Something Has To Change
Dissatisfaction with the “way things are” often plays a large role in people’s lives and can exert a significant influence on political processes and political conflict. For many, political conflict is the chosen arena in which to play out a drama of change. It provides participants with the opportunity to identify what is wrong and what needs to be done to put it right. Yet, often enough, the desire for change gets disconnected from any specific goal. Then, the desire is for “change” itself: we need to “shake things up;” we need to find something new and someone new. We need a “new politics” and a “new direction.”
Whether on the level of the individual’s personal life experience or in the larger world of culture and politics, we can see the influence of the need for change. Consider, for example, Amber Bain’s song Something Has to Change:
You got the same train
And you took it back
To the same place
You're back where you started
It's the same thing
You keep trying to do something different
Over and over again
Something has to change
Something has to change
Something has to change …
The insistence that something has to change repeats itself, but nowhere do we learn what it is that has to change, or what it must change into. Nowhere are we told who will bring about change nor are we assured that there is anyone capable of bringing about the change that must happen. Equally important, there is no suggestion that we can ourselves bring about the change that must occur. Instead, we hear about how “you” take the same train to the same place, “you” try to do something different, but still nothing changes.
The psychic power of the lament about change creates the opportunity for political parties to step into the vacuum and provide the yet-to-be determined change with a specific goal, to attach the undefined sense that “something” is wrong to pieces of their agendas. But, when we move too quickly to provide the plea for change with a specific shape and offer to provide an agent of change and a well-defined end, we risk missing the point.
In saying this, I do not mean to deny the importance of the reasonably well-defined changes people say they want. All of the pleas for change are not about a problem yet to be determined. People are concerned with global warming as well they should be. They are concerned with racial and ethnic divides in opportunity and quality of life. They are concerned with the quality of schools and the availability of affordable health care. But they are also concerned with change as such, and this concern for an unspecified change can play an important role in the way people go about pursuing the particular well-defined changes that direct political movements and party platforms. The latter can become surrogates for the former that obscure what is really at stake for the individual in the imperative expressed in the more indefinite language as: “something must change.”
It may be that what is distinctive about the wished-for change is precisely the absence of specificity. This would be the case if what needs to change is a persistent and prevailing state of mind that seems to exist without reason or cause and about which the best that can be said in words is: I feel bad, or I feel wrong, or I feel nothing at all. If we, then, ask someone suffering from this malaise why they feel bad or wrong, or what they feel bad about, there is no answer because what needs to change is not some definable aspect of life but life itself, which they experience as a deeply uncomfortable condition. It’s just a bad feeling and that’s it. The feeling is who I am and always threatens to be all that I am. The individual cannot change who he or she is because the problem is with the “I” who would be making the change. How can we begin to account for this seemingly immovable state of emotional distress?
In seeking an answer to this question, the psychoanalyst Michael Balint has, I think, something valuable to offer. Balint speaks of the internal situation I have just described as a consequence of the conviction that there exists, at the core of the individual’s being, a “basic fault.” The basic fault is “an irregularity in the overall structure… something wrong in the mind, a kind of deficiency which must be put right.” The basic fault is felt as “emptiness, being lost, deadness, futility, and so on, coupled with an apparently lifeless acceptance of everything that has been offered. In fact, everything is accepted without much resistance, but nothing makes sense.”
Michael Balint
The notion of a “basic fault” begins to put into words what is wrong and needs to be changed. Among these words, I think the word “futility” can be especially revealing. It suggests a special kind of experience, one to which Amber Bain refers in her song: “you keep trying to do something different over and over again” but everything remains the same. At some point, the experience of failure becomes an expression of what you are; in other words, you internalize it and take responsibility for it. You conclude that your central core of being is inadequate to the task of making something happen. It is the core of your being that needs to change.
One way to break through the impasse depicted in the plea for an unknown change is to consider the basic fault not as a given—a primordial defining condition of our being—but as the result of a specific trajectory of development involving the evolution of the way we communicate who we are and what we need. That trajectory of development begins before language is available. In primitive, or preverbal, communication, the child communicates the presence of want but not its specific object. For the connection to work, the parent must already know what the child wants. The use of words becomes necessary when this prior knowledge on the part of the parent cannot be assumed because the possibilities have expanded from unitary want to varied wants that can be satisfied in different ways.
Words enable the child to become the authority on what he or she wants. Something is gained by this, but something is also lost. What is lost is the seamless unity of want and its satisfaction. What is gained is the growing power and independence of the child to define wants in a personal way, as originating in the unique presence of the person the child is in process of becoming. In pre-verbal communication, want is experienced as a power that makes gratification happen. In verbal communication, want is not enough. The child must find the right words and an adult who will hear and respond to them. The result is: the connection between want and satisfaction becomes contingent.
If, however, the words we use, rather than provoking gratification, provoke a hostile response or no response at all, then following the path opened up by the new method of communication leads us away from our goal rather than bringing us closer to it. Words are the problem not the solution.
As we develop emotionally and cognitively, our parents take on the role of helping us find the words to describe our situation and communicate to others what we want. Now, the path from a state of unfulfilled desire to one of gratification takes us through a process of articulation and a way of relating based on it. If, however, the words we use, rather than provoking gratification, provoke a hostile response or no response at all, then following the path opened up by the new method of communication leads us away from our goal rather than bringing us closer to it. Words are the problem not the solution. This experience gets in the way of our effort to know and express (in words) what we need. It can even impede access to the words we could use to think about and communicate what we need. Something is wrong but we have no way of knowing or saying what it is.
Failing to articulate is a way of protecting ourselves from being rejected. Rejection here means rejecting our want and offering an emotional interpretation of our want as bad or wrong, a message conveyed when it is not satisfied. Rejecting what we want can take on the meaning of rejecting who or what we are. Then rejection offers us a judgment about the adequacy of our being or self: that it is in some important way faulty.
In response to the prospect of rejection, we may regress to the more primitive modes of communication that do not depend on saying what we want. Or we may give up on getting others to acknowledge what we need and help us find satisfaction. Then, if we do use words, it is not to connect ourselves to the reality of our internal experience, but to distance ourselves from it. We use the wrong words, and our use of others is not to help us find the right words but to help us avoid doing so.
What stops us from knowing and saying what we need and what change must come about if our need is to be satisfied may be the danger of rejection felt in knowing and saying what we need. But this does not diminish the need we feel; it may even make it more intense. So, considered on a more general plane, what we are being told about need when we are told that “something” must change is that we need the change that opens up the possibility that we can know and say what we want. What this means is that what we need is to reenter a process of self-discovery cut short by the responses to it early in life.
The problem we have in doing so involves our conviction about the power of words to destroy the vital connections on which we depend. To overcome that conviction, we must discover an external reality in the form of another person whose connection to us can survive hearing the words. What we need is someone who can help us speak the unspeakable, someone who can help us feel safe enough to find the words. And for someone to help us speak the unspeakable they must be able to hear the unspeakable spoken. When they hear the unspeakable spoken and remain connected to us, they weaken our conviction about the destructive power of words and help us gain, or regain, our access to them.
References
Balint, M. (1992) The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (originally published 1969).