Dear Perplexed,
Welcome to my blog, Letters to the Perplexed. Here, I’m imagining a community of people sending me their questions, feeling confused, seeking a sane perspective. These imaginary correspondents help me think through their concerns and make new answers. If you’re perplexed, you’ve come to the right place.
Now, you may be ashamed of your perplexity. No need! Only a dullard wouldn’t be perplexed. You’d have to be haughty, self-absorbed, addicted to self-cures, or morally pure not to feel bewildered by the complexity inside and around you. If you’re aware of both the inner and outer world, you’re going to be perplexed. Congratulations.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a perplexed person is “troubled by deep uncertainty, especially because of a complicated or unexplained matter; confused, baffled, bewildered, confounded.” The Latin origin of the word means “interwoven or entangled.” To be perplexed is to recognize a knotty entanglement, an entanglement that leads to uncertainty about what to feel or think or do.
Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, claimed that the only thing he knew was that he knew practically nothing. To admit ignorance, he insisted, was essential. Only then could one develop wisdom, which emerged through dialogue, a careful questioning and analysis of assumptions and meanings. Without dialogue, with yourself or others, life wasn’t worth living.
I know perplexity well. I’ve been perplexed early and often, and I realized that sorting out perplexities would be my life’s work. I turned to psychology, and eventually to psychoanalysis, to understand my bewilderment. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot. I still run into perplexities. In fact, the more I learn, the more I see that I don’t immediately understand. Experience does bring a growing comfort with not knowing. But now I’ve got a framework that helps me sort through perplexity, a model of the mind that illuminates those dark and tangled corners. Erik Kandel, neuroscientist and Nobel laureate, has described psychoanalysis as the most comprehensive and intellectually satisfying model of the mind. I’ve found this to be true, as have my patients, and maybe you will too.
I’m well aware that people have different ways to understand complexity, even people within the psychoanalytic community. Mine isn’t the only way. But I’m glad to share what experience and reflection have given me. I hope you find my reflections useful.
Inner Confusion
Where does perplexity come from? Certainly, from ourselves. We have contradictory feelings, impulses, and wishes. We don’t know how to reconcile them into a coherent whole, a unified approach to life. For example, you may long for an intimate relationship, yet you continually sabotage prospects. Or you want to excel at your job and get a promotion, but repeatedly avoid challenges. You see that your inner pushes and pulls don’t add up; they don’t track in the same direction. You’re left puzzled and confused.
You’re recognizing inner conflict. Inner conflict may feel messy and frustrating, but it’s an inevitable part of being human, the tortured gift of being inwardly aware and alive. According to psychoanalysis, our minds are layered contradictions: the wishful, the realistic, and the regulating conscience. In trying to flee tensions, we learn self-deceptions, those mental tricks that keep us balanced, but also obscure our true selves. Of course we’re perplexed, having entangled our real thoughts and feelings in unconscious self-trickery.
Relationship Confusion
Other people—partners, friends, children, or co-workers—also perplex us. We just don’t understand why they do the crazy things they do. Parents, for example, devote tremendous time and energy to their children. But even when parents try so hard to do the right thing, their kids go wrong.
There’s a basic habit of mental life that explains this heartbreak. We all export our stuff onto others, and so what drives us crazy about our kids or our partners is a mirror for ourselves. We use this habit of exporting, of externalizing or projecting, from the beginning. As babies, we swallow what tastes good and spit out what tastes bad. Early mental life follows the same pattern. To keep inner tensions manageable, we take in what feels good; it becomes part of us. What feels bad, we spew out; it becomes other, which we can then control, oppose, or escape. It’s the earliest way of staying balanced and we all at times revert to it.
Thus, our close relationships are fertile ground for externalizing. So they perplex us. It’s hard to disentangle the actual other from what came from us, what pressured the other to act in ways that push our buttons. A common example is aggression. We externalize our own aggression, then struggle to handle it in others. Children get an especially large load of this sort.
Cultural Confusion
We’re also perplexed by the culture. How, you ask, could humans, whom we assume to be the most intelligent species on the planet, have landed ourself in such a mess? We’re addicted to technology, incapable of civil conversation, divided on basic truths, and scared by (or denying the threats from) artificial intelligence and the changing climate. Millions of humans no longer have a home, and our expanding footprint is stomping out biodiversity. To understand our predicament, I’ll avoid the conventional right/left reactions and offer a psychological perspective in subsequent letters. You won’t agree with everything I say. But that’s the good beginning of a wholesome dialogue.
This returns us to the value of uncertainty, the strength in admitting bewilderment, as the beginning of wisdom. Your and my perplexities are gifts, gifts I’m looking forward to exploring together.
Thoughtfully yours,
Dr. Miriam