I have been thinking about boredom. In the therapy room, boredom is usually anything but boring. I find it fascinating, and yet I have struggled to make much sense of this overused word which crops up from time to time, and whose significance is easy to underestimate, or miss.
Psychoanalytical literature has numerous scattered references to an analyst's experience of boredom, highlighting this widespread phenomenon and suggesting that the experience of boredom in analysis may be a reaction to an encounter with a hidden, possibly encapsulated part of the psyche, a bidimensional area of experience in which mental activity has been suspended, and where experience remains meaningless.
Intriguing a proposition as this might be, I wonder whether boredom might also constitute an experiential expression of despair, a re-living of primitive object relations with an emotionally non-existent primary object. Through bringing the emptiness and desolation into analysis, the individual makes room for the empty, blunt, dead inner object which resides within her, and that needs to be integrated into the psyche. This inner object is a vital part of the client's inner world, part of her history, and can neither be erased nor filled in order to eradicate the emptiness.
I often find myself working hard to remain with the 'boredom' despite clients' endeavours to escape it. I remain curious as to their constructions of this mystical domain.
Anyway, what's wrong with boredom? In a world in which we are so rarely encouraged to slow down, and pause a-moment, perhaps the therapy room is the last place in which this dwelling can take place?
“If you think of boredom as the prelude to creativity, and loneliness as the prelude to engagement of the imagination, then they are good things. They are doorways to something better, as opposed to something to be abhorred and eradicated immediately.”
Dr. Edward Hallowell, psychiatrist and author of the book 'CrazyBusy'.
Boredom, is perhaps what we seek to avoid, for the pain it might entail. “Dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake,” Proust wrote. “And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory ... I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.” A new way to conceive of so-called 'comfort eating' perhaps...
When we fill the silence and the moments-in-between, do we lose more than we gain? What if being human, means taking time to think? Perhaps, steeping in uninterrupted boredom may be the first step toward feeling connected...
It “may take a little bit of tolerance of an initial feeling of boredom, to discover a comfort level with not being linked in and engaged and stimulated every second. There’s a level of knowing yourself, of coming back to baseline, and knowing who you truly are.”
Jerome C. Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University and co-author of 'The Loss of Sadness'.
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