He had this way of disappearing when things weren’t going well. Not by slamming the door, no. Just by becoming a little quieter, a little more elsewhere. His wife would say of him: “He goes into battle alone.” And it was true. He would return from his inner caverns empty-handed, but with a calm brow, never having laid his burden on the dinner table. His brother, conversely, would shout his pain to the whole world, convinced that sharing meant pouring out. One had learned in the clamor of silence, the other in the echo of his own voice. Which of the two had truly weathered the storm?
What irresistibly draws us to a person is less their natural brilliance than the soft patina of their understood wounds. The most likable beings are not those who have never suffered, but those who have taken the time to sit with their pain and question it. They possess that rare elegance of not reproducing the mistakes they saw committed, as if they had inherited, through simple observation, the wisdom of generations. Their presence is a silent confidence: “I have crossed through, I have looked, I have chosen not to pass on the pain.”
We all have our neuroses. What truly sets us apart is the way we choose to confront them.
Denial presents itself as a gentle sedative, a truce offered to a mind too fragile. Dictionaries call it “unconscious,” “protective,” almost benevolent. Yet, it is nothing but a fool’s bargain with oneself. For what one pushes out the door of consciousness re-enters through the window of the body or of action. One day, silence becomes a symptom, forgetting turns into violence. What one refused to weep, one will make bleed. What one refused to see, one will become in spite of oneself. Denial erases nothing; it merely quarantines the pain, until it escapes and contaminates everything.
Denial is never a private affair. By refusing to see what is, one forces the other to see what is not. Every evaded word, every silence placed like a lid on a boiling pot, becomes an atmosphere. Loved ones, for their part, breathe in this unease without being able to name it. They are the involuntary mirrors of our mute wounds. The discomfort they feel in our presence is nothing other than our own pain, deposited with them like forgotten luggage, which ends up weighing on their shoulders.
One believes they are closing the shutters on their past, but others always see the light filtering through. What one forbids oneself to look at, they read in our tics, our silences, our too-sudden angers. The relationship then becomes that wasteland where one gropes forward while the other pretends the ground is flat. No real encounter is possible when one of the two has not encountered themselves. For loving means first having made the journey to oneself, in order to welcome the other without asking them to carry one’s baggage.
One might think projection is a lie, but it is much more: it is a displaced truth. When I accuse the other of what eats away at me, I speak a truth—my own—by placing it in the wrong location. The accusation is sincere, but the culprit is false. Thus, I can spend my life fighting in others what I should heal in myself. I become a shadow vigilante, chasing my own flaws disguised as external enemies. Projection is that war lost in advance, where one fights everywhere except on the only battlefield that counts: oneself.
Thus, the soul that carries within it the terror of emptiness or the forbidden allure of the forbidden fruit can, by a strange reversal, lend its own inclinations to the being who shares its bed. Worried about its own weakness, it ends up suspecting the other of having succumbed to it. These grievances, repeated and ever-renewed, though devoid of any foundation, are then nothing but a mirror held up to oneself; they betray less the fault of the accused than the deep turmoil of the accuser, whose mind, to preserve itself, projects onto external reality the ghost of its own demons.
This phenomenon is disconcertingly commonplace and spares none of our relationships. There exists, as it were, a secret correspondence between the language we hold with ourselves and that which we address to the world: the more we evade our own lacks, the more resistant we are to our own flaws, the more impossible it becomes to offer others that natural indulgence we deny ourselves. Thus, our relationships with others are never anything but the faithful mirror of our inner wars—a mirror without complacency in which the battles we wage in the shadow of our consciousness are reflected, sometimes cruelly.
When the soul, tormented by its own contradictions, can no longer contain the tumult within it, it seeks refuge in the simplification of the world. Thus is born this Manichaean vision where everything is reduced to the brilliance of good or the abyss of evil, without ever allowing that tempered light which constitutes the truth of things to insinuate itself. But this inflexible division is a delusion: by trying so hard to separate everything, one loses the faculty of embracing reality in its complexity. Truth, however, always resides in this in-between, in this chiaroscuro where shadows themselves have their grace, and where good and evil, far from excluding each other, together compose the secret fabric of existence.
There are moments when the mind, weary of itself, chooses the simplest map to traverse the territory. Splitting is that shortcut: a fast track promising to pull us out of the tumult, to end indecision. Rather than facing the meanders of reality, one reduces it to two stark colors, two irreconcilable camps. It’s more convenient, quicker to think, quicker to decide. But this map is a lie: it erases the hills, ignores the streams, simplifies the landscape so well that one ends up getting lost in it. Our judgments then go astray, our choices shatter against reefs we had failed to see. And this is always how this old reflex betrays itself: when the world, before our eyes, loses its greys to become nothing but contrast—all white or all black—it means our mind has chosen the ease of the dream over the complexity of the true.
It is the same vertigo, the same impossible measure: the other becomes, in turn, sun or dust, never able to inhabit that tempered light which is that of true beings. Idealization lulls us, it places a golden veil over our fears, it adorns the chosen being—lover, guide, idol—with so much brilliance that we forget our own fragility. But every dream has its awakening. And when the illusion shatters, it is to plunge into the opposite excess: the same beloved face becomes shrouded in shadows, flaws swell like monsters, and we violently reject what we had held so tenderly. Thus swings the pendulum of the heart, from one pole to the other, never stopping in that temperate zone where humans live. And this perpetual motion ends up shaking even the most solid attachments, even the peace we seek within ourselves.
Our initial blindness, that enchantment that seizes us at the beginning of a relationship, carries within it the seed of all future disenchantments. For the other, in their secret lucidity, senses well that they are not up to the image we have formed of them; this blind generosity embarrasses them more than it flatters them. They sense that today’s idol will be tomorrow’s victim, and this worry poisons the sweetness of the exchange in advance. It would be better, from the start, to consent to see the other as they are, with their shadows and lights, their grandeurs and their smallnesses. For the admission of weaknesses reassures; it anchors the relationship in a truth that does not fear time. Without this initial honesty, the other lives in terror of the awakening, watching for the moment when our eyes will open to their imperfections.
It is true that our self-esteem sometimes finds satisfaction in this boundless admiration. Being adorned with qualities one does not possess, enjoying an esteem one has not earned, pleasantly flatters that need for recognition that slumbers in everyone. But it is a fool’s bargain. Days pass, the veil tears, and truth, unfailingly, reasserts its rights. Thus, on both sides, one finds oneself a prisoner of an illusion that cannot last. The only wisdom, therefore, is to refuse to enter this deceptive game, to prefer to the artificial brilliance of idealization the more sober, but more certain, light of truth.
There are hostilities that never take the royal road of open confrontation. They prefer the side paths, the edges where responsibility dissolves into ambiguity. Thus is born passive aggression, this cold war of everyday life: a repeated delay, a silence that drags on, an irony that bites without ever admitting its bite, a sabotage so discreet it could pass for clumsiness. It is a way of expressing conflict while refusing to take responsibility for it, of wounding without dirtying one’s hands. But this slow venom does its work: trust crumbles, the air thickens, and those who suffer these muted blows feel the tension rising without being able to name it, prisoners of a war whose very declaration is hidden from them.
It is salutary, when we catch in ourselves these oblique movements, these disguised hostilities, to stop for a moment and question their source. But this introspection is extremely difficult: passive aggression is, by nature, what escapes our consciousness, what acts in us without us. It belongs to those obscure regions of the soul we prefer not to visit. Yet, if we find the courage to look there, we almost always discover some shameful guest: an envy that dares not speak its name, an inability to confront the other face-to-face, a feeling of unworthiness so deep it prefers oblique revenge to explicit request. So many hidden wounds that, for lack of being recognized, continue to act in the shadows and poison our relationships.
Acting out is when an emotion muzzled for too long finally seizes power—but without words, without consciousness, without consent. A slammed door, a relationship sabotaged in one gesture, a night of reckless spending, a fit of tears or rage that comes from nowhere. Unable to say: “I’m suffering,” “I’m angry,” “I’m scared,” one shows it. One does it. And in the moment, it relieves. It is even terribly relieving. But the next day, you have to pick up the pieces. Because the act itself does not erase. It has left traces, wounds, sometimes ruins. Acting out is a release that comes at a high cost: it puts out the inner fire, but it sets fire to everything around.
There was a time, for almost everyone, when inner storms found their outlet in lightning. Adolescence is that season when one does not yet know how to hold back the thunder, when actions come before thoughts, when one breaks things without knowing why, except that it relieves for an instant. Then come other ages, and one gradually learns to tame these storms. One gives them names, words, barriers. Acting out becomes rarer, like an old storm that returns only reluctantly. But some remain, despite the years, despite the lessons, the terrible children of their own emotions. They continue to slam doors, to cut to the quick, to consume without thinking. And this war they wage blindly, they also wage on those who love them—a painful spectacle, these adults whom time has not softened, in whom the act has replaced speech, and discharge has replaced peace.
It is a much more troubling mirror game: one lends to the other an emotion, an ulterior motive, and through one’s own actions, forces the other to take on this reflection. Such as this individual who, through coldness and hostility, ends up making the other truly distant. Thus a deleterious spiral is woven, a relational trap where each is assigned a role they did not choose.
In principle, it is a maneuver of avoidance through assimilation: to avoid confronting one’s own uncomfortable states of mind, the subject tends to reduce the other to their own measure. The receiver of this duplication enterprise then experiences an otherness perceived as “toxic,” that is, as an attempt to delegate the affective residues that the subject cannot or will not assume.
Magical thinking falls under what could be called an ontological confusion: it postulates the causal efficacy of subjective intentionality over the course of objective events. This mechanism, often mobilized in the face of a feeling of powerlessness before the excess of reality, aims to restore a lost sovereignty. But by substituting incantation for action, it maintains the subject in the illusory and exempts them from the necessary trial of facing the world.
It is a scene that plays out in each of us, a scene where our thoughts imagine themselves as actresses capable of rewriting the world’s script. Religions, those great collective stagings, are striking proof of this. In the child, it is role-playing, a consequence-free sketch. But when the adult continues to play alone, to manage their life through these enchanted backstage areas, they become a character apart, whom others look at with embarrassment, like an actor who has lost the thread of the common play. To find the way back to the stage, one must then scrutinize one’s own lines, flush out the irrational hidden within them, and relearn to play in the real world.
When words are lacking, when the mouth remains closed on what cannot be said, then the body takes the floor. It speaks through sharp pains, through knots that tighten the neck, through that dull ache that twists the stomach or that migraine that pounds at the temples like a fist against a door. It is not an illusion; it is the mute voice of a sorrow without language, the last refuge of what could find no place in sentences.
This phenomenon, though familiar, is subject to epistemic and practical neglect: we do not listen to what the body, in its signifying materiality, is trying to tell us. However, a reduction, even prevention, of somatization is possible through a hermeneutics of everyday life. The repeated observation of somatic signals, combined with reflection on their possible affective anchoring, constitutes a path to appeasement. This endeavor requires a form of vigilance towards oneself, an intimate disposition to cultivate practices that refine attention to this flesh that speaks to us silently.
This is a movement of withdrawal by which the subject, to escape the torments of the reality principle, takes up residence in an inner world of which they are the sole demiurge. Daydreaming, as an ordinary mode of psychic life, should not be confused with this autistic fantasy which, by substituting itself for action, social connection, and object investment, institutes absence as a mode of being in the world. The subject, then, no longer inhabits reality; they have made another one for themselves, softer, but uninhabitable for others.
There are childhoods that unfold in the silk of a solitude populated only by absent ones. The only child, or the one whom age or sex separates from their siblings like a pane of glass, carries within them that void which reality does not fill. Then, to escape the greyness of days without response, they weave, in the secrecy of their room, a web of imagination. Fantasy books become for them echo chambers where their own dreams take shape; video games, those cathedrals of pixels where they, the overlooked, can don the purple of a leading role. Thus, through the breach of dreams, they escape from a world where they are merely extras, to reign, for the space of a reading or a game, over kingdoms that exist only for them.
But when maturity arrives, this secret garden where one peacefully cultivated one’s dreams becomes an enclosure that imprisons. What childhood dressed in indulgence, what the early years tolerated as a charming caprice, gradually transforms into a wall separating the adult from the world. By wanting to populate one’s solitude with chimeras for too long, one loses the path to others; one no longer knows how to walk in the stark light of reality, nor how to bear the weight of gazes that, no longer those, tender, directed at the child, now judge the strange adult with the harshness reserved for those who did not want to grow up.
Thus it is that under the pressure of an inner unease, whose origin—the world or oneself—one cannot discern, one catches oneself untying the threads of what one believed oneself to have become. One lets oneself slide, down a slope so gentle it is indistinguishable from fatigue, towards an earlier state, where the hand sought a hand, where the slightest distress called for a comforting word. One becomes whiny, dependent, demanding attention as one once demanded a gaze before falling asleep; one refuses to decide, as willpower shrinks away, as if one secretly hoped that time could be abolished, and that one could rediscover that era—which one never truly left—when one felt protected. But this regression, which is an inconsolable attempt at reparation, ends up enclosing us in a new powerlessness, and weighs on those around us with a burden that they, even in their kindness, cannot bear indefinitely.
These sediments of the soul, which we take for ramparts, are in reality only partitions of frosted glass. They do not break the pain with the wild violence of primitive reflexes; they filter it, softening it with a winter light. They establish within us a lull, a closed room where the breath of life seems held back, offering our self a form of stability that is precious but precarious, akin to those balances that only the awareness of a gesture to avoid allows one to maintain. They stem the flow of tears so they do not overflow the bank, but by stopping the current, they transform the river into stagnant marsh, thus preventing the slow work of involuntary memory and inner germination.
Repression is a consignment to the cellar. An operation of vertical storage. The mind becomes a geometer, an architect of the basement. It digs within itself dungeons, silos where to deposit the too-heavy grain of memory. It is not a rejection, it is a burial. One does not destroy the painful object, one assigns it a depth. One entrusts it to the inner night. Balance is restored, not by the disappearance of the weight, but by its displacement towards the foundations. Consciousness, on the surface, regains its lightness, its peaceful horizontality. But the cellar exists, full, dark, and sometimes its sighs rise through the cracks in the floorboards, reminding that the house of being has depths that only ask to be remembered.
This mechanism, at the moment of trauma, is like that helpful hand that, in a jostling crowd, holds us back and prevents us from falling. It allows us, despite the pain, to continue walking, to appear, to live. But what was thus relegated to the underground of memory does not remain inert there. It watches. It lives an obscure life, and at times, it reminds us of itself through signs: a causeless malaise, a gesture repeated tirelessly, an emotion that erupts out of proportion to the event that triggered it. Repression, in itself, is not the illness. It is that country doctor who dresses wounds in an emergency. It only becomes fatal when it settles in, when the closed room it opened for one night becomes a permanent dwelling, and when the soul, by dint of living in its cellars, forgets that it once had windows.
This effort to maintain things outside consciousness is never without cost. It drains, like an imperceptible leak in an overfull basin, the most precious energy of the mind. For one must constantly watch, constantly hold the door that memory pushes against. One then lives in that singular state which is that of the watchman: one believes in calm, but the ear listens; one believes oneself at peace, but one senses that under the floorboards, something is stirring. And this certainty that what was set aside can, at any moment, resurface, keeps us in a state of perpetual tremor. So much so that the feelings we thought we had relegated—ancient sadness, poorly extinguished anger, that nostalgia which is like the scent of a faded bouquet, or that regret which secretly gnaws—continue to inhabit the neighboring rooms of ourselves, and we manage, in the silence, to perceive their murmurs.
Rationalization is that elegant and deceptive faculty by which the mind, after the fact, clothes in a garment of logic what actually stems from more obscure movements. It invents reasons where there were only causes, it builds bridges of words over the chasms of the heart. Thus, the one who has just suffered a refusal convinces themselves, with an almost sincere conviction, that this position, in truth, did not suit them; they recite to themselves the motives for this retrospective disaffection with such art that the disappointment seems to vanish. Or, after the wrench of a separation, one hears oneself declare, in a voice one would like to be firm, that it was for the best, while deep down, in the closed room where consciousness does not penetrate, suffering continues its quiet work, like a piano one hears playing, muffled, through the walls of a neighboring apartment.
This mechanism is like an ointment applied to a still fresh burn. It protects the self from pain that, raw, would be intolerable. But this balm, in soothing, also distances us from the truth of our own flesh, from that primary and deep sensation that was ours before the mind undertook to veil it. It elaborates a narrative about ourselves, an acceptable, tamed figure, which we can look at without flinching. And as long as this facade holds, as long as the plaster does not fall, we can move forward, walk through life with a step that wishes to be assured. But this step, however regular it may be, leads us far from ourselves. It bypasses, without ever entering, the secret chamber where lies, unknown to us, what we truly desire, what we truly are.
There is no one, I think, who has not at some time resorted to this expedient of the soul. We are all, to varying degrees, secretly complicit. And this complicity is not, in itself, condemnable. For there are ancient wisdoms, those philosophies that come to us from the Greeks and the Romans, which rest on a similar principle: the art of accepting what cannot be changed. And what gentler way to achieve this than to persuade oneself that what happened is, all things considered, preferable? That the spilled wine might have been too bitter? That the path that ends before us spares us, without our knowing, an even more dangerous slope? Thus, by a delicate detour, reason becomes the accomplice of destiny, and the soul, lulled by this inner music, finds in illusion itself a beginning of peace.
Intellectualization is to rationalization what the cold room is to the cellar: a more austere variant, more stripped of human warmth. Here, the individual does not merely seek acceptable motives for their pain; they elevate their sorrow to the rank of an object of knowledge, contemplate it from the outside as one looks at a specimen under a microscope glass. They will speak of their grief as a sociological phenomenon, evoking the funeral rites of vanished civilizations with the same peaceful distance as if it were not their own. Of the trauma that inhabits them, they will make an exposition of a neurological process, detailing the circuits of the amygdala and the discharges of cortisol with the cold precision of a clinician describing the case of another. The pain is there, however, intact, but they have built around it a museum of mirrors where they can walk without ever touching it.
This faculty of distancing, which we call intellectualization, finds its use in those moments when the soul must not falter without compromising everything. The surgeon bent over their task, the lawyer pleading a case, the rescue worker facing disaster resort to it instinctively, as to a salutary reflex that allows the hand not to tremble. But what was, in an emergency, a precise instrument becomes, when it settles in permanently, a wall between oneself and oneself. The individual, by dint of thinking everything without feeling anything, ends up inhabiting their intelligence like an empty room. They move away from this body which is theirs, from these palpitations which are life itself, from this heart which still beats, but whose key they have lost. And they move away from others, too: for how can one touch someone who has made themselves into an idea? How can one love someone who watches themselves love?
For some among us, this armor is forged long before adulthood comes to require its wearing. It takes its source in those early years where childhood, which should be only play and light, already knows its shadows. When the child has suffered a pain too heavy for their young shoulders, when they could not let their tears flow or confide them to a loving ear, when they doubted being loved for themselves, unconditionally, then intellectualization can present itself as a lifeline. And if, moreover, this child proves brilliant in their studies, if school reflects back to them a flattering image of themselves, the trap closes with a gentleness all the more formidable. For the educational institution, in its natural movement, rewards mastery, analysis, performance, without offering much space for what overflows, what feels, what weeps. It encourages, without knowing it, this retreat to the icy heights of the intellect. Thus, what was initially a way to survive the pain becomes, over time, a way to ignore it, then to bury it under words, under concepts, under this fortress of thoughts that one takes for oneself and which is nothing but a sumptuous tomb raised in place of the heart.
Reaction formation is that singular masquerade of the soul by which it dons the exact opposite costume of what it feels, as if to better confuse the gaze of others and perhaps also its own. It is a psychic camouflage of a subtlety often underestimated. He who is consumed by hostility displays a politeness so meticulous, so studied, that it becomes almost a work of art; the envious, in the secrecy of their heart, lavishes admirations so warm that they sometimes come to believe them themselves, for an instant; and he whom desire attracts drapes himself in a coldness so perfect that it seems a second nature. This reverse metamorphosis is a desperate attempt to keep in check an emotion deemed unworthy, unavowable, unbearable. On the world’s stage, it “works,” as they say. One passes for a courteous, warm, or distant being as propriety demands. But inside, the gap widens. The smoother the mask, the greater the chasm between this plaster face and the palpitating truth it conceals. The individual, by dint of playing their opposite, no longer knows who they are. They exhaust themselves maintaining this facade, and this fatigue, that of the perpetual liar, ends up consuming their vital forces.
It sometimes happens that the smoothest appearances conceal the most troubled waters. This excessive politeness, this courtesy so studied it becomes a second skin, this religiosity that manifests itself with an almost ostentatious fervor can be, in some, the sign of a very different inner landscape. Beneath these impeccable exteriors, it is not uncommon for forbidden desires to slumber, for insecurities carefully kept away from consciousness, or for that obscure shame attached to certain episodes of the past like a stain one would like to erase without ever succeeding. The overly polite man, the overly devout woman, the young man overly respectful of proprieties are perhaps, without knowing it, the zealous guardians of a secret garden whose key they have lost, and their very virtue is but the noise made by their inner silence as it stirs to prevent what lies deep within them from being heard.
When an emotion, too heavy or too dangerous to be carried to the one who caused it, is forced to seek an outlet elsewhere, it takes the detoured paths of what is called displacement. Thus, the anger one dares not direct at one’s master spills over onto the members of one’s household, like water that, unable to break the main dike, seeps through the cracks in the secondary walls. One loses one’s temper with one’s family, with the innocent who crosses one’s path, rather than confronting the one whose words or silence first lit the fire. This mechanism spares, it is true, the dreaded confrontation. It maintains the peace of appearances where it seemed threatened. But what peace, good Lord, is that which is bought at the cost of a muted war waged against those very ones one cherishes? For the diverted emotion does not die out; it settles, like a slow poison, in the intimate atmosphere, creating around one this vitiated climate where one breathes poorly, where one hurts without knowing why, where love itself ends up being altered by contact with this bitterness that is not its own. Displacement solves nothing, it displaces, as its name indicates. It makes suffering travel, but it is always towards those who, at the end of the journey, await us with open hearts, that its baggage ends up falling.
This mechanism is a lie in space. It shifts the center of gravity of the pain, but does not lighten its weight. The man who strikes beside the point, who wounds where it is safe, organizes around himself a geography of fear. He creates a world where true dangers are spared and the innocent are exposed. It is a moral architecture of bad faith. That it is common, that it inhabits most human dwellings, does not change the nature of what takes place there: the inequitable distribution of suffering. And those who live in the load-bearing walls of this architecture, those upon whom the displaced weight falls, do not have to inhabit its cage indefinitely. Their presence is not an outlet. Their love is not a sponge.
Undoing is that quasi-magical attempt by the mind to erase, as one erases a chalk line, a thought or an act that consciousness deems unacceptable. It operates through immediate compensation, a sort of counterweight intended to restore the broken balance. One multiplies excuses, loading them with so much fervor that they seem to want to cover not only the fault but even the memory of the fault. One adds reparatory gestures to words, as one would add offerings on an altar to appease an angered deity. One repeats inwardly a formula, a phrase with the power of conjuration, one inhabits it, one chants it until it becomes a presence stronger than the absence it must fill. One invents rituals, precise gestures, obligatory sequences that, performed in the exact order, have the virtue of “neutralizing” the guilty feeling. All this, no doubt, soothes. It lulls consciousness to sleep as one lulls a crying child, with lullabies and caresses. But it also prevents learning. For what one corrects, in this haste to repair, is never the source, never the deep root from which the fault sprouted. One treats the symptom, polishes the surface, closes the wound without cleaning it. And the cause, unharmed, intact, simply awaits its hour to bloom again.
Dissociation is that strange scalpel by which the mind cuts the link uniting the memory to its affective charge, as one would detach a wreck from its anchor so it can float without holding anything to the bottom anymore. He who uses it can then evoke the most painful event with a neutrality so perfect it becomes chilling, akin to those winters too pure where frost has suspended all life. He recounts, he describes, he specifies, but his voice does not tremble, his eyes do not mist over. It is a sovereign protection against collapse, a rampart allowing one to traverse the unbearable without sinking. But this salvation has its downside. For the emotion thus separated, deprived of its attachment, does not disappear for all that. It remains suspended, like a note that has not finished resonating, like water that has not found its bed. And because it has not been lived, because it has not passed through consciousness to settle there in peace, it will return. Later. In another form, always. It will become pain in the body, or unjust anger, or objectless melancholy. It will knock on the door, and one day, it must be let in.
To be continued […]
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