Wisdom from the Couch. Jennifer Kunst

over time are those that can engage the challenges of life—adapt, evolve, and develop ways to thrive despite obstacles. Those species that become extinct are those that cannot adapt, those that shrink from life and wither away. Klein believed that all people have a relative balance between the life and death instincts, some leaning more toward growth and others leaning more toward self-protection.

      Since you’re reading this book, you must have some relative leaning toward the life instinct. Otherwise, you wouldn’t bother. I have been concerned that some people would be turned off by the ideas in this book because they are too hard. I don’t mean that what I am writing about is hard to understand, but the ideas are awfully hard to live. As I understand it, there is this fundamental truth about life: If you want to grow, you must take Robert Frost’s “road less traveled.” Or embrace the Buddha’s principle of nonattachment. Or discover Jesus’ narrow way. These wise ones all understood that a meaningful life is fundamentally about change. You’ve got to take up the cross and follow. I don’t mean that you have to walk in their very footsteps, but that you have to get up and get going on your own way, knowing that hard work, determination, and sacrifice are inevitable parts of the process of growing.

      If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we don’t like this idea at all. When the alarm clock goes off at 6:00 a.m., it is as if I am hardwired to hit the snooze button. For nine minutes (sometimes eighteen minutes), I give in to the death instinct. I want to stay in the womb, to cocoon in the warmth and protection of the blankets. I dread the day. I feel persecuted by its demands. I forget how much I love life and the satisfaction that it brings. And yet, soon after I rise, shower, and have my delicious coffee, I begin to wake up to the life instinct. Optimism, energy, and curiosity gain in strength. It is the inevitable rhythm of my morning. Each day, I must engage in this mini-struggle with the part of myself that wishes to shirk from life’s challenges because I have temporarily lost contact with its many rewards.

      I am always struck by this dynamic as it plays itself out in an ordinary way between fitness trainer and client at the local gym. Have you ever watched (or ever been) the client who whines throughout her workout, complaining to her trainer, “Why do you make me lift such heavy weights?” Or, better yet, “Why do you always make me sweat?” It is a frustrating yet rather hilarious moment when one realizes that one cannot get the benefit of the workout without the strain, that—in fact—one has intentionally put oneself in that position in order to grow. Deep down, we know that the saying is true—no pain, no gain—but that doesn’t mean we have to like it!

       Resistance to growth is something that we don’t like to recognize in ourselves, yet in many ways it is essential to acknowledge if one really wants to grow.

      Resistance to growth is something that we don’t like to recognize in ourselves, yet in many ways it is essential to acknowledge if one really wants to grow. The reality of resistance to growth explains why so many of us try to change but cannot. In Romans 7:15, the Apostle Paul speaks about this common problem when he writes, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Many of us relate to this frustrating experience. However, when we can step back to acknowledge it as Paul did, we gain a valuable perspective. We begin to see how we actually contribute to our own troubles, fueling the fire rather than doing what we can to put it out.

      It takes a lot of effort for us to grow because, as we can tell from observing ourselves, we human beings tend to unconsciously invest, over and over, in supporting the status quo, even if it is problematic. Freud called this the repetition compulsion, a highly charged dynamic in our inner worlds that keeps us trapped in vicious circles, making the same mistakes, hitting the same dead ends, and backing ourselves into the very corners we are trying to get out of. The conscious voice says, “I want to change!” and yet the unconscious voice says, “It is too dangerous! Keep doing what you know. You haven’t died yet.” This unconscious train of thought shows one of the key reasons why we resist change: We are afraid of dying.

      Now that may sound a bit dramatic, but the inner world is populated by some rather dramatic characters, the first and foremost being our baby selves. While the most adult part of our personalities might have good judgment and motivation for dealing with reality—and might be quite invested in growing—there is a central part of the personality that, just like an infant, comes into the world frightened, needy, and 100 percent dependent on another person for its survival. In a very real sense, there is a baby self within each of us that fears for its life. This is the starting point of personality development. The baby self, having no sense of time, lives on as if it were living in the first and most vulnerable days of life.

      I hope you find this metaphor as helpful as I do. I think it is a good alternative to the old metaphor of the psyche being like a wild horse (the id) that needs to be tamed and bridled (the super-ego) by a strong rider (the ego). I can relate better to the contemporary depiction of the psyche being more like an internal family in which internal parents work to help comfort, feed, discipline, and raise an internal baby, because it feels so much closer to my experience. I know I have a baby part of my personality that can get cranky, confused, irrational, and impulsive and needs the help of my more grown-up self. I also know I have a baby part that is curious, playful, and creative, and wants to learn more about this fascinating world of ours and wants to become more capable of handling it. So many of the psychological forces of life come from this baby part of the personality. I have found that getting to know and having a good relationship with her is key to being well and living well.

      But if you find it hard to picture yourself having an inner world that is populated with internal babies of all ages, as well as internal parents trying to have relationships with them, try to start thinking about it in another way. Picture the psyche as a tree trunk. All the layers of the self, through all the times and seasons of our lives, are preserved inside—alive—like rings in the trunk of a tree. The core of that tree trunk holds a lot of power, both in the beginning and throughout our lives. Being the oldest part of self, it also has a lot of influence because we have been relying on it for so long.

      The core of the tree trunk is the baby part of the self, the center of the personality. I like to call it the baby-core of the personality. Put simply, we are often unknowingly responding more to the baby-core’s needs and demands than to the needs and demands of the outer layers, or “adult” part of our personalities.

      So, if you can allow yourself to engage with this vivid metaphor about the baby-core of the personality, you might ask, “What is such an infant to do if she wants to survive?” As you can guess from what I’ve been sharing so far, one approach is that she can give in to the death instinct and try to flee from danger. That is, she can use the approach of avoidance. Kleinian analysts call it “getting unborn” or “becoming an unborn baby.” You can try to stay in the womb (metaphorically speaking) forever. Avoid risk at all costs, underachieve, hide out. This approach is something that we are all prone to using, at least from time to time, and I see it more and more in young people today. I call it “failure to launch,” borrowing the term from a romantic comedy. These are the twenty-eight-year-olds still living with overprotective moms and dads, sheltered from the dangers of life and falsely convinced that they can have all of the goodies in life without getting born into the world and growing up.

      The problem with the approach of avoidance is expressed in the simple truth of the adage that if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. To further develop the gym analogy, we all know that muscle, if not exercised, will atrophy. If you sit on the couch long enough (for example, playing video games or surfing the Internet), you’re going to have some problems—with your body and your mind. This is the place where a vicious circle can get set in motion. Our confidence deteriorates the more we avoid facing life’s difficulties. The less we face life, the less capable we feel. And the less capable we feel, the less we try. We can’t get up off the couch. If we’re not moving forward, we’re moving backward.

      While the couch potato analogy is a good one to understand the cost