Are you Happy With Your Height?

In “We never know our own height” (We never know how high we are) Emily Dickinson condenses into images a psychological dynamic well known to psychoanalysts, the passive retreating in the face of responsibility.

“The fear of being kings” precisely indicates such refusal to get involved. The king is the figure, the symbol of responsibility, the one who decides without submitting to anyone and who assumes the risks of his actions. He can be both esteemed and hated because he exposes himself to judgment, but his conduct is not influenced by it, such is his independence. He resists hatred and flattery, despite the prestige given by his position, maintaining a balance and lucidity that make him go beyond his particular interests. His horizon is ethical.

Now, humans often prefer a curved life, devoid of heroism, aimed at not losing anything, rather than trying to achieve something in daily life that resembles the work of a king, something that is really worthwhile on a higher level than their own low interests. “The heroism that we then recite would be commonplace if not for the fact that we ourselves are bending with our elbows.”

Therefore, humans frequently choose to be “servant” rather than “master” because they are afraid, they fear taking risks, and they want to be left alone. And by doing so, they become ill, wanting to preserve life from the risk of death, giving rise to a “living death.”

This is depression, the “moral cowardice” that Jacques Lacan talks about, the “sin” of ceasing to desire, of seeking ways to achieve something that makes sense. Obediently serving someone else repairs from uncertainty and tension, but it slowly kills subjectivity, fomenting hatred and resentment, eagerly waiting for the king’s death.

“If we are faithful to our task, our stature will reach the sky,” Dickinson says. Being faithful to our task means not compromising on talents and aspirations, it means taking responsibility for putting them to good use because they were given to us precisely with the “task” of developing them and generously giving them to the community.

Here echoes the Lacanian concept of the Law of Desire: there is a Law inherent in desire itself. Desiring is not going after momentary infatuations but energetically and disciplinarily carrying forward convictions and actions even when all seems lost.

Then “our stature reaches the sky,” not because we narcissistically exalt ourselves. Stature here is to be understood as the unfolding of our potential, as self-realization, as the highest expression of vitality in contrast to the withering of sadness and closure.

It goes without saying that the way to trigger this unfolding lies in responding to the “call” of desire. Here is the meaning of the first lines of the poem, “We never know how high we are Till we are called to rise.” Until we get involved, we don’t know who we are, we don’t really know ourselves, we are prey to the inertia of sleep. And getting up depends on us.

Someone or something calls us strongly, the sleep is disturbed, but it is up to us not to turn the other way and answer, get up, and go towards this someone or something.

Thus, many depressions underlie a mechanism of refusal of the effort to which we are all called to live. They are objections to uncertainty, risk, and fatigue associated with living. A sort of victory of the pleasure principle, understood as the search for absolute zero, of the “nirvana,” of pure stillness. A not getting up, a staying under the covers, sheltered from everything and everyone.

Any psychological therapy can never replace the dormant vital impulse of a subject. It can, however, provide a place where they will feel called. Not by the therapist, who wants nothing from them, but by their own unconscious, whose messages are finally heard and understood.

The treatment will act as an echo chamber. Then, it is up to the individual to choose. Whether to continue to complain, to take refuge in oblivion and irresponsibility, or to try, to try to take a step forward, after deeply metabolizing that everything always and only depends on us, even in adverse circumstances.

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