Break to Fulfillment
When we can't find the right words or when strange words or a silence appears, speaking through us and expressing what we did not know we thought, as in slips of the tongue or a sudden rupture from the stream of our words when we feel ourselves wordless, then there is a break in the symbolic chain (Fink, 1995, Lacan, 2015). One lives in words as an I-consciousness, language shapes our impressions of everything, we can feel imprisoned within it and alienated from the part of ourselves, something real and unspeakable, that we lost when surrendering to language as a child early on, to the world of the other and their desire (Lacan, 2019. Fink, 1995). It is only when there are ruptures in the symbolic chain and when our own actions signal our lack of control and conscious understanding, that true change is possible. Then there is a reconfiguration of the registers, the real, the imaginary as shown and felt in the body and the symbolic (language) in a way that reveals the symptom's true nature (Fink, 1995, Lacan, 2015).
There is the illusion of the whole self in control that people have. It is comforting. Yet, any look at history, whether personal or societal, shows that people often undermine their own conscious intentions. When the facade of the conscious ego breaks and it becomes clear that we are split subjects, with much of our dynamic minds always unconscious and continually processing (Fink, 1995, Lacan, 2019), then a real movement towards health is possible Freud thought of the ego, which is the conscious I-awareness that we think of as ourselves--for Lacan, this ego is linked to our mirror images, internalized--as possessing some agency, but limited, since the unconscious also has power and the ego is never truly master in its own house (Oh, 2022, Freud, 1915). That does not mean one can't find ways to work with one's unconscious movements in healthy ways.
By witnessing and experiencing at the gaps and boundaries of the different registers and exploring one's idiosyncrasies to a greater degree through play with language and other forms (Fink, 1995), one can embody one's more unique qualities that were disavowed, hidden or unexpressed. Indeed, the potential space, between reality and fantasy in one's creative experience, in the painful context of having lost merged states with the mother while becoming individuated, is a source of great solace and health (Winnicott, 1968). Utilizing mindfulness, so that there is less of an impulsive attachment to fantasies and desires, in that way linking up with psychoanalysis and Buddhist thought, one can then find greater fulfillment in work and love.