It's Oedipal All the Way Down

Some patients do not seem to wish. Immune to the educative impact of either disappointment or pleasure, they have no apparent use for experience of any kind. They neither pursue satisfaction nor flee from pain. Unmoved by either, they seem static. Each day is the same. They seem to instantiate Samuel Beckett's (1956) mordant remark: “… and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.”

These patients describe their sessions, like their lives, as inert, dead, and lacking in elements of interest; they move from moment to moment in a spirit of sodden compliance. Arriving on time to an appointment, they feel their work is complete — something good and transformative ought to take place right then. When it doesn't, they feel they have exposed one of reality's outrageous injustices. The analyst regularly senses a demand to provide sufficient reward, to somehow release the patient from his/her inescapable condition.

Many items on these patients' to-do lists are designed to mime what “other people” do — things like “reading books,” “going to museums,” “traveling,” even sometimes going so far as “falling in love,” “having a sexual relationship,” and “wanting children.” They consistently make the point, though, that, regardless of appearance, they are entirely different from those “other people.” Their apparent desires feel, in fact, like artificial ones. What is real about them, they say, is precisely this artificiality. They often claim to see through desire and glimpse its artificial core.

They are uncertain whether this sense of things marks them as superior or inferior to others. When superior, they portray people with desires as dupes and phonies, slavishly proper, “patients you see in Woody Allen movies.” When inferior, the others are a source of maddening jealousy; the others have it all. “I want everything they have, everything: their clothes, books, bodies, lovers. I'd steal it all if I could; if I can't get it in a