The Weariness of the Self

"It is the most systematic treatment of the depressive effects of burnout. It gives us a very detailed and rich picture of its clinical symptomatology. But more interestingly, I think, it gives us a psychosocial understanding of the social conditions of the possibility for burnout. It’s a book which is very sympathetic to psychoanalytic thinking, but also challenges it. A psychoanalyst needs to be able to have his own paradigm put in question, especially given what I’ve said about habit, habitual thinking, and becoming rigidified by compulsive activity. One of the interesting things he does is he says: ‘Look, we have a certain account in Freud, and in psychoanalysis, of why it is that people come to feel bad and inadequate about themselves.’ And the account, of course, is the superego, which has to do with license, with what we are licensed and prohibited from doing. If we do something that we’re not supposed to do, then the superego comes along and reproaches us; it belittles us, and makes us feel like we’re bad people. “Positive thinking is supposed to be empowering. But in fact it sets us up against an ideal of ourselves in the face of which we always feel inadequate” Ehrenberg says: ‘Is that really where we are?’ It was published first in 1998. So, he’s coming in at a moment where he’s really detecting a shift, probably dating back to the 1960s and 1970s where a different kind of language is taking over. At the beginning of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, the beginning of Rabbit, Run (1996), there’s a moment where the little boy is watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV, and Updike zeroes in on the language coming in through the Disney Corporation: ‘Everybody’s different! You have to be your own best self! Anything’s possible if you want it to be!” This language of possibility, Ehrenberg says, actually supplants the language of permissibility. He says, “Possibility over permissibility”—by which he means not, ‘yes you must do this,’ which is the superego’s maxim, but, ‘yes, you can.’ This is the watchword of a less well-known, earlier notion in Freud, the ego-ideal. The idea that ‘you can’ is a very different kind of persecution from ‘you must.’ It’s a simple, but very original and illuminating thesis, because it explains how the pervasive language of positive thinking can induce feelings of persecution rather than optimism. Positive thinking always assures us that we can be more, that we can do more, that we can achieve and attain more. This is supposed to be empowering. It’s supposed to make us feel very good about our own capacities. But in fact, it sets us up against an ideal of ourselves, in the face of which we always feel inadequate, and against which we’re always falling short of. Right. And that’s structural rather than contingent. That’s what’s so interesting about it. It’s not as though I happen to miss the target of the ideal, and next time maybe I’ll get there. It’s built in to the way this ideal works in us: we always fall short of it. If we didn’t fall short of it, it couldn’t do it its work, which is to spur us to always go one step further. So that’s why metaphors like the hamster wheel, or indeed the Myth of Sisyphus, are so popular: because we’re not meant to reach an end point. We just have the end point dangled in front of us like an ever-receding carrot. Yes, in the sense that depression is a much broader designation. In the history of psychiatry, of psychotherapy, of psychology, mental health generally, depression is notoriously elastic. It brings many different symptoms and conditions, at variable degrees of acuteness or chronicity, under a single umbrella. One of the problems, I think, is its elasticity. It becomes so generalized, and can encompass so many different clinical entities. In severe clinical depression, the sufferer is in a catatonic state, so debilitated that they’re literally unable to get up from their bed, the world weighing on them with a literally depressive heaviness that feels impossible to escape. In a way, it’s hard to specify what that has to do with the kind of ordinary depression that is part of ordinary neurotic life of all of us. What is useful about a term like burnout is that it certainly speaks of a variety of types of depression, but ties it to both specific symptoms and specific conditions, cultural as well as personal. So, somebody who’s ‘burnt out’ feels persecuted simultaneously by the standards they set themselves and the ones enforced by internalized authority figures. When we’re trying to attain this ideal, we usually have particular figures in mind, consciously or unconsciously: our parents, our teachers, as well as more phantasmatic figures like celebrities, people who loom large in our consciousness. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In burnout, I think, there is this sense of nervous oscillation between a hyper-manic readiness to do too much, and a shutdown in the other direction. Often, I think, one of the best encapsulations of the sensibility is, Waiting for Godot’s “‘Let’s go, yes, let’s go’. [They do not move].” That in a way is what the burnout is always saying: ‘Now is the time to go, now is the time to go,’ but they do not move. That inability to be stationary, paradoxically coupled with an inability to move out of one’s predicament—that’s what specifies burnout as a particular hybrid of anxiety and depression. What you don’t get in burnout in quite the same way as you do in a classical depression is a sense of fatalistic resignation. They can’t bring themselves to give up. But at the same time, they can’t bring themselves to try, either. That, to me, is really purgatorial."