Where My Mother Said the Pain Was Gone, My Body Still Hurts

Rastinews — I was a child then. When I fell and it hurt, my mother felt a helplessness too. She had no power to erase my pain. All she could do was distract me, keep me occupied, try to make me laugh — replace the pain with something more positive. Then she would kiss me and say, "It's gone now." But there was a gap between what my mother said and what my body told me. My mother said the pain was gone, yet my body still hurt. Perhaps that was when I first began to learn the difference between a word spoken from outside and an experience lived within. This kind of mismatch was itself a source of unease.

Back then, my mother was, in my eyes, the one who knew best. I learned about the world through her. She was the most knowledgeable, the most experienced person I knew. A mother is a person's first teacher. Even that my stomach was hungry, that I was tired, that I was sleepy — often it was she who told me so. While we were playing, she would come over and say, "You must be hungry, come and eat." Or she would call out, "You're sleepy, it's bedtime." It was as though she could see straight into our bodies. As if she held an X-ray machine or an ultrasound scanner, she knew exactly what we felt. More than that, we believed she knew not just what was happening in our bodies but what was passing through our minds. To a child, a mother is very often an all-knowing being. After a while, I stopped listening to myself, stopped sensing my own sensations, and began listening to my mother instead. As I became my mother's "clever boy," I drifted away from myself. I paid more attention to what was expected of me than to what my body was telling me. This is how a person abandons themselves. This is how a person grows distant from themselves — how a person becomes a stranger to themselves.

This experience is not confined to the mother alone. A similar image is projected onto God, the great mother-figure. God, too, is imagined as a being who sees inside us, who knows what we think, what we feel, even what we will do. The child's image of the all-knowing mother transforms, on another plane, into the image of the all-knowing God. In this way, a person often needs the word of an external knower even to reach their own inner world. A person comes to learn their own inside from the outside.

Modern society works in much the same way. Even our most basic bodily needs — eating, sleeping, resting — are increasingly arranged according to the logic of working life. In a workplace, we mostly eat not when we are truly hungry, but during the break allotted to us. We do not sleep when we are sleepy; what determines our sleep is what time we must be at work the next morning. We eat breakfast without paying much attention to whether we are actually hungry, because we know we're about to go to work and may not have the chance to eat when real hunger strikes. In this way, it is increasingly the outside world — working life, to be precise — that comes to regulate the rhythm of our stomach, our sleep, our fatigue. We listen to our bodies less and less. External conditions tell us not only what to do but when we are supposed to feel it. My body may not yet be hungry, but the work schedule tells me, "It's time to eat now." And when I am truly hungry, it tells me, "You must work now," and asks me to wait. Rather than following its own rhythm, the body is forced to adapt to the rhythm of living conditions. The gap between what I must do and what I actually feel keeps widening.

What begins in childhood with a mother's words continues in adulthood through institutions, working hours, calendars and social expectations. First it is the mother who says, "You're hungry"; later it is the clock, the workplace, the order of daily life that begins to speak. Over time, a person comes to hear the voice of external order more than the voice of their own body. And this is not limited to hunger, sleep and rest. Even having fun has its allotted time. People have the most fun on weekends, because what determines the urge to enjoy oneself is less the urge itself than when work comes to an end. Leisure is placed not in the time of desire, but in the time left over from work. We may be tired on a weekday, yet we cannot rest; we wait for the weekend to feel cheerful, to meet friends, to stay up late. Sexuality, too, is not entirely free of this. The time in which sexual intimacy and desire can be lived out can also be shaped by the working schedule. On weekends, when there is no obligation to rise early the next morning, more time and space opens up for sex. Seen this way, working life does not merely organise our labour and our time; it also regulates the time in which we can experience sleep, hunger, rest, leisure and even desire. In the end, a split emerges between a person's inner rhythm and social time: the body says one thing, the calendar says another. We do not eat when hungry, but when it is time to eat; we do not rest when tired, but wait for the holiday; we do not draw close when we desire, but wait for the right moment. Modern life thus shapes not only what we do, but the very relationship we have with our bodies and our desires.

It seems a person can know no one better than themselves…

I often speak of myself in my writing. Because I know myself best. I also have a real problem with sentences that begin, as some writers' do, with "One of my clients/patients…" Every patient I refer to here is a fictional, invented patient. Even if I believe I am concealing a real patient's story and identity, I do not think it right to turn it into material for a public text.

Speaking of myself this much might be read as a sign of narcissism, or of taking myself too seriously. There is, no doubt, some truth in that. But my real concern lies elsewhere: in psychoanalysis, even as we work with the people who come to us, we are, in one sense, constantly working on ourselves too. What we call countertransference is the feelings, thoughts, images and bodily sensations that arise within the analyst during a session. But these may not belong to us alone; they may also stem from the patient's inner world, from their way of relating, and from the relationship forming between us in that moment. This is why, while listening to the patient, we also try to work out whether what is stirring inside us belongs to our own past, carries something transmitted by the patient, or is born within the relationship itself, right there and then.

While listening to the patient, the analyst also listens to their own body. Sometimes the unease, fatigue, anger, drowsiness, tightness or restlessness that arises during a session is not simply the analyst's personal mood; it may also carry something stirring within the relationship that has not yet found words. Psychoanalytic listening, for this reason, is not listening done with the ear alone. The analyst also tracks what arises within their own body and mind as part of the relationship itself. In this sense, speaking of myself is not merely a narcissistic matter but a psychoanalytic one. A psychoanalyst who only narrates others, keeping themselves outside the narrative and apart from the relationship they observe, may in fact be drifting away from psychoanalysis itself. Because the analyst is not a neutral instrument standing outside the events they observe. They enter every relationship carrying their own past, their emotions, their vulnerabilities and their blind spots. Psychoanalytic work is not only an attempt to understand the person across from us; it is also a tracking of what is happening within us as we listen to them. This is why speaking of myself is not simply a matter of taking myself seriously, but an inescapable consequence of analytic work. In trying to understand the other, the psychoanalyst must also listen to themselves. Because sometimes the path that opens toward the patient runs through a feeling forming inside the analyst.

Perhaps this is exactly one of psychoanalysis's central questions for me: is the voice I hear within truly my own, or is it the voice of those who, over the years, told me what I ought to feel? Did my pain really go away, or did I come to believe it had gone simply because someone told me so? Am I hungry, or am I eating because it is mealtime? Am I tired, or must I put off my tiredness because the day is not yet done?

Let me introduce him: Hartmut Rosa…

Hartmut Rosa questions how modern life estranges people from their own experience, their bodies, and their living relationship with the world. In an accelerated world, people reach more, gain more options, travel to more places, come into contact with more people; yet despite all this increase, they are affected less and less by what they touch. As the world becomes more accessible, usable, measurable and manageable, a person's living relationship with it grows weaker.

What Rosa calls "resonance" is that a person does not build a merely functional relationship with the world. Resonance means being affected by the world, being able to respond to it, and allowing oneself to be changed within that encounter. The world stops being just an object to be used, consumed and controlled; it becomes something that speaks to us. Resonance is not about controlling the world completely, but about being able to hear its voice. But here a question arises: how will someone who cannot hear the voice of their own body hear the voice of the world?

If a person constantly regulates their own hunger, fatigue, pain, fear or desire according to outside measures, their relationship with their own inner rhythm weakens over time. The body says "I'm hungry," but the clock says "It's not mealtime yet." The body says "I'm tired," but work says "Keep going." The body says "I want to sleep," but the calendar imposes a different rhythm. Desire arises, but the moment is not right. A person thus grows accustomed to listening not to the voice coming from within, but to the voice of the outside order. In this sense, alienation is not only alienation from the world. Perhaps it begins earlier, with a person's alienation from their own body. Someone who learns to doubt their own sensations, who is forced to keep having what they feel confirmed from outside, eventually loses the reliability not just of their body, but of their own experience.

We meet the first forms of this in childhood. The child says "It hurts," the adult says "It's gone." The child says "I'm scared," and is told "There's nothing to be scared of." They say "I'm hungry," and get the answer "You just ate." Here the adult usually wants to calm the child; but when repeated, the child can learn to replace the knowledge coming from their own body with the knowledge of the outside authority. The distance between what they actually feel and what they are told grows. In adulthood, institutions, working hours, calendars, experts and social expectations take the place of the mother or father. The outside voice changes, but the structure can largely stay the same. First the mother says "You're not hungry"; later the workplace says "Now it's lunch break." First someone says "You're not tired"; later the work schedule says "You can't rest yet." A person increasingly focuses not on what their body says, but on what they are supposed to do.

It is possible to extend Rosa's concept of resonance a little further here, in a psychoanalytic direction. Rosa himself does not directly define resonance as "listening to the body's voice." His core concern is a relationship of mutual affect and response between the subject and the world. But perhaps one condition for being able to hear the world again is that a person first becomes able to hear the voice coming from within themselves again. Because someone who cannot hear their own pain can easily miss the pain of others, too. Someone who does not notice their own fatigue may also struggle to notice the echo the world creates within them. Someone alienated from their own desire may fail to hear what their relationship with the person in front of them is truly doing to them. In this way, it is not only speed but also inner numbness that stands in the way of resonance.

Perhaps this is why, in an age of constant communication, the real issue is not talking more. More messages, more images, more information and more contact do not always mean more relationship. The real issue is becoming able to hear again: our own body, our own voice, the person in front of us, and the world. Perhaps psychoanalysis, too, begins right here — in the effort to hear again an inner voice once suppressed, belittled or invalidated by a voice from outside. In being able to return to one's own experience, from the place where someone else once said what one ought to feel.

Where my mother said "It's gone," in letting my body still say "It hurts"…