and others the impossibility of ever
having established a real, vital self. This demonstration serves the purpose of reas-
suring ourselves that the exchange of selfhood for identification with traumatizing
objects and experiences is ‘good.’ What is more, if a real, vital, thinking, relating,
creative self is impossible to begin with, then we may be absolved of feelings of
guilt, not only at having failed to achieve this ideal for ourselves, but for our
impulses to share our own traumatic experiences with others.
 Incorporation of traumatic experience 61

Notes
1 I am grateful to David Levine for our conversations about the notion of the body as the
unthought.
2 “If I knew myself less well,” Montaigne writes, “I should take the risk of treating some
subject thoroughly. But, since I scatter a word here and a word there, samples torn from
their piece and separated without plan or promise, I am not bound to answer for them”
(1993, 131).
3 Although this book does not deal with Žižek’s (or Lacan’s) philosophy directly, it may
be worthwhile to note that while Žižek’s notion of “the Real” has changed sub-
stantially over the past twenty-five years, the Real has always been defined as that
which is not symbolized nor symbolizable. Žižek himself notes that: “Although I still
stand by the basic insights of The Sublime Object, it is clear to me, with hindsight, that …
it basically endorses a quasi-transcendental reading of Lacan, focused on the notion of
the Real as the impossible Thing-in-itself; in so doing, it opens the way to the cele-
bration of failure: to the idea that every act ultimately misfires, and that the proper
ethical stance is heroically to accept this failure” (2008, xi–xii).

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and New York: Verso.
4
MISUNDERSTOOD AND REPEATED
EXPERIENCE IN LE MALENTENDU

Albert Camus’ early three-act play Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding) borrows

thematic elements from classical tragedy, alludes explicitly to Gospel narrative,
references structural and character elements from the Renaissance commedia
dell’arte, and propels its action in ways reminiscent of situation comedies moder-
nized by Shakespeare but perhaps most familiar to contemporary audiences via
televised serials.
The plot of Le Malentendu is rather simple: Jan is a wealthy, married, middle-
aged man who, on hearing of his father’s death, returns after twenty years of
absence to the small Moravian inn where his mother and sister live and work. Jan
is not immediately recognized by his family, due, in part, to his extended absence
and, in part, to his mother’s and sister’s habit of sparing attention to guests whom
they intend to rob and murder. Jan also takes care to hide his identity from them,
ostensibly in order to gather information about them, to gain “a better notion of
what to do to make them happy” (Camus 1958, 84), and to set up a joyful surprise
when he eventually reveals himself.
Jan’s ruse is protested by his wife, Maria, who accompanies him but whom he
sends away for his first night at the inn. Jan’s mother and sister, Martha, mistaking
him for a wealthy solitary traveler, murder him and dump his body in the river
before his identity is revealed. Upon realizing what she has done, his mother
drowns herself in the river where she and Martha killed January Martha, now
alone and in despair, will hang herself. Maria in agonizing grief, pleads for help
and mercy but is heard only by an aged, taciturn servant, who replies, simply:
“No.”
Performances of the play were not terribly successful in the eyes of critics, but
the play itself has retained a great deal of influence in the context of Camus’
broader philosophical and literary project. A few of Camus’ contemporaries were
64 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

quite fond of it. Jean-Paul Sartre, who would soon cease admiring Camus’ work,
claimed that the play attained mythic proportion in that its central misunderstanding
“peut servir d’incarnation à tous les malentendus qui séparent l’homme de lui-même, du
monde, des autres hommes” (embodies all the misunderstandings that separate man from
himself, from the world, and from others) (1973, 62–63). Written in the early
1940s, in a time of terror, moral outrage, and physical illness for Camus, Le
Malentendu is typically read as modern, absurdist tragedy, its central theme being
that of “revolt against death and the arbitrary, irrational nature of man’s fate”
(Brée 1964, 150).
Beyond associations with Camus’ absurd philosophy, there are two main
‘moral’ conclusions scholars have derived from the play. The first is that Jan’s
quest for recognition, for his identity to be seen and known by his family, is
impossible and, thus, destined to bring disaster. Jan, on this account, suffers from a sort
of Hegelian hubris, believing he can be recognized and that his family’s recogni-
tion will bring him infinite happiness, erasing the pain of their long estrangement.
Certainly, such an interpretation seems to fit Camus’ philosophical project, which
asks us to recognize that our “sin[ful]” desire to know and our “wild longing for
clarity” are unfulfillable, impossible, and destructive (1955, 21). To chase after
understanding and recognition seems, in some of Camus’ writing, to lead only to
violence and death, whereas internalizing the inevitability of failure – as in our
fundamental “absurdity” – permits us to survive (see Bowker 2014).
The second, and nearly opposite, interpretation is that the play proclaims the
ethical necessity of open dialogue and communication, while condemning silence
and obfuscation (see, e.g., Matherne 1971, 74–77; Willhoite 1968, 64–66). This
conclusion was advanced by Camus himself after his play suffered a poor reception:
It is:

a play of revolt, perhaps even containing a moral of sincerity. … If a man

wants to be recognized, one need only tell him who he is. If he shuts up or
lies, he will die alone, and everything around him is destined for misery. If,
on the contrary, he speaks the truth, he will doubtless die, but after having
helped himself and others to live.
(Quoted in Todd 2000, 186)

This extremely facile interpretation, although offered by the author himself, is con-
founding and perhaps backward, for recognizing a person surely means something
other than “tell[ing]” that person “who he is.” In the best of cases, this inter-
pretation would flatten an already bare drama, making Le Malentendu the simplest
of cautionary tales.
Indeed, such an interpretation closely resembles the simplistic conclusion
reached by Meursault when Camus places a prototype of the story of Le Mal-
entendu in The Stranger. Here, Meursault describes the idea of hiding one’s identity
from one’s family as “a joke” (plaisanterie) (Camus 1988, 80). If, as alluded to in
 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu 65

Chapter 2, “nothing distinguishes jokes or jests more from other psychological

structures than their double-sidedness or duplicity” (Freud 1960, 213–214), then
jokes must always conceal or confound their own expression, must “muddle” their
true intentions (Camus 1958, 83), and, in this sense, must always miscommunicate
and must always be misunderstood.
Of the story, Meursault concludes: “On the one hand it wasn’t very likely. On
the other, it was perfectly natural. Anyway, I thought the traveler pretty much
deserved what he got and that you shouldn’t play games” (Camus 1988, 80).
While Meursault is not always the keenest observer of human emotion, he is
right that Jan’s gambit is like a joke and a game because it appears to be a
species of play, play being a form of creative experimentation where impulses
are heeded and where some departures from the rules of reality are tolerated, as
in the dramatic medium called the play.1 On the other hand, more sophisticated
understandings of the concept of playing, such as Winnicott’s (1971), would
suggest that there is something lacking in Jan’s play, perhaps even in his capacity
to play.
It may seem callous to discuss a drama full of violence and tragedy in relation
to jokes or games. But there is something to be learned in this comparison. First,
it reminds us that Jan’s actions express impulses and perhaps fantasies that may
belong to the periods of life in which playing is of the greatest import: infancy
and childhood. Second, Jan does not play well, not only because the consequences
of his playing are disastrous, but because he is unable to enact or realize his play in
the space between his subjective imagination and his objective interactions with
his mother and sister. This makes his playing frustrating and agonizing, to him
and to Maria, who strenuously objects to his ruse on precisely these grounds,
insisting that “there’s something … something morbid about the way you’re
doing this” (Camus 1958, 83).
Contrary to the two ‘moral’ conclusions cited above, the real tragedy of Le
Malentendu derives from Jan’s unconscious desire to re-experience his family’s
misrecognition and neglect, a traumatic experience he suffered years ago, which
he re-lives by undertaking an elaborate deception. An important clue about the
unconscious motivations of Jan’s actions comes when he describes his ruse as the
inevitable result of his “dreams,” by which he seems to mean both dreams
experienced in sleep and hopes of a happy reunion with his family, upon
which depends his ability to “find his true place in the world” (1958, 87).
Jan’s dedication to his unlikely ‘dream’ of resolving twenty years of estrange-
ment and psychological suffering by orchestrating a surprise announcement of
himself remains strong even as he begins to realize the potentially devastating
outcomes of his actions. This inflexible pursuit of his ‘dream,’ in spite of his
family’s clear inability to respond in the way he had hoped, also tells us some-
thing about Jan’s unconscious motivations and, therefore, about one of the subtler
malentendus in the play.
66 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

Recognition, relation, and identification

What really compels Jan to play this trick on his family? Why does he not heed
his wife’s advice to announce himself immediately? Maria over-simplifies things
but is not entirely wrong in suggesting that, “on such occasions one says, ‘It’s I,’
and then it’s all plain sailing.” It is “common sense,” she argues, that “if one
wants to be recognized, one starts by telling one’s name. … Otherwise, by pre-
tending to be what one is not, one simply muddles everything” (Camus 1958, 83).
It would seem sensible for Jan to introduce himself, as Maria instructs him, to say:
“I’m your son. This is my wife. I’ve been living with her in a country we both love,
a land of endless sunshine beside the sea. But something was lacking there to
complete my happiness, and now I feel I need you” (84).
But, of course, for Jan, and for Camus, and likely for many others, relating to
one’s family is not “so simple as all that” (1958, 84). Jan’s first line of defense
against the idea of openly communicating is to suggest that he has played no part
in the deception. When he is “given a glass of beer, against payment,”
“received … without a word,” and “looked at, but … [not] seen” (82–83,
emphasis in original), he claims to be stunned, deciding only at that moment to
remain silent and “let things take their course.” Maria correctly objects, however,
that there is no ‘thing’ to take its course, that, instead, the ‘thing’ to which Jan
refers is actually “another of those ideas of yours.” To this comment Jan retorts:
“It wasn’t an idea of mine, Maria; it was the force of things” (83).
Jan’s denial of his part in fabricating the deception, a denial of his own free
will, suggests that he is once again silenced by his family’s treatment of him, that
he finds himself paralyzed, perhaps re-experiencing the moment when his mother
sent him off so coldly twenty years before. “My mother didn’t come to kiss me,”
Jan recalls, tellingly. “At the time I thought I didn’t care” (Camus 1958, 82). This
withholding of affection, this non-existent farewell by Jan’s mother, involves the
rejection of him at a precarious moment of separation, at the very moment when
he literally separated himself from his family.
Jan’s mother’s rejection of him at this moment expresses her rejection of him as
a separate self, her refusal or inability to relate with him as someone other than a
member of the family. This event, and what it likely reflects about a pattern of
behavior in Jan’s family, appear to have been to some degree traumatic for Jan, not
only because of their lasting effects on his emotional life and his inability to be
happy, but in the ‘latency’ or delay (nachträglichkeit ) of their impacts: “At the time
I thought I didn’t care.”
Jan does not feel that he has a choice. His deception appears as necessary to
him, but he must assign responsibility for his choices to forces outside of himself.
Imagining one’s choices to be necessary consequences of forces outside of the self
is one way of misunderstanding oneself, of remaining unaware of one’s true inten-
tions, and of pursuing aims about which one must remain unconscious. It is also
common in repetitive and ritualized behavior, particularly that associated with the
 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu 67

compulsive element in traumatic repetition: the feeling that one is not in control,
that one is ‘forced’ to re-visit a traumatic scene either literally, in dreams, or in
obsessive behaviors that express or reflect traumatic material. An absence of will
and choice is also, as we have seen, an important component of several ideologies
of experience: Experience leads us where it will, Emerson might say, while we are
only along for the ride, hoping to find a passing good somewhere “on the highway.”
While little is offered by Camus on the subject of Jan’s childhood, conversa-
tions between his mother and Martha suggest that in his family – as was likely the
case in Camus’ own family – one is either ‘in’ or ‘out.’ Even when ‘in,’ of course,
one is not recognized as a unique or separate being but merely as a family
member. Incredibly, Jan’s mother fully admits as much, saying she “might have
forgotten her daughter [Martha], too,” if Martha hadn’t “kept beside me all these
years … probably that’s why I know she is my daughter” (Camus 1958, 95).
Martha is only known by her mother, only recognized, because she is literally
beside her mother. She is only known and recognized as a mother’s daughter, not
as an individual, and certainly not as a self.
The mother’s rejection of Jan at the moment of his physical departure there-
fore seems to reflect a dilemma of relating that pre-dated it, a dilemma in which
relatedness with family members across difference or distance was impossible.
Faced with such a dilemma, Jan would have had to choose between being abso-
lutely exiled and, in some sense, ‘dead’ to his family, and being permanently
“beside” his family only to receive acknowledgment as a family member. In other
words, in such a family as Jan’s, there is no relatedness. Instead, there is a schizoid
either/or, whereby one either exists in an immersive co-presence with the family,
or, if one attempts separation in any of its forms, one does not exist at all. Once
Jan decides to leave his family, he ceases to exist. Thus, for his mother, there was,
in some sense, no one there to kiss farewell.
Children raised in conditions similar to these are forced to make a terrible
choice at a young age: to identify with a parent’s or the family’s needs and to
serve those needs as a family member, or to face emotional exile by heeding the
child’s need to explore and discover something authentic and unique within
himself (see, e.g., Miller 1997; Winnicott 1965). Of course, since the child is both
physically and emotionally dependent upon the parent and the family, the choice
is really no choice at all, as such children must almost instinctively learn to repress
not only their needs but their awareness of them, for any outbursts of emotion
reflective of their discomfort – for instance, rage at those who demand self-
negation, or grief at the loss of self-expression – would only provoke retaliation
from the family in the form of further neglect, deprivation, or abandonment.
These dynamics are readily apparent throughout the play, particularly when Jan
speaks about his sense of “duty” toward his family (Camus 1958, 84–85), a rather
mysterious duty, presumably neglected for twenty years, by which he must now
make a conscious effort to procure the family’s “happ[iness]” (84), while at the
same time refusing to announce his true identity, and while misrecognizing and
68 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

repressing his own needs in relation to his family. “I don’t need them,” he insists,
“but I realized they may need me” (84).
Jan does admit a desire to “find his true place in the world” (Camus 1958, 87),
and the play asks us to imagine that he strives to establish this place by returning
to his family and “making happy those I love. … I don’t look any farther” (87).
But, of course, Jan’s act of concealing his identity succeeds neither in making his
family happy nor in bringing him closer to finding his “true place.” The “true
place” Jan seeks is really a regressive experience, an experience meant to sub-
stitute for a genuine “place” for himself amidst his family, which he knows to
be impossible. This regressive experience Jan seeks is, in many ways, the opposite
of finding a “place,” for he unconsciously desires not to be recognized but to be
misrecognized, not to be welcomed but to be rebuffed, not to find joy and
reunion but to re-encounter his rage and grief at his unfeeling expulsion from the
family.
To understand these claims, we must recall that although Jan has clearly
designed his charade in advance, telling Maria that her unexpected presence at the
hotel “will upset all [his] plans” (Camus 1958, 82), when he enters the inn, he
says that he “expected a welcome like the prodigal son’s” (83). Why, we may
wonder, would Jan consider playing his trick if he sincerely expected such a
joyous reception? Since this is not the sole reference to the story of the prodigal
son in the Book of Luke – later, Jan raises the cup of poisoned tea to his lips and
calls it “the feast of the returning prodigal” (109) – and since that story is, itself,
full of ambivalence, misrecognition, and resentment between members of a
family, it is worth a moment to analyze this reference.2
In Luke, the prodigal son, having wasted his inheritance “with riotous living,”
now in fear of starvation, returns to his father, saying: “I have sinned against
heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son” (15:21,
AV). The ashamed son plans to offer himself as a servant to his father’s household,
as he feels assured that he no longer deserves recognition even as a member of the
family (15:19, AV). But the prodigal son’s father rejoices that “this my son was
dead, and is alive again” (15:24, AV), giving him fine robes and preparing a
lavish feast in his honor. Such treatment arouses jealous rage in the elder
brother, who complains that, while he has toiled and served beside his father
his whole life, he has never been given such gifts nor inspired comparable joy in
his father. In reply, the father attempts to reassure the elder son of his indelible
membership in the family: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is
thine” (15:31, AV).
Jan’s reference to this story and his self-identification as the prodigal son, then,
suggest several things about his feelings and intentions regarding his family.
Although he has not wasted his family’s fortune on debauchery, he feels ashamed.
He is likely aware of the possibility of a negative or unsatisfying reception. He
may fear, in particular, the reaction of his sister Martha, who has remained by her
mother’s side and, in so doing, has not enjoyed the same freedom, travel,
 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu 69

romance, or fortune as he has. He may feel or anticipate guilt at the contrast

between his seemingly separate existence and his sister’s lifelong enmeshment
with their mother and their home. Jan’s mother’s treatment of Martha is similar
to that of the father toward the elder son in the story of the prodigal: The father’s
reply to the elder son does not directly address the elder’s son’s complaint that he
has never been ‘recognized’ as special or worth celebrating. Instead, the father
offers an erasure of boundaries between the son, the father, and all that belongs to
the family: The elder son’s unique self is still overlooked, while, in returning from
‘the dead,’ the prodigal son seems to have found a form of loving recognition.
Like the prodigal son, Jan fears announcing himself and incurring the rejection
of his family because he has at least partly internalized his family’s insistence that
his separateness is tantamount to his being “dead.” While the prodigal son in
Luke feared his own literal death by starvation, if Jan has internalized the equation
of separateness with death, then Jan may feel psychically “dead” while separated
from his family. Unlike the prodigal son however, Jan cannot bring himself to
announce that he has returned. He cannot make himself “alive again.”
Jan says he expected a welcome like the prodigal son’s, but his ruse assures that
he will receive exactly what the prodigal son feared: an experience of indifference
from the family and treatment as an outsider. Indeed, after Jan’s mother admits
she “might have forgotten her daughter” had she left her side, she adds, “if a son
came here, he’d find exactly what an ordinary guest can count on: amiable
indifference, no more and no less” (1958, 96). Just as the prodigal son imagines
that he may be forced to take on the identity of a servant to the family,
rather than being a member of the family, Jan assumes a second identity when he
pretends to be a mere lodger. Both a servant and a lodger can be expected to
elicit, if not indifference, something far less than familial intimacy. As in the
prodigal son’s offer to make himself a servant in penance for his sins, Jan seems to
heap emotional punishment upon himself by pretending to be a mere stranger.
According to Jan, his desire to return home is derived from the fact that, in his
separation from the family, he and his family have been lost or dead to each
other. He desires to revive his connection, however, with a family that offers
only self-occluding family membership or nothing. While he pretends to seek
recognition from and a mature relationship with his family, he must be at least
partly aware that his family is incapable of recognizing and relating with him as a
separate self. Thus, if he does seek to revive a relationship with his family, it can
only be one based on immediate presence, family membership, and de-subjectified
reunion. In this light, it is a matter of some importance that Maria offers him a
more profound and more complete loving recognition of his self. “I’ve always
loved everything about you, even what I didn’t understand, and I know that
really I wouldn’t wish you to be other than who you are” (1958, 85). Tragically,
Jan forsakes this apparently mature, loving relationship to re-enact a drama of
silence, loss, and death with his family.
70 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

Rage and reunion

Jan tells Maria that one of his aims in concealing his identity is to “take this
opportunity of seeing [his mother and sister] from the outside” (Camus 1958, 83),
to become informed about how to make his family happy. But it is not clear why
Jan should expect his family to be more revealing or honest when standing before
a stranger than before a son. Furthermore, to see others “from the outside” by
making them naïve about one’s identity risks exposing them to embarrassment,
registered by a hidden ‘eye’ (a hidden ‘I’) of which they are unaware.
Jan’s aim to hide, then reveal, his identity is a type of deception that manip-
ulates the emotions of his family, and perhaps his own emotions as well. Jan has
made the family naïve about an important piece of information. To make
someone naïve, as in practical jokes, may lead the naïve person to speak or act in
a way that is inappropriate, humiliating, or shocking to those privy to the with-
held information. The ‘practical joke,’ as it were, is ‘on’ the naïve person because
she is not ‘in’ on the joke. The victim of such a joke is ‘unmasked’ when she
who once loomed large is revealed to be flawed or ridiculous. As in satire, a
portion of the pleasure of joking lies in depicting those who are exalted (erhaben)
as vulgar or stupid (Freud 1960, 248).
For Freud, in joking, in satire, and in deceptions, we experiment with aggres-
sive impulses, in which we discover a way to inflict suffering upon others without
excessive guilt. More specifically, deceptions and jokes of this nature impose upon
their victims experiences resembling the helplessness of childhood (Freud 1960,
280–284): The naïve subject of the joke is exposed in a moment of childlike
confusion, ignorance, humiliation, or anxiety, particularly when provoked into
losing control or unwittingly transgressing social or moral norms. This aggressive
impulse to provoke, then witness, helplessness in others likely arises in connection
with the instigator’s own experiences of helplessness, although such experiences
are not always consciously recalled. In this way, such deceptions may actually be
attempts to transmit painful or traumatic experiences onto others via projective
identification, to re-experience them through others, and even to forge renewed
connections with others based upon a suffering now shared.
It is important, in the context of Le Malentendu, to ask how Jan’s family
members could be expected to feel after having been seen ‘from the outside’
treating their own son and brother as a perfect stranger, selling him beer and
making up his room. Although Jan’s mother is devastated at having taken part in
his murder, it is not precisely her killing of Jan that she laments most profoundly.
Rather, she is deeply aggrieved by her mistaking of January “When a mother is
no longer capable of recognizing her own son,” she claims, “it’s clear that her
role on earth is ended” (Camus 1958, 120). Even had Jan not been murdered, it
is certain that his ruse would have succeeded in making his mother’s mis-
recognition of him all too clear. It seems likely, therefore, that Jan’s aim is not to
happily surprise his family by exposing his identity, but to expose his family’s
 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu 71

failure to recognize him. Of course, Jan succeeds in exposing this failure, and
thereby re-experiences the earlier traumatic instance of this failure, all too well.
Jan’s odd yet carefully crafted deception permits him to re-experience some-
thing of his original rage and grief while inflicting pain and humiliation upon his
family. At the same time, he protects himself from the possibility of further
trauma and protects his family from his resentment and anger. He pursues his
deception in a way that leaves his family a way out, an absolution from respon-
sibility for this instance of misrecognition, since it is, after all, his deception and
not their hateful indifference that misleads them this time. His ruse, therefore,
partly protects his mother and sister, which expresses an underlying identification
with his family, with those who abandoned him, rather than with his self, which
felt and which continues to feel abandoned. Indeed, it is fair to say that Jan, rather
than being able to make himself “alive again” before his family, has made himself
a stranger to them, which suggests that his action may also express his desire to
take responsibility for the loss associated with separation.
To summarize, Jan’s deception allows him to hold on to his conscious estima-
tions of his feelings and intentions – that he is happy, that he does not ‘need’ his
family, and that he wishes to make his family happy – along with his unrealistic
hope for a loving reception by his family. It permits him to safely recall an
otherwise dangerous and anxiety-provoking rage and grief while ‘muddling’
those feelings with the pretenses of his ruse. It permits him to internalize responsi-
bility for his family’s rejection of him while protecting his family from the punch-
line of his joke, as it were. Perhaps most importantly, it succeeds in replaying the
very experience that he both dreads and needs, the experience that set him apart
from his family for twenty years, the experience of standing before his family as a
separate person and being unrecognized, unseen, unknown. By repeating this
traumatic experience, Jan finds a way to identify with his family and their
extreme demand that one either belong or die, that one be in or out. He,
therefore, seems to seek not loving recognition for himself, but only a “morbid”
repetition of a traumatic experience from his past.

Loss and melancholia

While the repetition of Jan’s experience of misrecognition reminds us of the
repetition-compulsion suffered by victims of trauma, an equally illuminating
analogy for his attempt to hold on to connection with an object, protecting it
while raging against it, all while repeating the experience of suffering or loss
associated with it, is the experience of melancholia, as defined by Freud and
developed by many of his followers.3
In his famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud claims that the
normal work of mourning involves reality-testing which helps the individual to
see “that the loved object no longer exists, and [to proceed] to demand that all
libido should be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (1957, 244),
72 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

while melancholia is a “mental constellation of revolt” against loss, a refusal to

mourn (248). As opposed to the process of mourning, in melancholia a connection
to the lost object is sought in extreme and destructive ways.
The work of mourning consists in accepting the loss of the object – in this
case, the loss of Jan’s family – and in adjusting to a world where that object, or
that object-relationship, is absent. The lost object is unmourned in melancholia
because its disappearance and, more importantly, the loss of the quality of feeling
in connection with the object are too difficult to bear. In a largely unconscious
effort to retain connection with the lost object, the melancholic person identifies
with the object’s bad aspects and grapples with this badness by punishing the self
and the representation of the object in the self forged via identification. Freud
famously referred to this process as one in which “the shadow of the object [falls]
upon the ego” (1957, 249). By punishing the self and the object-in-self, the
melancholic individual finds a certain sadistic pleasure as well as the possibility of
communion with the lost object:

If the love for the object … takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the
hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it,
making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. The self-
tormenting in melancholia, which is without a doubt enjoyable, signifies …
a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and
which have been turned round upon the subject’s own self.
(Freud 1957, 251)

While much more could be said about melancholia and its vicissitudes, it is
sufficient to note that in melancholia a regressive fusion is established with an
object in tandem with the hatred and rage occasioned by the loss. This fusion is
powered by the desire to identify with the lost object, rage against the object for
the broken relationship, and rage and shame directed at the self for still desiring
the object. The melancholic individual prefers this form of fusion – even with all
of its torment – to mourning the loss, since mourning implies separation from the
object and ‘moving on.’
In much postmodern ethical theory, this melancholic preference for fusion has
been valorized as a sort of moral revolt against loss. For Jacques Derrida, the
impossibility of mourning becomes nothing less than an ethical injunction never
to erase the other. Derrida argues that mourning must fail because when it fails, it
succeeds in leaving the other intact: It is then “a tender rejection, a movement of
renunciation, which leaves the other alone, outside, over there, in his death,
outside of us” (Derrida 1989, 35). In her essay on Emmanuel Levinas and Julia
Kristeva, Ewa Ziarek draws out the logical conclusion to Derrida’s argument by
claiming that the melancholic’s inability to heal from grief must be recognized as
a valiant moral refusal, undertaken with “unusual sobriety,” resulting in “a
 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu 73

powerful critique of the desire to master alterity through the order of representation”
(Ziarek 1993, 73).
But these accounts fundamentally (and tellingly) misunderstand the ideas of
mourning and separateness. To refuse to complete mourning, to refuse to represent
a lost friend or to reconcile oneself with mere memories of him, is to refuse to let
go of the friend. To reject our interiorizations and imaginations of the friend (see
Derrida 2001) does not “leave the other alone,” but holds on to the friend as a
now unthinkable thing-in-itself who, although dead, remains present in life
precisely to the extent that we cannot think of him as either alive or dead.
In successful mourning, we would be able to admit that the life of our friend is
gone, and that the remaining traces of him cannot be preserved ‘outside of us,’ for
even if we keep his ashes in an urn on the mantel, the living person is dead and gone,
and all we have left of him is interior: our memories, our thoughts, our dreams,
which can never be identical to the actual friend. To mourn loss is to permit the
self to separate from the object by recognizing that the lost friend is actually lost
and can never return, that even if the self keeps the memory of the friend “alive,”
the self’s imaginations will never be the same as the actual lost friend.
The problem with Derrida’s, and others’, approach is that, in the exhortation
to refuse mourning, we find also a rejection of thinking, knowing, and imagina-
tively relating to others, as these activities come to be associated with forms of
rationalized destruction (Derrida 1989; see also Bowker 2014). This danger is
expressed in Emmanuel Levinas’s account of the threat we pose to others even in
encountering them, as we inevitably subsume them in a system of our own
design, “making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves”
(1969, 21). To prevent ourselves from intellectually colonizing others, Levinas
recommends what Fred Alford aptly names “hostage-being” (2002, 29), where
the self must be the other’s hostage, enthralled to the other’s demands without
relation or comprehension, in any usual sense.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the Levinasian notion of an ethical other-invasion of
self, especially as it has been appropriated by postmodern theorists like Jacques
Derrida and Judith Butler, makes ethical being the opposite of the ideal of self-
hood. Instead of relating to the other, the other must not only be left “alone,”
but must be given precedence over the self, such that the self’s very existence
must be put “into question … by the presence of the other” (Levinas 1969, 43).
This rejection of thinking, knowing, and imaginatively relating resembles what
Bion calls “attacks on linking,” by which he means repudiations of the potentially
healthy emotional links between selves and objects. Attacks on linking blur the
boundaries between self and other because the “link” that is attacked is always a
“contact barrier” (Grinberg, Sor, and de Bianchedi 1977, 49), a boundary that
both separates and connects. To attack the links between self and other is to
attack the boundary that permits both self-integration and relatedness between
selves, since, in lieu of a boundary, material must be projected and introjected
between disintegrated, unreal, and unknowable objects in an attempt to manage
74 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

anxiety, desire, rage, fear, and badness. In the end, attacks on linking lead to a kind
of disintegration of both self and object, for without separateness or relatedness,
there can be neither an ‘I’ nor a ‘you.’
To be sure, the condition in which there is neither an ‘I’ nor q ‘you’ has been
championed by many of the celebrants of experience, cited in Chapter 1 and
throughout this book, as a desirable state of (non-)being, a foundation for a
political community without selves and therefore without the capacity for self-
ishness or rationalized violence. As such, the valorization of melancholy experi-
ence, the refusal to mourn, and the rejection of separateness and relatedness in
modern and postmodern thought represent an attack on the separate self. In
particular, they represent an attack on the capacity of selves to get out from under
the shadow of experience’s object.
If these refusals and rejections attack the self by undercutting its capacities for
integration, separateness, and relatedness, they also encourage individuals to dis-
cover a substitute for selfhood in agonizing fusion with experience’s object.
Members of a family or group who find their “place” only in proximity and
belonging are in some sense united by melancholic experience because thinking,
relating, and communicating as separate selves have become impossible.
On this note, it is helpful to conclude by considering a more recent play about
deception and communication. In John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, based
largely on real events, wealthy Manhattan art dealers Flan and Ouisa Kittredge
take in a young conman, Paul, who presents himself as the child of Sidney Poitier
and a friend of their children at Harvard. He is invited to stay for dinner and the
night and quickly develops affectionate connections with those he meets. Much
of the action takes place within private residences, while the Kittredges relate
their shocking and perhaps even traumatizing experience at parties and social
gatherings. The relation between public communication and the intimate,
although deeply distressing, experience of Paul is at the very heart of the drama.
Indeed, in what may be the most important moment of the play, Ouisa blusters
that they are turning their experience with Paul:

into an anecdote to dine out on. Or dine in on. But it was an experience. I
will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we fit what happened to us in
life without turning it into an anecdote with no teeth and a punch line you’ll
mouth over and over years to come. “Tell the story about the imposter who
came into our lives –” “That reminds me of the time this boy –.” And we
become these human juke boxes spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an
experience. How do we keep the experience?
(Guare 1990, 115)

Here, Ouisa is protesting relating their story about Paul, arguing that in com-
municating her traumatic experience she will lose it, that in making it known,
recognized, or recognizable to herself or to others, she will no longer possess it.
 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu 75

Ouisa also fears that by turning Paul, whom Ouisa has come to love, into an
anecdote, endlessly and perhaps compulsively repeated, she and her husband are
losing their humanity, that they have become mere “human juke boxes.”
Ouisa seems to feel that she must “fit what has happened to [her] in life” the
way one fits into a suit or cocktail dress. That is, even if the experience does not
suit her, she must fit into it. Would simply not communicating about Paul allow
Ouisa to “fit” her experience, to “keep the experience” intact and, so, to keep
him intact? Why must she continue to be connected with her agonizing yet
enthralling experience of him?
Ouisa’s fear of transforming her experience and the object of her experience,
Paul, and his intimate violation of her trust and her family, into an anecdote with
no “teeth,” just a “punch line,” suggests that, for her, the telling of anecdotes
diffuses a deep, inner, perhaps even secret or “incommunicado” experience stored
somewhere between her self and the outside world. She hates the notion of
turning her experience into something she and others can “dine out on,” preferring,
instead to keep this experience to herself, perhaps somewhere in her body, in that
unknowable area referred to in Chapter 3, neither inside or out. This holding on
to traumatic experience permits her to remain connected to her experience and
to the individual who tormented her, but it alienates her from her family and
friends, and, very likely, from herself, in that it will be difficult for her to be
herself in light of this experience, to act and relate with others in ways that are
not disrupted by frequent feelings of unreality, confusion, or despair.
Winnicott’s idea, discussed in the previous chapter, of an “incommunicado
element” of self, which must be protected from the world of objects lest it be
adjusted or altered (1965, 187), seems to come into play in the case of both the
repetition of traumatic experience, as in the case of Jan, and its hiding, a subject
to be explored in greater detail in Chapter 7, on the experience of hikikomori. If
Jan’s experience shattered the integrity of his separate self, and if the Kittredges’
experience with Paul broke through the “barrier” or “protective shield” (Caruth
1996, 61) surrounding their home and their private lives, then it would seem that
traumatic experience sets itself up both inside and outside the self, as an object
around which both Jan’s and Ouisa’s lives now revolve.
This is but another way of stating what has been set forth in Chapter 3 as the
hypothesis that trauma may be less about the après-coup effects of shock or incursion
than about the adoption of experience’s objects as a seemingly essential yet ultimately
unsatisfactory element of identity. As discussed earlier, if traumatic experience
cannot be held or contained within the self, but must be introjected and pro-
jected ad nauseam, then attempts to ‘possess’ such experience as part of the self’s
identity can only mean repeating and returning to experience, over and over again.
Thus, seeking to derive feelings of reality not from an authentic “little fragment
of living substance” (Freud 1920, 27), nor from a “secret self” protected from the
world, but from the repetition of traumatic experience and melancholy reunion
with experience’s objects, leads to a dilemma from which there is no easy escape.
76 Misunderstood experience in Le Malentendu

Notes
1 Freud considers play to be “the first stage of jokes” (1960, 156–157), and jokes to be
forms of “developed play” (222), because jokes and jests pursue aims discovered first in
play that nevertheless rely on sophisticated psychological mechanisms in order to find
expression.
2 As Jan drinks his poisoned tea at his “feast of the returning prodigal,” he says: “The least
I can do is to do it honor,” he says, “and so I shall have played my part until I leave this
place” (Camus 1958, 109).
3 The relationship between trauma and melancholia is substantial and complex. If one
examines the underlying fantasies and dynamics of traumatic repetition, one finds many
meaningful similarities (see, e.g., Caruth 1996; Freud 1957, 1961; Rauch 1998).

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5
EXPERIENCE AND CONTROL IN
HIGHER EDUCATION

Today, two contradictory discourses reign in American higher education. The

first is the pedagogical discourse of experience, by which, for approximately the past
four decades, experience has become a principal – if not the principal – value
guiding the development of teaching methods and pedagogical aims. Best repre-
sented by the renewed interest in the work of early twentieth-century American
philosopher John Dewey, the pedagogical discourse of experience recommends
the application of experiential, collaborative, and problem-solving orientations
and methods to virtually all academic disciplines.
There is “no such thing as educational value in the abstract,” writes Dewey
(1997, 46), stating what must have seemed to him to be a self-evident truth.
Having “taken for granted the soundness of the principle that education in order
to accomplish its ends both for the individual learner and for society must be
based upon experience” (89), what matters, for Dewey, is that students participate
in a “process of social intelligence” (72). That is, the processes and outcomes of
learning are both experiential and social in character. Indeed, the difference
between experience and sociality is intentionally blurred in Dewey’s account, as
will be discussed below. The Deweyan educator creates socially controlling
learning experiences that produce students who will contribute to the betterment
of society, which means the betterment of social experiences.
The second is the discourse of student narcissism, in some sense an age-old dis-
course involving the disparagement of the young, but, in this case, a definable new
trend in which the vaguely defined generations known as ‘millennials,’ ‘post-
millennials,’ ‘Generation Z,’ and, as Jean Twenge calls them, “Generation Me” are
characterized as uniquely and dangerously “narcissistic” (Twenge 2006; Twenge and
Campbell 2009; see also Bowker 2012; 2015). Unfortunately, most of those who
wield accusations of narcissism lack understanding of the concept or its origins,
 Experience and control in higher education 79

mistaking “narcissism” for excessive self-love, usually thought to be derived from

the indulgence of parents, overly tolerant educational cultures, or lax moral standards.
Related diagnoses of American youth as lacking “grit” or toughness have also
become increasingly fashionable (see Duckworth et al. 2007). Peter Gray (2015)
of Boston College argues that “young people, eighteen years and older, [are]
going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still
feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it.” Citing Dan Jones,
past president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center
Directors, Gray agrees that students today “don’t seem to have as much grit as
previous generations.”
Calls for increased stoutheartedness and accusations of childishness and narcis-
sism now work together to establish a narrative about education that suggests that
‘tough love’ and exposure to the realities of experience are needed to prepare young
people for the adult world, which is characterized as a world of labor, self-denial,
and sacrifice.
These discourses are problematic, contradictory, and at odds with other related
trends in higher education. Consider how, even as educators lament the rising
egocentrism of students, the ideal of ‘student-centeredness’ is simultaneously
embraced to justify an ever-increasing bevy of personalized services and amenities
available on college campuses, including, but not limited to: state-of-the-art
dining and athletic facilities; 24-hour Technical Support hotlines; four-year ‘gra-
duation guarantees’; personalized ‘skills teams’ comprising academic, financial, and
psychological staff; and myriad opportunities for ‘engagement’ activities that involve
the student in campus and community life. Today’s student is encouraged to believe
that most, if not all, of her needs, desires, and goals, even those having little to do
with formal education, can be met in connection with her learning institution.
So, on one hand, students’ expectations of ‘narcissistic’ gratification are stoked
by promises of an immensely stimulating, entertaining, and accommodating col-
lege experience. At the same time, the hostile attribution of student ‘narcissism’ is
deployed to justify efforts to break students out of their intellectual ‘comfort
zones’ and to expose them to the tough realities of life in the community, which is
the life they will face after college. It has become all but routine for educators in the
United States to be entreated – in campus addresses, teaching workshops, ‘webinars,’ or
institutional initiatives – to liberate students from their ‘narcissistic’ self-orientations,
which are thought to be correlated with low levels of “intrinsic motivation”
(Deci and Ryan 1985), by connecting learning experiences inside the classroom to
experiences outside the classroom, in ‘the real world.’ These ‘real world’ experiences
are imagined to motivate and prepare students for the type of social labor that
awaits them upon graduation (see, e.g., Curtis 2001; and Kolb and Kolb 2009).
Means of connecting so-called ‘real world’ experiences to college courses have
been developed far beyond yesterday’s ‘field trip.’ Today, some students spend a
majority of time in a course engaged in a community-service project, while other
students find that the ‘real world’ has overtaken their very classrooms, which are
80 Experience and control in higher education

no longer simple assemblages of desks and chairs but are ‘interactive learning
spaces’ and ‘collaboratoria,’ outfitted with the latest in ‘interactive technologies’
and designed, often at great expense, to maximize student stimulation and
technology-assisted interaction.
Although these trends are familiar to educators and scholars of teaching and
learning, in his recent Atlantic article, Michael Godsey relates a few truly mem-
orable examples of how “classroom environments that embrace … dynamic and
social learning activities are being promoted now more than ever,” to the detri-
ment of students, some of whom are “easily drained by constant interactions
with others.” For instance, the University of Chicago library announced recently
that “in response to ‘increased demand,’ librarians are working with architects
to transform a presumably quiet reading room into a ‘vibrant laboratory of
interactive learning’” (2015).
Similarly, Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric has challenged its
students to “forego passivity in favor of contribution and participation,” appar-
ently because, unbeknownst to many writers, writing is “a communal act,” not a
“private isolated one.” Indeed, the site explains, “students must overcome isola-
tion in order to learn to write” (Dartmouth College 2015). Worse, Georgia
College’s official statement on collaborative learning informs students: “Together
is how we do everything here at Georgia College. Learn. Work. Play. Live.
Together. … It’s a fact. We’re all in this together” (2015). Perhaps Godsey is not
wrong to compare this statement to Sartre’s famous line from Huis Clos (No
Exit): “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is other people) (1989).
If experience-based approaches are designed in part to enhance students’
‘intrinsic motivation’ to learn, then it becomes either an ironic or misguided use
of the adjective ‘intrinsic’ when students’ motivational levels become the objects
of extensive manipulation by educators and administrators. Indeed, too few eye-
brows were raised when Dan Berrett, unwittingly echoing Noam Chomsky,
titled his popular article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Can Colleges
Manufacture Motivation?” (2012).
As if the confusion over who is motivating whom were not enough, experi-
ence-based learning efforts stand in uncomfortable relation to the increasing
emphasis on the socio-economic instrumentality of academic work. It is neither
“educational value in the abstract” nor learning for its own sake that is advertised
in campus brochures, nor underscored in campaign rhetoric about the value of
education. Rather, education is now conceived almost exclusively in terms of its
economic benefits to the student and to the community.
To take but one example, the educational and political prioritization of what
are known as STEM disciplines – disciplines related to Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics – has been clearly embraced by the US govern-
ment and, subsequently, by both public and private learning institutions. As
Gonzalez and Kuenzi outline in their Congressional Research Report, efforts to
promote STEM have been officially justified by:
 Experience and control in higher education 81

the relationship between STEM education and national prosperity and

power. … [T]oday the economic and social benefits of scientific thinking
and STEM education are widely believed to have broad application for
workers in both STEM and non-STEM occupations. As such, many con-
temporary policymakers consider widespread STEM literacy, as well as spe-
cific STEM expertise, to be critical human capital competencies for a 21st
century economy.
(2012, 1)

One way to understand how these contradictory discourses and practices could all
stand side by side is to recognize the financial interests that unite them. The costs
of new services and amenities are justified by their relationship to increased
enrollment and retention of students: More students apply, more pay tuition, and
more are kept satisfied and in good academic standing. Affording students
opportunities to forge ‘lifelong’ identifications with learning institutions also fos-
ters alumni involvement and monetary donations after graduation. Community
activities and partnerships may be understood as highly marketable semi-public
‘events’ that serve publicity functions for learning institutions, functions integral
to developing corporate sponsorships and affiliations with community institutions,
not to mention both private and public grants available to institutions that can
demonstrate their ‘social impact.’
But it would be foolish to presume that changes in higher education in recent years
have had only financial motives at their root. There are ‘true believers’ among
university executives, administrators, and faculty who, over time, have inaugurated
an ideological transformation that transcends financial strategy. In this chapter, I argue
that these two discourses, together with their contradictions, may be understood
only if we regard the focus on shaping the student’s experience as an effort not to lib-
erate the student from his ‘narcissism,’ nor to afford him opportunities for intel-
lectual growth. Rather, experience-based education represents an effort to correct
the putatively self-satisfied subjectivity of the student by coercing him to replace
the discovery and pursuit of his authentic needs with activities that promote
enmeshment with the educator’s, the institution’s, and the community’s needs.
To put it in a stark light: Many experience-based pedagogies and methodolo-
gies aim to destroy the student’s self. This aim is motivated partly by hatred and
envy, but, most importantly, by a narcissistic dilemma faced not by students but
by educators in the increasingly deprived and depriving environment higher edu-
cation has become. This dilemma, one in which academics and academic work
are deemed valueless unless they have ‘social impact,’ has not been resisted by
educators, but, surprisingly, has been embraced, perhaps in an attempt to salvage
careers, political identities, or modicums of self-respect. Unfortunately, the con-
sequent need to connect academic work to social experience and social impact, in
the classroom and out, ends by persuading students to participate in projects and
pursuits whose aims and ends are not their own.
82 Experience and control in higher education

Experience: continuous and interactive

In his 1938 Experience and Education, among his latest works, John Dewey presents
two related principles of experience: (1) continuity: that all experiences shape
future experiences both by shaping the self that experiences and by changing the
world and its objects; and (2) interaction: that experience is a bi-directional inter-
play of objective and internal conditions, a kind of interpenetration of individual
and world, one that can and must be managed by those with the benefit of
greater experience, such as parents and educators (1997).
Dewey maintains that experiences are naturally continuous, and that the indi-
vidual who fails to manage experiences so as to preserve their continuity is to
blame:

Different situations succeed one another. But because of the principle of

continuity something is carried over from the earlier to the later ones. …
The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. Otherwise the
course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into
making an experience is split. A divided world, a world whose parts and
aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided per-
sonality. When the splitting-up reaches a certain point we call the person
insane. A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when
successive experiences are integrated with one another.
(1997, 44)

Dewey’s defense of continuity puts the onus on the experiencing individual –

and, by extension, on the intermediaries of experience, such as educators – to
integrate experience as a continuity. It is “the individual factor that enters into
making an experience” that is responsible for making “the course of experience”
either orderly or disorderly, and the person either sane or insane.
Since Dewey also contends that experience is naturally and essentially inter-
active, that it consists of an inter-connection between internal psychic factors and
external objects of experience, then, in order for experience to be continuous,
interactive experiencing relationships must be consistent. That experience is
“interactive” means, for Dewey, that experience has the power to shape and
configure the individual’s inner world, principally to determine the individual’s
desires and values. “Every experience is a moving force,” writes Dewey. “Its
value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into”
(1997, 38).
The learning experience, if it is successful, should generate in the student a
desire for repeated experiences, based largely on the pleasure of controlling, or
believing she is controlling, both inner experience and experience in the outer
world. When Dewey writes that “the most important thing is to keep student’s
desire for learning intensified,” and that “attentive care must be devoted to the
 Experience and control in higher education 83

conditions which give each present experience a worthwhile meaning” (1997,

48–49), he specifically rejects the notion that educators should entice students to
learn with pleasurable or immediately gratifying learning experiences. Instead, he
asserts that the educator’s responsibility is to understand the particular “needs and
capacities of the individuals who are learning at a given time” (46), and to insti-
tute “conditions for the kind of present experience which has a favorable effect
upon the future” (1997, 50). That is, the educator arranges experiences such that
the student is led down a path of ‘discovery,’ where the discoveries have actually
been pre-arranged to suit the specific needs of each student and pre-assessed so as
to have maximally enticing effects upon her.1
Since, for Dewey, “all human experience is ultimately social” (1997, 38), the
educator must govern educative experiences such that the interactive elements in
learning experiences contribute to the continuous growth of a social attitude, an
attitude that looks favorably upon future similar educative experiences. The student’s
experiences must generate in him an unquestioned sociality, a paradigmatic orien-
tation toward social objects and toward the useful and productive interactions he
may have with them.
Continuity and interaction, then, are not merely descriptive qualities of
experience, but are prescriptions and objectives that determine experience’s value.
Since “continuity and interaction in their active union with each other provide
the measure of the educative significance and value of an experience,” these become
the “immediate and direct concern of an educator,” who must regulate all
objective conditions and each learning experience, including:

not only words spoken but the tone of voice in which they are spoken …
equipment, books, apparatus, toys, games played … materials with which an
individual interacts, and, most important of all, the total social set-up of the
situations in which a person is engaged.
(1997, 44–45, emphasis added)

The conclusion Dewey draws from the intersection of his two principles is that
great attention must be devoted not only to the external, objective conditions of
experience, but to the internal states of students, such that their internal experi-
ences are also well regulated, educative, and orderly. How the educator may
consistently transform the interior world of the student, then, is the primary
question of Dewey’s text.
“The ideal aim of education,” Dewey writes, “is creation of power of self-control.
But the mere removal of external control is no guarantee for the production of
self-control” (1997, 64). On the contrary, technologies of “social control” must
be improved, made more subtle, even made invisible, so that “self-control”
may be instilled without the student ever feeling as if she has been controlled.
Needless to say, the solution Dewey proposes to generate this quantity and quality
of control over the student is “experience” (51–60).
84 Experience and control in higher education

Technologies of self/social control

“The ordinary good citizen,” explains Dewey, “is as a matter of fact subject to a great
deal of social control,” although this control is not “felt to involve a restriction of
personal freedom” (1997, 52). Why is this?, Dewey wonders, and how can this
situation be duplicated with young people in the educational environment?
While appearing to liberate students from restrictive, traditional educational meth-
ods, the aim of Deweyan education is the unthought acceptance of the controlling
effects of experience upon the student’s activities and intentions. The educative ideal at
which Dewey aims is, in several ways, identical to what Michel Foucault famously cri-
tiques as technologies of self-discipline and self-government (1975, 1980), in which
individuals internalize frameworks and agents of control, unwittingly recapitulating
political power upon and through their thoughts, language, and behavior.
To “guarantee the production of self-control” in the student, Dewey recom-
mends a course of experiential interactions between the student and the social
environment, carefully designed by the educator, such that the student comes to
believe that she is being guided along by the ‘natural’ force of her own experience.2
When there is a “weakness in control” within the student, it arises:

from failure to arrange in advance for the kind of work (by which I mean all
kinds of activities engaged in) which will create situations that of themselves
tend to exercise control over what this, that, and the other pupil does and
how he does it. This failure most often goes back to lack of sufficiently
thoughtful planning in advance.
(Dewey 1997, 57)

Dewey sets out three related means of achieving this end: the creation of an
illusion of freedom in the student; the diffusion of the locus of control across the
social group; and the generation of experiences of fusion that lead to indelible
attitudinal shifts.

The illusion of freedom

As discussed above, the “interactive” nature of experience means, for Dewey, that
educators must consider not only objective conditions but also internal ones, for
the problem with the “traditional education” against which he rails is “not that it
emphasized the external conditions that enter into the control of the experiences
but that it paid so little attention to the internal factors which also decide what
kind of experience is had” (1997, 42). Dewey’s call for attention to the “needs
and capacities of the individuals who are learning” may seem liberal enough, but
the goal of understanding students is not to gauge or serve their authentic desires,
but to arrange learning encounters that “will function in generating an experience
that has educative quality with particular individuals at a particular time” (46).
 Experience and control in higher education 85

Indeed, when Dewey recommends that educators heed students’ communities –

a recommendation that has been used to justify all manner of experience-based,
community-based, and service-based learning projects – he does not intend this
recommendation to mean that students should literally leave their classrooms and
learn via community-based experiences. Instead, he urges educators to gather
knowledge about students’ home lives and communities as tools, granting edu-
cators greater access to students’ psyches. Better understandings of where students
‘come from,’ and with what they are familiar, helps the educator ascertain how
they will respond to various learning experiences (1997, 39–41). In fact, it would
be entirely possible to host a strictly Deweyan ‘experiential learning program’
wherein students never left the classroom, for Dewey’s account of the value of
learning about the student’s community is as a reconnaissance operation for edu-
cators, to gather information that may be used to entice, manipulate, and ulti-
mately mystify the student into believing that he is operating freely in an
environment that he has chosen, when, of course, the opposite is the case.
When Dewey asks himself and his readers what ends increased “liberty” in
education serves – and he insists quite emphatically that freedom or liberty is only
“a means, not an end” (1997, 61–62, emphasis in original), he offers three sur-
prising answers. First, a certain degree of freedom afforded to students permits the
educator to gain greater knowledge of them. By using the data offered in ‘free’ divul-
gences of students’ thoughts and feelings and in spontaneous “disclos[ures of] their real
natures” (62), the educator may tailor and craft more “educative” experiences. If
the educator unwisely restricts students’ freedom to such a degree that nothing of
their personalities can be known, then “there is only an accidental chance that the
material of study and the methods used in instruction will so come home to an
individual that his development of mind and character is actually directed” (62).
Second, freedom counteracts passivity and quietude, which represent the most
substantial threats to a Deweyan education, since participation- and group-effects
are the primary technologies employed to achieve the pedagogical aim of self-control
directed toward socially redeeming ends. Passivity and quietude degrade the coercive
power of the social situation and threaten to ruin the illusion of total, voluntary,
shared participation on which the Deweyan educator relies. To remain apart, alone,
or uninvolved now represents not merely an individual withdrawal but an opposi-
tion to the scheme of educative control that requires the involvement of the entire
learning group. If the freedom of students does not lead to this end, then it “tends to
be destructive of the shared cooperative activities which are the normal source of
order” (1997, 63).
What is truly fearsome in “the new education” (1997, 18–22) is not a student’s
excessive freedom or devolution into unpredictable behavior, but agnosticism,
separation from the group, aloneness, disinterest, or, worst of all, an “anti-social
attitude” (57). When a group’s meanings and purposes are held together by
shared experience, about which more will be said below, the greatest threat does
not arise from those who accept the group as holder of authority, even if they
86 Experience and control in higher education

simultaneously behave wildly. The real threat to the learning group is the student
who rejects the group experience and seeks to remain distinct from or separate
from it. This student shuns the control of the leader, who has diffused her lea-
dership throughout the group structure, the learning situation, and the other
group members who have all been coerced so as to internalize her control.
Of course, there are ways of preventing the separation of the student. Paige
Wolf (2015), of George Mason University’s Business School, recently argued that
the primary benefit of their interactive learning program is its incontestable power
to break down of the boundaries of the individual student. Everything, from the
physical environment to the norms embedded in the culture, means that “stu-
dents can’t hide,” she claims. “They feel responsible for participating.” In this
way, we may not be entirely incorrect to imagine students who might wish to
stand apart as those unlucky individuals in Rousseau’s social contract who deviate
from the general will and so are “forced to be free” (1987, 150).
Third, the student must believe he is “participat[ing]” in “the formation of the
purposes which direct his activities … to secure the active cooperation of the
pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying” (1997, 67). Of
course, the student does not really get to participate in defining these purposes any
more than he designs the learning experiences, themselves. Dewey never remo-
tely suggests that the student should take part in the creation of either. Rather, he
is quite emphatic that the more experienced educator should always determine
the aims and designs of all learning encounters (38–40). But the educator must
find a way to convince the student that he is freely participating so that the force
of the experience can take full effect.
Since Dewey argues that “freedom is … identical with self-control,” being
“the power to frame purposes and to execute or carry into effect purposes so
framed” (1997, 67), one might think that respect for the student’s autonomy
would be central to his philosophy. But Dewey here seems to mistake self-control
for self-determination, for the capacity to create, think, and act on behalf of
authentic aims and purposes. This mistake, I argue here and in the following
chapter, derives directly from an over-emphasis on experience, since, according
to the logic of experience, higher purposes are always defined by greater experi-
ence, such that submitting to experience or its object comes to be mistaken for
thinking and acting on behalf of one’s potential self (see also Levine 2011).
As “we can be aware of consequences only because of previous experiences,”
the development of purpose depends, for Dewey, not only on the power of self-
control but on the acceptance of the guidance of a more experienced other. And
“since freedom resides in the operations of intelligent observation and judgment
by which a purpose is developed, guidance given by the teacher to the exercise of
the pupil’s intelligence is an aid to freedom, not a restriction upon it” (1997, 71).
Mechanical uniformity and rigid external controls are rejected by Dewey not because
he is interested in facilitating the student’s creativity or the pursuit of students’ authentic
aims. Rather, rigidity and uniformity prevent the educator from divining the
 Experience and control in higher education 87

idiosyncrasies of each student, and, therefore, from developing stratagems to “direct,”

shape, and control the mind and character of each student. These differences in
emphasis represent important philosophical and psychological differences related to
how the student is regarded and treated. Ultimately, Dewey’s “freedom … identical
with self-control” is reminiscent of the dark side of “positive liberty” or “positive free-
dom,” referred to in Chapter 2 as a common understanding of the meaning of selfhood.
If positive freedom means the fulfillment of the self’s aims and goals, many
liberals have pointed out, correctly, the risk that this orientation to freedom may
be co-opted by more powerful others (Berlin 1969). In such a case, it is not the
self that determines its authentic aims and goals but a teacher, leader, or master
who defines what the self should desire. This risk, of course, does not negate the
importance of self-determination in defining both freedom and selfhood. Instead,
it reveals that there is a fine and easily obscured line between supporting the
freedom and selfhood of students and destroying it.
Dewey is right that:

there is no intellectual growth without some reconstruction, some remaking,

of impulses and desires in the form in which they first show themselves. This
remaking involves inhibition of impulse in its first estate. The alternative to
externally imposed inhibition is inhibition through an individual’s own
reflection and judgment.
(1997, 64)

But while it is true that managing primitive impulses is an important component

in both freedom and self-development, it is also true that organized efforts to
restructure students’ impulses without their knowledge or consent, and to replace
them with experiences aimed at producing qualities of self-control and pragmatic
value-orientations, may result in the loss of contact with what is real and
authentic in the student. There are more than enough grounds to suspect that a
student of Dewey’s method would find herself remaking her will not ‘freely,’ not
in accordance with her own higher aims and goals, but, rather, in accordance
with the demands of the learning experiences carefully arranged and tailored to
induce acceptance of the aims of the educator and learning institution.

Diffusion of the locus of control

Perhaps the most important aspect of Dewey’s thought concerning the aim of
self-control is, as we have said, that in order to ensure student cooperation and
internalization of the educative experience, the student must never experience
control as “the manifestation of merely personal will” but as “control … exercised
by situation in which all take part” (1997, 54). The ideal is that “control of indivi-
dual actions is effected by the whole situation in which individuals are involved, in
which they share and of which they are co-operative or interacting parts” (53).
88 Experience and control in higher education

Some of the most famous psychological studies, such as Stanley Milgram’s

obedience experiments (Milgram 1974) and Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison
Experiment” (Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo 1973), not to mention historical
studies of civilian involvement in the commission of atrocities (see Browning
1998), have demonstrated that the power of the social situation is considerable in
shaping individual attitudes and behaviors. Part of the force of the situation resides
in the fact that situations can be made to appear given, natural, or inevitable, as if
they were not fabricated or constructed by human design. The apparently
voluntary participation of members in social situations also contributes to a feeling
that certain tasks and limitations are obviously necessary or unquestionable.
Dewey argues that the educator must take full advantage of these persuasive
qualities of social situations: The “teacher [must] arrange conditions that are
conducive to community activity and to organization which exercises control
over individual impulses by the mere fact that all are engaged in communal pro-
jects.” The planning must allow for “individuality of experience” yet be “firm
enough to give direction towards continuous development of power” (1997, 58).
The force of the situation derives largely from its shared quality: that it is a
situation in which an entire group takes part. The fact of others’ participation
lends to the activity a sense of legitimacy that is not unrelated to the drive to
comply and conform, not to mention the dread of rejection. The Deweyan
educator is invited to avail herself not only of the enticements of sociality, but of
the threat of isolation, imagined to result from disobedience or withdrawal:

The primary source of social control resides in the very nature of the work
done as a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to
contribute and to which all feel a responsibility. Most children are naturally
“sociable.” Isolation is even more irksome to them than to adults. … But
community life does not organize itself in an enduring way purely sponta-
neously. It requires thought and planning ahead. The educator is responsible
for a knowledge of individuals and for a knowledge of subject-matter that
will enable activity ties to be selected which lend themselves to social orga-
nization, an organization in which all individuals have an opportunity to
contribute something, and in which the activities in which all participate are
the chief carrier of control.
(1997, 56)

The problem with traditional schooling was that the school-day did not consist
of experiences “held together by participation in common activities” and, con-
sequently, the ideal “conditions of control were lacking.” Without this more
effective form of control, control had to be exerted by the direct interventions of
the teacher as a superior, external will who “as the saying went ‘kept order.’ He
kept it because order was in the teacher’s keeping, instead of residing in the
shared work being done” (Dewey 1997, 55, emphasis in original).
 Experience and control in higher education 89

Alternatively, when experience guides education, a social group is formed

(Dewey 1997, 58). The educator is encouraged to take up a position within this
group that disguises his power to make his power appear to be the power of the
group. As “the teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on
that of leader of group activities” (59), a significant shift takes place in the learn-
ing experience, such that students now face choices involving group participation
versus isolation, rather than obedience versus defiance.
Although Dewey pays lip-service to the idea that learning activities should
express the student’s aims and not the educator’s, there is no room in his
philosophy for students’ authentic purposes to develop or to find expression.
Indeed, he seems even to confuse the facilitation of genuinely student-directed
learning with the creation of the illusion of it, when he argues, for instance, that
the educator’s:

suggestion [is] made to develop into a plan and project by means of the
further suggestions contributed and organized into a whole by the members
of the group. … The essential point is that the purpose grow and take shape
through the process of social intelligence.
(1997, 71–72)

“Social intelligence,” as it was originally defined by E.L. Thorndike, and likely in

the sense in which Dewey used the term while writing in the 1920s and 1930s,
meant the “ability to understand and manage other people, and to engage in
adaptive social interactions” (Kihlstrom and Cantor 2011, 359). Around the same
time, Moss and Hunt defined social intelligence as the “ability to get along with
others” and Vernon described it as the:

ability to get along with people in general, social technique or ease in

society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other mem-
bers of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods or underlying
personality traits of strangers.
(Kihlstrom and Cantor 2011, 359–360)

Participating in a “process of social intelligence,” then, requires not only a high

degree of “susceptibility to stimuli from other members of the group,” but the
ability to cooperate with others in projects that Dewey prefers to describe as
games. The language of ‘games,’ is actually a fruitful one for our purposes, for
games may describe not just the games of school-children but the more complex
social and symbolic games played by both children and adults.
The “controlling feature” of all games is that the rules are embedded within
the game-structure such that they ultimately become identical with the game,
and, to a great extent, incontestable:
90 Experience and control in higher education

The rules are a part of the game. They are not outside of it. … As long
as the game goes on with reasonable smoothness, the players do not feel that
they are submitting to external imposition but that they are playing the
game. … Those who take part do not feel that they are bossed around by an
individual person or … subjected to the will of some outside superior person.
(Dewey 1997, 52–53)

Just so in learning experiences, where the diffusion of power across the social
group may be continually relied upon, since it is “not the will or desire of any one
person which establishes order but the moving spirit of the whole group. The
control is social, but individuals are parts of a community, not outside of it” (54).
Even in competitive games, there is a fundamental “sharing in a common
experience,” which is, in fact, inseparable from the common experience of
internalizing the rules of the game as if they were something like natural law.
Indeed, players of games tend to identify with the rules of the game so pro-
foundly that they become upset not at the arbitrary exigencies and limitations
built into the game, but, rather, at the suspicion that someone has violated or
exceeded those exigencies and limitations, that is, that someone has broken the
rules. Breaking the rules of the game, of course, is akin to breaking the shared
experience that is the unspoken bond uniting the group.
Thus, objections to rule-breaking may be understood as objections to the
attempted assertion of separate selves or independent wills over and against the
shared experience of the group, which is its law. The experience of the group
and its law are, of course, not as naturally or freely developed as a student might
think, since they are meticulously designed in advance by the educator. It is in
moments of game-playing, then, that students may feel free and unencumbered
but are, in fact, confused about where the game ends and where they begin;
confused, in a sense, about the nature of their own experience.

Fusion with experience’s objects

Dewey, along with other empiricist-pragmatists of his day, is known for objecting
that, when we try to speak about our experience, we end up speaking about
ourselves, about our act of experiencing instead of about the object of experi-
ence. If we try, for instance, to describe our experience of a chair, we end up
describing how we think about the chair, or the color we perceive in the act of
seeing the chair. In our intellectual vanity, we erase experience’s object: the chair.
Of course, there is nothing objectionable about taking our perception of the chair
as an ‘object’ of study for scientific or phenomenological analysis, although this
‘object’ of inquiry must be recognized as a secondary and reflective object,
whereas the natural reality of the chair remains primary (Dewey 1929, 17–19).
When we fail to remember the difference between “crude primary experience”
and experience of second-order objects like thoughts or perceptions, when
 Experience and control in higher education 91

“reflection does not return to primary experience, when it fails to come back to
earth, its proceedings become obscure, and lose contact with everyday affairs”
(Earls 2012, 52–53).
For Dewey, in order for reflection upon experience not to “lose contact” with
experience’s objects, it must return to a primary experience that is not reflective.
Experiencing a chair in this unreflective way means experiencing no separation
between the chair and the individual sitting in it. What counts is not the experience
of considering sitting in the chair, nor the experience of remarking how com-
fortable or uncomfortable the chair is, but, rather, the crude experience of it. It is
when the human being and the chair are mixed up in an unreflective unity that
we may speak of primary or ‘ordinary’ experience in Deweyan language. In
object-relations language, such experience might be called ‘undifferentiated,’
‘contiguous,’ or even ‘fused.’
Following William James, Dewey’s view of experience is “double-barreled,”
meaning that “it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and
material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality,”
whereas “‘thing’ and ‘thought’… are single-barreled; they refer to products dis-
criminated by reflection out of primary experience” (1929, 10–11). Dewey means
that experience, itself, refers to moments of undifferentiation or fusion, where
differences between subject and object, thing and thought, are not perceived.
The goal is for both primary and secondary objects to “get the meaning con-
tained in a whole system of related objects,” to be “rendered continuous with the
rest of nature and [to] take on the import of the things they are now seen to be
continuous with” (1929, 8, emphasis added).
This philosophical contention directly informs Dewey’s vision of the power of
experience in education, where learning experiences render students “con-
tinuous” with the meanings and purposes of the educator and her broader educative
paradigm, without the educator ever having to make such things explicit. Since, as
we have noted, “the formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes” (1997,
47–48) – most importantly the attitude of sociality and the “creation of power of
self-control” (64) – are the primary goals of education for Dewey, we may say
that experience-based learning is not about learning to think, but about learning to
return to unthought moments, to internalize seemingly natural experiences and
their embedded values as touchstones to which to return throughout life.
Practitioners of experience-based pedagogies would respond to such accusa-
tions by referring to the ‘reflective’ moments Dewey advocated and the ‘reflective
practices’ now associated with many experience-based learning projects (see, e.g.
Kolb and Fry 1975). It is held that offering ‘reflective periods’ after or between
experiential encounters provides students with opportunities to take up critical or
higher-order judgments about their experiences. In practice, however, these
periods often become occasions to strategize better means of managing or con-
trolling the next experience (see Bowker 2012). Reflection on experience fails in part
owing to the attractive nature of experiences designed for students, and in part owing to
92 Experience and control in higher education

the enticements of unthought, unanalyzed experience. The pragmatic and instru-

mentalist foundations of experience-led education also reveal themselves here, for it is
to the use of the object and to the experience of future objects that periods of reflection
are dedicated much more often than to a paradigmatic critique of the framework of the
experience or the situation or community in which it is embedded.
Dewey, himself, writes that “the intimate coordination and even fusion of
these [immediately felt] qualities [of experience] with the regularities that form
the objects of knowledge … characterize intelligently directed experience” (1929,
xvi–xvii). That is, even in moments of ‘reflection,’ we design our next attempts at
“intelligently directed experience” and remain “fus[ed]” with the felt qualities of
experience. Reflection upon experience, especially ‘guided reflection,’ may even
become an instrument “to render [experience] more secure … by ability to
control the changes that intervene between the beginning and end of a process”
(xvi). Intelligently directed experience, such as we aspire to in experience-based
learning, may only further serve the end of linking the learner, the educator, the
object of experience, and its instrumental functions (xvi).
If experience teaches the learner how to accomplish something, it also instills
the value of practical achievement, gives an uncognized weight to the methods
and purposes imbricated in the instrumental approach, and distinguishes worth-
while and “genuine aims” from “merely emotional and fantastic ideals” (1929,
xvi). Dewey’s program, as we have already shown, centers upon the instillment of
a social and pragmatic orientation in the student, the adoption of the goals and
purposes of the educator as the student’s own, and the development of what
Dewey calls “the basic characteristic of habit,” which “covers the formation of
attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual; it covers our basic sen-
sitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we
meet in living” (1997, 35). If experience is to be a driver of education, it is
so that students will meet their conditions of living not as “intellectuals,” at
“the mercy of every passing breeze” (1997, 51, 85), but as experienced re-actors,
well habituated to the rules of the governing social games and the techniques
needed to gain control of themselves in response to – in reaction to – their
environments.

The Ivory Tower and the attribution of narcissism as a technique

of control
Against this vision of education stands the image of the Ivory Tower. We might
say that, in reinvigorating curricula and ‘re-branding’ themselves as experience-
oriented practitioners, American institutions of higher education have found it
necessary to address the ‘Ivory Tower Problem.’ The ‘Ivory Tower Problem’
contends that ‘traditional’ approaches to learning, classroom-based, text-based,
and reflection-based methods of learning, along with conceptions of colleges or
universities as entities separate from the social, political, and economic
 Experience and control in higher education 93

communities in which they are embedded, no longer prepare students to serve

the needs of employers, communities, fellow citizens, and the state. In their place,
efforts to reimagine the learning institution as a “community-partner” and to
dramatically increase connections between students’ education and community-
based, service-based, and experience-based activities have become widely popular
(see Bowker 2012, 2015; Mooney and Edwards 2001; Ruben 1999).3 Few are
the voices defending the idea that a separation should be preserved between the
learning institution and the community, or between the individual and the social
functions of education (Bowker 2012). That students, faculty, and academic
institutions should engage community needs, partake in community affairs, and
develop themselves in order to serve real and virtual communities is, in many
areas of scholarship and practice, taken to be an obvious point.
The advantages of this blurring of the private and the public, the student and
the society, are often expressed in terms that can only be described as grandiose
fantasy, fantasy in which it is claimed, for instance, that:

there is literally no end to the benefits of integrating cooperative learning

strategies into your pedagogy. … Cooperative learning is a way to integrate
the social with the academic; but what’s more, cooperative learning strategies
harness the greatest part of human evolutionary behaviour: sociality. If
humans are anything, we are social animals. So whether you are taking-down a
woolly mammoth or trying to study for the mid-term, humans are always more
successful when they exercise cooperation.
(Haynes 2015, emphasis added)

If there is to be no distinction, in higher education, between “taking down a

woolly mammoth” and “studying for a mid-term,” then surely the concepts of
students as selves and education as an intellectual project have been lost.
While there are no clear theoretical distinctions separating experience-based,
community-based, and service-based pedagogies, these loosely defined orienta-
tions inform a number of popular contemporary educational practices, including
problem-based learning, experiential learning, service learning, pedagogies of
social justice, academic learning communities, collaborative learning, and aca-
demic programs focused on the development of values such as ‘leadership,’
‘stewardship,’ and ‘citizenship.’ Such programs often reveal surprising attitudes
toward education, its place, and its meaning.
Consider, first, learning institutions’ statements of their own priorities, which
frequently center upon the promise that the institution will prepare the student
for the day when he will finally enter “the real world” (Barack, Mintz, and Emba
2014; Svetlik 2007) that lies “beyond the campus walls” (Courtney 2009; Moore
2015). One advertising slogan of a college in New York state proclaims to its
students: “When you’re here, you’re almost there” (D’Youville 2015). This notion,
that when a student is “here,” at the college, he is, in effect, nowhere, reminds us
94 Experience and control in higher education

how even an aspirational slogan may become complicit in producing a vision of

the learning institution as a non-place, outside of ‘real life,’ existing in a liminal
dimension from which one can only hope to escape.
Metaphors depicting educational institutions as ‘Ivory Towers’ or ‘non-places,’
surrounded by “campus walls,” emphasize the desolation of the learning envir-
onment, portraying it as a sort of prison. Although relatively few American
campuses actually feature high walls or towers, these metaphors ask us to imagine
that the traditional university keeps its members shut away from real life and
freedom, away from the meaningful and vital activities of others. At the same
time, these metaphors express hostility and perhaps envy toward the esoteric (i.e.,
exclusive) functions of towers and walls.
Ivory Towers, and those within them, seem to exist for themselves alone,
occupying themselves with ancient philosophies, devising theories full of abstract
speculation, even dressing and behaving in manners somewhat out of touch with
fashions known in the “real world.” The walls and towers that symbolize traditional
methods of teaching and learning, therefore, threaten to keep students and edu-
cators ‘out of touch’ and ‘inexperienced,’ cloistered, surrounded by stale, old books
or dry, dead theories. The campus is depicted as sterile and empty to the extent that it
is abstinent from inter-penetration with the community. If educators accept such
attributions, then we can only conceive of ourselves as infertile, impotent, or, in a
more common metaphor, engaged primarily in the non-reproductive act of ‘intel-
lectual masturbation.’ Such infertility and emptiness are often imagined to be the
result of centuries of scholars’ greedy solitude, in which we inhabited the esoteric
chambers of our minds and, instead of engaging with the world around us,
indulged in a sort of incestuous intellectual relationship with ourselves, sometimes
creating monstrous theories that would only wreak havoc if applied in the “real world.”
In an age where educational objectives are frequently defended with reference
not to students’ intellectual gains but to the financial benefits of holding degrees
or to the vivifying economic effects education can bring – as in the discourse of
STEM discussed above – it is not surprising that the Ivory Tower would be
condemned as reactionary and purposeless. Indeed, the relationship between
community and educator in which the former confers meaning and value on the
work of the latter is likely reinforced by changing economic realities according to
which educational institutions, particularly smaller ones, are, in fact, increasingly
dependent upon community members to assure their financial survival in the
form of grants, donations, corporate gifts, and sustained student enrollment.
All of this is to suggest that educators and learning institutions now face a
narcissistic dilemma of their own, one in which they seem no longer capable of
generating their own value. At the heart of this narcissistic dilemma is a damaging
attribution, an attribution that is not always recognized and that is coped with in
destructive ways. The attribution is that institutions of learning, faculty members,
administrators, and students are all in danger of succumbing to an isolation that
threatens our destruction, a threat from which we may be saved only by engaging
 Experience and control in higher education 95

in a process of “social intelligence,” only by re-orienting our aims to match those

of society.
That experience-based pedagogies have been embraced by many American
educators suggests that they have come to accept self-attributions of emptiness
and their implicit imperative to locate the value of academic work in its capacity
to serve the needs of society, to have ‘social impact,’ be it local, regional, national,
or global. The basic meaninglessness of ‘abstract’ academic work can only be
redeemed, on this account, if we can break down “campus walls” and forge a
(re)productive relationship with the community, if we can “learn to serve and serve
to learn” (Hurley 2013), if we can blur or erase any differences between the
students’ goals, the educator’s demands, and the needs of the community.
If contact with the community is what safeguards us from sterility or emptiness,
then educating a student means developing in that student skills and attitudes
endorsed by social groups and community institutions. The student is educated, as
it were, on behalf of society. We have abandoned the notion that, while in college,
a student should be permitted to indulge in inhabiting an ivory tower, a sort of
adolescent holding environment, protected to some degree from relating to
objects in the real world and, thus, protected from impingement and undue external
demand. Instead, we insist upon a fundamental identity of interests, shared by
educators, students, and the community to which the student must adapt.
Students who wish to gain favor with their professors and their institutions are
encouraged to accept this identity of interests and to collude, as it were, in their
own enmeshment with the goals and values of the community. Of equal
importance, the educator who offers up her students to community experience
may become identified with the community’s idealized value. Community orga-
nizations now ‘need’ the educator, thank the educator for her ‘service,’ nominate
the educator for awards, and praise her for training young people to serve ‘social’
ends. Most dangerous about this dynamic is the possibility that students’ sub-
jective needs become secondary to the achievement of a desired identification
between educator and community, even to the extent that the student’s educa-
tion and the educator’s teaching practice are transformed into a ritualized sacrifice
of the student’s self to the community.
By accepting the premise that separation from the community leaves both
educators and students without meaning or value, today’s student has met with attri-
butions, not unlike ‘narcissism,’ once reserved for inhabitants of the Ivory Tower.
Although many students are willing to orient their educations toward the attain-
ment of qualifications for careers and toward other exigencies of the “real world,”
students – or faculty – who resist the social control exercised via experience-
oriented pedagogies may be viewed as depriving or dangerous, since they threa-
ten the new source of institutional value and, quite possible, the foundation of
institutional financial survival. Such students may find themselves facing hostile
attributions or other forms of official or unofficial discipline for being ‘narcissists’
who must take more seriously the learning experiences that will engender the
96 Experience and control in higher education

attitudinal and behavioral shifts necessary to serve the needs of the educator. In
this way, we may see in educators’ fervent desire to tear down the Ivory Tower
an expression of hatred of the student’s self (see Bowker 2012, 2015).4

Experience and the social order

Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy entails the premise that experiences are valuable
only if they are useful in shaping future useful experiences, useful not only for the
individual but for others: Experiences are valuable if they “promote the enriched
growth of further experience” in the student (1997, 73), but the “growth of
further experience” also has a pragmatic and utilitarian meaning. This principle is
applied with considerable enthusiasm in the late chapters of Experience and Edu-
cation, where Dewey presents experience-led scientific education as the crux of a
renewed social order.
Dewey begins with a fairly reductive account of human experience, whereby:

existing experience in detail and also on a wide scale is what it is because of

the application of science, first, to the processes of production and distribu-
tion of goods and services, and then to the relations which human beings
sustain socially to one another.
(1997, 80)

Thus:

it is impossible to obtain an understanding of present social forces (without

which they cannot be mastered and directed) apart from an education which
leads learners into knowledge of the very same facts and principles which in
their final organization constitute the sciences.
(80–81)

Put simply: Science determines existing experience because experience is reduci-

ble to calculable social forces, processes of production and distribution. These
processes determine social relations which, in turn, determine experience. Edu-
cation, therefore, must teach students to “master and direct” social forces in order
to create better and more useful experience.
The only way that “a better social order can be brought into existence” (1997, 81),
which is the real goal of learning, is to apply scientific and pragmatic methods not
just to problems of social engineering, but to the project of education, itself. That
is, the “intellectual organization” generated in the population via programs of
scientific, pragmatic, and experiential learning “is not an end in itself but is the
means by which social relations, distinctively human ties and binds, may be
understood and more intelligently ordered” (83). The purpose and meaning of
learning, for Dewey, is the creation of stewards of social progress who will serve
 Experience and control in higher education 97

the society by controlling and improving those objects of experience most valued
by the society.
The “better social order” Dewey imagines is one in which greater control over
objects of practical experience and “everyday life” (1997, 80) is valued throughout
the educational system. The Deweyan attitude toward experience may become
second nature in students if educators apply consistent training in science and its
pragmatic value-orientation so as to develop “intense emotional allegiance to the
method” (1997, 81). And the task of the educator can be measured (only) by
“what it accomplishes, or fails to accomplish, for a future whose objects are linked with
those of the present” (76). That is, a Deweyan education is valuable not for what
changes it may affect in students, but for what improvements in social conditions
are forged on behalf of the objects and experiences of the future.
Since Dewey offers no usable guideline to define what is “better” or “worse”
other than “the enriched growth of further experience” (1997, 73), we run into a
paradox of pragmatic moral philosophy: that what is “good” is what “works,”
and what “works” is “good” because it “works.” Pragmatic orientations, then,
while seeming progressive in spirit, often tend both toward instrumentalism and
conservatism, for accepting the equation of “the good” with “what works”
requires a high degree of adaptation to existing political, social, and economic
conditions. One strives, that is, to improve experiences within existing frameworks
and infrastructures. The Deweyan student does not question science, itself, but
uses the scientific method to enhance experience. He does not question the need
for ‘economic progress’ but applies his experience in producing it. The depth of
the critique offered by experience-oriented education is limited by the concep-
tion of experience itself. If one has not directly experienced a world without
science or capitalism, one has no data, no prior experience from which to draw in
order to learn about it, and one is relegated to what Dewey dismisses as reflection
upon “emotional and fantastic ideals” (1929, xvi).
That a “better social order” is the true aim of a Deweyan education is made
evident by his account of the power of external conditions to determine our
internal states:

Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree
the objective conditions under which experiences are had. The difference
between civilization and savagery, to take an example on a large scale, is
found in the degree in which previous experiences have changed the objec-
tive conditions under which subsequent experiences take place. The exis-
tence of roads, of means of rapid movement and transportation, tools,
implements, furniture, electric light and power, are illustrations. Destroy the
external conditions of present civilized experience, and for a time our
experience would relapse into that of barbaric peoples.
(1997, 38–39)
98 Experience and control in higher education

If changes in external conditions would lead directly to changes in our experi-

ence, then the “interactive” quality of experience would seem asymmetrically
interactive, heavily weighted toward the external. That is, one might imagine an
alternative case in which external conditions changed dramatically, and yet selves
were capable of withstanding such changes, continuing to forge experiences in
line with self-directed goals and expectations. Such selves would have to possess
within them a strong sense of place and purpose, and would have to be capable of
creatively acting upon, rather than merely reacting to, a changing environment.
One would think that the goal of education might be to create such sturdy
selves, a goal in keeping with our contemporary imagination of ourselves as living
in a world of rapid change and even recurrent crisis. That it is not suggests that our
vision of the control and power produced by education, like Dewey’s, resembles
the capitalist ideology in which the worker is imagined to master the machine,
manipulating its numerous handles and levers to produce on command, when, in
fact, it is the machine, its designer, and its owner who have, in effect, mastered
the worker, who have trained the worker to move when the machine requires it,
and who have therefore facilitated the mechanization of the human being.
In the following related excerpt from Dewey’s essay “The Need for a Recov-
ery of Philosophy” (1917), we see what begins as an attempt to balance naïve
philosophies of absolute subjectivity transform itself into a confusing account of
human action and reaction, control and adaptation:

Experiencing means living; and … living goes on in and because of an

environing medium, not in a vacuum. … The successful activities of the
organism … react upon the environment to bring about modifications
favorable to their own future. The human being has upon his hands the
problem of responding to what is going on around him so that these changes
will take one turn rather than another, namely, that required by its own
further functioning. While backed in part by the environment, its life is
anything but a peaceful exhalation of environment. It is obliged to struggle –
that is to say, to employ the direct support given by the environment in
order indirectly to effect changes that would not otherwise occur. In this
sense, life goes on by means of controlling the environment.
(1960, 48)

We may notice here how Dewey lumps together precisely what ought to be
distinguished. His phrase “reacting upon the environment” is an interesting
combination – or perhaps parapraxis – merging the phrases “reacting to” and “acting
upon.” While, of course, there is likely no pure action and no pure reaction without
admixture, Dewey’s conflation of the two leads him to equate our task of
“responding to what is going on around” us with living, and living with “con-
trolling the environment.” It leads him to equate self-preservation with self-realization,
 Experience and control in higher education 99

and to claim that our self-realization depends, paradoxically, upon “independent

changes in the surroundings” (1960, 48).
Once again, we see that Dewey grants more autonomy to the environment
than to the human being. So, far from a philosophy of naïve individualism, his
philosophy borders on naïve determinism, in which the human being’s role is, by
and large, to “react upon” changes that occur around her to preserve her life,
which, unfortunately for Dewey’s philosophy, is the same as preserving her self.
If “all human experience is ultimately social,” if freedom is equated with self-
control, and if adaptation requires self-control that is confused with self-determination
and controlling the environment, then there is really no refuge for the self, no
place or moment of separation, no point where the self’s experience might escape
or transcend the social environment and the objects in it. If it is true that our
experience would “relapse” to that of barbaric peoples simply because our
external conditions changed, then “the individual factor that enters into making
an experience” seem not even to belong to the individual, but to the external
world. Dewey is not wrong that human actions affect the world in which future
human actions occur, nor is he wrong that human experience is largely depen-
dent upon external conditions. Yet he seems to imagine the idea of “interaction”
in such a way that it always privileges the objects of experiences to such a degree
that the self disappears in an ‘educative’ program of adaptation.
Dewey advocates a model of teaching and learning by experience that, like
theories of the state of nature discussed in Chapter 8, confuses submission to
experience with self-realization, self-control with self-development. It is from
an examination of his theory of education, and a reflection upon how highly
esteemed his pedagogy remains, that we see how deeply entrenched are our
commitments to self-failure, deprivation, and even trauma: the trauma that
includes the erosion of the capacity to be a solitary self. So deeply held are our
commitments to the experiential value of learning that we hasten to apply them
even to children and young adults, ultimately to serve the needs of social groups
and community institutions that depend upon the absence of selves to build a
social order of merely experienced and experiencing beings.

Notes
1 It may be worth mentioning that Dewey’s educational philosophy was not targeted
specifically at university students, although he did not exclude them from his theories.
While his work remains influential throughout the educational system, some of the
ideals now appropriated for use in colleges and universities were originally aimed at
secondary-school- and even primary-school-aged children.
2 This proposal, of course, is reminiscent of Rousseau’s educational ideal in Émile (1979),
where the objective is to persuade Émile that his limits are natural, and not the result of
the superior force of others’ wills.
3 According to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), such efforts have
succeeded in encouraging college students to invest time and energy in their commu-
nities. In 2011, over fifty-seven percent of American Baccalaureate students reported
100 Experience and control in higher education

that they had “performed community service as part of a class,” while over eighty-seven
percent indicated that they had performed “volunteer work” in the past year (Pryor
et al. 2011). Although the NSSE disclaims its validity as a generalizable or comparable
measure of student trends, the effect of such surveys has been broad acceptance of the
belief that community-engagement is what students, faculty, administrators, community
organizations, employers, and public officials desire.
4 Although in some sense natural to the process of narcissistic object-relating, it is never-
theless surprising when communities that rely on narcissistic defenses wield accusa-
tions of narcissism at those who defy their demands. One may readily see how
common and how dangerous such dynamics can be in broader political culture. For
instance, in Jeffery Toobin’s (2013) The New Yorker essay on Edward Snowden,
Snowden is described as a “grandiose narcissist” for leaking classified NSA information
related to telephonic surveillance. Here, the attribution of narcissism serves to frame
Snowden’s act, and to re-frame the political import of the leaked information itself. If
Snowden is merely a “narcissist,” then his act is not political. It becomes, instead,
Snowden’s effort to aggrandize himself at the expense of a government agency and a
nation whose interests he was supposed to serve. At issue when considering whether
Snowden and others like him deserve to be considered heroes, criminals, or whistle-
blowers is really the way we interpret individual behaviors that defy the demands of
organizations and the society of which they are a part. The attribution of narcissism,
here, strips the individual and his actions of meaning, such that he and they appear to
be the result of a lack of control and a disregard for the stability of the social order, a
social order which is, in fact, built upon a narcissistic relationship in which the indi-
vidual obtains value only by serving agreed-upon ideals or objects of social utility. The
narcissistic attribution given to dissenters, protestors, and whistleblowers may be seen as
part of the social punishment for, and, therefore, part of the coercive deterrent against,
violating the rules of an already narcissistic exchange, which is, itself, part of the bond
that unites the group.

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6
ALONENESS AND ITS OPPOSITES

The previous chapters have explored ways in which ideologies of experience set
themselves against authentic aims of the self. We have devoted some attention to
what might be termed the pro-social tendency within ideologies of experience:
the tendency to over-value social objects of experience at the expense of the
development of the self. In Chapter 2, we noted how thinking may be perceived
as a threat to the group, and to the necessary transformation of the ‘bad’ to the
‘good.’ In Chapter 3, we considered how valorizations of self-failure and trauma
recommended the incorporation and re-transmission of unthinkable, traumatizing
experience for the sake of advancing collective goals and the preservation of
shared experience. In Chapter 4, we remarked how Jan’s fantasy of re-enacting
and re-engaging an experience of self-loss lead him to mistake reunion with his
family for a creative activity that might help him find his “place” or come “alive
again.” And in Chapter 5, we studied the example of experience in higher edu-
cation to demonstrate the lamentable situation in which students may be sacri-
ficed to venerated objects of social experience in the name of higher learning.
There, we explored the confusion between self-determination and self-control,
the latter being, for Dewey and others, a means of social control.
This latter confusion I take up again in the following two chapters, but from
the other side, as it were. Just as some ideologies of experience encourage forms
of self-control that are little more than self-repressive efforts aimed at forging
connections with experience’s social objects, there are equally recognizable
ideologies of experience that recommend social isolation and withdrawal under
the aegis of self-protection and self-mastery. In an important sense, however, the
differences between these strategies of obscuring the self are merely apparent, for
the student immersed in a group project and the individual in extreme isolation
may be equally wedded to internal objects of experience and their representatives
104 Aloneness and its opposites

in collective life. Indeed, by confusing isolation with aloneness, by confusing

hiding and mystification with the capacity for interior solitude appropriate to the
development of self, the attitudes and behaviors described in this chapter leave
individuals even more deeply fused to experience’s objects, for their inner and outer
worlds become so empty that there is little else left. As will be discussed more
thoroughly in Chapter 7, what those who hide are hiding from is, in many cases,
their selves, or the need, desire, or potential to make contact with and express their
selves. In these cases, however, the erroneous solution advanced is not identification
with or immersion in a group, but the secession from relatedness with others.
Because the literatures upon which I draw use both the terms ‘solitude’ and
‘aloneness’ frequently and interchangeably, so shall I. Both may be taken to refer
to the capacity of being alone I describe here. This capacity, it shall be made clear,
refers not primarily to the physical presence or absence of others, just as it differs
substantially from self-imposed isolation or other-imposed exclusion.

Being alone
In this chapter, I attend to the matter of the self’s capacity to be alone in the
context of the demands of the family, group, or community. I wish to argue that
it is from the capacity to be alone – which is not identical with hiding, isolation,
or withdrawal, and which depends, in part, upon the capacities to feel real and to
think and act autonomously – that both vital selfhood and authentic relationships
with others may arise. Thomas Merton summarizes this view rather succinctly:

When men are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings

pushed around by automatic forces, they lose their true humanity, their
integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When
society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be
held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent
and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude
and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes
putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.
(1958, 13)

Merton wisely notes that to be incapable of “interior solitude,” or to deprive the

self or others of such solitude, is to thwart the self’s capacity for healthy and
loving contact with itself and, therefore, for healthy and loving relationships with
others. What is more, the absence of solitude is an absence of a form of freedom,
without which love is replaced by hate, and creative and ethical activity is
replaced by either compliant or defiant resentful reactivity to others.
Well-known methods of punishment and torture, such as extended solitary
confinement, are designed to force isolation upon an individual in a way that
deprives her of the solitude needed to psychically survive it. There is an
 Aloneness and its opposites 105

identifiable category of abuse and maltreatment in which neglect, abandonment,

or punishing isolation undermines the ability to maintain contact with the self,
such that these experiences are tantamount to psychic annihilation. In such cases,
isolation means self-disintegration, to which even violent or abusive contact with
another may seem preferable.
There is all the difference in the world between imposed confinement and an
experience of aloneness or “interior solitude” because the experience of aloneness
or solitude depends upon the relationship between an individual’s inner (or psy-
chic) experience and the external world. The most important factor in this rela-
tionship is the factor of control: whether the isolated or solitary individual in
question possesses the capacity to “limit access” to the inner world (Levine 2003,
60–61), and, at the same time, possesses the ability to “control … the initiation,
maintenance, termination, and avoidance of social contact” (Stern 1985, 21–22).
Without such controls, the individual is constantly at risk of being intruded upon,
emptied, or abandoned. Such control entails the capacity to generate valuable
experiences in the internal world, for if one wishes to be when alone, and not
merely to physically survive, one must be able to generate and possess some of
the vital stuff of being.
If experiences of aloneness or solitude are created by the self and undertaken
with the expectation that there are good things to be found ‘inside’ the solitary
experience, experiences of isolation – whether self- or other-imposed – are
intended to deprive the individual of good things which are thought to exist only
on the ‘outside.’ We may even say that isolation – again, whether applied by
others or by the individual – strives to inflict a type of deprivation by which the
isolated individual’s dependence on the punishing (internal or external) object is
re-affirmed. This, we shall see, forms a large part of the condition known as
hikikomori, a self-imposed period of incarceration, often lasting for several years, in
which the individual both seems to seek an absolute severance of contact with
family and the social world, and yet, at the same time, behaves in such a way as to
re-affirm and even revive a dependent and indulgent relationship with others.
Montaigne observes that “there are ways to fail in solitude as well as in com-
pany,” for “it is not enough to have gotten away from the crowd … we must get away
from the gregarious instincts that are inside us.” “Ambition, avarice, irresolution,
fear, and lust,” he continues:

often follow us even into the cloisters and the schools of philosophy. Neither
deserts, nor rocky caves, nor hair shirts, nor fastings will free us of them. …
We take our chains along with us; our freedom is not complete; we still turn
our eyes to what we have left behind, our fancy is full of it.
(1965, 176, 182–183)

It is strange, to say the least, that a thinker like Montaigne would celebrate soli-
tary experience as the individual’s emancipation from “the crowd” and from our
106 Aloneness and its opposites

“gregarious instincts,” while claiming, as we have seen in Chapter 3, that the

vanity of thought and imagination are the ruin of both individual and society.
Indeed, Montaigne is not alone among modern champions of experience in
endorsing an ideal of solitude while rejecting the grounds upon which the
capacity for such solitude could develop and thrive.
Contemporary social theorists follow in Montaigne’s confusion, inveighing
against pervasive social powers while at the same time insisting that solitary indi-
viduals cannot and must not exist, lest they threaten the community. Several the-
orists already discussed, including Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan, and others, would agree that modern and postmodern individuals are
‘always already’ mediated by symbolic environments, normalized by custom, dis-
ciplined by power/knowledge, and implicated in the work of overlapping cul-
tural, economic, and political institutions. The factual claim of the impossibility of
aloneness and the normative claim that none ought to be alone are not terribly
different in nature, as both reflect the desire to make solitary experience impos-
sible, to ensure that no one ever be alone. As we shall see at the end of this
chapter and in the next, the inability or unwillingness to be alone implies, in
almost every case, an inability or unwillingness to recognize and support others’
being alone, which is to say, others’ being. This means that the capacity to be
alone is, in an important and often overlooked sense, central to the capacity to
relate ethically to others.
For Winnicott, the capacity to be alone is effectively “synonymous with
emotional maturity” (1965, 31), for it entails readiness for true, authentic
experience not marked by reactivity or defense and “relatively free from the
property we call withdrawal.” Of course, “the basis of the capacity to be alone is
a paradox” because the experience of being alone as an infant or child occurs “in
the presence of mother” (30–31). Nevertheless, from this initial paradox, an adult self
with the capacity to be alone may eventually develop around the internalization
of a safe, bounded, and benign environment provided by the parent (32).
Consider how vastly this benign internal environment differs from Nietzsche’s
famous discussion of the independent “free spirit” in Beyond Good and Evil:

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever
attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that
he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.
He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which
life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see
how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by
some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this
happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor
sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the
pity of men.
(1989, 41–42)
 Aloneness and its opposites 107

For Nietzsche, himself one of the great solitaries of recent memory, the solitary
individual is lost, endangered, imperiled. Most terrifying is her secession from the
“comprehension” (Verständnis) of the group. To be uncomprehended, to be
incomprehensible, means that the group can no longer ‘hold’ or ‘grasp’ her, that
she is permanently exiled from the care, recognition, and understanding of others.
Because Nietzsche here describes independence without the capacity to be alone –
not unlike the hikikomori’s isolation without aloneness – the way for such an individual
to survive is to call up an “inner constraint” to substitute for the lost dependence upon
the group or community. This “inner constraint” is not the same as a “strong” or secure
self, and may be more restrictive than the moral code of the group that has been quit,
for it may signify the incorporation of the self-occluding values encoded in experience’s
grandest objects, as we have discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.
The idea of an “inner constraint” is helpful in distinguishing between false
independence or defensive withdrawal and the genuine experiences of being
alone with which they are so often confused. Specifically, what is confused is the
matter of self-control and control over the boundary between internal and
external experience that allows for the protection of the inner world. An appro-
priate facilitating environment does not control the child but protects the inner
world of the child, such that if the child is not at risk of being intruded upon,
emptied, or displaced by others or events, then the emerging adult may one day
enjoy a sense of inner security and interior solitude.
The governing feature of the facilitating environment is not “constraint” or
control but creativity, such that meaningful and valuable experiences may be gener-
ated and contained within the inner world. Without these, being alone could not
be fulfilling. That is, if one is wholly dependent upon control over the self to
bring it in line with the needs of others, upon the reinforcement of “inner con-
straint,” then experiences of solitude can be little more than experiences of fear or
psychic starvation.
For those unable to be when alone, the condition of physical or psychological
distance from others or from representatives of others may be experienced as a
threat of annihilation. Such individuals cease to be, in a psychological sense, as
soon as they are disconnected from others or from their environmental sub-
stitutes. They exist – or feel they exist – only when plugged into a circuit of
connectedness. Break the circuit, and being ends. In such a vulnerable condition,
avoiding the disintegrative experience of non-being depends upon assuring reli-
able connection with others, such that rigid and compulsive behaviors may be
undertaken to ensure that connectivity is retained in all circumstances and that
the threat of aloneness is minimized at all times.
Put another way, if being a self entails being alone, and if an individual’s sense
of survival depends on not being alone, then surviving, paradoxically, depends on
not being, while being means death. The idea of selfhood, in such a condition,
becomes meaningless. What is more, the experience that best resembles or
simulates being depends upon constant contact and group-belonging, such that,
108 Aloneness and its opposites

although one finds the means therein to secure survival and a facsimile of alive-
ness, one survives under constant threat of annihilation by separation. Survival is
precarious, reliant upon satisfying internal and external conditions that assure
one’s place in the group.
In this case, self-control takes on a repressive meaning, since it amounts to the
need to withdraw, repress, or even extinguish aspects of self that threaten to disrupt
identification with or membership in the group or its ideals. Self-development,
self-protection, and self-determination, on the other hand, are necessary and
healthy aspects of mature selfhood. Too often, these self-affirming ideals are reduced to
self-control, as in Nietzsche’s quotation above. As we shall see, self-control is
often invoked as a value designed to assist in the project of self-suppression, to avoid
and deter genuine experiences of aloneness, both in the self and in others.

Controlled but not alone

At this point, we may remind ourselves that to be alone, in the sense I have
described above, it is not necessary that the self be literally or physically alone. Indeed,
the presence of the other, at certain times and in certain forms, is required in
order for the self to be alone. Thus, in considering the following, we must keep
in mind the idea that being alone is coincidental with, and not contradictory to,
being oneself among others and relating to others as a separate self.
Many celebrants of experience, modern and postmodern, upon close exam-
ination, defend positions of false aloneness: superficial rebellion against society
that actually reinforces identifications with objects of experience embodied in the
will of the majority, a community, a nation, or a privileged or sacred group.
Advocacies of experience as a vehicle for independence may actually express the
opposite wish: the wish to be fused with the object of social or political experi-
ence with which one may identify at the expense of separate selfhood. Ironically,
the grandiose experience found in fusion becomes more important than the
genuine experience of selfhood that is found in being alone, which also contains
the potential for an ethical relatedness we may call public being.

The Stoic
The Cyprus-born slave turned Stoic philosopher Epictetus is perhaps best known
for his insistence upon the difference between that which is in our power or “up
to us” (ἐφ' ἡμῖν) and that which is “not up to us.” “Our bodies are not up to us,”
states the Enchiridion, often to the surprise of today’s readers, “nor are our posses-
sions, our reputations, or our public offices.” By contrast, only “our opinions …
our impulses, desires, aversions” are within our control (1983, 11). While not
excluding periods of literal sequestration, the Stoics emphasized a metaphorical,
moral solitude in which the mind or soul was severed from the external world,
removing desire from any object of which one was not truly the master.
 Aloneness and its opposites 109

Based upon a rather complicated theory of knowledge and natural determinism

(see Saunders 1994), the Stoic goal was to ‘comprehend’ (katalepsis) the laws of
Nature such that we would be untroubled by events that might otherwise be
distressing. If we truly comprehended Nature’s Law and the natural inevitability
of death, for example, we would appreciate that living and dying are not “up to
us.” Thus, we would not suffer even at a loved one’s loss. “If you kiss your child
or your wife,” instructs Epictetus, “say that you are kissing a human being; for
when it dies you will not be upset” (1983, 12).
The Stoic’s apparent liberty is won by a profound identification with the will
of Nature, such that desire is never at odds with actual events, which are both
inevitable and well ordered, that is, ‘as they should be.’ Indeed, to achieve the
Stoic’s false solitude, one converts oneself into an object of Nature’s will: “Do
not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to
happen as they do happen, and your life will go well” (1983, 13). That is, suppress,
control, and change your authentic impulses, desires, and emotions such that they
accord with whatever occurs, and you will live in harmony with Nature.
For Seneca, a soul so aligned “is independent in its own fortress; and every
weapon that is hurled falls short of the mark” (quoted in Foucault 1988, 65). The
Stoic’s psychological distance from social life and its vicissitudes represents not an
effort to be alone in a robust sense but, rather, a defensive withdrawal. His effort
is not to be alone with his self, but the opposite: to sever contact with his self and
to replace his authentic needs and desires with those that accord with the object of
experience par excellence: Nature. “Remember,” advises Epictetus, “that you are
an actor in a play, which is as the playwright [Nature] wants it to be” (1983, 16).

The American
Alexis de Tocqueville’s prodigious Democracy in America (2000), first published in
1840, still influences political theorists concerned with the deterioration of civil
society. More recent studies like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950),
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), and Robert Bellah and his co-authors’
Habits of the Heart (1996), to name but a few, echo Tocqueville’s major concerns.
Tocqueville worried that the American democratic revolution had created a
lamentable creature known as an “individual.”
Individualism, for Tocqueville, was not something of which Americans should
be proud. Individuals in a democratic society, rather, are minimal, withdrawn,
and alienated from others and from themselves. American society “make[s] each
man forget his ancestors … hides his descendants from him and separates him
from his contemporaries; it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and
threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart” (2000, 484).
Tocqueville’s claim was that individualism in a mass democracy convinced citi-
zens not of their autonomy but of their inevitable dependence upon the greater
power of the majority.
110 Aloneness and its opposites

It may seem paradoxical to argue that Americans’ mental energies are regularly
turned back toward ‘private’ concerns, while at the same time, Americans are
enthralled to the will of the majority. It is a condition in which individualism and
democratic liberty reinforce majority rule, popular opinion, and even the force of
‘common sense.’ For Tocqueville, American society resembled nothing more
than a royal court in which citizens sang the praises of ‘the people’ in lieu of the
king, and in which value was located only in deeds that accorded with ideals that
were ‘popular’ (i.e., related to or in service of ‘the people’).
The philosophical underpinnings of democratic practice partly explain this
apparent paradox. In a democratic society, the will of the majority is the majority
of individual wills, each of which, according to the democratic premise of moral
equality, is as worthy as any other. Under the assumption of moral equality, two
heads are better than one, and a majority of heads is better than a minority. But
there is more than mathematics involved in the American worship of both ‘the
people’ and ‘the individual.’ American devotion to practical experience, con-
ceived as a form of democratic education available to all, endowed experience
with a nearly divine authority in American philosophies and literatures of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Lundin 2005, 163–165). Thus, ‘good’
acts and ‘good’ individuals are those that are aligned with the will and opinion of
the people, not because the majority forces them to be so, but because men of
experience are:

like travelers dispersed in a great forest in which all the paths end at the same
point. If all perceive the central point at once and direct their steps in this
direction, they are insensibly brought nearer to one another without seeking
each other, without perceiving and without knowing each other, and they
will finally be surprised to see themselves gathered in the same place.
(Tocqueville 2000, 588)

The dangerous consequence of democratic, majoritarian thinking, for Tocqueville,

could not be overstated. Whereas a king:

has only a material power that acts on actions and cannot reach wills, the
majority is vested with a force … that acts on the will as much as on actions,
and which at the same time prevents the deed and the desire to do it. I do
not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and
genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.
(2000, 243–244)

In such a society:

the public therefore has a singular power … the very idea of which aristo-
cratic nations could not conceive. It does not persuade of its beliefs, it
 Aloneness and its opposites 111

imposes them and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure
of the minds of all on the intellect of each.
(409)

The power of the majority, vested in part in the American ideology of experi-
ence, condemned most Americans to unwitting conformism, agitation, and pur-
suit of social status and material wealth: busy yet trivial existences in which
selfhood, solitude, and creativity could find no place. As American culture lost its
capacity to facilitate being alone, Americans increasingly reverted to the kinds of
activities that express not being a self, what Winnicott calls “the doing that arises
out of [not] being … a whole life … built on the pattern of reacting to stimuli”
(1986, 39):

[T]here is nothing less fit for meditation than the interior of a democratic

society. … Everyone is agitated: some want to attain power, others to take
possession of wealth. In the midst of this universal tumult, the repeated col-
lision of contrary interests, the continual advance of men toward fortune,
where does one find the calm necessary to the profound combinations of the
intellect? How does each man bring his thought to a stop at such and such a
point, when everything moves around him and he himself is carried along
and tossed about every day in the impetuous current that swirls all things
along?
(Tocqueville 2000, 434)

In Tocqueville, then, we find a critique of democratic individualism on the

grounds that, while it seems to isolate citizens, it also rivets them to revered
objects of shared experience – the majority and ‘the people’ – in a way not at all
dissimilar to the Stoic’s submission to the will of Nature.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about Tocqueville’s thesis is that he does
not suggest that Americans, nor citizens of other modern democracies, would
outwardly recognize much less advocate conformism. Quite the opposite: Toc-
queville saw that Americans held to their illusory independence religiously. That
democratic individuals, as well as those inhabiting what we now refer to as ‘mass
cultures,’ unknowingly propitiate the will of the mass while espousing their own
unlimited independence reminds us that attempts at achieving solitude and self-
hood may fail because they are thwarted by unconscious desires for their
opposites.

The vampire
In American popular culture, perhaps no figure conveys the ideological confusion
of false independence, “inner constraint,” and self-control with genuine solitary
experience and the possibility of self-determination more effectively than the
112 Aloneness and its opposites

vampire. Like the vampire of old, today’s vampire suffers from an intense craving
for blood. Being immortal, the vampire would not die without blood, but would
experience eternal weakness and hunger. In this sense, the vampire drinks blood
not precisely to survive but to feel alive, to find the feeling of existing, or “to
come alive” (Levine 2003, 104).
Typically, vampire protagonists or ‘good’ vampires stoically control their desire
to consume fresh human blood, settling instead for animal blood, synthetic
blood-substitutes, and the like. This resistance to the vampire’s most fundamental
desire is apparently no mean feat, since the experience of being surrounded by
humans, particularly young and attractive ones, is depicted as an excruciating
torment.
In the Twilight series, the ‘good’ vampires of the Cullen coven, with whom
(the human) Bella Swan associates, demonstrate their superhuman power not
only in displays of physical speed and strength but in holding themselves to their
strict dietary regimen. They have committed themselves to an eternal life of
repressing their most basic desire, and of contending with the anxiety of being
overtaken by desire, either in the form of an irresistible impulse to kill or in the
(externalized) form of rivaling, murderous, ‘bad’ vampire gangs.
In the penultimate chapter of the series, Bella is impregnated by her vampire
lover, Edward, and faces a grim prognosis due to the destructive half-human,
half-vampire fetus she carries. The story of Bella’s labor is a story of anxious self-
control and its relationship to the demands of the group. To nourish her baby,
Bella must submit to being consumed from the inside out, until she is on the very
brink of death. Indeed, the fetus is so destructive to Bella’s body that, for her to
survive the birth physically, she must become a vampire, herself, and risk being
overtaken by her own vampire-related destructiveness.
That is, in order for Bella to survive the birth physically, she will have to
become non-human. But in order for her to survive the birth psychically, in order
for her to remain ‘herself’ after her metamorphosis, she will have to commit to
the eternal suppression of her desire for human blood, and to the eternal sup-
pression of her child’s identical desire. The child Bella carries thereby represents
the dilemma of the parent who must facilitate the development of a child (and a
potential self), while suspecting that the child’s desires are dangerous and
destructive, likely to overwhelm the parent with an all-too-familiar temptation. If
the parent fears the desire of the child to become himself, then the parent will
not lay the groundwork for the child’s separate selfhood, but will insist that the
child become a ‘good’ child – in this case, a ‘good’ vampire – by learning to
suppress his fundamental desires in order to retain contact with his parent, his
family, or his community.
In the world of the vampire, moral behavior is understood to be a matter of
depriving the self. To be moral means to be a member of a ‘good’ group, which
requires the control of one’s basic desire, which is not exactly to eat and kill but
what these activities represent to the vampire: to feel alive. To be moral, then,
 Aloneness and its opposites 113

means not to feel alive. What is more, to be moral means not to be alone, for, as
we were told in the popular television show True Blood, when vampires spend
too much time apart from human beings, when they retreat into solitary hunting
or ‘nest’ with other vampires, they countenance their true desires and rationalize
their blood-thirst. Constant contact with human beings – or with ‘Humanity,’ as
a more abstract object of experience – is necessary for the vampire to remain in
control of herself, which is the same as being good, which is confused with the
vampire remaining ‘herself.’
Being good, if we approach the life of the self and the group in this way,
comes to mean controlling and repressing the self in service of others, and iden-
tifying with others’ needs more than with our own, ironically ensuring our con-
tinued goodness by reminding ourselves of our essential badness. If our attempts
to act upon desire and feel alive will destroy others, then we must learn to scorn
our desire as a shameful or monstrous transgression. The vampire, therefore, is
stuck in a position of shameful compliance, in which she must eternally enforce
the repression of her desires – and others’ desires – on the grounds that they are
repugnant and destructive.
The repression of the vampire’s vitality is rewarded not only by immortality
and certain supernatural abilities, but by the good favor of the human commu-
nity, by the vampire’s ability to identify with and even live alongside humans in
spite of her inhuman condition. Once again, we find an identification in place of
an identity, and it should be remarked here that what the vampire identifies with
is not merely the human community but the capacity to sacrifice, control, and
discipline the self for the sake of others, held up in such narratives as a quintes-
sential ‘human’ virtue. Here, we are reminded of contemporary efforts in political
theory to outline the moral value of shame, discussed in Chapter 1, and taken up
again below.
If the good vampire’s humanity, like the good Stoic’s identification with
Nature, may be considered a kind of internal object set in the service of con-
trolling and constraining desire while ensuring that the vampire is never alone –
never alone with its desire – then contemporary vampire sagas present us a picture
of the good life as a life of belonging and moral virtue, but also a life of
independence without aloneness, of supernatural power without aliveness.

Rejecting others’ solitude

Taken together, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1961), Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (1959), and “Totem and Taboo” (1938) make a con-
vincing case that fundamental ambivalences between the assertion of and the
atonement for independence lie at the heart of psychic life. In Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (2006), this fine Freudian line between
totem and taboo is tested as the Buendía family isolates itself from the rest of the
world in a surreal, collective solitude. As this small community is necessarily
114 Aloneness and its opposites

incestuous, anxieties about its separation are expressed in the terror of a child
born with a dreaded defect: a pig’s tail.
The incest taboo has particular relevance for us because it symbolizes the
autarchy of the primal father and his pre-societal coercive power, which must be
overturned to establish a society ruled by equal subjection to the law. Thus, fears
about withdrawal from society may be thought of as fears about the incestuous
nature of solitude, which invite guilt and dread of punishment for risking the
survival of the social group. To the extent that we misconstrue aloneness as
withdrawal from or rejection of the social group, we will link aloneness with
immorality, since morality is the code of conduct endorsed by the group.
Whether we consider the capacity for aloneness and its realization healthy or
unhealthy, ethically necessary or morally threatening, is in some ways the crucial
political question. As in Jan’s family in Le Malentendu, the specter of separation
raises tremendous anxieties about the survival of groups that depends upon the
belonging and co-presence of their members. The notion of a solitary self threa-
tens the group with doubt, doubt cast upon the immediacy and needfulness of the
objects of experience that unite the group, adverse, injurious, or traumatic
though they may be.
An alternative approach to solitude and collective life, such as that advanced by
Merton, would suggest that groups need not fear the solitary capacities of mem-
bers, and that selves’ capacities to be solitary depend upon healthy and function-
ing groups. A self with the capacity to be alone not only possesses that degree of
“ontological security” needed to “live out into the world and meet others”
(Laing 1969, 39), but retains the capacity to retreat from or oppose others should
a situation arise in which the vitality of any self – not just his own – is unduly
endangered.
That is, the achievement of a self with the capacity to be alone is the founda-
tion for ethical respect of others’ selves, since, if a self finds itself to be “real, alive,
whole, and … continuous,” it reaches out toward “a world and others experi-
enced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous” (Laing 1969, 39). A fair
number of contemporary social and psychological theories would agree that
individuals who experience themselves as selves or subjects are likely to recognize
others as selves or subjects deserving of respect (see, e.g., Benjamin 1998; Buber
2004, Fraser 2000; Kohlberg 1973; Lasch 1984). On the other hand, individuals
who may only behave or misbehave according to the rules of a group in which
they are thoroughly embedded are relegated to reacting (positively or negatively)
to others’ demands. The experience of such individuals consists only of coercion,
compliance, or opposition.
Both the self and the mature group ought to desire the continued development
of selves, for, in so doing, the individual may become more than just an indivi-
dual, and the group may become more than just a group. Without a dedication
to developing the self’s capacity to be alone, in the sense defined above, indivi-
duals are likely to enter into what Harry Guntrip refers to as “schizoid
 Aloneness and its opposites 115

compromise” (1992), in which the self is split into two or more parts. Typically,
one is withdrawn, hidden from others and even from itself, while another is fused
with the group or the objects and experiences cherished by the group. In such
cases, individuals fail both at being alone and at being related to others because
“the split self is not enough for either the self or the group. Each is impoverished,
and each impoverishes the other” (Alford 1994, 52–53).
Such a situation is apparent in Jonathan Franzen’s well-known essay on the
erosion of the public sphere, “The Imperial Bedroom,” where he claims that
reading the Starr Report on the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, while sitting alone in
a Manhattan apartment, marked a personal violation, a feeling of “being intruded
upon” (2003, 41). When Franzen writes that “what’s threatened isn’t the private
sphere. It’s the public sphere” (48), he seems to mean that details of personal lives
have come to pervade public spaces, that there is no more room for public dis-
course, only for the exchange of intimate yet trivial ‘dirty laundry.’ Thus, reading
the Starr Report over breakfast becomes an instance of “private life brutally
invading the most public of public spaces” (51), a “flood of dirty suds from the
Office of the Independent Counsel, oozing forth through official and commercial
channels to saturate national consciousness” (40).
In his opposition to casual Fridays, modern décor, gossip columns, internet
chatrooms, and personalized voicemail, Franzen is not alone in extolling the
virtue of shame and the dream of escaping the “tangled sheets” and “in-your-face
consumerism” of private life, where “flashers and sexual harassers and fellators on
the pier and self-explainers on the crosstown bus all similarly assault our sense of
the ‘public’ by exposing themselves” (49). Instead, he envisions a public sphere,
exemplified, oddly, by an art museum, where someone may “promenade” in a
“place to go when you want to announce to the world … that you have a new
suit, or that you’re in love, or that you suddenly realize you stand a full inch taller
when you don’t hunch your shoulders” (50).
Franzen is right that it is possible, and possibly dangerous, for the private to
invade the public in a way that prevents meaningful communication. When
political discourse is infused with narratives of sex and desire, and when details
about intimate encounters “ooze” into public space – we may note Franzen’s
preoccupation with his experience of boundary invasion – it may seem more
difficult to interact with others as selves and to be treated as a self. But it would
seem that Franzen has made an error in designating as ‘public’ the promenading
of one’s private possessions, one’s latest romance, or one’s taller stature, while
condemning as ‘private’ not only the details of the Starr Report but all those who
“assault” us by “exposing themselves.”
Of course, we may imagine that there are some differences between revealing
one’s new suit and discussing unsavory personal matters within earshot of others,
or between “dress[ing] to the nines” for a party and “flashing” one’s naked body on
the subway (54). The difference Franzen alludes to here is not merely a difference
between controlling exposure and being forced to see what one does not wish to
116 Aloneness and its opposites

see. Rather, his account suggests that all (others) should be dominated by self-
repression and shame. It is, after all, the “delicious … enforced decorum” in the
corporate offices of the “upper echelons of business” where “codes of dress and
behavior are routinely enforced, personal disclosures are penalized, and formality
is still the rule” that Franzen lauds, and with which he appears to identify (50–
51). He defends a concrete standard that determines who may display what,
where, and when. People who fail to adhere to the standard ‘should be ashamed,’
for “without shame there can be no distinction between public and private” (49).
Thus, Franzen strives to define and defend a public sphere, a sphere tradition-
ally associated with the government, the law, and the abstract citizen, ostensibly
to protect us from intrusion. And he is right that a public sphere should protect
us, for there is no outlawed idea or ‘thought-crime’ in a public sphere, just as a
public sphere must be governed by the rule of law, not the rule of particular
interests or privileged groups. But Franzen surprises us by imagining a public
sphere where we give private performances, rather than enter into reasoned
reflection or undertake action as public citizens. As a true public sphere would
safeguard and even underwrite the importance of a private sphere, one would imagine
that such performances could be conducted in private without losing any of their
significance, plurality, or visibility (see Arendt 1998; Kohn 2000).
Émile Durkheim’s understanding of the State as the instantiation of the public
realm in political life may be helpful to better understand the relationship
between the citizen and the public realm that Franzen seems to be after:

Far from its tyrannizing over the individual, it is the State that redeems the
individual from society. … It is not this or that individual the State seeks to
develop, it is the individual in genere [in the abstract], who is not to be
confused with any single one of us.
(1958, 69)

For Durkheim, the State protects the individuality of each citizen equally, thus in
following the law, each is freed from merely complying with or rebelling against
the forces of the majority, the market, or the people. Instead, the laws of the
State make what Durkheim calls individuality, but what we might call subjectivity
or selfhood, politically possible, so “whilst we give the State our cooperation …
we do not become the agents of a purpose alien to us” (69). A genuine public
realm, civil society, or, in Durkheim’s language, “State,” would be one in which
each citizen finds not a demand to repress herself for the sake of others, but an
environment that protects her from the coercive push and pull of the group, such
that the anxieties about attempts at separation are made manageable.
As for Durkheim, for Hannah Arendt the public or political sphere represents
an emancipation from the coercion of “the social” realm (1998, 22–49), which
Hanna Pitkin (2000) famously caricatured as “the blob.” Like Franzen’s “dirty
suds,” the social “blob” swallows up all in its path, destroying both public and
 Aloneness and its opposites 117

private lives in an embroilment of private interests, intimate exchanges, and banal

pursuits. Indeed, for Arendt, the social realm of consumption, labor, money, and
the like turns what could be a nation into little more than a vast, multiplied
family which, by eliminating the boundaries that separate individual citizens,
reduces all to “only one opinion and one interest” (1998, 39). This coerced
conformity:

excludes the possibility of action. … Instead, society expects from each of its
members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules,
all of which tend to “normalize” its members, to make them behave, to
exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.
(40)

Arendt’s vision of a despotic social realm, then, echoes Tocqueville’s concern

about the “omnipotence” and “tyranny of the majority” over both action and
thought (2000, 235–249).
Although a public sphere is necessary to protect the individual from undue
coercion by powerful groups, it is possible to abuse distinctions between public
and private to enforce repression by demanding that some be held to standards of
‘public’ behavior while others retain the right to behave ‘privately.’ This abuse is
prevalent in Franzen’s essay, in which some must refrain from certain forms of self-
exposure while others may go to the art museum to show off their new clothing or
lovers. Some individuals’ self-expressions, that is, enjoy the label of ‘public’ since
they accord with the norms of powerful groups, while others’ self-expressions are an
unwelcome invasion of “privacy” and should be “shame[d]” out of consciousness.
Such defenses of a false public sphere typically deploy the words ‘public’ and
‘private’ as cudgels, defining both in ultimately ‘private’ terms. What is public, for
Franzen, is merely conformity with the norms and codes of the privileged or
‘good’ group. While it is not Franzen’s argument, it would not be inconsistent
with his logic to argue that certain displays of affection (for instance, those
between two men, or between people of different ethnicities) are not appropriate
for ‘public’ spaces. This logic defines a false public sphere because the funda-
mental criterion of publicity, that each citizen be treated as an abstract (separate)
and equal entity, has been violated.
It is surely not uncommon for thwarted desires related to self-expression to
find a modicum of fulfillment in aggression directed at others, such that “the
energy of desire gets channeled into the sadistic impulse to repress others” (Levine
2004, 106–107). If desire must be repressed, then it may also be translated into a
demand that others repress themselves, in which case I may “convince myself that
desire and duty are one and the same, or that I am forced to act on self-interest to
protect myself from the immoral and threatening conduct of others” (Levine
2004, 107).
118 Aloneness and its opposites

As mentioned above and as discussed in Chapter 1, advocacies of the political

value of shame are not at all unpopular in political theory (see, e.g., Deonna,
Rodogno, and Teroni 2012; Nussbaum 2004; Saxonhouse 2006; Tarnopolsky
2010). These accounts often rely on fears of social degeneration that seem to
reflect unconscious anxieties about the devaluation of the inner world, anxieties
addressed by affirming the importance of controlling and repressing the self, not
only for the self but for others. Just as the vampire’s moral status demanded self-
repression, being a ‘public’ citizen here demands shame, such that, once again,
moral behavior comes to be equated with the rejection of the self, particularly in
its separateness from the norms of the ‘good’ group.
If mature selfhood is perceived as a threat to the social group, then we arrive at
the curious situation in which agents of the social group take it to be their
responsibility to shame would-be selves into non-existence. Too often, defenses
of the public sphere disguise attacks on selfhood in which the demands, standards,
or codes of a powerful group are enforced with shame. Rather than protecting
the boundaries of abstract individuality and the possibility that selves be conceived
of as separate beings, such projects subject all individuals to the will of a majority
or group that believes its interests represent the interests of all.
As alluded to above, a world in which the self is never alone, and, therefore,
where others also ought never be alone, is precisely what many contemporary
political theorists have prescribed. Some who have followed in the tradition of
Emmanuel Levinas have defined moral being as the destruction of the ability to be
alone that we have associated with selfhood, where the other must always overwhelm
the self and where ethical action requires “the putting into question of my
spontaneity by the presence of the other” (Levinas 1969, 43) as well as the suspen-
sion “of my spontaneity, of my jouissance, of my freedom” (Critchley 1996, 30).
Levinas claims that it is my ethical obligation even to give up my right to exist:
“The ethical I is a being who asks if he has a right to be!,” for, contra Spinoza:

my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival, le

droit vitale. … To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face [of the other]
is to put my ontological right to existence into question. In ethics, the other’s
right to exist has primacy over my own.
(Levinas and Kearney 1986, 23–24)

We have already noted how this line of thought has been picked up by several
contemporary theorists, most notably by Judith Butler, who claims that loss and
grief are valuable because these emotional states display “the thrall in which our
relations with others hold us … in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious
account of ourselves as autonomous and in control” (2004, 23). What is to be
gained from this enthrallment and from “remaining exposed to its unbearability” is
precisely the loss of the capacity to be alone. Instead, we are assured, if we
develop “a point of identification with suffering itself” (30), we may possess the
 Aloneness and its opposites 119

other in ourselves, alienating ourselves from our selves, and protecting others
from our innate destructiveness: “My own foreignness to myself,” Butler writes,
“is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (46).
Here, a loss of self-contact and a loss of the ability to be when alone becomes
“the tie” that binds the group together (Butler 2004, 22). The postmodern call
for moral self-sacrifice appears more and more like a demand that each be
enthralled by experiences of other-intrusion. Instead of supporting public insti-
tutions and public spaces that, in turn, support the development of separate selves,
we are urged to share in the experience of losing our selves, our autonomy, and
our aloneness, which losses make “a tenuous ‘we’ of us all” (20).

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7
HIKIKOMORI
Deprived, isolated, and disfigured selves

In this chapter, I carry further the line of thought developed in the previous
chapter by interpreting the behavior of individuals in hikikomori, as well as the
attitudes of those who study and treat them, as an attempt to isolate the individual
while abandoning the self in a way that is the opposite of being alone. Specifi-
cally, hikikomori represents an isolation from and deprivation of familial and social
experience which, paradoxically, expresses the desire to return to lost experiences
of dependence and indulgence. The extreme self-incarceration of hikikomori,
along with apparent difficulties in understanding hikikomori in the psychiatric and
medical communities, derive from denials and mystifications of the desire to be
alone in the sense outlined in Chapter 6. The current scholarly and clinical
practice of treating hikikomori as a “culture-bound” Japanese phenomenon, for
instance, obscures more than it clarifies and may be interpreted as an attempt to
hide it away, rather than to acknowledge the inner crisis of desire and deprivation
that it represents, one that is not unique to Japanese individuals.
Amae (甘え), the Japanese term for loving indulgence – typically parental or
familial – is both sought after and refused in hikikomori, for the desire for amae has
come to be experienced by the individual as monstrous and intolerable. Amae
coincides in several respects with Winnicott’s notion of a facilitating environ-
ment, a condition that facilitates aloneness but is not identical with actually being
alone, a condition in which a potential self may develop the capacities to become
a self. While current applications of the construct of amae to the phenomenon of
hikikomori find amae to be a cause of the disorder, amae need not be read as cul-
turally unique nor pathogenic. On the contrary, it is the deprivation of emotional
indulgence that ultimately leads individuals to the shame, self-incarceration, and
self- and family-victimization that defines hikikomori. What is unfortunate about
the hikikomori population and the academic and popular communities concerned
122 Hikikomori

with the phenomenon is that, within both, we find the self’s desire to be loved,
to be indulged, and to be capable of being itself represented as something mon-
strous and shameful.
This disfigurement of desire, I propose, reflects not only a misunderstanding of
the dependency involved in facilitating aloneness and selfhood, but an ideological
orientation toward maturation, in which the impingement of others’ needs is
regarded as natural and normal, something to which the individual must learn to
adapt. Hikikomori, then, appears to be an attempt to retroactively shut out
impingement and to be alone, but, as we noted in the previous chapter, and as
we will see, the attempt is not only too late, but is undertaken without the inner
resources needed to be alone in a meaningful sense.

What is hikikomori?
Hikikomori (ひきこもり) derives from the Japanese words hiku, or pulling in, and
komoru, or retiring. It means, literally, “pulling away and being confined” (Hair-
ston 2010, 311; Wong 2009, 128), or “to be confined to the inside” (Ohashi
2008, iii). It is used to refer to the state of isolation (‘to be in hikikomori’) as well as
to an affected individual (‘a hikikomori’). The construct, which describes a period
of severe social isolation often lasting for several years, has gained notoriety in
Japan and worldwide since the year 2000. It was first introduced to the Japanese
lexicon with the publication of Tamaki Saito-’s Hikikomori: Adolescence without End
(2013). With new estimates that over one million Japanese citizens, roughly
twenty-five percent of Japan’s young population, will suffer from hikikomori in
their lifetimes, the phenomenon is regarded as a dangerous national crisis, “a
disease that can bring the nation to collapse” (Shimoyachi 2003).
Hikikomori is not classified in any version of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders) or ICD (International Classification of Diseases). Surveys
of mental health professionals and pediatricians in Japan and around the world
reveal familiarity with the phenomenon but equally extensive disagreement about
its diagnosis. Hikikomori is most commonly treated as a symptom of an alternative
underlying condition, although differential diagnoses range from schizophrenia to
depression to autism to unspecified stress-related disorders (Tateno et al. 2012). The
phenomenon affects both sexes, with males in the slight majority, usually in their
teens, twenties, and thirties, hailing from middle- to upper-middle-class families
(Tateno et al. 2012). The average duration of hikikomori is thought to be approxi-
mately four years (Koyama et al. 2010; Ohashi 2008; Saito- 2002), although some
studies suggest average durations of up to nine years (Sakai et al. 2010). In some
cases, individuals have been known to remain in hikikomori for over thirty years.
The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare defines hikikomori simply
as the “state of confining oneself to one’s house for more than six months and
strictly limiting communication with others” (Ministry of Health, Labor, and
Welfare 2003; Umeda and Kawakami 2012, 121). Alan Teo and his colleagues
 Hikikomori 123

recently set out slightly more detailed diagnostic criteria which include: a period
of at least six months characterized by “spending most of the day and nearly
every day confined to home,” “marked and persistent avoidance of social rela-
tionships,” “marked distress in the individual or impairment in occupation …
academic … , or interpersonal functioning,” and “the lack of a better differential
diagnosis such as social phobia, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, etc.”
(Teo, Stufflebaum, and Kato 2014, 447).
Both the hikikomori construct and the hikikomori population overlap sub-
stantially with psycho-social categories of futoko (school-refusal) and NEET (an
acronym derived from the UK meaning those ‘Not in Education, Employment,
or Training’), as well as the slang category freeter, meaning the willingly unem-
ployed or underemployed. Although hikikomori are often casually referred to as
“parasites” (see Furlong 2008), the population does not coincide with the newly
defined social group maligned as parasaito shinguru, or “parasite singles”:
employed, unmarried females without children often living with their parents
into young adulthood (Watts 2002; Yamada 1999; Yamada 2006).
Case analyses have suggested that some, but not all, individuals in hikikomori
have suffered negative precipitating events in their social lives. But such events are
hardly unique to those in hikikomori, and it is not clear that they interact uniquely
with aggravating conditions within the individual’s family or personal history.
Most researchers have found no significant correlations between hikikomori and
extraordinary precipitating events, “general parenting style,” parental mental ill-
ness, physical or sexual abuse, or poverty (Umeda and Kawakami 2012, 126).
And while it is not uncommon to find single studies that report correlations
between hikikomori and other psycho-social variables, such as anxiety and insecure
parental attachment (e.g., Hattori 2005; Krieg and Dickie 2011; Nagata et al.
2011), such findings are not consistently confirmed and, more importantly, have
not been employed to develop a robust theory of the phenomenon.
As attention to hikikomori has increased over the past two decades, so, too, have
public funds for research and treatment increased. In fact, Japanese law now
requires every prefecture to establish at least one hikikomori treatment center. No
available evidence, however, suggests that such efforts have contributed to the
prevention or treatment of hikikomori on a measurable scale. An important
obstacle to effective treatment remains the professional and scholarly disagreement
about whether hikikomori is a definable disorder with medical and/or psycholo-
gical causes. In spite of numerous attempts to define and classify the phenom-
enon, one finds at every turn “conflicting results and lack of empirical findings on
risk factors” (Umeda and Kawakami 2012, 121), such that even the most funda-
mental elements of the condition remain in question. Communities and family
members also play their part in hiding hikikomori and making detailed information
about the phenomenon hard to come by, for “in order to avoid criticism and
even ostracism, the parents of those with hikikomori hide their shut-in children
from their relatives, neighbors, and their communities” (Hattori 2005, 198).
124 Hikikomori

But the foremost difficulty arises from the nature of the phenomenon itself. That
is, the hikikomori population is, by definition, incommunicado, and, as such, extremely
averse to clinical and social contact. The Yokayoka treatment center in Fukuoka, a
“one-room support center” ironically “linked to a youth employment facility,” mainly
fields phone calls from “worried parents” of hikikomori, while “only a small number
of hikikomori actually show up at the center. Of those, a minority are treated success-
fully” (Wang 2015). If a rare individual in hikikomori does present herself for treatment,
she may offer little or no insight into her experience. One of the more typical responses
when asked what caused a period of hikikomori, or what the experience was like is,
simply: “I don’t know” (Kato et al. 2012, 1063; see also Jones 2006).
To the extent that hikikomori is or is not distinctly Japanese – a question to be
taken up momentarily – it can be difficult to distinguish between its academic,
clinical, and popular understandings. Terms like hikikomori occupy a unique lex-
ical space in Japan, reserved for psycho-social phenomena attributed to changes in
Japanese society and often associated with globalization and the clash between
foreign and ‘traditional’ values. For instance, in the early 1990s, a highpoint of
economic growth, “there was a sudden rush of concern about karoshi (death by
overwork) that suggested the country was labouring itself to an early grave”
(Watts 2002, 1131). Today, in the virtual age, the term otaku denotes a growing
segment of the youth population seen as “‘oddballs,’ ‘geeks’ or ‘nerds’ … avid readers
of manga comics and heavy internet users” who are thought to be “somewhat
socially inept” (Furlong 2008, 321–322; see also Tateno et al. 2012, 169).
Although there are variations in theories concerning the cause of hikikomori,
Jonathan Watts remains correct that “there is broad agreement that this illness is a
product of the affluence, technology, and convenience of modern Japanese life”
(2002, 1131). That is, while not ignoring “wider sociological trends,” such as
“the breakdown of communication and collapse of the family and human rela-
tions” in Japan (Allison 2013, 74), scholars and pundits return to what might be
seen as parallel phenomena at national and familial levels: Hikikomori is under-
stood to be a disease born of excess, permissiveness, and indulgence (Kato et al.
2011, 67; Murakami 2000; Zielenziger 2006).
These trends help explain why Japanese individuals in hikikomori have received
such negative treatment in the Japanese media and public (Hattori 2005,
Kitayama et al. 2001). The broader Japanese public remains quite:

hostile to Hikikomori and assumes that it is a moral weakness, rather than a

legitimate psychological disorder. … [T]he man or woman on the street
regards people with Hikikomori as spoiled, lazy young people who willfully
disregard their parents’ wishes and arbitrarily avoid social obligations.
(Hattori 2005, 198)

Although recent depictions of hikikomori in youth-directed media are sometimes

sympathetic, more frightening portrayals, as in films such as Hikikomori: Tokyo
 Hikikomori 125

Plastic (2004), which depicts a cruel hikikomori corrupting innocent young women
from his solitary lair, are not uncommon.
Hikikomori’s pejorative connotations are also inseparable from its introduction
to Japanese consciousness via two widely publicized crimes committed by indi-
viduals with a history of the disorder, one involving the hijacking of a bus and
the killing of a passenger, the other involving the kidnapping and extended cap-
tivity of a child (Rees 2002). Accounts of hikikomori physically assaulting their par-
ents are also well known and have been confirmed by multiple studies. In the 2003
study sponsored by the Japanese government, forty percent of hikikomori cases
involved domestic “violence.” Although “violence” here included “both verbal
and physical abuse,” “nearly a third of domestic violence cases perpetrated by the
hikikomori warrant[ed] the evacuation of family members” (Ohashi 2008, 14).
Thus, in the early days of moral panic regarding the condition, hikikomori were
regarded as over-indulged yet violent and unpredictable criminals. Unofficial
“boot-camp facilities” were established in which “parents coerce[d] youth with
Hikikomori into military-like training programs,” where they were “forced to
perform manual labor for disciplinary purposes” (Hattori 2005, 198). One
‘recovery’ organization was recently sued for having run “an ‘abduction and
confinement’ regime” in which a detainee died after being “chained to a pillar for
four days.” Although condemned for their actions, such organizations apparently
“received an enormous amount of sympathy from a public who regard hikikomori
as free-riding parasites and feel that parents are not providing the discipline
necessary to reform this anti-social behaviour” (Furlong 2008, 317).1 Such
responses suggest fear, hatred, and perhaps even envy of hikikomori and what it
represents.

‘Bound’ by culture
Hikikomori is widely, although unofficially, recognized by mental health practi-
tioners and researchers around the world as a “culture-bound syndrome.” While
acknowledging the flaws of the term, and even while recognizing the existence of
similar phenomena in other countries, Teo, Stufflebaum, and Kato argue that
hikikomori must be considered ‘culture-bound’ because:

(i) it is a discrete, well-defined syndrome; (ii) it has been argued as a specific

illness; (iii) it is expected, recognized and to some degree sanctioned as a
response to certain cultural precipitants; and (iv) it has a higher incidence of
prevalence [in Japan] compared to other cultures.
(2014, 449)

This designation affects not just theory but practice. Numerous cross-national
studies have found, for instance, that Japanese care-providers tend “to be more
passive in providing medical intervention in hikikomori cases” (Tateno et al. 2012, 4),
126 Hikikomori

a reluctance to act that may reflect the belief in the inevitability of hikikomori in Japan
or in the futility (or even undesirability) of treating Japanese sufferers.
What is certain is that if hikikomori is to be defined as a Japanese phenomenon,
then it is comprehensible only within the context of Japanese cultural life. And
while scholars continue to debate the details of the disorder, few have recognized
the consequences of approaching hikikomori as a “culture-bound syndrome,” itself
(see Sakamoto et al. 2005). To define hikikomori as a syndrome that “thrives in
one particular country during a particular moment in its history” (Jones 2006) is
to insist upon a very specific relationship between it and contemporary Japanese
culture. This means that individuals in hikikomori, their experiences, and all they
represent are sequestered from theories and constructs that are not specific to Japan
(e.g., agoraphobia or social withdrawal) and that are not similarly culture-bound
(e.g., intrapsychic dynamics, attachment patterns, or early childhood experiences).
It is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter to review the extensive
literature that contests the viability of the concept of ‘culture’ (see, e.g., Eagleton
2000; Finkielkraut 1987). It is undeniable, however, that, in the realm of the
social and behavioral sciences, ‘culture’ has often served a less-than-noble func-
tion, tending to promote stereotyping, chauvinism, and orientalism (see Said
1979) as much as or more than meaningful understanding. In the domain of
psychology, Ethan Watters justly quips that the so-called “culture-bound syn-
dromes” treated so delicately in the final pages of the DSM, such as koro and
amok, end up being for the reader little more than “carnival sideshows” that
“might as well be labeled ‘Psychiatric Exotica: Two Bits a Gander’” (2010, 5).
Defining hikikomori as a culture-bound syndrome also permits hikikomori to
function as a weapon in mounting attacks on Japanese society, whether those
critiques run for or against ‘traditional’ values. Michael Zielenziger, for instance,
has argued that young people in Japan “want to be different than their parents
and different from their peers, but Japan is so collectively engineered that it’s very
difficult, if not impossible, for them to really express themselves” (2006). Simi-
larly, in her article entitled “Hikikomania,” Kathleen Todd argues that Japanese
society has created a situation in which a young person’s “original personality” is
effaced, “while the [false] front personality compulsively conforms to perceived
expectations” (2011, 137–138). While such critiques could be applied to practi-
cally any youth population on the planet, the high rates of hikikomori in Japan
seem to serve as anecdotal evidence in support of such claims. The literature on
hikikomori uses the self-punishment and self-deprivation of those suffering from
the syndrome to direct criticism at the relatively easy targets of “Japanese society”
and “Japanese culture” (Todd 2011, 136).
If, as discussed in Chapter 3, “every instance of severe traumatic psychological
injury is a standing challenge to the rightness of the social order” (Herman quoted
in Shay 1995, 3), it is this belief that has made the concept of trauma so fasci-
nating to social theorists in Europe and North America for the past three and a
half decades. This same link – the link between the victims of a psychological
 Hikikomori 127

syndrome and their potential use as evidence to ground social critique – is part of
what has made hikikomori such an attractive concept for the clinical, academic,
and popular imagination both within Japan and beyond.
It remains unclear to what extent broader social critiques reflect individuals’
understandings of the causes of their own hikikomori. It may be, for instance, that
blaming the growing Japanese economy or rapid changes in Japanese society for
the psychic pain associated with hikikomori is in some sense ‘necessary’ for the
individual to ‘recover’ in Youth (Hikikomori) Support Centers and, more gen-
erally, in a society that comprehends hikikomori symptoms solely along such lines.
Thus, it may be that, even in ‘recovery,’ the individual’s authentic feelings and
self-understandings are supplanted by accommodation to others’ needs to frame
and interpret the hikikomori experience in a particular way. To use hikikomori as a
sign that something is amiss in Japanese society, the meaning of hikikomori must
be discussed but never pinned down, experienced but never understood. Defin-
ing hikikomori as a culture-bound syndrome effectively isolates the disorder from
thought and understanding, echoing, in a metaphorical sense, hikikomori ’s pri-
mary symptom. These reflections shed light on another salient aspect of the lit-
erature and phenomenon of hikikomori taken up below: the relationship between
victimization and mystification.

The distortion of amae

A careful reading of the scholarly and popular literatures makes it difficult to
avoid the conclusion that those who treat and study hikikomori have (ambiva-
lently) psychologically identified with their subjects, such that comprehending the
behavior of hikikomori comes to represent a betrayal of hikikomori and their
experience. Like those who, as we noted in Chapter 2, feel that there is an
“absolute obscenity in the project of understanding the holocaust” (Lanzmann
1995, 204), those who forge identifications with individuals in hikikomori see
themselves as privileged witnesses to an experience of suffering which it is their
obligation to protect and defend. Without trivializing the horrors of the Nazi
camps, the self-incarceration of the individual in hikikomori is in some ways akin
to a private concentration camp, one whose secret sufferings are carefully guarded
against outsiders’ understandings (see also Bowker 2014).
An excellent example of this protective dynamic may be found in the
acclaimed Japanese film Tobira no Muko (literally: The Other Side of the Door)
(2008), which borders on documentary, and which stars Kenta Nigishi, himself a
recovering hikikomori. The film depicts the struggle of the Okada family and their
son Hiroshi, a teenaged boy who, one day, enters his room and is hardly seen or
heard by the audience again. The film illustrates the effects of Hiroshi’s hikikomori
on his mother, father, and younger brother, while introducing audiences to
Sadatsugo Kudo, who plays himself, as the director of a local Youth (Hikikomori)
Support Center.
128 Hikikomori

The film’s depiction of all characters is sympathetic, and yet Hiroshi’s hikikomori
is inscrutable to audiences, who must guess what has precipitated his isolation,
what his experience of it is like, and when or how he might emerge from it. In
many ways, it is really the audience who is left on ‘the other side of the door,’
restricted from seeing and understanding Hiroshi in a way that suggests the film’s
real intent: to transmit, rather than to communicate, the frustration and confusion
experienced by those confronting hikikomori. To see the film is to wonder why it
is necessary that nothing about Hiroshi, and hikikomori, be clearly understood.
Indeed, one is left with the impression that the denial of understanding is
Hiroshi’s goal, the goal of the film, the goal of many individuals in hikikomori,
and, perhaps, the goal of scholarly and popular treatments of hikikomori as well. If
the individual in hikikomori refuses to communicate and to be understood, as do
the researchers working in the cottage industry of hikikomori scholarship, then
what exactly must be hidden in hikikomori and what is the psychic meaning of this
hiding? The answer to these questions lies in a closer examination of the concept
of amae and, strangely enough, in its consistent misapplication by researchers on
hikikomori.
The Japanese term amae and the verb amaeru are quite close to the English
noun ‘indulgence’ and the verb-forms ‘to indulge oneself’ and ‘to presume
indulgence.’ In English, ‘indulgence’ has a rather complex range of meanings, since,
for instance, one may indulge oneself, one may indulge one’s baser instincts, one
may indulge another person, and one may indulge in the indulgences offered by
another. In all cases, indulging involves yielding or acceding, either to one’s own
desires, or to the desires or demands of another.
In Japan, and one might argue in many cultures, it is expected that an infant or
child will amaeru to his parents: that he will indulge in their indulgence of him.
That is, the child is expected to permit himself to become dependent upon his
parents, to expect some adaptation to his needs and desires, and to enjoy this
experience – at first unknowingly, but in time with some recognition of his state.
It is also expected that the child’s parents will not refuse or reject his demands and
dependence, and that a good many indulgences will be offered to the child. And
the parents, of course, come to depend upon the child’s dependence, and may be
said to indulge themselves in the child’s indulgent use of them.
Takeo Doi must be credited with bringing the idea of amae into clear focus and
applying it to a wide range of psycho-social phenomena, both in Japan and else-
where, in his two best-known books, The Anatomy of Dependence (1973) and The
Anatomy of the Self (1986). In one’s immediate family, argues Doi, even as an
adult, it is permissible to amaeru and thus to be self-indulgent, since one may
depend upon the indulgence of family members. One need not restrain oneself
nor follow the (sometimes stringent) norms of courtesy, as one might in less
intimate social relationships. One need not worry about imposing upon others,
nor apologize for one’s inevitable impositions. In the ideal Japanese family, Doi
claims, one exists in a state of secure interdependence: One is assured that one’s
 Hikikomori 129

requests will be met, and, more importantly, one is assured that the desire for
indulgence will not lead to rejection or the loss of the good will of loved ones.2
Here, it is important to associate indulgence and dependence not with merely
physical needs, but with the emotional needs that compose the infant’s and the
child’s primary relationships. The concept of amae, then, may describe not only
the orientation of the child toward primary attachment-figures but the broader
web of relatedness (and separateness) in which both indulgence and dependence
occur. Amae is more robust than what attachment theorists would describe as a
“secure base” (Bowlby 1988), more complex than what Freud would call “the
child’s primary object-choice” (Freud 1964, 180). It accords best with what
Winnicott would refer to as an adaptive and nurturing facilitating environment
(1965). Indeed, the widely held Japanese belief, cited by Doi (1973, 20), that a
healthy jibun (self) grows from “the soil” of amae in early relationships is quite
similar to the Winnicottian notion that the infant’s and the child’s capacities for
creativity and autonomy are facilitated through satisfactory early experiences of
facilitation and attunement.
An adequately ‘indulgent’ environment permits dependence to be experienced
as omnipotence and predictability as creativity, which affords opportunities for the
infant and child to explore her own authentic desires, emotions, and needs. The
child who is able to indulge herself in all that is offered is able to establish the feeling
that not just her external world but her internal world is safe, benign, and good.
A child whose need for indulgence has been unmet inhabits a world quite
different from that of the “ontologically secure” individual, for whom “related-
ness with others is potentially gratifying,” as is being alone. The ontologically
insecure person must be “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying
himself: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten his low threshold of security”
(Laing 1969, 42, emphasis in original). An individual suffering from losses or
deprivations of amae, then, contends with a world whose “everyday happenings …
come to have a different hierarchy of significance from that of the ordinary
person.” The ontologically insecure individual begins to “‘live in a world of his own’
or has already come to do so” (43, emphasis added).
Frustration in the desire for amae is a complex phenomenon, and is too often
blamed squarely on some essential attribute of the child (e.g., his ‘temperament’)
or on some obvious failing of the parent. Doi describes a conversation with the
mother of an anxious, non-hikikomori patient who characterized her child as some-
one who “did not amaeru much … kept to herself, never ‘made up to’ her parents,
never behaved childishly in the confident assumption that her parents would
indulge her” (1973, 18). Such children in Western countries might be described
as ‘independent,’ when, in fact, underlying their apparent self-sufficiency may be
profound anxiety that their desires for care and attention cannot or will not be met.
A relational approach, on the contrary, would suggest that frustration in amae
arises from a set of unfortunate experiences, fantasies, and fears developed within
the parent–child relationship. Specifically, the child who does not amaeru may not
130 Hikikomori

only fear the experience of frustration of her immediate needs or desires, but,
more fundamentally, may fear the negative psychic consequences of becoming
aware of, expressing, or fulfilling, such desires. These consequences may include
the shameful perception of herself as needy, greedy, unworthy, or ridiculous, as
well as the feared rejection or loss of love of the parent.
What is striking about the literature on hikikomori is that, in almost every case,
amae, seen as a Japanese cultural norm, is also understood to be a cause of hikiko-
mori. Although amae is not a new construct, believed instead to have been a part
of Japanese culture for centuries (Doi 1973), it is, ostensibly, this same Japanese
dynamic that has rather suddenly struck down millions of otherwise healthy indi-
viduals who are now unable to leave their rooms. Amae, then, is understood to be
both an impinging parenting practice that cripples the child’s capacity for social
functioning and a proud cultural tradition that is, in spite of all, still “considered
adaptive by Japanese standards” (Teo, Stufflebaum, and Kato 2014, 449).
We may wonder why so many studies on hikikomori that discuss amae, even
those that cite Doi’s well-known work (see, e.g., Hein 2009; Horiguchi 2012),
view the notion in this confused way, as both a healthy tradition and an
unhealthy parental dependence. Although dependence surely accompanies an
indulgent early childhood environment, a less conflicted notion of amae would be
one in which the child’s receipt of loving indulgence were imagined to con-
tribute to a secure attachment and a stable self-relationship. It is tempting, on this
point, to speculate that the ambivalence expressed in research on amae expresses a
conflict at its core, a denial of dependence and a denial of desire for amae,
achieved by pathologizing a desirable aspect of the child’s environment. The con-
comitants of such denials, which include repressed rage and envy, are discussed in
further detail below.
As Heinz Kohut notes, and as has been alluded to in relation to education and
narcissism in Chapter 5, difficulties in school or work, specifically difficulties in
mobilizing energy or ‘intrinsic motivation’ to achieve goals, are rarely the result of
indulgent love or excessive self-esteem, but the opposite: “Many of the most
severe and chronic work disturbances,” Kohut argues, are “due to the fact that
the self is poorly cathected with narcissistic libido and in chronic danger of frag-
mentation.” Since “a relationship to an empathetically approving and accepting
parent is one of the preconditions for the original establishment of a firm cathexis
of the self” (1971, 120), the individual who has been indulged in amae is less likely
to refuse school, to refuse work, or to withdraw into hikikomori.
It is true, of course, that the demands of school and work can be experienced,
in any society, as impinging and oppressive. Nonetheless, to understand hikikomori
as the result of experiencing school or work in this way would be to see only the
surface, for individuals who have been afforded appropriate facilitating environ-
ments are more likely to develop the capacities needed not only to withstand
occasional impingement but to create and transform their experiences in ways
aligned with the self’s authentic needs and desires. That is, to the child who has
 Hikikomori 131

been ‘indulged,’ courses of study and, later, periods of work represent opportu-
nities to realize the self in the world, rather than cruel, foreign impositions that
demand passive compliance or refusal. The difference between these two types of
experience is, obviously, considerable: If there is “a living self in depth [that] has
become the organizing center of the ego’s activities,” then the individual’s work
is “undertaken on his own initiative rather than as if by a passively obedient
automaton … [with] some originality rather than being humdrum and routine”
(Kohut 1971, 120).
The misconstrual of amae as an overly indulgent attitude, instilled in the child
via a unique parenting style and exacerbated by recent decades of affluence, sug-
gests exactly the wrong solutions: the imposition of increased “grit” and tough-
ness and the deprivation of indulgence and care in the home, in school, and in
the workplace. At a practical level, this line of thinking has led to the popular
belief that “hikikomori can be cured with tough love and being kicked out of their
nest” (Hairston 2010, 319), and to the development of organizations like the
aforementioned ‘recovery’ camps where individuals in hikikomori were mistreated
and, in some cases, tortured and killed (Furlong 2008, 317). This line of thinking
threatens the (already-threatened) individual in hikikomori, and what he represents,
with renewed deprivations of indulgence and care. In maligning amae as a dan-
gerous desire, and in threatening those who do desire amae, current theory and
practice surrounding hikikomori may be read as a rejection of, even a hatred of,
individuals in hikikomori, who are imagined to greedily presume upon their
families for food, clothing, shelter, and more. Individuals in hikikomori, then,
symbolize a powerful desire for amae that must be repressed as a defense against
the pain of its articulation and its potential frustration.

The disfigurement of desire

Interpreting scholarly, clinical, and popular discourses on hikikomori with an eye
to defensive resistance proves to be a helpful method of approaching the phe-
nomenon of hikikomori itself. Of course, understanding psycho-social phe-
nomena like hikikomori in their socio-political and cultural contexts is often
valuable, but in this case, a sort of intellectual protectionism of hikikomori has
mystified rather than illuminated the condition. At the same time, in spite of
insistences that researchers focus on culturally unique interpretive keys, the most
relevant of Japanese socio-cultural norms, amae, has been consistently mistaken
and misapplied.
If we focus on the individual’s desire for amae, we see that this desire is not in
itself unreasonable, just as the desire to be loved and cared for is a healthy and
fundamental desire of every child. But individuals with frustrated desire for amae,
having internalized a prohibition against experiencing this desire in order to avoid
the pain of failing to fulfill it – along with the pain of being aware of a desire that
is unfulfilled and, perhaps, unfulfillable – come to believe it to be shameful and
132 Hikikomori

inappropriate, deny that they experience it, and recruit others to agree with these
beliefs. By making it appear as if parental love is equivalent to damaging over-
indulgence, it is implied that the desire, itself, is imposed, that it is not the indi-
vidual’s own. That is, the individual in hikikomori would never have developed his
symptoms had not his parents and his culture foolishly over-indulged him. By
construing amae as a form of culturally sanctioned parental abuse that causes life-
long mental anguish, and by implicitly threatening those in hikikomori with the
‘solution’ of further withdrawing support and care, those concerned with hikiko-
mori translate frustrated desires for amae into critical and sadistic attitudes toward
those who seem to demand the indulgences they envy. What may be really
feared about hikikomori is not that someone in hikikomori may commit a violent
act, but that the truth about hikikomori will be revealed, the truth of a desire that
cannot be recognized without shame.
This state of affairs can only be sustained via a sort of ideology of hikikomori and
a systematic effort at mystification, a Marxist term popularized in psychoanalytic
theory by R.D. Laing (1961, 1985; see also Laing and Esterson 1964), meaning to
prevent understanding or to insist upon a false reality. Like ideology, mystification
often involves both subtle and overt forms of aggression to prevent recognition of
that which might threaten the holder of power, or, what amounts to the same
thing, to protect a cherished belief or fantasy that would be lost if subjected to
conscious scrutiny. Laing notes that mystification primarily involves the abuse of
others to shore up internal repressive efforts, since “if the one person does not
want to know something or to remember something, it is not enough to repress
it (or otherwise ‘successfully’ defend himself against it ‘in’ himself); he must not
be reminded of it by the other” (1985, 348).
A host of fearsome consequences awaits the one who attempts to break
through the veil of mystification. The skeptic, the whistle-blower, or the psy-
choanalyst who questions the false reality protected by mystification may be cast
as irresponsible, cruel, heretical, insane, or worse. In most cases, the resistance to
penetrating what has been mystified is grounded not primarily in reasonable fears
about likely negative consequences, but in unconscious associations and ancient
terrors of bad objects that mis-represented and mis-figured themselves (i.e., mystified
themselves) as good.
In light of this connection between the frustration of amae in the family, its
misconstrual in the literature, and the isolation and non-communication which
are the defining features of hikikomori, it is difficult not to recall Franz Kafka’s
famous story, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), wherein traveling salesman
Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find that he has been ‘mysteriously’
transformed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer, a “monstrous vermin.”3 What presses
most heavily on Gregor’s mind at the outset is that, in his newly transformed
state, he is quite unable to leave his room to go to work.
Particularly interesting about Kafka’s story is the way Gregor’s transformation
transforms and even reverses the relationships of dependence and indulgence
 Hikikomori 133

between him and his family. Since the collapse of his father’s business, Gregor’s
“sole desire was to do his utmost to help the family … so he had set to work
with unusual ardor” (Kafka 1971, 110). While his tireless work for an abusive
chief clerk meant that he was “able to meet the expenses of the whole house-
hold” (111), Gregor’s family had become accustomed to depending upon his
extraordinary self-sacrifice: “They had simply got used to it, both the family and
Gregor; the money was gratefully accepted and gladly given, but there was no
special uprush of warm feeling” (111).
In one sense, Gregor’s transformation sets him free from his toil. In fact, the
German word Verwandlung can mean not only ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘transforma-
tion’ but ‘commutation,’ as in the commutation of a prison sentence. But in
another sense, Gregor’s ‘freedom’ now depends upon the indulgence of his
family. He must be taken care of; he must be fed and his room must be cleaned.
To the extent that the family continues to regard the vermin as Gregor, his
physical survival requires that they nourish and protect him. Gregor is therefore
both free and dependent. In this way he returns to a child-like condition, perhaps
one he never knew as a child. But Gregor is also ungeheuren, monstrous and
hideous. His disfigurement, which might be interpreted as the consequence of
trying to return to a child-like condition that never was, means that, unlike an
adored and indulged child, he must lock himself away in his room lest he upset
his family, must bar himself from meaningful contact, and must deprive himself of
all but the most basic of necessities.
Japanese therapist Yuichi Hattori, who stands somewhat apart from his con-
temporaries in defining hikikomori as a “trauma-based disorder” that is nonetheless
lacking most defining characteristics and symptoms of PTSD (2005, 184), studied
thirty-five clients at a suburban Tokyo clinic, some of whom revealed similar
family dynamics.4 While the dependencies and indulgences of the Samsa family,
and then Gregor, are cast in terms of physical need and accommodation, so are
the behaviors of hikikomori, whose self-incarceration may be highly symbolic. In
an illustrative case, a twenty-eight-year-old woman recovering from hikikomori
explained that, in her childhood:

My mother depended on me for comforting. My mother treated me like her

personal teddy bear and used me to satisfy her own emotional needs. She
wasn’t interested in knowing my feelings and thoughts. I don’t think my
mother regarded me as a human with free will. She sometimes looked like a
zombie to me. I felt emotionally suffocated, as I couldn’t communicate with
her. I secretly feared my mother, but I tried always to please her. I wanted
freedom. I felt emotionally abandoned as a child.
(2005, 197)

So, if we read Kafka’s story in one way, we find a set of dynamics quite similar to
those of the individual in hikikomori, who returns to a child-like state, but one
134 Hikikomori

distorted by the realities of the individual’s deprived childhood. Like the young
woman described in Hattori’s study, Gregor had been used to indulge his parents’
needs, rather than the other way around. Certainly, the Samsa family does not
seem “interested in knowing [Gregor’s] feelings and thoughts,” nor do they
regard him, either before or after his transformation, “as a human with free will.”
Gregor’s demand for care and attention, therefore, can be expressed only through
hideous self-transformation and isolation.
Gregor’s physical death is caused by starvation, but his existence, his self or his
psychic existence, is terminated the moment his sister Grete convinces the family that
they “must just try to get rid of the idea that this is Gregor” (Kafka 1971, 134), a
notion that she defends by arguing that the real Gregor would be too considerate
to presume upon his family’s indulgence for so long. That is, the real Gregor
would have killed himself or exiled himself from the home for their sakes long ago
and would be ashamed to hang around requiring care and sacrifice on their parts.
If we imagine, for a moment, that Gregor has not physically changed at all,
that his ‘transformation’ has been a transformation of emotion or attitude, then
we may read his metamorphosis as a metaphor for his desire to indulge himself
and to be indulged by others. Of course, Gregor’s discovered desire ‘monstrously’
disfigures him with respect to his own self-concept and his family’s impression of
him. In a sense, Grete is right that, if all the family knows of Gregor is his will-
ingness to repress and exploit his needs in their service, he no longer exists, and
the “idea” of Gregor, which mistakes him for his self-occluding role in the
family, has already been lost. Tragically, in the moment of his death, Gregor
comes to agree with the family that, in his new “monstrous” form, he is not
himself, is not lovable, and therefore must be eliminated:

[Gregor] thought of his family with tenderness and love. The decision that
he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his
sister. … In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until …
his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the
last faint flicker of his breath.
(1971, 135)

Gregor’s ‘mysterious’ transformation, then, may be read as a claim to indulgence,

a self-incarceration, an escape from a painful condition, and a disfigurement of his
self’s most basic desire, one that makes his desire unrecognizable. What is com-
pelling and tragic about the story, of course, is that it should not be necessary that
Gregor be disfigured, or that he conceive of himself as disfigured, in order to
discover his own desire for love and care. That is, Gregor’s transformation may be
read as a botched attempt to rediscover his capacity to amaeru. This attempt ulti-
mately fails because he is unable to experience or act upon his desire for amae
without becoming overwhelmed by shame and self-loathing, disfiguring his desire
into something hideous. Gregor both strives to fulfill and sabotages his own
 Hikikomori 135

struggle for amae by becoming “monstrous” to himself and to those from whom
he most deeply desires love and indulgence.
If it is the internal conflict between Gregor’s shame and his desire to amaeru
that causes his disfigurement, then his metamorphosis appears very much like the
metamorphoses of scores of young men and women who enter hikikomori, who
feel that their desire for amae, expressed in an isolation that demands a half-measure
of indulgence, also makes them monstrous and unworthy of amae. It would seem
that the metamorphosis of the socially functioning individual to the individual in
hikikomori is characterized by both profound shame and impossible hope, or, to be
more precise, hope made impossible by an equally powerful sense of shame.
Since the individual in hikikomori experiences his desire to amaeru as childish,
shameful, or monstrous, consciously seeking to distance himself from it as
much as possible, his silent self-incarceration might also be understood as a des-
perate attempt to enter a protective ‘cocoon’ from which he may one day emerge
not as a disfigured vermin full of monstrous desires but as a person worthy of
certain indulgences. As Winnicott might say, such an individual and his “anti-
social tendenc[ies]” reflect an effort to “get back behind the deprivation moment
or condition” (1986, 92), to return to a state of freedom, security, and indul-
gence, perhaps lost long ago. But the ambivalence about this desire, owing to the
shame the individual has internalized as a defense against its frustration, suggests to
him that returning to this state is neither possible nor desirable. The impossibility
of his hope, then, turns the individual in hikikomori to rage and anger, as he
repeats rather than redeems his moment of deprivation while seeking to impose
his deprivation onto others. To understand these final characteristics of hikikomori,
we must turn briefly to Winnicott’s work on deprivation and delinquency.

Deprivation and victimization

In his short paper entitled “Delinquency as a Sign of Hope,” Winnicott is concerned
with children who have experienced deprivation: the loss or withdrawal of care,
dependability, and indulgence in their worlds. Deprivation may be painful in terms
of the frustration of momentary needs or desires, but, more importantly, it occa-
sions a tremendous change in the entire psycho-social experience or “the whole
life of the child” (1986, 91). That is, deprivation is not experienced by the child as a
trivial or temporary environmental failure. The child, possessed at first by “unthinkable
anxiety” about his new condition, quickly strives to comply with the new order
of things, fundamentally because “there is nothing else that the child is strong enough to
do” (92). But adaptation to a depriving and impoverished environment means the
loss of the spontaneity, safe expressions of aggression, and creativity appropriate to
facilitating environments. Although she had little choice, the child who identifies
with the framework of control and deprivation inflicts a greater loss upon herself.
She compounds her initial loss – we might even say she unwittingly colludes with
her depriving objects – to produce a state of profound self-deprivation.
136 Hikikomori

Winnicott posits that it is common for children who can still recall an earlier
state of indulgence to seize upon an occasion for hope, and to strive to “get back
behind the moment of deprivation” by “reach[ing] out” and, perhaps, compulsively
stealing or breaking something (1986, 92–93). This initial impulsive act repre-
sents, for Winnicott, creative object-seeking more than anti-social or criminal
delinquency. That is, such acts of theft or destructiveness are really attempts to
rediscover and safely express authentic and aggressive impulses (94–95). Ultimately,
what is hoped for in apparently ‘delinquent’ behavior is the return to the state –
composed of both reality and fantasy, of conditions in both the inner and outer
world – in which spontaneous gestures and authentic desires may be experienced
safely, indulged by the parent, enacted freely, and tolerated by the environment.
The same may be said of individuals in hikikomori: that they have suffered
deprivation, that they are behaving in a way that appears, if not delinquent, then
at least anti-social, but that ultimately they seek not rebellion but the return to a
condition of connection with their own desires and impulses, perhaps especially
the infantile and childish ones. They seek, for lack of a better term, the ‘indulgent
self-experience’ facilitated by a nurturing environment that, since it belongs properly
to childhood, has to a large degree already been lost, and can only be mourned,
never fully restored in adolescence or adulthood. But, of course, internal conflict
about this desire makes behavior of hikikomori a curious mixture of self-defense
and self-sabotage, ultimately ill suited to achieving this aim.
In the minority of cases in which hikikomori verbally or physically attack family
members, it is possible to see attempts to reverse early emotional deprivation,
attempts which are, given the circumstances, almost certain to fail. Hattori relates
the case of a twenty-one-year-old man who “pinned his unresponsive mother to
the wall, squeezed her neck with his hands, and said, ‘Tell me how you feel
about me.’ The mother said repeatedly, ‘I’m sorry. I am to blame.’” Hattori
concludes that the mother’s irrelevant and tangential response “disappointed” the
young man “overwhelmingly,” although we must imagine that such disappoint-
ment had very likely already been experienced by the young man in hikikomori
and that its effects had already overwhelmed him (2005, 189–190).
If several of Hattori’s clients “withdrew even more after domestic violence
ceased,” it would seem that such individuals in hikikomori, having failed to create
an indulgent environment for themselves in self-incarceration, and having subse-
quently failed even in last-ditch attempts to re-ignite loving or indulgent rela-
tionships with their parents, simply give up. At this stage of hopelessness, the
individual in hikikomori can only compulsively re-enact his deprivation, attaching
a more regressive aim to his expressions of despair: to share his agony with others
by visiting it upon them.
It is important not to overlook how the self-deprivation imposed by the indi-
vidual in hikikomori also denies family members the freedom and autonomy due
to subjects as separate individuals. Family members caring for an individual in
hikikomori provide meals, clothing, shelter, and other basic needs, often making
 Hikikomori 137

tremendous sacrifices in their own lives. But it would be a mistake to imagine

that an individual’s state of hikikomori forces family members to return to ‘care’ in
a rich sense, or to amae. At least, such an interpretation would seem to offer a
very shallow understanding of what amae signifies and what is ultimately hoped
for, since family members are prevented from emotionally interacting with the
individual and are relegated to the status of servants.
The refusal, on the part of the individual in hikikomori, to help the family
understand its sudden servitude and the trying situation (self-)imposed upon the
individual leaves family members unsure whether the hikikomori is a punishment
for some misdeed, or whether it will lead to greater physical or mental sickness,
suicide, or violence. Parents and family members of individuals in hikikomori fre-
quently report feelings of guilt and shame concerning their hikikomori family
member. By denying communication, by shutting family members out, and by
abandoning family members in their shame, worry, and fear, the individual in
hikikomori victimizes her caretakers while similarly occupying the position of a
victim. Part of the deprivation involved in hikikomori, then, is that the individual
who is shut away in her room manages to deprive others of psychological well-
being, comfort, self-esteem, participation in normal activities and relationships,
and the ability to indulge themselves or to enjoy the indulgences of others. The
individual in hikikomori makes others responsible for her survival and, by
implication, for her hikikomori state as well.
Gary Paul’s very short story “Hikikomori” shares something of its effect on a
sibling with painful simplicity (2012, 69–70, emphasis added). In the story,
Satoshi writes a note to his sister to accompany her nightly meal, left outside her
door. Satoshi has not seen her in five years:

I hope you’re still alive and well. I mean, someone eats the plates of food I
leave outside your door. … I’m just writing this letter because I wanted to
talk to you in some way or another. … Oh, don’t think I’m pressuring you
to come out or something. Just want to talk. … As for me, I had a girlfriend
last year! You may have heard us talking and laughing loudly late at night.
She made me laugh. She wanted to meet you, you know, but … we’re not
together any more. I couldn’t leave the house for too long, not with you left all
alone here. I don’t mean to sound bitter, I like looking after you. Think I’m
a little bit hikikomori myself, haha. I don’t do much these days. I don’t
know why … I just feel sort of numb. The world has gotten harder in the
last few years. I’m not sure I want to be a part of it any more. Honestly,
caring for you is the only thing I think I’m good at, and, even then, I don’t
know if I’m succeeding …
I love you.
Happy Birthday.
–Satoshi
138 Hikikomori

To consider hikikomori a means of punishing others by punishing the self, and,

as such, as a form of victimization via self-victimization, is to interpret hikikomori
along the lines of Theodor Reik’s understanding of masochistic behavior as
symbolic aggression that announces: “That’s how I would like to treat you” (see
Uebel 2013, 480–481). Indeed, it would not be out of order to speculate that a
goal of the individual in hikikomori is to transmit to family members and others
her own isolation, shame, and fear, just as Satoshi’s sister forces him to become
something of a hikikomori just to tend to her hikikomori state. Doing so may permit the
individual in hikikomori to experience her own deprivation, perhaps for the first
time, and to contend with her confusion and anger by projectively identifying
with the family’s suffering.
Developmentally speaking, we may say that the deprivation of indulgence,
dependence, or amae is the original act of victimization. To be deprived of amae is
a form of victimization that leads many individuals to carry with them, through-
out life, a sense of having been profoundly harmed. In adulthood, individuals and
groups continue to make use of the mechanism of projective identification to
re-create this early victimization, to experience their own feelings through others’
reactions to being victimized, and to impose upon others the responsibility for
their own acts of victimization. In the final chapter, I discuss the state of nature as
a fantasized original, natural condition in which what is most obviously lacking is
not political authority but something like amae. It may be read, I will argue, as a
fantasy about re-experiencing the original act of victimization in a way that is not
entirely dissimilar to the phenomenon of hikikomori.
Indeed, in politics, the dynamic by which victimizers hold onto and strive to
re-experience victimization may be frequently seen, as in the Zenkyo-to- move-
ments in Japan in the 1960s, discussed by Doi, who noticed that both amae and
higaisha-ishiki (the sense of grievance and of being a victim) were at work, and
that the two constructs were closely connected. Doi remarked how the students
of the Zenkyo-to- movements were able to operate aggressively while, at the same
time, framing their actions in ways that succeeded in “putting themselves in the
position of victims” (1973, 25–26).
More recently, in the United States, the killings of black males by police offi-
cers in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, Baltimore, Maryland, and elsewhere,
and the unfortunate police responses to public protest and outrage, have shown
that police, government, and diverse civilian groups are all capable of casting
themselves as victims and, as such, of acting with the objective of transmitting and
re-transmitting their own experiences of suffering, imposing upon others the
agony, confusion, and incomprehension of the victim.
These protests have struggled with conflicting desires related to the experience
of victimization. On one hand, protestors have seemed to wish to know and to
make known to others exactly what has happened to victims such as Freddie
Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and many others. On the other hand, pro-
testors seek to transmit to fellow protestors, to the police, to the media, and to
 Hikikomori 139

the public the message that it is impossible to understand what being a victim is like
unless one is or has been a victim. That is, protests such as these, and the media
discussion and intellectual discourses that surround them, are concerned with both
sharing and hiding the experience of being a victim, an experience that, itself, seems to
include both confusion and certainty, fear and rage, frustration and gratification.
That individuals in hikikomori remain shut away in their rooms and refuse, for
years and even decades, gestures of understanding and care from family members
and social workers implies that the behavior involves a powerful compulsion to
repeat an early failure in the relationship between child and parent, a compulsion
that cannot be resolved because the individual in hikikomori is unable to accept his
own desire but is also unable to abandon it. The resistance to accepting a belated
form of amae by the individual in hikikomori may be, as suggested above, related
to the shame felt by such individuals: the disfiguring of their desire as something
monstrous, which only deepens their sense of unworthiness. At the same time,
the inability to abandon the desire for amae may be related to unyielding feelings
of rage and resentment at having lost the indulgence and care due a child and the
subsequent losses suffered by the adolescent or adult.
By focusing on the ‘mysteriousness’ of hikikomori, and by preserving its mys-
tery, individuals in hikikomori and those who study and treat them condemn them
to repeating and re-experiencing their losses. We may even say that the individual
in hikikomori is stuck in a paradox out of which he might think, but this thinking
has so far been elusive to most. He wishes to be alone, as he should have been
once, but finds that all he can do is lock himself in isolation. He needed others in
order to be alone, and now he rejects others to try to undo his need. He is
unaware of his desire to be meaningfully related to others, which is also a psychic
potential that seems impossible to him. Finding no words or thoughts to com-
municate these feelings to himself or others, the complexities of these apparent
contradictions overwhelm him, just as they seem to overwhelm scholars and
theorists who study and treat the phenomenon.

Notes
1 According to some, the idea that hikikomori are over-indulged corresponds to their
typically middle-to-high socio-economic status. Other explanations, not unique to
hikikomori or Japanese culture, may be equally relevant, such as the well-known ten-
dency of poverty to both exacerbate and obscure mental illness. Poverty leaves many
undiagnosed and untreated, owing to unemployment, inadequate housing, physical ill-
ness, lack of access to psychiatric resources, and related socio-economic problems (see,
e.g., Saxena et al. 2007; Thompson 2007; World Health Organization 2009). Con-
comitantly, as recently collected data on the high prevalence of hikikomori in Lagos,
Nigeria, suggests (Bowker, Ojo, and Bowker 2015), hikikomori may be simply impos-
sible under conditions of subsistence-level family economies, where non-employment
and dependence upon family-based home-care are inconceivable.
2 Doi writes that in Japanese society, a useful distinction may be drawn between the inner
and outer circles of relationship. According to Doi, when in the inner circle, both the
140 Hikikomori

child and the adult are “protected and permitted to amaeru” (1973, 107), while, within
the outer circle, the individual is asked to restrain (kigane) herself, to refrain from
expressing willfulness or personal desires, and to strive primarily for the harmony of the
group. To amaeru where one ought not is to presume upon the indulgence of those
who do not owe one indulgence, and is a criticism that has been levied against insuffi-
ciently sober individuals and student protest movements alike (see Doi 1973, 1986).
Today, to the extent that hikikomori is considered a “national” problem with consequences
for the entire Japanese society, this criticism is applied to individuals in hikikomori and
their families.
3 The term, ungeheuren Ungeziefer, literally means “monstrous vermin,” and is translated
into English either as such, or as “gigantic insect,” based upon details given later in the
story that suggest Gregor’s form to resemble that of a beetle or roach.
4 There are some limitations to Hattori’s study. First, although his qualitative case studies
are not statistically significant or representative with respect to the Japanese hikikomori
population, he sometimes draws broad conclusions based upon his quantitative results.
Second, one must regard with a certain degree of suspicion the fact that no qualitative
or quantitative study, conducted either before or after Hattori’s, has replicated such
significant correlations between hikikomori and trauma or dissociative personality systems,
the latter being Hattori’s area of personal expertise.

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8
‘NATURAL’ EXPERIENCE AND THE
STATE OF NATURE

The idea of a state of nature, a human condition preceding organized society and
government, may be found in the texts of Judaic, Dharmic, Islamic, and Christian
religions, in the classical thought of Plato and Hesiod, in contemporary theories
of justice advanced by John Rawls and David Gauthier, in the psycho-historical
imagination of Sigmund Freud, in the apocalyptic visions of dozens of post-
moderns, including many of those mentioned in previous chapters, along with
Maurice Blanchot, Jean Baudrillard, and others (see also Jay 1993), and in popular
representations of catastrophic events that eliminate law and political order, leav-
ing survivors to contend with warring groups and assorted monsters. But its
purest expression, and its distinctively modern presumption of a natural right or
freedom as the basis for legitimate civil government, is found in the works of
Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Its critics, who object to the terms of the social contract as well as to the
characterization of the state of nature, have grown in number over the past sev-
eral decades, from Carole Pateman’s influential critique with respect to the status
of women (1988), to Charles Mills’ similar critique with respect to race (1997), to
psychologically attuned and care-ethical approaches that question the internal
logic and validity of the assumptions of the social contract as a primary foundation
for liberal individualist thought.
The best-known critique of the state of nature is that it presents a picture of
the subject as asocial, disembedded, independent, and abstract, that the realities of
human dependence and interdependence seem to have no bearing upon con-
tractarians’ view of “humans as originally isolated and self-enclosed” (Gerson
2004, 777). This argument has been advanced by a number of contemporary
theorists such as Annette Baier (1994), Seyla Benhabib (1987), Christine
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 145

DiStefano (1983, 1991), Virginia Held (1993), and Martha Nussbaum (2000), as
well as earlier critics like Mary Astell (1704) and Mary Wollstonecraft ([1792]
2004), all of whom have correctly pointed out the denials of dependence and
intimate human relationships in the state of nature.1
This critique, however, is in one important respect inaccurate, for it is not
precisely subjects or selves that are portrayed in the state of nature. Rather, the
state of nature presents us with a picture not just of an ungoverned, unrelated
human being, but a being without a self. The difference amounts to more than
hair-splitting, not only for contract theory but for its consequences in con-
temporary political discourse. Consider, for instance, the longstanding liberal–
communitarian debate, represented in part by figures like John Rawls, Michael
Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. A prominent – perhaps the
prominent – point of contention is how to regard the political subject or self,
whether it is possible to abstract the self from her commitments and community,
and whether it is desirable, even in theory, to do so.
While it is not the focus of this chapter, this debate could be clarified to a great
degree if distinctions could be preserved between human beings, individuals, and
selves. Human beings cannot develop the capacities of selfhood without the
interventions of civil society and its institutions, especially the family. At the same
time, the human being does not become a self in a non-problematic alignment
with the traditions and commitments of family or community. Selves do not
develop in isolation, but neither do group identities and traditions encourage the
development of selves. Human beings live and have always lived in groups. But
this fact does not mean that group contexts are at the center of what it means to
be a self. Rather, the self depends upon families, groups, and even states that
facilitate its capacities both to resist their pull and to meaningfully participate in
them. To become a self requires having been afforded, by others, the ability to
escape, return, and re-negotiate contact with those same others on the self’s own
terms.
In this chapter I do not delve into this particular debate, nor do I defend the con-
struct of the state of nature against a flawed aspect of its critique. Rather, I wish
to show that the state of nature’s representation of a natural, originary experience –
again, not of free and independent selfhood but of a selfless freedom and innocence –
reinforces a primitive orientation to selves and groups that could otherwise help
facilitate their mutual development. That is, the fantasy of the state of nature both
contributes to and helps us understand the preoccupation with preserving
experiences of ‘natural’ psychic devastation in our private and civil lives.
Holding onto experiences of psychic devastation, which may have occurred in
reality, in fantasy, or both, and deeming them ‘natural,’ ‘original,’ or ‘inevitable’
means unconsciously reinforcing paranoid-schizoid orientations toward the self,
others, and civil institutions. These orientations and dynamics have been discussed
throughout this book, perhaps most memorably in Chapters 2 and 3, where Bill
Holm asked us to imagine that civil institutions seek to “rob us” of our
146 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

experience and then “kill” us. Instead, we must quickly “kill” them “inside us”
and “damage” them in the external world (Holm 2010, 15–16). That is, contrary
to the stated purpose of the state of nature thought-experiment, the fantasy of the
state of nature impedes the development of sane, healthy attitudes toward civil
institutions that might otherwise support selves.

Heuristical or historical?
As is well known, the states of nature commonly imagined in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, as well as their contemporary variations, such as Rawls’
famous “original position” (1971), are presented as heuristic devices to assess the
legitimacy of government. Fictions, thought-experiments, tests by which to assess
the justice of laws and restrictions imposed by a civil state, states of nature are
essentially narratives of abstract moral criteria. State-of-nature theorists tell stories
about pre-social individuals who never existed, in order to make claims about the
limits of governments and institutions that do exist.
It would be nothing new to say that the defense of a social contract based on a
hypothesized – or hypostatized – state of nature contains logical fallacies, includ-
ing the unwarranted assumption fallacy, where conclusions are drawn from pre-
mises that are unlikely or untrue. More problematic is that, although most serious
state-of-nature theorists (except Locke) explicitly deny the historical reality of the
state of nature – as they should, given all available anthropological evidence (see
e.g., Gamble 1999; Leakey and Lewin 1978) – somehow this fact is elided in
both elaborations of and critiques of the construct. Even Carole Pateman (1988),
vociferous critic of the social contract and the patriarchal domination carried over from
the state of nature, treats these scenarios as both male fantasy and historical reality.
Hobbes frankly admits that “there was never such a time, nor condition of
warre” as his state of nature suggests, only then to remind the reader that “there
are many places, where [people] live so now,” such as “the savage people in
many places of America … [who] have no government at all” (1985, 187).2
Similarly, Rousseau famously opens his second Discourse by “putting aside all the
facts, for they have no bearing on the question. The investigations that may be
undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths, but
only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings” (1987, 18). The state of nature
is a state “which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably
never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order
to judge properly our own present state” (1987, 34). Nonetheless, Rousseau
simultaneously proclaims:

O man, whatever country you may be from … listen: here is your history, as
I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellow men, who are liars,
but in nature, who never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be
true; there will be nothing false except what I have unintentionally added.
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 147

The times about which I am going to speak are quite remote: how much
you have changed from what you were!
(1987, 19)

Locke is something of a special case, for he obscures the unreality of the state of
nature right from the beginning. The chapter in the Second Treatise devoted to it
opens with the assertion that “to understand political power right … we must
consider what state men are naturally in” (1980, 8). Locke soon cites one of his
favorite authorities, the “judicious [Richard] Hooker,” in affirming the historical
reality of the transition from “living single and solely by ourselves” to a civil state:

To those that say, there were never any men in the state of nature, I will …
oppose the authority of the judicious Hooker … where he says … “for-
asmuch as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with com-
petent store of things, needful for such a life as our nature doth desire … as
living single and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek com-
munion and fellowship with others: this was the cause of men’s uniting
themselves at first in politic societies.”
(1980, 13)

When addressing the “mighty objection” that men cannot be found in the state
of nature anywhere in the world, Locke replies, “since all princes and rulers … all
through the world, are in a state of nature, it is plain the world never was, nor
ever will be, without numbers of men in that state” (13). Locke’s point is that the
state of nature may have been real in the past, and, more importantly, remains
real as a psycho-political potentiality, given up but not extinguished upon entry
into civil society: “All men are naturally in that state, and remain so, till by their
own consents they make themselves members of some politic society” (13–14).
This notion is not original to Locke, for Hobbes notes as well that “in all times,
Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in
continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators,” which is to say,
in a condition of liberty like the state of nature, but “because they uphold
thereby the Industry of their Subjects,” their ‘natural’ liberty leads not to the same
misery as the ungoverned individual (1980, 187–188).
It will come as no surprise to students of political theory that state-of-nature
theorists, while perhaps ambivalently denying the historical component of the fantasy,
nevertheless use the state of nature to define human nature, such that the con-
struct of the state of nature becomes a descriptor not only of external conditions
governing states and sovereigns but of internal conditions governing states of
mind. For Locke, as C.B. Macpherson notes, “natural is not the opposite of social
or civil. The natural condition of mankind is within man now, not set apart in
some distant time or place” (1971, 74). The same may be said of Hobbes, who
argues that if one doubts the veracity of the picture of the state of nature he has
148 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

drawn, then one may have it “confirmed by Experience.” That is, the incredulous
person should recall that:

when taking a journey, he armes himselfe … when going to sleep, he locks

his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests … what opinion he
has of his fellow subjects. … Does he not there accuse mankind by his
actions, as I do by my words?
(1985, 186–187)

Whether the hypothetical status of the state of nature is muddled with a historical
one, or whether its relatively aggressive and paranoid orientation is carried over
into civil society partly or fully, it is clear that there remains a powerful connec-
tion between imaginative accounts of ‘natural’ humanity and contemporary
human experience. That is, the imagination of the state of nature demands ana-
lytic interpretation, interpretation as an unconscious driver of contemporary
ideologies of experience. As I demonstrate below, the state of nature may be
considered a fantasy, for it contains powerful elements of wishful and even
magical thinking: the wish that wishing could change reality. That the hypothe-
tical is often confused with the historical, and that the principles of the natural
condition are carried over, explicitly or implicitly, into the civil state, suggest not
merely conceptual inexactitude but the influence of disavowed elements of fan-
tasy upon the individuals and institutions that have, directly and indirectly, arisen
from contractarian formulations.

Born free?
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These words open Rousseau’s
Social Contract. “How did this change take place?,” Rousseau asks. And he answers:
“I have no idea.” What concerns Rousseau is “what can render [this change]
legitimate” (1987, 141). And, of course, what legitimizes humanity’s passage from
a natural to a civil state is the total alienation of the individual from himself to the
political community, as well as “the remarkable change in man” produced by it,
as set out by Rousseau in the well-known formulae of the general will.3
But if, as Rousseau and others admit, the state of nature is an ahistorical con-
trivance, then in what sense are humans “born free”? Are we “born free” to
Rousseau because, in this moment of his writing, he is affirming the historical
reality of the state of nature, the “original state of man” which “differ[s] so
greatly” from civilized man (1987, 80)? Or, are we “born free” only in the fic-
tional scenario of the state of nature but not in our actual (pre)history? Does the
phrase “born free” merely refer to the premise of natural liberty derived from the
imagination of the state of nature? And if so, are we “born free” simply because it
is possible for us to imagine ourselves having been “born free” in this natural
state? Can we, in fact, imagine ourselves “born free” in such a state? If our
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 149

freedom depends upon our capacity to imagine ourselves as possessing freedom,

then is our freedom magically derived, such that we become free simply by
wishing we were born free?
Perhaps we may understand the claim that we are “born free” ontogenetically,
as individuals. It is true that many infants enjoy an experience we ought not
object to call ‘natural’ and ‘free.’ This experience of “primary narcissism,” as
Freud described it, includes the experience of omnipotence: an illusion of perfect
control over the infant, others, and the world, which are not yet differentiated.
Primary narcissism, which is the “libidinal complement to the egoism of the
instinct of self-preservation” (1914, 74), is related to but not equivalent with the
“secondary” or pathological narcissism that presents itself in adult personality
disorders and in grandiose and persecutory delusions.
Primary narcissism, we might say, is the psychic state of the human being in
the state of nature, particularly Rousseau’s state of nature in which we are “born
free.” Rousseau presents us with a child-like creature in the body of an adult, a
being who lives “in himself” (1987, 81), who lives to preserve himself, and who
happily gratifies his own desires:

Wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwell-

ing, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men,
and correspondingly with no desire to do them harm … savage man … had
only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to that state. … If by
chance he made some discovery, he was all the less able to communicate it to
others because he did not even know his own children. Art perished with its
inventor. There was neither education nor progress; generations were mul-
tiplied to no purpose. Since each one always began from the same point,
centuries went by with all the crudeness of the first ages; the species was
already old, and man remained ever a child.
(1987, 57)

Consider, by comparison, Rousseau’s intellectual ancestor Michel de Mon-

taigne, who informed Europeans about the life of the Brazilian “cannibals” and
their infantile yet Edenic state. Montaigne invokes Plato in his famous essay in
order to allude to the differences between the “cannibals” and the utopian
Republic. Where the Republic calls for decades of education and generations of
‘civilizing’ to achieve its aims, Montaigne wishes to show that the ‘children’ of
Nature are ‘born free’ of constraint, corruption, servitude, and imperfection:

This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no kind of com-

merce, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no title of magistrate
or of political superior, no habit of service, riches or poverty, no contracts,
no inheritances, no divisions of property, only leisurely occupations, no
respect for any kinship but the common ties, no clothes, no agriculture, no
150 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

metals, no use of corn or wine. The very words denoting lying, treason,
deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. How far
from such perfection would he find the republic that he imagined: “men
fresh from the hands of the gods.”
(1993, 110)

Of course, the primarily narcissistic infant who experiences something of a

natural freedom is not aware that it has been provided for her by a perceptive and
generous parent. As far as she knows, others and the environment do not impinge
upon her because she is the environment, or, rather, she controls the environment
and others, who seem to bend readily to her wishes.
As ideology, the state of nature may deny not only a reality confirmed by
anthropological evidence, but a reality of individual human development. Freud
rightly links the state of primary narcissism to the propensity for magical thinking
and to the “omnipotence of thought” (1938, 873–4): the belief that wishing can
alter reality, that wishing makes things so. And Winnicott was more correct than
not when he famously claimed in his 1952 paper on “Anxiety Associated with
Insecurity” that “there is no such thing as a baby” because there is always
“someone caring for the baby,” always “a ‘nursing couple’” (1992, 99). In only
slightly different language, in a 1959 paper on “The Fate of the Transitional
Object,” he argues that “there is no such thing as an infant,” only the same
“‘nursing couple’” because “when we see an infant … we know we will find
infant-care with the infant as part of that infant-care” (1989, 54). “It is not logical,”
therefore, “to think in terms of an individual because there is not yet an indivi-
dual self there” (Winnicott 1988, 131; see also Bowlby 1988). Even in Rousseau’s
language, far from being “born free,” a human infant seen objectively, and not
from within the infant’s fantasy, would be necessarily “enslaved,” since the infant’s
needs make him utterly “incapable of doing without another” (1987, 59).4
So, although the infantile illusion of magical power may ground later, more
mature experiences of autonomy and creativity, what belongs to the state of
nature is the fantasy of omnipotence, not the reality of the psychological or poli-
tical origins of civility and maturity. Put more simply: What is wrong with the state
of nature is not that it depicts isolated and independent selves but that it depicts
magical and narcissistic infants. This means that the denial of dependence in the state
of nature may not be the most misleading aspect of the fantasy. More confounding,
rather, is how the primary narcissistic component of the state-of-nature fantasy is
carried over into the psychic experiences of individuals living in civil society.

The ‘bad’ self, the ‘natural’ self, and the not-self

Several years ago, I interviewed a young woman named Maria who told me
about her gruesome experience of having been kidnapped and held in captivity,
by herself, for four days in a small room, until she was eventually rescued by the
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 151

police (see Bowker 2014).5 A fourteen-year-old girl at the time, Maria’s experience
of captivity was traumatic and terrifying.
“I screamed so much I forgot my talking voice,” she recalled. And “by the
third or fourth day, I really didn’t know who I was. I was afraid of how I
behaved. I was full of rage,” she said, holding up her forearms to demonstrate
how she injured herself by continually pounding against the locked door. In the
years following her abduction, Maria experienced uncertainty, anxiety, paranoia,
difficulty performing in school, and a feeling that she was involved in a constant
struggle to “figure out what was going on.” “I’m not normally a person who
yells and screams,” she explained, “but I behaved in the most odd manner and,
for months after, [I] behaved strangely.”
In spite of all this, Maria referred to her experience of captivity as her “natural
state,” presumably because she was alone in a bare room, with no one explicitly
interfering with or physically abusing her. Of course, as has been discussed in
Chapter 6, her involuntary confinement was an explicit form of interference and
abuse, but she did not experience it in precisely this way. In fact, the link
between her confinement and what she called her “natural state” was what
troubled her the most. Maria wondered why she was so afraid to confront her
“natural state.” “Why didn’t I feel safe there?,” she asked. “Should I have really
been afraid of myself that much?,” she wondered. Of course, there is nothing
“natural” about a child held in captivity, just as one would imagine that Maria
had many things to fear during those four days other than “herself.”
Maria’s attempt to comprehend her experience as “natural,” like her expressed
wish to “thank” her captors and to “buy them dinner,” seemed intended to
transform a horrific experience into a learning experience. Maria reported that, in
time, she came to recognize that her captors were her most valuable teachers,
because they showed her “the most crucial purpose and thing in my life,” which
is “to understand me.”

The ‘bad’ self

Maria’s story, then, returns us to Lichtenberg’s cruel joke about experience, with
which Chapter 2 began: “Experience means experiencing what one does not
wish to experience.” Maria had turned her involuntary, injurious experience into
something ‘good,’ or at least she had tried to. She had relied on the concept of a
“natural state” to do so, lending an aura of benevolent and even divine purpose
to what others might regard as a violent experience inflicted upon her by the
cruelest of criminals.
While some will be tempted to see in Maria’s eventual attitude toward her
captors a mere identification with them, her attempt to find something good in
her experience did not strike me as such. Maria’s attempt to ‘take’ something
from her experience was not merely a defense against it, nor a denial of her need
to mourn her pain and what she had lost. Her error lay in the much more basic
152 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

assumption that her “natural” self was to be found inside a screaming, panicked,
helpless child, forcibly locked away in a room. This error lies at the foundation of an
apocalyptic fantasy, derived from the state-of-nature fantasy, that in experiences of
psychic annihilation of the self, one becomes ‘free’ to return to the natural state in which
one was ‘born,’ that in self-death one’s naturalness and freedom are restored.
In Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity (2014), I argued that desubjectifying con-
ditions and apocalyptic, disaster-oriented, survivalist fantasies served the psychic
interests of individuals seeking regressive experiences of illusory freedom and
innocence. I might have done more there to explain the relationship between
freedom and innocence, which is not difficult to understand. To use Kleinian
language, what weighs on the psyche is guilt and fear, guilt and fear concerning
one’s own rage, hate, and destructiveness: For Klein, “the central conflict in
human experience … is between love and hate, between the caring preservation
and the malicious destruction of others” (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983, 142).
But if external conditions are disastrous enough, one need no longer feel guilt
or fear about destructive rage, for one finds oneself in a world where there are no good
objects left to harm. Put another way, the external world mirrors the paranoid-
schizoid outlook, where good and bad objects are radically split and clearly dis-
tinguishable, such that one hardly risks mistaking one for the other. A form of
innocence, then, is imagined to belong to the one who has no need for guilt or
reparation. This situation would also seem to afford a kind of primitive freedom:
the freedom to act upon any impulse, even the most violent, without internal
consequence. While we may harm or be harmed, kill or be killed, in such a
condition “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and
Unjust have there no place” (Hobbes 1985, 188). To become accommodated to
a state of nature, one has to learn how to survive physically, and doing so would
seem to rely, in many apocalyptic fantasies and narratives, on accepting, psychically,
one’s unlimited “right to every thing: even to one another’s body” (190).
Maria was “full of rage,” and it was, above all, her own uncontrollable rage
that frightened her, as she became aware of her own destructive potential, awa-
kened by the violence she was suffering. But, having no one before her toward
whom to direct her rage, having been blindfolded so that she could not even call
up the face of one of her tormentors, she was stuck. The only object available for
her to hate was the self she had become in her captivity. Maria attributed her rage
and hate to this ‘bad’ self, and attempted to conquer this ‘bad’ self by embracing
her captivity as a learning experience. Her ‘natural state,’ along this reasoning,
must be one that is not afraid of capricious violence or confinement, one in
which there is no reason to struggle against abuse.
Maria’s experience of being “blindfolded” serves as a horrific yet apt metaphor
for those who experience captivity, abuse, and unfreedom in less literal forms, but
who are quite uncertain of whom to blame, not least because they have been
‘blinded’ by ideologies that convince them that their experiences are ‘natural,’
‘normal,’ or ‘good.’ In Chapter 3, I suggested that something like a ‘straw self’
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 153

was constituted in trauma to be destroyed, and that this self would inevitably be
characterized as ‘bad’ in its expulsion from the psyche and its replacement with
traumata or traumatizing objects. The logic here is the same: If painful, depriving,
or terrifying experiences of life inspire hatred, fear, or rage, but such experiences
are conceived to be ‘natural,’ then it is our feelings that must be out of touch
with ‘nature.’ ‘Nature,’ then, must recommend a selfless state, or at least a state
where the self is unguarded, where it has no expectation of not being impinged
upon, violated, overtaken, or possessed by trauma.

The ‘natural’ self

What is the experience of the human being in its ‘natural state’? Does this human
being have a ‘natural’ self? If so, we must be cautious not to confuse that fantasy
with the notion of the “true self” as elaborated in Winnicott’s well-known sense
of the term (1965), although it may well be that this very confusion between a
Winnicottian “true self” and a ‘natural’ self born of self-destruction, a confusion
sponsored by a particularly violent ideology of experience, lies at the heart of the
matter. In order for the ‘natural’ self not to be afraid, it must detach itself from
the former ‘bad’ self, which contains authentic emotions, attachments to others,
and expectations of physical and psychic integrity and safety.
While differing accounts of the state of nature describe widely differing degrees
of desperation, chaos, and violence, what they hold in common is that the natural
state is by and large a state of loneliness. Even if there are some forms of rela-
tionship between human beings, as in Locke’s account, there remains what Frieda
Fromm-Reichmann would call “a want of intimacy” (1959). If the state of nature
is not primarily a fantasy of independent adults but of magical infants, it is also,
perhaps paradoxically, a fantasy of deprived children. That is, the state-of-nature
fantasy features a selfless, relationless homeostasis that is also clearly marked by
deprivation, abandonment, and loneliness. This, we ought to remember, is the
condition that is regarded as ‘natural.’
As I have argued, the self is an ideal, a potential and complex human
achievement. This means that, if by ‘natural’ we mean ‘that which has not known
human interference,’ there is some truth to the claim that not becoming a self is
‘natural.’ Winnicott admits as much when he argues, citing Foucault, that:

before a certain date it is possible that there was only very exceptionally a
man or woman who achieved unit [self] status in personal development.
Before a certain date the vast millions of the world of human beings quite
possibly never found or certainly soon lost at the end of infancy or childhood
their sense of being individuals. … We cannot so easily identify ourselves
with [these] men and women.
(1971, 70)
154 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

While Winnicott at least does not pretend that mature adults spring up from the
ground “like mushrooms” (Hobbes 1972, 205), he does overlook the potential
for psychic identification with the selfless. It is this identification, via the construct
of Nature and the conditions of deprivation and abandonment, that I wish to
argue is served by the fantasy of the state of nature.
As has been discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 7, individuals such as those
in hikikomori may re-create forms of deprivation and isolation in misguided
attempts to “get back behind the moment[s] of deprivation” in their familial,
social, and civil lives (Winnicott 1986, 92). What is agonizing is “the neutral
state,” a phrase by which Winnicott means a condition of self-loss in the face of
deprivation, a state governed largely by annihilation anxiety and terror (92). From
within this neutral state, however, there may be some occasion to find “hope.”
This hope, which is not unrelated to wish or fantasy, is for Winnicott the hope of
rediscovering the capacity for creative experiencing.
But at the stage of development in which holding and creative finding are
most closely tied together, there is not only “no such thing as a baby” (1992, 99),
but there is no such thing as an object-relationship (Winnicott 1965, 37–55).6 That
is, the state or condition that the hopeful yet deprived individual is after is not, as
Winnicott puts it, a hope to “rediscover himself” exactly (1986, 95), but, rather, a
hope to return to the impulsivity and aggressiveness that may arise in the holding
relationship between infant and parent and its “indestructible” environmental
features that safely contain expressions of aggression and destructiveness.
To be abandoned is different from playing hide-and seek, and yet the child
who plays hide-and-seek a great deal, or who plays hide-and-seek compulsively,
may have a special purpose driving his behavior, one that, unfortunately, removes
it from the category of play and locates it much closer to reactivity to deprivation or
repetition of trauma. In this way, the individuals in hikikomori discussed in Chapter 7
may be understood as attempting to find, in reality, a fantasy inspired by the state of
nature. Isolating, depriving, and abandoning their selves, these individuals redis-
cover powerfully aggressive (and passively aggressive) impulses as they attempt
(tragically) to revive a magical, selfless, and relationless experience that has been lost.
That they fail to find in their hikikomori experience the more mature capacities of
selves, such as creativity, authenticity, or genuine aloneness, is no great surprise.
In speaking of the discovery, in reality, of a ‘natural’ fantasy of self- and other-
abandonment, it is difficult not to recall Peter Shaffer’s extraordinary 1973 play
Equus. In it, Alan Strang becomes passionately, religiously, and erotically identi-
fied with horses and with the god “Equus” that lives in all of them. He creates an
elaborate religious ritual where, every three weeks, he rides alone at night, naked
on a horse, praying to Equus that He “make us one person” (Shaffer 2007, 58).
Alan declares that no one understands the nakedness and naturalness of horses
as he does. While others don bowler hats and “‘[dress] for the horse’,” Alan
sneers, “the horse isn’t dressed. It’s the most naked thing you ever saw! More
than a dog or a cat or anything” (2007, 33). Only Alan understands how “filthy”
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 155

and corrupt it is to “indulg[e],” as his mother’s family did, in “equitation” of this

sort (33). Rather, Alan and cowboys understand. Of cowboys, Alan cries:

They’re free! They just swing up and then it’s miles of grass. I bet all cow-
boys are orphans! I bet they are! No one ever says to cowboys, “Receive my
meaning”! They wouldn’t dare. Or “God” all the time, “God sees you,
Alan. God’s got eyes everywhere.”
(2007, 33)

Here, the fairly common childhood fantasy of being abandoned or orphaned is used
to great effect, illustrating what Alan detests about the oppressiveness of his home and
social life: a father who bosses him around, a mother who subjects him to an omni-
present, watchful God, and a social condition that similarly affords him no privacy,
no aloneness, no freedom to be himself, nowhere to be ‘naked.’ Orphaning or
abandonment by such parents, such a society, even such a god, might be welcomed as
a chance at self-liberation. Alan’s retreat, however, into his seemingly more ‘naked’ and
‘natural’ religion, unfortunately, does not liberate his self so much as it binds him fast
to a new yet equally self-occluding experience of worship, awe, and dread.
We might understand Alan’s behavior in terms of aggression if Winnicott, and
Freud before him, were correct in asserting that a common “method for dealing
with aggression in the inner reality is the masochistic one by which the individual
finds suffering, and by one stroke expresses aggression, gets punished and so
relieved of guilt feelings, and enjoys sexual excitement and gratification” (Winnicott
1984, 90). Alan’s efforts at freeing his ‘natural’ self by turning to a highly esoteric
and ecstatic suffering not only release aggression but direct it at the very capacities
of the self he might have wished to liberate. Alan is nearly destroyed by his all-
consuming passion for Equus: He is not free, nor is he himself. And Equus, who
becomes to Alan the same jealous, all-seeing, all-knowing god he abandoned in
Christ, exerts a terrible ‘inner constraint’ upon him, preventing him both from
being alone and from being with others, as demonstrated so memorably in the
most famous scene of the play, in which his inability to make love with Jill
Mason, owing to intrusive thoughts of Equus, leads him to rise up and blind six
horses in their stable.

The not-self
Perhaps we may now consider a different aggressive and masochistic fantasy: that
proposed by John Rawls in his conception of the original position, the most
influential contemporary version of the state of nature. Critiqued most famously
by Michael Sandel, Rawls’ original position is a thought-experiment that consists
of a rational, choosing subject dislodged from its community, family, language,
personal qualities, values, interests, and commitments. This so-called ‘subject,’
whether it be ‘abstract,’ ‘metaphysical’ or simply ‘utterly deprived,’ seems difficult
156 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

to imagine, and, even if it were imaginable, would appear quite distinct from a
self. “Even if it could be imagined,” writes Fred Alford, “a self shorn of its
interests, ends, talents, goals, and relationships with others … is a self that seems
hardly worth protecting” (1991, 9). Now, Rawls does not claim that such a
subject should persist or that we should strive to remain in the original position,
but it is not difficult to find others who do.
Popular spiritualist Eckhart Tolle, for one, claims in his best-selling book The
Power of Now (2004, 34) that “the secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ – and
find that there is no death.” Tolle is not referring to near-death experiences but
to the premise that:

the most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work
you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical
appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief
systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other
collective identifications. None of these is you.

Death is “a stripping away of all that is not you,” which means that “death,” for
Tolle, can happen at any moment in life, or, perhaps, throughout life (34).
If these aspects of what Tolle calls “ego” – including work, knowledge, abil-
ities, relationships, family, beliefs, and identifications – are “not you,” then, what
are “you”? Furthermore, why should we associate “death” with the stripping
away of what is not ‘us’? Is Tolle not using the word “death” to describe a fantasy
in which all that might be construed as socially determined or potentially ‘unna-
tural’ about the self is purged from the ‘natural’ self underneath? What is this
‘natural’ self, and why does it seem to require the experience of death-in-life?
Algerian philosopher and mentor of Albert Camus Jean Grenier would
understand the relationship between the ideal of Nature and the impulse toward
self-deprivation and self-destruction as the very nexus of primitive desire, even
the fundamental desire repressed in modern society. Grenier asserts that a common
if not universal wish, not entirely distinct from Thanatos, is “to go from the state
of being a man to being a brute, to go from the state of being an organism to
being an element” (1967, 92). To suffer a thoroughgoing “dépossession” (depri-
vation), writes Grenier, while agonizing, also “makes all psychological constraints
disappear” (53), and “frees us of everything … first of all from ourselves” (93).
The fantasy of a state of nature, even in a figure as sober as Rawls, may contain
traces of the apocalyptic fantasy of death-in-life and life after death. It is no
coincidence that scholars have used the phrase “death in life” frequently to refer
to experiences of surviving devastating trauma and atrocity (see, e.g., Lifton
1991), which, of course, bear heavily upon the ideologies of experience discussed
throughout this book. Of course, if one discovers one’s ‘natural’ self only by
experiencing death-in-life, a destruction of all that might constitute a self, then
we may say that the ‘natural’ self is really the not-self.
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 157

The ‘not-self’ can only be attained when self-identity is obliterated in ecstatic –

from ek-stasis, meaning displacement, departure from the self – identification with
the objects of experience available in a condition governed by impulse and not
thought, the body and not the mind, the survival of the organism and not
attention to the needs of the self. It is more difficult, although perhaps less pain-
ful, to achieve this state of not-self in meditation or spiritual reflection than in
overwhelming experiences that short-circuit, as it were, the self’s nervous system.
This might make experiences of deprivation, failure, and trauma, even vicarious
experiences of the same, appealing as a quick fix for the unfulfilled individual.
If the death of the self is natural, then the self is unnatural, perhaps even a ‘crime
against nature,’ a notion that resonates throughout Eastern and Western thought,
from the Buddhist principle of ana-tman or non-self, to Attic tragedy, to Christian
dogma, to modern and postmodern discourses of anti-subjectivity. By suffering
deprivation and abandonment, the self collapses into its ‘natural’ state of failure, and
so is reunited with the reality of the human being. This reality includes a paradoxical
account of a human being who is not a self but is nevertheless free.
To be sure, the deprivations that individuals suffer, whether inflicted by
families, by social groups, or even by individuals upon themselves, are regularly
blamed on powerful institutions and governments. As Bill Holm suggests, to
“kill” the organizations that “rob” us of our experience we must “put [our] arms
around everything that has ever happened to [us], and give it an affectionate
squeeze.” We must “accept [our] experience” as our new “teacher, mother, state,
church” (2010, 15–16), which is to say: Civil institutions must be reshaped in our
own image, an image that finds its form in the fantasized, narcissistic experiences
of a ‘natural,’ selfless, and childish state.
Although we may consciously acknowledge the fiction of the state of nature,
semi-consciously or unconsciously the fiction has come to be accepted as reality.
This ‘reality’ has been used to frame and comprehend countless modern and
contemporary moral and political projects: the constitutions of liberal states; ideas
and ideologies concerning the legitimate scope and function of governments
(see also Curtis 2010); and the tenets of contemporary moral philosophies.7 Of
course, efforts to shape civil institutions according to an infantile fantasy of a not-
self are unlikely to be conducive to the development of mature selves and insti-
tutions that respect selves’ needs and capacities. Instead, efforts to ensure that
natural experiences are preserved in our private and civil lives may come to mean
“kill[ing]” our selves and killing others’ selves by turning and returning to
experiences of trauma, failure, and deprivation in the name of upholding nature,
reality, and freedom.

Paranoid-schizoid politics
Ultimately, the state of nature suggests a regressive and dangerous ideology, for at
least two reasons. First, the achievements of robust selfhood that would best suit a
158 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

liberal vision of democratic citizenship actually rely upon the kinds of care,
dependence, and facilitating environments that are denied in much of social
contract theory. Second, and what may be worse, instead of “design[ing] their
accounts so as to help men and women become more autonomous and free,”
state-of-nature theorists and their intellectual progeny merely set out about
“convincing them that they already are” (Alford 1994, 7). Indeed, one might argue
that when even a philosopher as astute as Richard Rorty suggests that “words”
are the only tools available to the contemporary individual to “get out from
under inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies … by redescribing
[the past] in his terms, thereby becoming able to say, ‘Thus I willed it’” (Rorty
1989, 97), we encounter a similar fantasy, a return to the magical powers of the
narcissistic infant who believes he can reshape objective reality in his own image.
In civil life, of course, redescriptions of past contingencies are almost indis-
tinguishable from ideologies, used to cover over errors and injustices that might
otherwise be met square-on.
Foucault’s remarks on Marx come close to accurately assessing the situation, in
which imagined experiences of natural freedom are not presumed to be either
historically or factually accurate but fictional, yet nevertheless possessing con-
siderable psychic meaning for those in conversation with them. “Experience is
neither true nor false,” writes Foucault. “It is always a fiction, something con-
structed, which exists only after it has been made, not before; it isn’t something
that is ‘true,’ but it has been a reality” (1991, 36).
To understand the idea of an experience that is not true but has, nevertheless,
been a reality, we have turned to the notion of psychic experience and psychic
reality, fantasies lived or even remembered, although never realized. On this
account, our original, natal, natural freedom is not true or false but is a “reality”
because it coincides with something in our psychic “experience.” I propose that
what it coincides with is not merely, as others have held, a desire to be an adult
free of dependence, but a fantasy of an infant free of both self and relatedness.
Assertions of natural freedoms derived from the state of nature are therefore quite
unlikely to support the development of robust selves in civil society because, at
bottom, such assertions suggest that the self is unnatural and undesirable, if not
impossible.
If state-of-nature theorists imagine an original freedom and independence from
others, those who seek to confirm this premise in their experience must identify
with and internalize the demands of superior forces of Nature and of others as
their own in order to retain the illusion of omnipotence. At the same time, they
must enforce the will of Nature, however it may be construed, and the will of
the majority or group with which they identify, upon others, assuring that no
separate self be permitted to arise, since – because freedom has become equated
with a fantasy of omnipotence – the separate self now represents an attack on the
experience of original freedom. Put another way, as we have discussed above,
particularly in Chapters 5 and 6, adaptation and compliance may be masked as
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 159

self-determination, if the more one adapts to the needs of others or the envir-
onment, the better one is able to predict, manage, and master internal and
external reactions. When this pattern of behavior is applied in political settings, then
groups and institutions tend to direct their energies toward the suppression of the
self in the name of the preservation of collective fantasies of control and power.
In Melanie Klein’s ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position (1975), the good and the bad
must remain dis-integrated, such that sources or symbols of vitality must be kept
separate from sources or symbols of pain and frustration. Of course, a degree of
‘splitting’ – separating good from bad, self from other – is normal and even
healthy; it becomes unhealthy primarily when the severity of the split exaggerates
the qualities of goodness and badness or exaggerates the difference between self and
others, when it prevents individuals from integrating good and bad aspects of
themselves and others into wholes that can be tolerated and related to in healthy ways.
If a ‘bad’ part of the self – and every other – is construed as dangerous to the
group, then an all-good, salvific object must eventually arise in order to suppress
this bad element. This object, itself, is created from the putatively ‘natural’ parts
of individuals, which we have identified with material related to infantile, undif-
ferentiated, and omnipotent fantasies. Perhaps this explains, to some degree, the
properties with which we invest “a God who would assist in the perpetration of
every sort of atrocity” (Klein 1975, 203n).
Or, perhaps the famous frontispiece to the Leviathan, created by Abraham
Bosse, in which the body of the Sovereign king is literally composed of members
of the commonwealth, better illustrates this dynamic. The biblical epigraph atop
the image, like the name Leviathan, appears in the Book of Job: “Non est potestas
Super Terram quae Comparetur ei” [No power on Earth may be compared with
him]. The King James version reads: “Upon earth there is not his like, who is
made without fear” (Job 41:33, AV). Like the Leviathan, made without fear,
Hobbes’ Sovereign both contains the fears of all those who constitute his power
and embodies a fearsomeness before which citizens tremble in reverence and awe.
But as this “Mortall God” is made in the citizens’ image (1985, 227), citizens may
identify themselves with it to soothe the pains of having surrendered themselves
to it. It is important to note that, in Bosse’s frontispiece, the citizens are all turned
to face not the audience, nor each other, but the Leviathan, suggesting that so
long as their attention is directed primarily toward a shared, collective object to
which they all owe allegiance, they can suffer – although likely not relate with,
support, or nurture – their own and each other’s existence.
In Locke, where some have seen a moderate, liberal balance of individual and
collective rights, a more careful analysis reveals an idealized mode of domination –
the acquisition of property – in response to the threat of domination. Locke’s
assertions of ongoing, ‘natural’ independence seem to lead him to use the acqui-
sition of property as a sublimation for the aggressive and destructive desires that remain
“within man now” in society. Locke’s civil individualism, argues Macpherson,
“can only be realized fully in accumulating property, and therefore, realized only
160 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

by some at the expense of the individuality of others” (1971, 82–83). Thus, what
seem to be lawful and innocent actions of civil beings, for Locke, actually express
“greedy, acquisitive, domineering” impulses (Alford 1991, 121). Here, selves do
not really contend with the dilemma of retaining contact with the self or others’
selves, but, rather, equate selfhood with the pursuit of acquisitions and public
esteem that symbolize the connection to a fantasized experience of freedom and
power.
For Rousseau, the legitimate subjugation of a free individual requires that the
individual identify with the sovereign will, which is the general will, the will of
the community as a community (1987, 151–154). Rousseau’s idea is that if an
individual identifies himself with the authority he obeys, and if he accepts the
authority’s will as what he ought to have willed, then subjection to authority is
not humiliating or alienating but a form of self-government. Like Hobbes,
Rousseau asks citizens to establish an idealized object and to identify with this
object as the most important part of themselves. Thus, for Rousseau, the way to
avoid the experiences of alienation and domination associated with subjugation to
others is to demand “the total alienation of each associate, together with all of his
rights” to the idealized object that is the general will. In so “giving himself to all,”
Rousseau claims, “each person gives himself to no one” (148), because, once fully
identified with the community, in obeying the community one only obeys oneself,
and “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty” (151).
According to contract theorists, to learn from our imaginary experience of the
state of nature is to learn that we must split ourselves and identify with the will of
a superior power, even if that power is merely, as in Rawls, an abstract imaginary
power that temporarily decouples us from our identities, causing us to see the
world from what might be imagined as a ‘traumatic’ vantage point, from behind
“the veil of ignorance,” which is the point of the annihilation of the self (Rawls
1971). The result of this process is to turn away from the self and others as sources
of danger, and to look, as in Bosse’s frontispiece, to an idealized object of
experience to save us. The civil individual must hide her self away and be wary of
its appearance in herself and in others.
In groups and throughout civil society, we find individuals who are defended,
immature, split, and in some important sense lacking, obsessed not with being
themselves and “doing” what “arises out of being,” as Winnicott would put it
(1986, 39), but with their own security, with the acquisition of property, with
avoiding experiences of domination, with striving to win the unwinnable game
of amour propre (love or approval contingent upon the opinion of others), with
hiding their own ‘bad’ selves away from a cruel world.
This attitude encourages the dividing of the self, or, in extreme cases, the
suppression of the very core of the self, in exchange for the minimal protections
afforded by physical safety, property ownership, and group belonging. This
exchange expresses itself in the schizoid solutions offered by contract theorists, as
well as in the more common “schizoid compromise” of civil privatism and
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 161

contemporary liberalism (Guntrip 1992), wherein the self offers adaptation and
compromise to the world outside while retaining, often simply by hiding, itself
from a world that is feared to be unappreciative or unaccommodating to it.
Indeed, the real “tragedy of human life in groups,” writes Alford, is that indivi-
duals undermine groups and groups undermine selves when each needs the other
to thrive, that “individuals destroy the one entity that could, if properly orga-
nized, help them realize [their individuality]” (1994, 8). As discussed in Chapter 6, a
less schizoid account of the relationship between self, society, and state would
suggest that secure selves may give something of themselves to groups and insti-
tutions, just as institutions and groups need not be designed to protect the society
from dangerous selves, but may take as their charge to emancipate and facilitate
the self.

Guilt, the real, and the failure to imagine

These reflections permit us to conclude by pursuing a curious, and rarely asked,
question regarding the state of nature, one raised briefly in the beginning of this
chapter and one alluded to in the opening chapter of this book: Are we, in fact,
able to imagine the state of nature, as it has been described in the texts of
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others? Can we, contemporary persons immersed
in all of the civilizing influences and encumbered with all of its intellectual and
moral baggage, imagine ourselves “strip[ped]” of all faculties obtained by learning,
reason, tradition, and civilization (Rousseau 1987, 40)? Or, when we strive to do
so, do we find that we encounter, instead, a failure of thought?
Rousseau, himself, suggests that we may not be able to do so. Throughout his
second Discourse, he emphasizes how “unrecognizable” the civilized individual is
to the natural one, and how each step of social and scientific progress further
removes us from the ability to comprehend “the most important knowledge of
all,” which is the knowledge of our [imaginary] human origins. Indeed, suggests
Rousseau, by “studying man … we have rendered ourselves incapable of know-
ing him” (1987, 33). Rousseau’s choice of words here is fortuitous, as it is pre-
cisely the ‘unknown’ quality of the being of the state that permits our fantasy and
ideology surrounding him to function.
The human being in a state of nature is naïve to the extent that she cannot
imagine an alternative condition or an alternative mode of experience. She fails to
think, fails to imagine, lives in the moment. Rousseau’s racist and degrading
account of the Caribbean savage is precisely that of a creature without reason or
foresight: “In the morning he sells his bed of cotton and in the evening he returns
in tears to buy it back, for want of having foreseen that he would need it that
night” (1987, 46).
Is it possible for us as contemporary persons to imagine ourselves in such a
state? Must we mock it to imagine it? Is our mockery, then, not also a way of
distancing ourselves from and not imagining it? Surely, nothing in our experience
162 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

would seem to prepare us to imagine life in a state of nature. Even the time of life
in which we most closely approximate the creature in a state of nature, our very
first months of life, is lost from memory. If we cannot imagine a state of nature,
then it seems that, in hypothesizing such a state and in locating it at the center of
much moral and political thought, we have engaged in an effort to establish
something unknowable and unthinkable at the very center of our moral and
political lives.
One way to understand this is that in attempts to imaginatively insert our-
selves into the state of nature, we encounter, first, the alluring fantasy of de-
subjectification discussed above, and permit ourselves to retreat from or negate
the capacities of selfhood in ourselves and in others. But if we ultimately fail to
imagine ourselves in a state of nature, then might not this very failure to think,
this failure to understand what is supposed to be our natural condition, lead us
back to a facsimile of the experience we seek? That is, in failing to imagine the
state of nature, we identify at an unthought level with the inhabitants of the state
of nature, who had no power of imagination.
In this way, through our failure of thought, something of the psychic force and
putative reality of the state of nature may be transmitted, just as Cathy Caruth
would claim that in the unthinkable yet “necessary” transmission of trauma, we
make an “appointment with the real,” with a “site of trauma” that always,
inevitably, escapes us but that we find again by “missing” it (1996, 108–110). Or,
as Georges Bataille would write in “Experience, Sole Authority, Sole Value”:

Experience attains in the end the fusion of object and subject, being as sub-
ject non-knowledge, as object the unknown. It can let the agitation of
intelligence break up on that account: repeated failures don’t serve it any less
than the final docility which one can expect.
(1988, 9)

Earlier, we discussed the magical thinking associated with primary narcissism and
how we may be tempted to re-describe ourselves as ‘born free,’ such that our
self-destructive actions and schizoid compromises became less narcissistically
injurious. The other side of this coin is the failure to imagine ourselves in the
state of nature, where this failure transmits an experience of confusion that binds
us not only to the state of nature’s infantile fantasies but to the terms of social
contracts derived from them, much as Freud’s vision of totem sacrifice, mourning,
and festival bound the group and its members to their gods, to their ancestors,
and to each other in a kind of social contract of collective guilt (1938).
If failing to imagine being born free is central to a shared experience of self-
lessness, then we may make sense of Martin Jay’s otherwise enigmatic claim that
“experience is paradoxically not only a proactive ‘tearing’ of the subject from
himself, but also a reactive, post facto reconstruction of that deed” (2005, 398).
Here, experience means self-loss, even self-destruction, presumably in the face of
 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature 163

an object of experience that demands as much. It is not only the immediate act of
“tearing” the self from itself, but the ritualistic, repetitive, and shared remember-
ing of that deed that serves as a means to expiate the guilt of our ‘original sin,’
which is our awareness of our own destructive, aggressive, and sadistic impulses, an
awareness which, if made tolerable, grounds the potential development of a self.
Might we not say, then, that the experience of failing to imagine ourselves in a
state of nature, like totem ritual, expresses the need to tear our selves from our-
selves, in an attempt to re-establish connection with a lost, unthinkable, yet
idealized natural condition in which we are free from this ‘sin’ of selfhood? Might
we not say that when we seek experience, we seek connection with the moment
in which we dared to imagine a self, suffered for it, and secretly hoped to ‘get
back behind’ this guilt and this suffering, to a fantasized state of self-less freedom,
power, and innocence? If so, then experience, experiences of nature, experiences
of trauma, experiences of deprivation, and experiences of failure may be under-
stood, as I have suggested, as efforts to make real an apocalyptic self-imagination,
in which we rediscover our seemingly ‘natural’ capacity for self-destruction, to
which we tragically pay homage throughout our private and civil lives.

Notes
1 In response to Hobbes’ famous analogy in De Cive that we may “consider men as if but
even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full
maturity, without all kind of engagement with each other” (1972, 205), Astell writes
sarcastically, “How I lament my Stars that it was not my good Fortune to live in those
Happy Days when Men spring up like so many Mushrooms or Terrae Filii, without
Mother or Father or any sort of dependency” (quoted in Achinstein 2007, 22).
2 These “savage” people do have “the government of small Families,” Hobbes confesses,
even though “the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust” and not a common
power that could arrange for peace (1985, 187).
3 The general will alone makes the bargain of civility for naturalness a good one, for only
living in accordance with the general will is superior to living in accordance with
nature. Everything else, all forms of political community in between, are perversions or
degenerations of these conditions.
4 Similarly, Rousseau’s Émile may misunderstand himself to be free (1979), to encounter
only natural hardships and not the wills of superiors, but it would seem odd to suggest,
in light of the extensive control and training Émile receives, that he is “born free,” or
even that he develops freely.
5 I have changed the name and identifying characteristics of this respondent to an interview
protocol conducted from 2008–2012 (see Bowker 2014).
6 In David P. Levine’s chapter, “The Isolation of the True Self and the Problem of
Impingment.” In Bowker and Buzby (forthcoming, 2016), this logical yet frequently
overlooked consequence of Winnicott’s thought regarding the early infant–parent
relationship is illuminated with great clarity.
7 It is hard to miss the influence of the state-of-nature doctrine in modern declarations of
independence, constitutions, and other charters of freedom. “Men are born and remain
free and equal in rights,” reads the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789.
The American Declaration of Independence (1776) likewise holds certain “truths to be
self-evident,” namely “that all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with
164 ‘Natural’ experience and the state of nature

certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.”

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INDEX

a priori concept 4 Bacon, Francis 1

abandonment 155 bad experience vs. good experience 21–5,
abstraction, plague of 38–9 29, 33
acquisition of property 159–60 bad self 150–3
action, selfhood and 12–13 badness, internalization of 33
Adorno, Theodor 29 Baier, Annette 144
adversity 21–5 Bataille, Georges 5, 15, 27, 35, 106, 162
Agamben, Giorgio 29, 30, 35 Baudrillard, Jean 144
Alford, C. Fred 73, 156, 161 Bellah, Robert 109
aloneness: American individualism and Benhabib, Seyla 144
109–11; capacity for 105–7; forced Benjamin, Walter 3, 29–30, 49–50
isolation vs. 104–5; inner constraint in Berlin, Isaiah 31
107; overview of 103–4; rejecting Berrett, Dan 80
others’ 113–19; selfhood and 16; Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 106
Stoic’s false 108–9; as threat to Bion, Wilfred 32, 73
self 107–8; value of 104, 114; vampires Blanchot, Maurice 144
and 111–13 bodies, as processes 46–9
amae (loving indulgence): desire for 121, body language 48
131–5; explanation of 128–30; body politics 37–40
misconstrual of 130–1 Bollas, Christopher 10, 27
American individualism 109–11 Book of Luke 68–9
The Anatomy of Dependence (Doi) 128 “born free” state of being 148–50
The Anatomy of the Self (Doi) 128 Bosse, Abraham 159, 160
annihilation, aloneness as 105, boundaries, of selfhood 10–11, 32
107–8 Bowling Alone (Putnam) 109
“Anxiety Associated with Insecurity” Brennan, Teresa 47
(Winnicott) 150 Brown, Michael 138
“Apology for Raymond Seybond” Butler, Judith 5–6, 73, 118–19
(Montaigne) 50
Arendt, Hannah 116–17 Camus, Albert 15, 28, 37–9
Astell, Mary 145 “Can Colleges Manufacture Motivation?”
attacks on linking 73 (Berrett) 80
168 Index

Cantor, Nancy 89 education see higher education

Caruth, Cathy 44, 45, 46, 49, 56–8, 162 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 15, 55–7, 60, 66–7
civil state, state of nature and 146–8 endurance, as essence of life 52–3
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 113 Epictetus 108–9
classical era 1 Equus (Shaffer) 154–5
collaborative learning 80 “Erfahrung und Armut” [“Experience and
“Communicating and Not Communicating Poverty”] (Benjamin) 29–30
Leading to a Study of Certain experience: continuity/interaction in 82–3;
Opposites” (Winnicott) 59 of failure 21–4; fortification of 25–31;
communication 25–6, 115 fusion with objects of 90–2; humility
community 37–40, 59, 85 and 50–7; ideology of 6–9, 14–17;
community member 17 material reality of 48; of not being 58–9;
concept of experience: intellectual history power and 26–7; social order and 96–9;
of 1–3; for phenomenologists 4; the see also concept of experience
sacred and 5; self-effacement and 6; “Experience” (Emerson) 55
slipperiness of 3–4, 29; see also “Experience, Sole Authority, Sole Value”
experience (Bataille) 162
continuity 82–3, 90–1 Experience and Education (Dewey) 16, 82, 96
control 87–90, 105 Experience and Its Modes (Oakeshott) 3
Cooke, Jennifer 38 experience-based learning: attribution of
crude primary experience 90–1 narcissism in 94–6; community/
culture-bound syndrome 125–7 service-based 92–3; diffusion of locus of
control 87–90; fusion with objects of
Davies, James 6 experience 90–2; illusion of freedom and
Davis, Andrew Jackson 5 84–7; overview of 79–80; social order
death-in-life 156 and 96–9
deception 65–6, 69–71, 74 experientia literata (learned experiences) 1
delinquency, deprivation and 135–6 external conditions, experience and 97–9
“Delinquency as a Sign of Hope”
(Winnicott) 135–9 facilitating environment 107, 121, 128–30
democracy, aloneness and 109–11 failure: of body politic 37–40; community
Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 109 identity and 36–7; experience of 21–5;
dependence, amae and 128–31 history of 34–5; to imagine 161–3;
deprivation: hikikomori and 135–9; natural natural state of 157; of recognition
self and 153–5; not-self and 155–7 69–71; of thinking about experience
Derrida, Jacques 72–3 26–31; value in 35–6; of witnessing
desire: for amae 128–31; disfigurement of 58–9
131–5; misrepresentation of 121–2 Fairbairn, Ronald 33
devaluation of self 53–4, 66–8 false aloneness 108–9
Dewey, John 15, 16, 78, 82–99 false self 23, 33, 126
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental family: deception and 69–71; estrangement
Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III) 45, from 63–5; hikikomori and isolation
122 from 121–2, 127–8, 132–9; individual
Die Verwandlung [The Metamorphosis] (Kafka) as family member 17; indulgence in
132–5 128–31; seeking relationship in 67–9;
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality traumatic repetition in 65–6; work of
Among Men (Second Discourse) (Rousseau) mourning and 71–5
146, 161 “The Fate of the Transitional Object”
discourse of student narcissism 78 (Winnicott) 150
DiStefano, Christine 144–5 feeling, selfhood and 12
Doi, Takeo 128–9, 138 Felman, Shoshana 37, 39, 58
dreams, traumatic transmission in 57 financial motives, of education 80–1
Durkheim, Émile 116 forced isolation, aloneness vs. 104–5
 Index 169

fortification, of experience 25–31 of locus of control 87–90; discourse of

Fortune 51–4 student narcissism in 78–9; experience/
Foucault, Michel 27, 84, 106, 158 social order and 96–9; financial motives
Franzen, Jonathan 115–16, 117 in 80–1; fusion with objects of
freedom, illusion of 84–7 experience 90–2; illusion of freedom and
Freud, Sigmund: on dreams 57; on 84–7; pedagogical discourse of
independence 113; on jokes 15, 21–4, experience in 78; student-centered/
70; on melancholia 71–2; on primary experience-based 79–80
narcissism 149, 150; state of nature and “Hikikomania: Existential Horror or
144 National Malaise?” (Todd) 126
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda 153 Hikikomori (Paul) 137
fusion: melancholic preference for 72, 74; hikikomori (self-incarceration):
with objects of experience 90–2, 108 communication and 25–6, 105, 107; as
futoko (school-refusal) 123 culture-bound syndrome 125–7; denial
of understanding 127–8; deprivation/
games, control and 89–90 victimization and 135–9; distortion of
Garner, Eric 138 amae in 128–31, 139; misrepresentation
Gauthier, David 144 of desire and 121–2; mystification of
The Gift of Adversity (Rosenthal) 6 131–5, 139; negative views of 124–5;
Godsey, Michael 80 selfhood and 16; symptoms of 122–3;
Goethe, J.W. 1 treatment for 123–4
good experience vs. bad experience 21–5, Hikikomori: Adolescence without End (Saito-)
29, 33 122
Graham, Martha 48 Hikikomori: Tokyo Plastic (film) 124–5
Gray, Freddie 138 historical component, of state of nature
Gray, Peter 79 146–8
Grenier, Jean 156 history of trauma 49
Grotius, Hugo 144 Hobbes, Thomas 144, 146–8, 159
group(s): aloneness in context of 104–8; in Holm, Bill 26–7, 34–5, 36, 48–9, 145–6,
education 85–7; influence of 32; 157
membership 16–17; social control of Holocaust Memorial Museum 28
87–90; state of nature and 144–5, 161; Hooker, Richard 147
suppression of self by 157–61; threat of hostage-being 73
individual separation from 113–19; human being: bad self of 151–3; as born
united by melancholy 74 free 148–50; failure to imagine by
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 161–3; natural self of 153–5; not-self of
(Freud) 113 155–7; state-of-nature theory about
groups, state of nature and 144–5, 161 144–8, 157–61; term usage 17
Guare, John 74 Hume, David 3, 4
guilt, of selfhood 163 humility, experience and 50–7
Guntrip, Harry 114–15 Husserl, Edmund 3, 4
hypothetical, state of nature as 146–8
Habits of the Heart (Bellah) 109
Hattori, Yuichi 133–4, 136 ICD (International Classification of Diseases)
Hegel, G.W.F. 3 122
Heidegger, Martin 4 ideals of selfhood 2, 4, 9–14, 31
Held, Virginia 145 identification, Le Malentendu and
Herman, Judith 39 65–9
heuristic component of state of ideology of experience 6–9, 14–17
nature 146–8 ideology of trauma 59–60
higher education: attribution of narcissism illusion of freedom 84–7
in 94–6; community/service-based 92–3; imagination, failure of 161–3
continuity/interaction in 82–3; diffusion “The Imperial Bedroom” (Franzen) 115
170 Index

The Importance of Suffering (Davies) 6 learning process 21–4, 78

In Defense of Shame (Deonna, Rodogno and Leviathan 159
Teroni) 6 Levinas, Emmanuel 5, 73, 118
incestuous nature of solitude 114 Leys, Ruth 45–6, 49
individual 17 Lichtenberg, G.C. 21, 23–4, 33, 151
individual freedom 7 Locke, John 3, 144, 147, 159–60
individualism 109–11, 116 The Lonely Crowd (Riesman) 109
indulgence, amae and 128–31 loss, mourning and 71–5
infants, born free state of 149–50 Luther, Martin 1, 5
injury, self-destruction and 21–5 Lyotard, Jean-François 35
inner constraint 107
inner experience 105–6 MacIntyre, Alasdair 145
intellectual history, of concept of Macpherson, C.B. 147, 159
experience 1–3 majority, tyranny of 109–11, 117
intellectual pride 51 Le Malentendu [The Misunderstanding]
interaction, in experience 82–3 (Camus) 15; interpretations of 64–5;
International Classification of Diseases (ICD) loss/melancholia in 71–5; overview of
122 16; plot 63–4; rage/reunion in 69–71;
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 57 recognition/identification in 65–9;
Ivory Tower Problem 92–6 separation and 114
Malraux, André 29
James, William 3, 91 Márquez, Gabriel García 113
Japanese culture 125–7; see also hikikomori Marxism 7
(self-incarceration) materiality, of experience 48
Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and melancholia, loss and 71–5
Welfare 122 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4
Jay, Martin 3, 28, 162 Merton, Thomas 104
jokes 21–4, 64–5, 70 Michaels, Walter Benn 57–60
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious Milgram, Stanley 88
(Freud) 15, 21 Miller, Alice 48
Jones, Dan 79 Miller, Jerome 5
Mills, Charles 144
Kafka, Franz 132–4 mind, activity of 51
Kant, Immanuel 3, 4 modern era, concept of experience in 1
Kato, T. 125 Montaigne, Michel de 1, 15; on
Kihlstrom, J. 89 humility 50–5; on solitude 105–6; on
Klein, Melanie 11, 32, 151, 159 state of nature 149–50; on thinking/
knowing, selfhood and 32–3 knowing 60
knowledge, power of 26–7 moral defense 33
Kohut, Heinz 33–4, 130 mourning 71–3
Koselleck, Reinhart 49 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud) 71
Krystal, Henry 46 The Music of Failure (Holm) 26
Kudo, Sadatsugo 127 mystification, of hikikomori 131–5
Kuhns, Richard 2
naïve determinism 99
Lacan, Jacques 13–14, 57, 106 narcissism 78–9, 149–50
lack of control 66 natural state 150–5; see also state of nature
Laing, R.D. 12, 29, 30, 48, 132 Nature 34, 51–4, 109
language, selfhood and 13–14 “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”
Lanzmann, Claude 28 (Dewey) 98
The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your neutral state 154
Childhood Dreams (Pausch) 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24–5, 106–7
Laub, Dori 59 Nigishi, Kenta 127
 Index 171

not-self 155–7 repetition-compulsion, of traumatic

Nussbaum, Martha 145 experience 69–71
“The Repression and the Return of Bad
Oakeshott, Michael 3, 25 Objects” (Fairbairn) 33
“On Democritus and Heraclitus” Republic (Plato) 149
(Montaigne) 53–4 Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity (Bowker)
“On Experience” (Montaigne) 52 2, 5–6, 10, 37, 40, 54, 64, 73, 127, 151,
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) 163n,
113–14 Riesman, David 109
ontological security 12 Rieux, Bernard 37–8
Rorty, Richard 158
Paneloux, Father 38 Rosenthal, Norman 6
paranoid-schizoid politics 157–61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 144, 146–7, 148–9,
paranoid-schizoid position 11 160, 161
parasaito shinguru (parasite singles) 123
parents, mediating influence of 32 Saito-, Tamaki 122
participation 86, 87–90 Sandel, Michael 7, 145, 155
passivity, Deweyan education and 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul 3, 63–4
Pateman, Carole 144, 146 schizoid compromise 114–15
Paul, Gary 137 scientific education 96–9
Pausch, Randy 25 Second Treatise of Government (Locke) 147
pedagogical discourse of experience 78 self-control, vampires and 111–13
phenomenologists 4 self-control technologies: diffusion of locus
Pitkin, Hanna 116 of control 87–90; fusion with objects of
The Plague (Camus) 37–9, 52 experience 90–2; illusion of freedom and
Plato 1, 52, 149 84–7
positive freedom 87 self-determination 86–7, 98–9
posthumanity 6 selfhood: aloneness and 16, 104; attacks on
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 44, 116–19; bad self and 150–3; boundaries
45 of 10–11, 32; failure of 21–5; illusion of
power, of knowledge 26–7 9–10; natural self and 153–5; not-self
The Power of Now (Tolle) 156 and 155–7; paranoid-schizoid/depressive
pride 50–1 posture and 11; state of nature and
primary narcissism 149–50 145–6; term usage 17; thinking
prodigal son 68–9 and 31–4; three main axes of 12–14;
Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias trauma and 45–6
and the Politics of Shame (Tarnopolsky) 6 selfobjects 33–4, 51
public sphere, defenses of 115–18 self-occlusion 52
von Pufendorf, Samuel 144 self-repression 112–13, 116–18
Putnam, Robert 109 separation, of students 85–6
Shaffer, Peter 154
quietude, Deweyan education and 85 shame: desire for amae and 129–30;
hikikomori and 132, 134–5, 137, 139;
rage 69–71, 150–3 value of 6, 115–16, 118
Rambert, Raymond 37 Six Degrees of Separation (Guare) 74–5
Rawls, John 144, 145, 146, 155–6 Smail, David 8
the Real 58 Social Contract (Rousseau) 148
reality principle 22–3 social contract theory 160; state of nature
recognition, in Le Malentendu 65–9 and 144–6, 157–8
reflection, in experience-based social control, shared participation
learning 91–2 and 87–90
regressive experience 68 social intelligence 89, 95
Reik, Theodor 138 social order, experience and 96–9
172 Index

social realm (“blob”) 116–17 True Blood (TV show) 112

Socrates 54 true self 23, 153
solitude see aloneness truth, trauma as 44–50
Songs of Experience (Jay) 3 Twenge, Jean 78
Spinoza, Baruch 2 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche) 24
Stanford Prison Experiment 88 Twilight series 112
state of nature: bad self and 150–3; as born
free 148–50; failure to imagine 161–3; unit status 12–13
heuristical/historical 146–8; influence of the “unthought known” 27
16–17; natural self and 153–5; not-self
and 155–7; paranoid-schizoid politics vampires, aloneness and 111–13
and 157–61; selves/groups and 144–6 victimization 137–9
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, violence 125, 136
and Mathematics) disciplines 80–1
Stoics 108–9 Watters, Ethan 126
The Stranger (Camus) 64–5 Watts, Jonathan 124
Stufflebaum, K. 125 Whitehead, Alfred North 3–4
suffering: as essence of life 52–3; value of 6 willful, purposive acts 12
supplice, as key to experience 35 Winnicott, D.W.: on aggression 155; on
aloneness 106; on deprivation/
Tarnopolsky, Christina 6 delinquency 135–6; facilitating
Tarrou, Jean 37–9 environment and 129; on false self 23;
Taylor, Charles 7, 145 on feeling of real 12; on incommunicado
technologies of self-control see self-control element 65, 75; on infants as
technologies individuals 150; on not being a
Teo, Alan 122–3, 125 self 111; on reality principle 22; on
terminology 17 rediscovering self 153–4; on secret
Thanatos 156 self 59
thinking: avoidance of 26–31; interference witness, to trauma 57–60
of 55–6; selfhood and 13–14, 31–4 Wolfe, Paige 86
Thorndike, E.L. 89 Wollstonecraft, Mary 145
The Throe of Wonder (Miller) 5 World Trade Center attack 28
Tobira no Muko [The Other Side of the Door]
(film) 127–8 Yokayoka treatment center 124
Tocqueville, Alexis de 109–11, 117
Todd, Kathleen 126 Zenkyo-to- movements 138
Tolle, Eckhart 156 Ziarek, Ewa 72
Totem and Taboo (Freud) 113 Zielenziger, Michael 126
transmission of affect 47 Zimbardo, Philip 88
traumatic experience: bad self and 150–3; Žižek, Slavoj 13, 58
holding on to 74–5; physicalization of “A Zombie Manifesto: The
46–9; repetition of 69–71; self- Nonhuman Condition in the Era of
devaluation and 50–7; transmission of Advanced Capitalism” (Lauro and
57–60, 70; as truth 44–50 Embry) 6