An embarrassing streak of cynicism
Psychology was my least favorite subject in high school. I wasn’t bad at it – in fact I aced every test that I took, but ultimately failed the course because I hadn’t kept a “Dream Journal” that amounted to something like 35% of my final grade. Rather than scramble to compile the journal on the night before it was due (as many students opted to do), I chose to spare myself the dreadful task of colossal eleventh-hour bullshitting simply to make the grade, which in my eyes was the greatest psychological lesson of all and why that “F” never haunted me. Because, seriously, a dream journal?
I suppose I never started on the journal because the very idea of it made me boil over with cynicism. Psychology seemed so easy and second-nature to me as a subject to be understood, and yet the last thing on Earth I wanted to do was use it as a tool to understand, least of all if I was the guinea pig.
I’m having the same feeling creep over me as I attempt for the second time to read Harville Hendrix’ book about relationships, Keeping the Love You Find (I can barely type the title without feeling a vague sense of disenchantment and anger). The book is torture. Chapter One, entitled “What’s wrong with being single?” and containing a brief testimonial from a thirty-year-old New York ad-copy writer who the author identifies as having “the ideal single life” (living in a high-rise on the Upper East Side, beginning to lose interest in sexual conquests and “just having someone to go out with on a Saturday night,” etc.), is torture. I can’t help but bristle with more cynicism as I read, feeling as though I might as well be reading a pamphlet about the lifestyle of aliens from another galaxy and nothing that applies to my own existence — swindling myself.
But a particular sentence in Chapter Two, contained in a section titled “Enter the Unconscious”, arrives with a merciful knockout blow: “Here was the new individual, reveling in his freedom from the collective and in his view of himself as, above all, rational and autonomous, confronted by the notion that a large part of his hard-won free will was illusory.”
Piqued at the mention of Freud – that fucking “F” – I put the book down and wonder, what was I dreaming about anyway, when I was so reticent to write about my dreams to try to understand myself? I can only remember incoherent, garbled nonsense. I can only remember bullshit. It’s only been in the last few weeks that it’s felt like my dreams have achieved something akin to coherency and clarity. It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve realized how much more from life I owe myself.
My better judgment finally winning out, I bite down hard on my lip, pick up the book and keep reading, pushing every pang of self-doubt aside and hoping the pain isn’t for nothing.
