I sit on the deck of my friend's beach house on Chincoteague Island in Virginia. I hear the laughing gulls. Earlier, we had been on the beach of the adjoining Assateague Island, a federal wildlife refuge, and host to a herd of wild Chincoteague ponies. The beach borders the Atlantic and has bracingly cool water even in July. All around these islands are eagles, hawks, cardinals, turkey vultures, terns, pelicans, and abundant gulls. There seems to be nothing more demanding to do today than watch the gulls fish for oysters and crab. They hover over the wooden pier with the shellfish in their beaks, and then drop them, cracking their shells, allowing access to the tender meat within.
One of the gulls dropped a crab on the pier so that it became lodged, pincer end down, between two planks. So confined, the hapless crab was devoured. My sympathy lies with the crab; but the gulls have to eat, and the crab provided a meal. This is the sort of place that allows me to forget about myself. Attending to the ponies and birds draws me out of myself and my mundane concerns. This is the appeal of trips into nature. It does not reflect back to me my worries and preoccupations, and it therefore makes me feel enlarged.
Desire, too, pulls us out of narcissism. As infants we are hungry, we cry to be fed, but feeding never comes as quickly as we want. We have to wait. While waiting for a feed from the breast, the infant hallucinates the satisfaction that can be provided by the breast.
Marilia Aisenstein described how the capacity for desire arises in this time of waiting for the breast to arrive. Primary masochism facilitates desire, when the infant learns to find the pleasure in waiting. In her paper, for the panel at the January 2012 APsaA meeting “On Desire and Desiring,” she describes the mother soothing her baby and helping it to wait. The baby, supported by the mother's cooing and gentle strokes, becomes able to wait, and eventually to find pleasure in the pain of delay. From this tolerance for waiting emerges the capacity for desire. In the empty space, the void, between hunger and satiety, something takes place. Desire fills the space, and desire leads to thinking. Thinking of what is to come makes it possible to wait. Finding pleasure in the void makes it tolerable. And when the void can be tolerated, it is made use of by the developing infant, and provides a platform for the emergence of a mind.
The hungry gulls are, and are not, me. I understand hunger and the need for a meal, but I can also understand the suffering of the creature who gives up his life to feed me. All voids beckon to our narcissism to fill them, and nature is such a void, because humanity is missing. There are, of course, things we can see in nature that are like us. I understand hunger, and so do the gulls. But when looking into nature the human mind is absent.
Donald Moss, in his paper for the desire panel, described a patient who would not allow himself to feel desire. Moss's countertransference experience of being with this patient was to feel “entombed.” Such a patient forsakes desire, the wishing for something that is not yet here, to have the seeming safety of the eternal now. With such a patient there is no future, no place other than the present. There is no other, no not-me to seek or long for. Such a patient seeks a merger in the present, to erase time, space, and separation, and so erases the possibility of real engagement with another person. Desire introduces risk, and it allows for growth. We have to let go of what we have now to take a chance on the next thing. But it might not work out. By suppressing desire, this patient does not take that risk, and so does not form connections.
Phoebe A. Cirio, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., is an advanced candidate in adult psychoanalysis at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. She is also a candidate in child psychoanalysis at the New Orleans/Birmingham Institute. She maintains a private practice in St. Louis.
Nature, for Lacan, is the big-O Other. It is not-me. When I look at the wild ponies on Assateague Island, I know that in two weeks there is going to be a round up of the mothers and their foals. Because the island can only accommodate about 160 ponies, they have to cull the herd. This is accomplished by separating some of the foals and selling them. I can empathize with the mothers, who will shortly lose their yearlings. And with the foals, who as herd animals, will lose the only family they have ever known.
Their experience is similar but not the same as mine. Nature is Other. It is the not-me that reminds me of my limitations. My experience of my humanity is one where I am finite, limited. I have arthritis in my thumbs. But, it is also part of my human experience that I long for omnipotence. Why can't I go on forever? In some way, these poles define the experience of being human. I am, and am not, a part of nature. I can reflect on life. The gulls, eagles, terns, and herons do not think, and so are not like me. I know I will age and die. They don't. I want things I do not have. They don't have a sense of the future.
Desire is born of wanting what we do not now have. This experience of wanting is deepened, and made tolerable, when we can find pleasure in it. Desire draws us out of our own narcissism. It pulls us into connection with others, and deepens our experience. But desire is also dangerous. If we take the risk of wanting what is not here now, we risk the disappointment of not getting it. Moss's patient is frozen in time and space, and defensively compromises his humanity by avoiding the risk of desire. Nature is unreflective; it just is. There is no tension about what is to come. In traversing the void, we have to chance loss to find meaning in life.