Loading...
When we talk about devotion and autonomy, we imagine them as the two ends of a spectrum, a bipolar axis of action with subtle shades of the two concepts. Everything can fit together as long as it exists in the right proportions and quantities. Likewise, these concepts, depending on the respective quantities that characterize our interactions, create dynamics of communication and relationships. Our hypothesis concerns movement along this axis, continuous negotiation, and the resulting possibilities for freedom, where both the literal and the metaphorical body are called to choose—or reject—while maintaining dynamics of non-change. It is important to note that, by remaining neutral toward changes in systems, even in maintenance processes, the body can function as a tool for generating possibilities of freedom for the individual, since the cost of a new qualitative state, a new configuration, may be greater than that of non-change.
If we do not fanatically choose one of the two poles, we spend our lives in a constant wandering between devotion to others and our autonomy from them. Devotion concerns our relationship to something else—societies, people, and qualities such as ideas, thoughts, narratives, and emotions. It could be described as more of a performance-oriented side and less as a side of needs, although both coexist. Autonomy concerns our relationship with ourselves, our boundaries, and personal needs, and less with performance. People are called to choose which side they will nurture more or less depending on circumstances, especially during changes that arise in periods of crisis. Our brain struggles to remain with two conflicting ideas without discomfort, and because of this ambivalence, it prefers to “pause” along the axis, creating fixations and meanings that economically organize reality. This phenomenon is called cognitive dissonance, and biologically, it seems to participate in the subject’s action to reduce conflict.
A few months ago, a client came to me for therapy who had a fear of failure, self-deprecating narratives, and physical anxiety symptoms such as rapid breathing and sweaty hands—the latter interfering with his profession as a musician. The symptoms appeared in situations of public exposure or where he might be judged or evaluated. Despite his difficulty, he managed to navigate these situations successfully.
A few sessions later, and through techniques for externalizing his anxiety and thoughts, we began discussing a thorny pattern that hurt him when he “sat on it” and could not face it directly. Ideally, the client would like, by changing his relationship with it, to sit beside it while playing the violin. Interestingly, when asked if he wanted to remove this pattern, the client paused for a long moment and began to cry, speaking of his desire to remain near it because, for the time being, he needed it to be effective—and if he tried to leave, he would invite it to return beside him.
Although he appears devoted to his symptom, at the same time his need for autonomy seems attended to through his present devotion to a dysfunctional pattern. Here, the body generates possibilities for freedom in the subject, and he seems to choose which of these he needs. After this realization, his hands sweated less when performing in front of an audience, and he was able to face the pattern directly.
Mony Elkaim, in his book If You Love Me, Don’t Love Me (1991: 27), speaking about incoherent communication (in the case of the double bind), notes that it follows an internal coherence of the system and constitutes the factor that creates stability despite the apparent contradiction. Often in psychosomatic symptomatology, we see that while the subject remains devoted to something, he simultaneously sets boundaries, attending to autonomy and personal needs. In cases of eating disorders, the pattern appeared as a call for help regarding personal boundary-setting and autonomy amidst situations of high devotion and blurred boundaries.
The body, in these cases, returns to itself and, through dysfunctional patterns, absorbs heavy communications and creates a sense of control and individuation—as choices of freedom. In a teenager who came because he had become alienated from his parents and spent many hours on the computer, his lack of autonomy kept him devoted to both parents without needing to choose a side in the triangulation they imposed, achieving a homeostasis that gave him a sense of freedom from the situation.
This continuous relational contradiction in human stories I recently encountered in a poem by Titos Patrikios:
“When they talk in cafes / about love and freedom and such / how can you tell them about the abandoned love / that resists even isolation, / about justice built in the chaos / of thousands of insults and transgressions, / how can you tell them about freedom that is only won / through the depth of suffocating dungeons / that imprison every hour of our lives...” (2017: 270)
Elkaim, M. (1991). If You Love Me, Don’t Love Me. Athens: Kedros.
Patrikios, T. (2017). Poems A’: 1943-1959. Athens: Kichli.