Therapy clients often tell me they understand why they do the things they do, but can’t seem to change them. Their hope is that I can tell them how.
They’re painfully aware of the spite that’s driven their greatest accomplishments, the jealousy that motivates them to be a devoted partner, or the fear of aging that fuels their active lifestyle. They feel skeptical of their own motives and terrified of getting found out.
They’re frustrated that seeing these things doesn’t make them disappear. They wonder what the point of awareness is if it only draws attention to the parts of themselves they wish they could eliminate. They want to be pure of anything unflattering, so that if someone could see through them, they would find nothing but goodness.
This is a wish worth examining.
Motives as Structure
Motives are tangled with our histories, relationships, vulnerabilities, and desires in ways that make them impossible to isolate from the rest of our lives.
In psychoanalysis and related therapies, the word defense refers to a mental operation that our minds use to keep something intolerable out of awareness. Defenses protect us from distressing conflicts that we’re not currently able to contend with directly.
Lacanian psychoanalysis understands defenses as protecting us not simply from painful memories or feelings, but from the irreducible lack that characterizes human existence. We seek ways of avoiding the unsettling truth that no achievement, relationship, or identity can make us whole; that to live is to be driven by unsatiable desire.
In this sense, we can understand our motives, flattering or not, as essential, potentially defensive parts of our psychic structures. The spite behind accomplishment and the jealousy behind devotion are not dismissible features of who you are. They belong to the bigger picture that makes you a particular person rather than an interchangeable one.
The Wish to be Exceptional
Humans seek relief from the pain of separateness. We seek transcendental experiences, through love, drugs, spirituality, and art. But anyone who’s lost themselves in a relationship, struggled with addiction, or handed their identity over to an institution knows that there is no permanent escape from separateness for as long as we are alive. The self we are trying to escape is also the self through which we experience the world.
One way we seek relief is through the fantasy of exceptionalism.
If we are superlative in some way, we feel we have risen above the human condition of being one among many. We want to feel singular: the richest, the most beautiful, the smartest, the funniest, or at least in an upper tier. If not to everyone, then at least to some; and if not to some, then at the very least to one.
We can also feel exceptional by becoming incomparable. If we occupy a space where no one else lives, if we drop out of the race completely, we defend ourselves from comparison, from being accused of being like anyone else. Rather than striving to be the top of a category, we might refuse to let anyone else into ours.
The CEO of a company and the struggling artist could have more in common than it first seems. The wish to escape the vulnerable truth of being just one life among billions can be pursued by striving for the top, distinguishing yourself creatively, seeking reassurance that your partner has chosen you and you alone, establishing a spiritual identity that makes you feel higher to God than the rest, or attempting to purify yourself of ordinary human imperfection.
Purity as a Defense
The wish to be purely, cleanly motivated that I often encounter in therapy is a form of perfectionism that functions as a defense. Like any defense, it is not something to be forcibly dismantled, but something to be understood. It protects us from the difficult reality that to be human is to be dependent, contradictory, vulnerable, and driven by desires that can never be fully satisfied.
The wish for our lives to matter is not something that separates us from others, but something that unites us. It is a wish we all share by virtue of being mortal, bounded, particular people. The fantasy of purity offers one response to this vulnerability, promising that if we could become good enough, selfless enough, or psychologically evolved enough, we might transcend the ordinary conditions of human existence.
Recognizing this wish as a defense does not mean trying to eliminate it, but seeing it for what it is: not as something that can be satisfied, but an attempt to protect us from something painful. When we mistake the fantasy for an attainable goal, we begin denying the context of relationships, language, and the circumstances into which we are born. We imagine ourselves as capable of existing outside the limitations that shape every human life. In doing so, we make it harder to accept those same limitations in ourselves and in others.
The Fantasy of Root Causes
Clients sometimes tell me they left cognitive-behavioral therapy because they wanted to identify the root cause of their symptoms instead of managing them.
This logic of the imagined solution, however, falls into a similar trap as the initial problem. Whether trying to locate a core belief driving behavior or a childhood experience that explains our symptoms, the isolated focus is the same.
The search for a root cause implies that there is a thing to be excavated, that once identified, explains and frees a person from the symptoms they are suffering with.
Maybe there is an element of digging in therapy, but rather than digging to find something, it could be more like loosening packed soil to allow for movement and rearrangement.
The goal of therapy, from this perspective, is not to edit ourselves into an imagined ideal, to unearth a revelatory root cause, or to progress along some culturally constructed hierarchy of what it means to be well. Rather, it’s a continuous exploration that has a similar effect as massaging a knot does.
Living With Ourselves
Recognizing that the wish for purity is itself psychologically meaningful extends the same logic that led us to understand our motives as part of our psychic structure. Rather than treating the wish for purity as another obstacle to overcome, we can understand it as something to be explored. This shifts the question we orient around in therapy from one of domination to one of dialogue.
Awareness is not valuable because it dissolves what we don’t like about ourselves, but because it lets us meet more of ourselves. It allows us to understand our defenses as meaningful attempts to respond to the difficulties of being human.
Therapy, from this perspective, is not a process of purification, but an expansion of our capacity to live with the complexity that characterizes our existence. The goal is not to become free of contradiction, dependency, vulnerability, or unflattering motives, but to develop a greater capacity to be in relationship with ourselves.
