In this brief example I could see that the timing of the sessions represented yet another way in which he had to fail. I was this punishing authority that was making him suffer.
He is saying this because he wants to be a man, not a macho man, but a man and doing these things, such as completing an art history course that he has been interested in. That would make him a man. But he can never do it because he’s so anxious about it. It is always over there, where there is this ‘other Steven’ that he’s trying to get to, a phantastical place called ‘the perfect man’.
To me this is a clear example of beating oneself up, just like the child in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’. It is as if he has recruited these ideas in order to humiliate himself. The project seems to be about feeling a failure and finding standards that he can continually fail to reach. Later he went on:
It all started with us being a failed family, a mutated family from the time of my father leaving. From that moment on, my mother reiterated that we were spoiled goods. This is her family myth. If only my father had been there, I would have been fine’.
Whichever way you look at this scenario, this man has taken up the family mode of being and also transposed this view of life onto what he perceives as the established social order. Not only has he taken on the punishing dynamic of the family, he has also taken up the punishing liberal state thereby ensuring that it still exists. Thus, on the one hand he identifies with his mother, but on the other he is identified with the father or rather, the mother’s version of the father. The father has left, he’s a failure; he doesn’t do the right thing. The kind of self-reflexivity permitted in psychoanalysis can sometimes seem empty. For this particular patient, the question becomes this, ‘That’s all very well, but how can I stop it?’ Of course it is all very well to say, ‘step outside of it’ or ‘uncouple yourself from that to which you are so bound.’ Put simply, this is a way out of such a dilemma, involving leaving one’s mother/liberal state/ and at the same acknowledging the fact that you have a real craving for a mother/ a just liberal state. For this patient at least, it seems as if the only way to protest is through failure. The only access to freedom is through failure. Ironically, one perversely adapts yet still plays within the parameters of the game.