Tales From The Therapist's Couch

'Her desire for a sports car was narcissistic. She felt younger with the attention it brought her'

Imagine the following scenario. A woman arrives for therapy looking like a cat with a bowl of cream. She has, after many months of planning, purchased her very own sports car. She is in her late thirties and says that, sitting at the wheel with the roof down, she feels half her age. Listening to her, I am initially reminded of another patient, a man in his early fifties who some time ago bought a small sailing boat. Like this woman, his purchase was accompanied by a mood of euphoria. Yet there the comparison ends. For in a very fundamental way their purchases stemmed from entirely different impulses and answered significantly different needs.

Some years back Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have or To Be? In it he talks about the difference between the "having mode" and the "being mode". In the having mode, we are driven to possess something or someone in our environment to make ourselves feel superficially better. The being mode is about relating to the objects in our world in a way that makes us feel more deeply and fully alive and content. The two fictional snapshots above illustrate these different ways of being. The woman's desire for a car was essentially driven by her narcissism. She was strikingly attractive and throughout her life she had come to depend upon others' admiration of and desire for her. Recently, however, she had become painfully aware that heads didn't turn and gaze in the way they used to. All this changed when she was seated in her sports car. She felt a decade younger, and replete with the attention it brought her.

By contrast, the man's hunger for a boat was nothing to do with how the world would perceive him. Sailing opened up an aspect of himself which, in his busy life, had long been dormant. The boat was loved for its craft and beauty but even more, for where it could take him emotionally as well as physically. When he described the pleasure it gave him, his language became unselfconscious, less self-centred and full of reverie. He became immersed in the landscape of sea, sky, sun and wind, rather than needing the landscape to be immersed in him.

Another way of describing this conflict between having and being is Jung's notion of the clash between the needs of ego and Self. Jung uses the ego as referring to that sense of ourselves we are conscious of in the everyday world of "I am". The Self, by contrast, is the larger, deeper awareness that dwarfs and humbles the ego in rarer moods of awe, numinosity, wonder. It is often this awareness of the limitations of our egotism and a hunger for what the Self represents that brings many people to therapy. Saturated with a lifetime of living mostly in the having mode, many express a longing to shift to a deeper, more meaningful relationship with themselves.

Of course for most people, the search for and use of objects to transform in our lives is on a far smaller scale than sports cars and sailing boats. It can be anything we use to make ourselves feel transformed: a piece of clothing or music, a person, a landscape, a job. And rarely in everyday life is there such a clear-cut distinction between having or being as the examples above suggest. Mostly the way we use our environment is something of a blur between the two: a highly qualified woman is tempted to study for an umpteenth qualification at great cost in terms of both time and money. She is deeply uncertain whether her desire to do so is propelled by the satisfaction of having more letters after her name, or by a genuine hunger for learning. Or both. A man is very much in love and fearful of being abandoned, an emotion he has experienced too much of in the past. He has been buying his partner a lot of presents, and wonders if this generosity is in part his way of trying to secure the relationship, as well as being tokens of love.

As Fromm himself points out, writing about this opposition between having and being is hardly new. It figures in philosophy, Marxism, many world religions, existentialism. And yet maybe for many of us its challenge can never be new enough.

Most of us settle for some kind of balance between the two, and yet it's always daunting to remember that the responsibility for that balance, or imbalance, rests with us alone. So maybe it's the right time of year to ask ourselves which objects, people, places and ideas we choose to express ourselves through. And whether those choices enhance or diminish the person we feel ourselves to be.

elizabeth.meakins@blueyonder.co.uk

Elizabeth Meakins is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. None of the clinical material above refers to specific cases