Developmental Considerations on Being: Everything, Something, Nothing
There’s a theoretical line of development that occurred to me the other day when revisiting a lecture I had attended early last year. I should have time stamped the portion of the lecture that I’m referring to now, but to the best of my recollection, the part of interest was one of the panelists talking about Heidegger’s notion of nothingness as a developmental achievement. That coming into awareness of the no-thingness of Dasein’s being-in-the-world offered a kind of possibility that is unavailable to the person who has not been able to come into presence or awareness of that aspect of being.
I want to carry that developmental concept a bit further and suggest that there is a psychoanalytic-existential ways of tracking development on an ontological level along a spectrum of “thingness” which travels from our being everything, to our being something, and concluding with recognition of our being nothing (or no-thing as I am prone to writing it). These categories signal something about the fundamental relationships we are capable of and the ways in which those relational capacities structure our understanding of the world. As with many other developmental categories in the psychoanalytic tradition, each later category contains elements of that which came before it. Which means that even in our awareness of our nothingness we can still be consumed by a being-as-everything, but a being who has only so far come to understand itself as everything cannot take hold of its nothingness.
The sense I have of being-as-everything likely occurred as a consequence of the reading I have been doing of the work of Donald Winnicott and Hans Loewald over the course of this year. In Winnicottian terms, I am thinking here of the ways in which Winnicott understands the baby as being a part of a baby-mommy interactional matrix in which the baby operates from a position of the illusion of omnipotence. For the early infant (and to some extent, in their capacity to care for the infant, for the mother or caretakers as well), there is no distinction between self and environment or self and other. The possibility of separation comes later, as the mother begins to wane in her capacity to tend to the child’s every need and inevitable failures enter the relationship, ideally at a point in time at which the infant has achieved enough of a sense of supportiveness from the environment to tolerate these early insults to their perceived omnipotence. Loewald constructs this as the movement from the “primal density” of early experience into later secondary processes that account for self-other recognition, usually articulated through the medium of language and the infant’s ability to begin to register their world symbolically.
The idea of being-as-something is the mode I would suggest most of us operate on the level of most often. This is Heidegger’s fallenness. It’s also the position of the neurotic. It is the mode of everydayness in which we typically organize our experience, with a clear delineation of self and other (whether or not this delineation is an accurate representation of “reality”). This is going to be a fairly broad generalization, but my sense of what it means to operate in this world, and the philosophical ground on which I build that supposition, indicates something like the idea that most of us conduct ourselves on a day to day bases with some presumed (unconscious, implicit, symbolically ordered) sense of who or what we are, a who or what that is constructed out of some subject-object interaction of our own sense of those things and the feedback we get from the world about what those qualities might be. Things like ones occupation, hobbies, role in my family of origin or the family they are now constructing past experience, and hopes for the future all communicate some present-at-hand quality of how we perceive our existence at any given point in time. These qualities are structured through relationship, but also out of relationship, into something that feels like it either is representative or the product of some coherent, centralized self.
Our being-as-nothing is the last rung in this developmental ladder. Being-as-nothing is the ontological ground from which we spring. It is the anxious awareness of our own lack of significance. That the being-as-something we think we are is a condition of our being thrown. Though not everyone will necessarily take or put in the time to come to terms with this from and intellectual or philosophical position, it is something that most will feel at various points in their life. It is the call or the appeal. Those moments that seem dually marked by anxious awareness of the uncertainty of it all and complete clarity. We have options in this mode. We can choose to answer the call. To take over our own thrown possibility and summon ourselves to reckon with the ungrounded nature Dasein and, as Heidegger would have it, “win” ourself; or we can deny the call, cover over our anxious awareness, and “lose” ourself. It is from this mode that we can learn to take on the world in radically new ways, but it also means a letting go of the set of subjective principles by which one has likely structured their sense of themselves. It means facing head on the kind of anxiety which Kierkegaard has called “the dizziness of freedom”.
As I mentioned previously, each earlier phase of development is available to the later phases, and indeed in someways must be available to the later phases. We cannot persist in this mode of nothingness. It is a conditional mode of existence that allows for some pretty remarkable things, but it is a mode we cannot remain in indefinitely (at least that is not my sense). It is helpful to be able to navigate the world in a way that is conditioned by a certain set of principles or beliefs and is not perpetually marked by our existential anxiety. The relationship between worldview and worlding is a necessary one. Coming into awareness of our embodied relational uncertainty affords us the ability to emerge into new possibilities, but would otherwise make the world unnavigable, disrupting our ability to attend to the day-to-day needs of our existence and the existence of those around us, and so we most often are in our mode of being-as-something.
The argument for our being able to access the mode of being-as-everything is probably best articulated by our object relations theorists mentioned above. Generally psychoanalytic traditions would likely see this mode as a regression, something that is therapeutically beneficial for working through past traumas but is not necessarily a useful mode in and of itself. For Loewald and Winnicott, being able to remain connected to this mode allows us something like the ability for creative expression and authentic engagement with earlier modes of organization that were less susceptible to differentiation. In fact, I think there is an argument to be made that being-as-nothing must contain some element of being-as-everything, that it is a way of connecting back to that mode in a manner that checks its original narcissistic pull. It honors the hermeneutic relationship between everythingness and nothingness. It recognizes that if everything is everything and differentiation is something we do, then everything is nothing and our nothingness means that every possibility for organization is available to us. In psychosis, this proposition can be dangerous, but with one foot in the being-as-something mode, it is—potentially—liberating.
How to help our clients into this mode from a therapeutic sense is a challenging one, but I think it has something to do with the conditions of the “holding environment” and being able to observe the play and potential space attendant in the process of doing therapy. We must work to consistently open up new possibilities of being and never grow too comfortable situating the work in any one mode. I had a teacher (who practiced therapy from the Narrative tradition which can be existential in many ways) who once referred to this as “not letting the conversation land”. We remain open to the call in order to allow the client to “hear” the call when it comes into the consulting room. We teach them how to attend by attending ourselves and by already having attended ourselves.
