Showing Up in Life: A Clinical Report

Why show up at all? Why do I want to do this work? This psychoanalysis? Let me tell you: Sometimes I don't want to do this work; I don't want to show up, but I do. Why?

I can give you a reasoned explanation with the typical clinical vignette appended to illustrate whatever point I wish to make, or I can tell you a different kind of story. In this case, it is a clinical report of sorts, and it is about a patient whom I saw in a clinical setting. And it is literally about showing up when it would have been understandable if I had chosen not to.

This story came to mind as I was reading Alenka Zupancic's (2008) The Odd One In, which is a psychoanalytic exploration of comedy and comic forms. She is discussing Murnau's (1924) silent movie, The Last Man (sometimes listed as The Last Laugh), in which an elderly fellow, who has worked all his life as a hotel porter, gets assigned to a lower and less distinguished job as a janitor. He is no longer allowed to wear his rather aristocratic porter uniform. He loves this uniform and cannot bear not to wear it. The movie is a meditation on this symbolic investiture, exploring the nature of how we come to exist as humans through highly cathected material things, in this case, his uniform. He doesn't like, and perhaps doesn't know, who he is without it.

Though Zupancic's book is about comedy, it is impossible to discuss comedy without also discussing tragedy and pathos. In the case of Murnau's porter, we are in the realm of pathos.

Now to my story about showing up. I believe it will be evident to you, after hearing it, why I thought of it in relation to Murnau's porter, the Last Man. The underlying question, as I have already signaled, is

why do we continue to show up? Why do we want to do this work, come what may?

In 2005, I received a phone call. It was from a physician, a medi