Why You Feel So Empty Most of the Time
Staring into an Abyss of Nothingness
I’m sure you are familiar with the sense of loneliness, confusion about your life and goals or just a lack of motivation that plagues all of us from time to time. But what is this feeling of emptiness? Is it sadness? Melancholy? Boredom? Well, it is probably a bit of everything and it goes back way further than you might think.
It all began when you were just a baby, happily crawling around the house without a worry in the world until one day you caught a glance of someone in a mirror and realized that that someone was you. At that moment, which the French psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan refers to as stade du miroir or mirror stage, you saw yourself as an object for the first time and your “I” (ego) was born.
In a blink of an eye you became a thinker of your thoughts, a feeler of your feelings; a someone to whom life was happening. Prior to this mirror stage you were just a scattered mess of various sensory sensations but none of them condensed into a single unified form. But now your reflection in the mirror created an imaginary unity; a form with a clearly defined outline and all of this happened before you even acquired language.
Unfortunately, this moment of recognizing yourself is actually a misidentification, what Lacan calls méconnaissance, because the reflection in the mirror you identified yourself with wasn’t really you, it was just an image of you. This misidentification in early life is the root cause of all the anxiety you experience in your live today because deep down you knew all along that the image you were identifying yourself with wasn’t really you and this created an intrinsic lifelong desire to be yourself.
Lacan’s Registers of Experience
Imaginary – Symbolic – Real
The object cause of desire, Lacan’s objet petit a, is that feeling deep inside you that always points outwards to other objects that you imagine will make you more yourself if only you had them. In a Lacanian sense what you imagine yourself to be is a cleaned up, socially acceptable, worthy image which is mixed up with all your fantasies about a version of you that doesn’t really exist. As a result of this you are probably never going to be yourself.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis there are three registers of experience: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The Imaginary is associated with the spheres of consciousness and self-awareness, what you imagine others to be and what you imagine yourself to be, including from the imagined perspectives of others. The symbolic refers to the customs, institutions, laws, norms, rituals, rules, traditions, et cetera of cultures and societies. In Lacan this can be roughly understood as equivalent to what Hegel designates as “objective spirit”, i.e. the human spirit insofar as it has become capable of a raional identification of its individual self. The register of the Real is tricky to encapsulate and evades being pinned down by a neat definition. It is like an absent space that the other two registers are meant to build up so that you don’t have to encounter it. It’s unmediatable and you will spend most of your life pretending that it doesn’t exist because encountering the Real means temporarily blowing up your carefully constructed self-image which makes it really hard to live until you piece it back together. The Real is the source of all your anxieties. It was Nietzsche who said , “When you stare into the abyss then the abyss stares back at you” and that realization that the abyss is staring back, that is the Real.
Life is a never-ending search for objet petit a, be it stuff or recognition by others and yourself; it is a way of shielding yourself from the prospect of remaining empty forever. However, whenever you get what you desire, it is instantly replaced with a new desire and the feeling of emptiness remains. It’s a perpetual cycle of pleasure and suffering, an emotional rollercoaster that never ends, what Lacan calls Jouissance. This nothingness, the spectre of pure loss that always lurks in the back of your mind, is terrifying and it’s at the root of all your existential anguish. To avoid the abyss of nothingness you have no choice other than to pursue object petit a. If you can’t believe the aching emptiness inside you, caused by Jouissance, can be filled by something, then what’s the point of existence?
The Gaze of an Imaginary Crowd
This is where the Gaze comes into being. Lacan claims that what you ultimately desire is to be seen in the Gaze, in the visual field, because you become coherent there. Lacan here is drawing on Sartre’s phenomenology but extends it to show that the function of the gaze is to externally construct yourself as if others are looking at you from the outside. These others, the imaginary others (Autre), become part of you from the mirror stage onward. They are an imaginary crowd of onlookers that you can’t get away from even when you are alone. Unfortunately, you are never actually seen because the imaginary crowd is in you and not out there. Even in a healthy normal relationship it is your image that is seen — an image draped in another’s fantasy — a ghostly alien shell that you know is not you.
The tragic catch-22 of this whole situation is that you desire everything what might make you feel more complete, relationships, careers, lifestyles, gadgets or whatever. Yet by doing this, you desire the desire of others which, in turn, will make them feel incomplete. In the end, everyone is as anxious as you are and this is why the loop of desire is never ending. It orbits an interminable, fundamental empty space at the centre of your selfhood. If you were complete, you wouldn’t be neurotic about not being yourself or not being properly seen as yourself; you wouldn’t feel so empty.
In the mirror you came to see yourself as an object, a single unified form. However, the mirror was outside of you and it only provided you with an externalized image of yourself as an object alongside other objects that made up your world, your blankets, toys, bottles and so on. Yet, you also had an internal experience of desire that was diametrically opposed to that shape in the mirror. Your desire didn’t show up in the mirror even though those other objects did. As a result, you are caught in an irreconcilable paradox: you saw and imagined yourself as a thing yet, throughout the years that followed, you have come to realize that you can never be a thing but that the not- you is still a fundamental part of you.
This is a fiction that you have to believe in, it’s your reality whether you like it or not. The rest of your life is trying tragically to catch up with this reality, catching up with your “I”. This is the reason why it’s so difficult to ever be happy with who you are and what you have; it’s the reason why you feel so empty most of the time, you’re always chasing a ghostly alien shell.
[T]here you are.
Sources:
Lacan, J. (2007). Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (B. Fink, Trans.). Wiley.
Nietzsche, F. W. (2014). Beyond good and evil. Millennium Publications.
Pinkard, T. (2019). Objective Spirit. In M. F. Bykova (Ed.), Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit – A Critical Guide (pp. 147–163). essay, Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, J., & Renaudie, P.-J. (2022, March 26). Jean-Paul Sartre. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved July 12, 2022, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
