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Trying too hard is symptomatic of a mind divided

One of the most useful things anyone ever told me was to watch how you respond to things other people say about you. If you’re irritated or frustrated it suggests they have touched a nerve. This doesn’t mean what they’re saying is accurate but it does mean it hit the mark somehow, in a way that warrants further investigation. I suspect this extract from Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice will lodge itself in my psyche to a similar extent. From loc 590:

This is a crucial yet all too often overlooked facet of every instance of intense intentionality (or “trying so hard”): One has to focus one’s attention so acutely on doing one thing precisely because something in one wants to do the opposite! If I have to be extra, extra careful not to miss an appointment, it is obviously because something in me does not want to go to it. Trying too hard is symptomatic of a mind divided.

There are comparable propositions which are quite widely understood as he notes on loc 603. If you know someone really well, you can often see the patterns in how they do this. Frustratingly, it’s more difficult in my experience to notice the comparable patterns in your own behaviour:

it is elementary psychoanalytic thinking in our times to realize that people overemphasize or over-accentuate one thing because they mean the contrary (they say, “Oh, your talk was so interesting” when they found it boring, or “We would never even dream of hurting you” when they have not just been dreaming about hurting you but even been planning how to do so), and that they are often led to focus a huge amount of their attention (“concentrate their willpower”) on doing x precisely because they wish to do the opposite of x!

But leaving aside the practical outgrowth, there’s a radical implication here for the digital distraction debate. The problem is not digital devices ‘hijacking the lizard brain’ (etc etc) but rather a divided mind susceptible to the behaviourist prompts of contemporary systems. Which came first? Once you start trying to unpick that chicken and egg question, the psychic ontology in which this is being raised as a social issue starts to look almost bewilderingly bereft of analytic insight. We need a new way of talking about this.

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