If we truly are what we lack, as the Lacanian idea more or less goes, we are also the times we were rejected. That is, if a rejection is properly called by that name, it is because it was felt as such and, as a consequence, is the product of something that withdraws from the possibility of existing.

The father who withdraws, and so withdraws the possibility of filiation existing. The lover who withdraws, and so withdraws the possibility of that love for two existing. The invitation that is withdrawn, the invitation that does not arrive, or life boiled down to invitations to meetings that are nothing but reenactments of ancestral ruptures, because we would be, or are, what we lack.

A few weeks ago I wrote a kind of inaugural article for this site’s Transactional Analysis section, and it was not possible, and was not even wished, to keep myself from recognizing how much an analyst’s life is subject to a certain emotional variation that is sometimes comic. That is, we analysts, when properly analyzed and willing to leave the couch for the armchair, develop some understanding of the more or less common psychic phenomena. They no longer surprise us at all. Resorting to the device of a primordial rejection is old hat.

In that article, I use a movie scene to illustrate the tragedy of having a family gathering, or rather a gathering that drags us into parental experiences. It is the spark of “this reminds me of my mother,” “this reminds me of my father,” “you look like my brother,” “she’s doing it on purpose” that blows up the barrel of communicational occultisms and contaminates relationships deliriously. Our feelings are absurdly more powerful in guiding us than our reason. When Freud spells out this statement in Civilization and Its Discontents, he seems to share the same sense of misery as we do.

On two unforgettable occasions we heard from people we loved that our analytical view of life offended them. We honor them for the courage to tell us why we are passed over in certain groups. Speaking of comedy, it is as if, in the scene of the Transfiguration, Peter asked Jesus to stop this Son-of-God talk.

It would be inconsequential not to bring from the same Freud the consideration that the number of people we live with tends to shrink, which we would add happens “astonishingly,” for those who succeeded in their personal relationships during youth. Performing wild psychoanalyses or any analytic savagery can be a violent attitude when it splashes onto things that remind us who we are. Hence one would have to take the humble, coherent attitude of answering oneself: “how do these words affect me?”

Searching for that answer seems to us, today, one of the safest responses to the discomfort of being crossed by emotions we did not ask for. But, in any case, there also remains the pleasant taste of learning a craft. As long as we are apprentices of the work of loving and being loved, there will always be the glory of having learned to do something we did not know before. In this very specific case, the glory of being water, of not arguing with the stone. Faced with the impossibility of undoing an impediment to the course, getting around it and passing by it without small or great discouragement.