Re-kindling Desire in a Responsive World…
But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.
― Cassandra Clare
I’ve written from a few different angles this year on the ‘art of wanting’, and I’m revisiting that theme again with a little more faith and bounce, in the hope that some of us can warm up our capacity to live our desires more freely.
Like many of us, I had a fractured connection to wanting from an early age. It seemed a realm of failure and disappointment, of private, pointless hopes. There seemed little or no link between what I wanted and what happened.
Whether this was ‘real’ or simply how I constructed things, I cannot be sure. But something in my capacity to freely want got broken.
And yet, everywhere, teachings point to the importance of desiring – the value of intentional hope, the raw power of wanting, the beauty of entrusting our visions to the world and to each other, bestowing our desire with the blessing of potential collaboration, exposing ourselves to a ‘yes’, learning to survive the inevitable, necessary ‘no’s’ of which ordinary lives are made up.
So I’m taking another tilt at wanting – with the help of two perspectives that opened up a new route for me: Winnicott’s depiction of how our early environment supports or compromises desire in early life, and couples’ therapist Harville Hendrix’ articulation of his growing faith that we inhabit a responsive universe receptive to our intentions and expectations – the ‘Quantum Field’.
What is important here is that those of us whose early faith in the potency of desire was damaged find some way to re-awaken it. That we learn how to re-engage our wishes and expose them more often and more faithfully to a world that will sometimes align with us. In essence, this is a story about ‘reclaiming hope’ in this receptive universe, breaking a pattern of premature adaptation and despondent fatalism. It invites us to attend both to ourselves and to reality with more nuance, emergence and presence, expressing ourselves more richly, and building the resilience to risk the failure - and the success of our longings…
The Arc of Our Wanting
(FROM ADAPTIVE CHILDHOOD TO ADULTHOOD’S OF SUBDUED DESIRE)
Let’s begin at the beginning, with a map from Winnicott, about how early desire may thrive or flail:
For Winnicott, optimally, a baby finds him or herself with a mother able to park her own agendas sufficiently to give him a temporary taste for his “subjective omnipotence”. By this we mean that the lucky baby receives what he displays he wants often enough that he learns there is some kind of stable link between his needs and desires and what the world offers him. This is an extraordinarily potent imprint for the baby: It lets him relax in a safe, attuned world, and feel the creative power of his wishes.
THRIVING SUBJECTIVITY
Here’s Winnicott on the baby’s experience of early desire: ‘his wish makes things happen…’ He learns to trust the link between his internal needs and hopes and the world that manifests around him. This is not about indulgence so much as building a foundational faith in his own value, in which he experiences being able to co-create a world that is good for him:
‘the temporary experience of subjective omnipotence provided for the infant by the mother’s holding and facilitating remains as a precious legacy and resource. This crucial early experience enables the growing child to continue to experience his own spontaneously emerging desires and gestures as real, as important, as deeply meaningful…’
or…SUBDUED ADAPTATION
But heaps of us have a different experience of desire and need in babyhood. For many, this foundational era of luxurious potency never happens. Instead, we find ourselves in an unresponsive or ill-attuned world, and develop adaptation as a primary impulse, learning to be compliant and vigilant to those around us, and never developing trust in the relevance of our own subjective impulses. Such babies often become adults who are inclined to doubt their wanting can matter or be fruitfully shared. We lean up and out – the subjective middle of us lies unvisited. Our core seems at best a side-story or an afterthought – apart from the main action of life.
‘if the mother has trouble surviving the baby’s usage of her, if she withdraws or collapses or retaliates, the baby must prematurely attend to externality at the price of a full experience of his own desire, which feels omnipotent and dangerous. The result is a child afraid to fully need and use his objects, and, subsequently, an adult with neurotic inhibitions of desire…’
some CONSEQUENCES:
We all depart childhood with implicit conclusions about our needs and desires: which ones we can bear to know, whether it is fruitful to express these and to whom, whether we believe the world is predisposed to respond to us. We do not know these stances, we just live them. But they are profoundly influential: much of our future happiness will depend upon whether we emerge from our early years with a buoyant, hopeful wanting largely intact or with a subdued, fatalistic, inhibition of this subjective essence. If the former, we approach life thereafter with the faith that our creativity, wishes and needs matter; if the latter, we will ‘know’ they must be largely cast aside for the sake of belonging.
Inevitably, these conclusions will radically influence what we ‘evoke’ from others and from life itself.
Our radar is attuned to look for what it knows. When we are primed for responsiveness and collaboration, we will activate the enthusiasm of others; when we are primed disappointment, our attention will fall on subtle hints of rejection, on what is wrong. Inevitably, in some way or other, all of us are defended. Braced against the sources of past hurt. Wary from certain angles: Wherever hurt, betrayal and disappointment have seared us worst, we have grown guarded, defensive, over-sensitive, occasionally paranoid. And so, without an alternative narrative, we remain primed to expect the blows we know, and this defensive expectation, in the guise of protecting us, deprives us of a more open availability to ‘what happens’…