We are all seekers. Something pulls us into life\u2026 to keep at it\u2026despite its harshness. We long for specific things and people all our lives but our longings are hardly limited to a specific thing or person. Our longings expand beyond a specific need or a specific person and contain deep imprints of who we are and what infuses life in us.
Some people invest their lives in this quest for \u2018something\u2019 – something they don\u2019t know about but feel compelled to engage with – an uncertainty, a nothing, a void, a chasm. Poets and psychoanalysts and sages, philosophers, and artists and even scientists are driven by this love for the unknown.
But most of all, the lovers. The lovers grapple and struggle and suffer this \u2018nothing\u2019 so much, incarnating and directing it towards an other – the beloved. No wonder, most cultures represent love as some sort of illness or madness that one gets struck by! Full of questions! Why don\u2019t they love me? Why do they love \u2018me\u2019! ? Do they love me? Intrigued and enamoured and plagued by this not knowing\u2026 but driven and passionate precisely because of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ghalib\u2019s famous ghazal remains so relevant across time and captures so many subtleties of our desire – Haven\u2019t we all been lovers? When the spells break, in the road ahead in our lives we also come closer to our quests as familiar but not quite directed at an other. We recognise something in our quests as parts of our own self – carved out of our many longings and desperate actions in life around a pull for something unknown – a nothing, a lack. \u201cWhat was I longing for all the while that I was in quest for someone or something desperately?\u201d is a question worth asking in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We may not know and find the answer precisely (and that\u2019s not the most important part) but the asking of the question is very very important because it leads to looking at ourselves askance (obliquely). And some things cannot be glanced at directly but only obliquely to get a flavour of it. To look at our essence we need to ask \u201cWhat do you long for?\u201d \u201cWhat was that gaping \u2018nothingness\u2019, an empty void that you were looking to find the right fit for?\u201d Something of your own self gets carved out in that process. The words we speak through our mouth as well as through our bodies (language and actions) when allowed that askance space of looking convey much more about who we are than any concrete description we build as an answer. Those \u2018sweet nothings\u2019 that we uttered to our lovers, the longing distant nostalgic eyes gazing into empty space while the mind swayed like waves of moments of connect and disconnect. Indeed, \u2018sweet\u2019 and \u2018nothing\u2019 but definitely \u2018something\u2019. Something we try to name all our lives and yet no name is enough for describing our longing, our desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because psychoanalysis is a discipline which engages with the unconscious aspects of our mind, it allows the space for all the \u2018nothings\u2019 and all the \u2018non sense\u2019. Not only since time immemorial but also since the history of psychoanalysis, the question that was persistent was \u2018why we act irrationally or in ways that make no rational sense?\u2019. \u2018How come we are not the master of our own consciousness?\u2019 \u2018What unknown logic is at the base of our compelling actions and feelings?\u2019 Like the lovers, the psychoanalysts as well as their psychoanalysands (or patients) really suffer these questions and also bear them. They meet weekly, sometimes twice or thrice or four times a week to sit together (or for the patient to lie on the couch) and enter into that distant space through free-association (speaking freely, letting the mind wander, not in search of anything specific but illuminating nonetheless along the way important ways of our own being).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The presence of someone is very important as an orienting force for our free speech giving way to our own subjectivity. The presence of a listener creates a space for us to make an attempt to put into words what we never found words for. The words we utter to someone are also meant for our own ears, but can only reach our ears back when we speak them to someone. Sweet Nothings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyone (including ourselves) who tries to concretise our longings and desires, anyone who tells us that we must speak only in a specific way, or offers us a guarantee to fill our lacks and longings, and anyone who says words only mean one thing, is a killer of subjectivity, a killer of our desire and being and our soul. Our lack is precious. Because while trying to speak into it we discover new words and names for ourselves. Our lack sustains our desire and our desire has no specific aim but nonetheless is vital to bring our \u2018self\u2019, our subjectivity to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An abusive lover or an abusive system or government or parent can really kill dreams by fixing meaning. To assign only a specific way of speaking and being is the death of love and our being. To assign a limited and specific aim to our desire is a violation of our being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are all seekers. Something pulls us into life\u2026 to keep at it\u2026despite its harshness. We long for specific things and people all our lives but our longings are hardly limited to a specific thing or person. Our longings expand…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","has-post-thumbnail-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepsychotherapistcollective.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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(link to the full ghazal and translation https:\/\/www.rekhta.org\/ghazals\/hazaaron-khvaahishen-aisii-ki-har-khvaahish-pe-dam-nikle-mirza-ghalib-ghazals<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artists many times squint at the subject they want to paint, so that they can get a \u2018broad stokes\u2019 idea of the picture. To not get lost in the details and concreteness , but to be able to read a pattern, an essence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
-Ananya Kushwaha<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"