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Boston traffic jam /bumper sticker: Remember / who you wanted to be.
Pindar (c. 480 b.c.): Become who you are.
Bollas: Ask of any individual whether or not he is fulfilling his destiny.
Common unhappiness and the fashioning of a life. Psychoanalysis has never had an easy relationship to existential language, yet psychoanalysis is inherently rooted in the existential. Early on, in Studies on Hysteria, Freud (Breuer and Freud 1893-1895) with piercing clarity summed up the limitations of psychoanalysis: “When I have promised my patients help … I have often been faced by this objection: ‘Why, you tell me yourself that my illness is probably connected with my circumstances and the events of my life. You cannot alter these in any way. How do you propose to help me, then?’ And I have been able to make this reply: ‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness …” (p. 305).
And just what is this “common unhappiness”? Freud nearly leaves us hanging, but the implications are clear: Fate can indeed make us or break us—we cannot control what is thrown at us—but (as the existentialists would assert) we can, nevertheless, own our very “thrown-ness.” Like the Delphic oracle's admonition (“Know thyself”), for Freud the way to self-possession is through self-knowledge.
Christopher Bollas, too, looks beyond fate to ownership of one's truest self, through what he refers to as the “destiny drive”: “incompleteness [of destiny] that we must all endure is a special sense of loss, as each of us is only ever a part subject, an incomplete sample of our potential. … We are stopped by our deaths and usually long before then—in what we modestly phrase a mid-life crisis—we have an inkling of how we shall not be destined after all to fulfil our urge to be fully present in our own existence” (p. 55).