Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.2 Everyday Life
Let us focus on a banal sequence of experiences on an ordinary day in my life. I am expecting a couple of friends for dinner tonight. I go out to buy some wine, walk down the stairs, and do so with a sense that soon I will be going back up them for three floors. I hate these stairs. I have almost reached the bottom when a vague sense carries me back to 15 years ago, slipping in between my thoughts without even let- ting itself be touched: I was living in Rome at the time, on the last floor of a building with no elevator. All this is not even an image or memory: it is more like an atmo- sphere that I grasp for a fleeting instant. I am in the street. I head toward the wine store. As I cross the street, I am struck by the square: it looks like a square in Le Marais, in Paris. I had always wanted to move back there, but then I found a place here in Geneva with a Parisian feel to it. I am leaving for Paris tomorrow but will only be staying in the city until evening. I need to drop by my favorite bookshop to see if among the secondhand books I can find a certain volume by X that is out of print. I wonder if I will have enough time. Meanwhile, I have reached the Russian church. A blonde woman in her 50s makes her way down the steps of the church, shrouded in a gossamer veil. I am gripped by a vague feeling, like the trace of the presence of a Polish friend of mine, from my youth. Oh, youth! It is as though it were still here and not decades away… As I am about to cross a bridge, I imagine the view of the lake concealed by the grassy hillock. On the sidewalk three clerks in short sleeves are rushing off to have lunch. They look like bank clerks. They are having a listless conversation—perhaps they are discussing how to invest in the
2 The domain of the proper is grasped as a relation that is always underway starting from the ongo- ing situation.
3 From this perspective, the attempt to reduce the understanding of others to the exterior perception of acts or expressions of the human body—by tracing these back to psychic connections and ulti- mately completing the constitution of the flesh viewed from the outside by Einfühlung—seems contrived at best.
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stock market... This is a sequence of experiences like many others from my every- day life. I go out to buy some wine, walk down the stairs, find myself in the street, prepare to cross a bridge, etc. As I experience these and other things, I experience myself – and now and then encounter myself.4
All the possible ways of reaching myself, and of experiencing the environmental contexts which I come across, emerge through my position in actual life. In other words, even in encountering the most banal circumstances, I am oriented by that sphere of possible understanding, by that more or less stable sphere of the possibil- ity of sense, in which I largely unreflectively live according to certain tendencies and a network of motivations, which actual life sets in motion. At the same time, these also constitute an anchoring to the saliencies of the world and my relations with others, as well as a center and direction of gravity.
On the other hand, my position in the world, my familiarity with others, and the sense I have of myself are in each case elicited by the occurrences that, in meeting me, mark out as many specific “places” of self-understanding. The experience of novelty can only be understood by taking into account the inhibiting of the familiar- ity I have with myself in my mode of existing. In actual experience, it takes shape as that which falls out of the temporally particular context of expectations carried out by factical life.
What occurs is always experienced within the framework of a particular mean- ingful context and hence in the light of given motivations and expectations that lend life a direction, stability, rhythm, and sphere of intelligibility which every situation mobilizes anew. This is the always-to-be-established domain of the proper in the light of which one lives.
As already noted, the domain of the proper gives itself in an intelligible way in concrete situations, and experience represents the expression of it. Even the content of the most banal experiences presents itself in everyday existence according to a certain “how,” which is to say, within a factual context of manifestation and hence in the light of possible motivations and tendencies.
Experiences, then, are not accessible as isolated entities, as things; rather, they appear to be the expression of actual life situations. Ipseity takes shape in each case according to a unique weave of occurrences and to a sphere of intelligibility which occurrences remobilize and recall on each occasion, de facto regenerating the access to what has been.
It is therefore according to a given access key that sense is elicited in terms of an indication, manifestation, or more or less acute accentuation of the domain of the proper: it is through what occurs that I have—or do not have—myself. And it is in this attempt to see myself on the basis of the unfolding of my life that the latter shows or conceals itself, since there is no need for life to step outside itself in order to grasp itself: life addresses itself in its own “language,” to quote Dilthey. It traces, searches for, and grasps its own limits; it establishes its own objectives, perspec- tives, burdens, and questions; in other words, in each case, it brings its tendencies to
4 Greisch is particularly fascinated by this patchwork aspect of the “carpet of life” and identifies it in Stefan George’s poems (2000).
5 Self-Intimacy and Individuation
fulfillment in the context of its own spheres. I only grasp myself through this condi- tion, which cannot be transcended and which determines all the directions of my inquiry.
Heidegger describes this basic aspect of life as self-sufficiency. This self- sufficiency is to be understood in phenomenological terms, and that is to say, as the generation of sense in relation to the meaningfulness we encounter. It has nothing to do with the biologization of life or with the positing of impulses or motivational principles determining its articulation. With its self-sufficiency, life always addresses itself in its own language, coping with its incompleteness through the creation of meaning: the original motility of existence makes the world appear as it penetrates it, becoming visible and traceable. Quesne (2004) observes: “The self-sufficient expression is ambivalent: at times it indicates a positive character of factical life, namely its movedness (Bewegtheit); at other times, it indicates the dangerous auton- omy which this factical life can possess in relation to meaningfulness (meaningful contexts), insofar as it only possesses this ontological autonomy within this rela- tionship of retrieval of meaningfulness” (p. 166).
The actual course of one’s existence, then, appears to be marked by the possible opening or closing of the dimension of sense, by the loss or achievement of the pres- ence to oneself in the various situations which punctuate the different periods of one’s life according to a certain ever-renewed “how.” Personality is this individual rhythm articulated over the course of one’s existence: the emergence and loss of self-intimacy characterizing one’s expressive intensity but also the disclosure or concealment of the past, connected to the mode of manifestation of the world one experiences. What we have here is a sphere of accessibility, a range of possible modes, a personal style with which we find ourselves among things and with other people in different moments of our life, a rhapsody of attitudes with respect to which the contents of life can be delineated in all of their diversity.5
If ipseity constitutes the starting point of psychology, one closely related ques- tion concerns the fact that its situational actualization corresponds to the disclosure of a coherent sense, of a style of experiencing, within each given experience. By adopting this perspective, in the subsequent chapters, we shall see how the move- ment of therapeutic care unfolds precisely within the experience of encountering and relating to our own lived experience, which is opened up and made possible by anything significant which addresses us. Therapeutic care consists precisely in the restless reclaiming of my own personal story in the light of the way in which the things I experience lead me to question myself and hence through the thematizing of the perception of self-familiarity distinguishing these experiences. In such a way, it is possible to bring to light the tendencies and motives supporting the factual articulation of existence on each occasion.
As will become evident, the therapeutic method has nothing to do with technical knowledge and its application to individual stories, since it is rather based on the very unfolding of life. It will be shown, therefore, that access to the self-intimacy of
5 Personality, in other words, does not correspond to a theoretical category, but is rather a formal indication.
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individual life begins with the articulation of sense through which it is factually realized. Psychotherapy sets out from life itself: for life itself is forced to choose the care of self as a means to achieve its fullness by its very unfolding and hence by its very motility, which constantly erodes the meanings it engenders. Only in such terms is it possible to understand why one of the crucial elements for the reconstruction- appropriation of a patient’s personal story lies in the therapist’s sen- sitivity to discover and indicate those events whose meaningfulness has shaped the actual course of the person’s story; this sensitivity represents the cornerstone of every therapeutic relationship.