“Understanding the Ununderstandable” by Hamidreza Yazdani

Understanding the Ununderstandable

Hamidreza Yazdani

“Men know nothing of women, and women know nothing of men.” This is Lacan’s very negative statement on love, which may seem strange at first glance. But what I will examine in this writing is a step beyond this statement, namely that “no human being knows anything of any human being, and more importantly, cannot know.”

It is now abundantly clear that three theories dealt a fatal blow to the human position and brought it from the throne to the ground: first, that the Earth, the home in which humans live, is not the center of the universe and the cosmos does not revolve around the Earth, which was called the Copernican Revolution; second, that Darwin demonstrated the animalistic nature of humans and that humans are not the pinnacle of creation, as sacred texts had suggested; and third, that Freud, through psychoanalysis, showed that humans are not even aware of what goes on inside them and are not masters of their own house, and that the root of our fundamental problems lies within ourselves, of which we have a dark and obscure understanding, and that we are not the rational beings we thought we were, intimate with reason. Our reason is the plaything of unconscious drives whose mechanisms we are unaware of, and we do not even know how they affect us.

In fact, Freud’s discovery showed that the unconscious holds such sway over the human mind and psyche that it shapes the processes of human thought, action, and feeling. And more strangely, one of the important insights of psychoanalysis was that many problems are rooted not in adulthood but in our childhood. A childhood of which none of us even has a memory. And as John Bowlby showed, our relational tensions and conflicts trace back to maternal care in which we ourselves played no role, and in truth, we humans are heirs to problems of which neither we ourselves are aware, nor those responsible for our birth and upbringing. In other words, a human does not know what has happened to them, what treatment they received in childhood, and when a human does not know what goes on inside them, it results in the human being unable to fully and completely understand themselves and know what they want.

Even more astonishing is that this cycle does not only culminate in childhood and the manner of upbringing, and according to Melanie Klein, the roots of behavioral influences in adulthood can be traced further back. According to Klein, infants are dividers of the world into two camps of good and bad, and in the mental process she terms splitting, the infant reduces the mother to the good and bad breast, and over time may gain the ability to distinguish and discern the gray spectrum between good and bad, and many even enter adulthood without traversing this gray process and the depressive position, the result of which leads to abnormal behaviors. Or Lacan’s mirror stage, which shows that the infant’s ego, regardless of the intervention of upbringing methods, can play an important role in our adulthood, and we all grow up with a history and background that is in no one’s control and is beyond the reach of parents.

One of the very important implications of Freud’s discovery in particular, and psychoanalysis in general, is that a human cannot even understand themselves and know what goes on inside them. And this means nothing other than that a human cannot understand themselves. Understanding is a strange word. This word is a very important concept in every human’s life. If Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov believed that “a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that is all he can do. It would never occur to him to nail people by the ears,” perhaps he did not know that man, with all this artistry and capability to kill artistically, even beyond that, to artistically torment, torture, be ignored and ignore, fall in love, give love, receive love, the only thing man is incapable of doing is understanding a human being.

Understanding and being understood play a significant role in the individual and social life of every human being. One might say that human relationships are organized around this very comprehensibility. When you want to start a relationship, you consider being understood the most important factor. A person who feels understood will experience greater mental and emotional peace and security. Each of us has witnessed various experiences in our lives where what we seek in love is profoundly different and distinct from what happens in relationships with people. It was not without reason that Lacan believed that the bond we fear losing never existed in the first place. Our relationship has not come to this day out of foolishness or error; rather, this is the natural course of love.

The question that arises here is whether such a belief in being understood and understanding is fundamentally reasonable? And more important than reasonableness, is it feasible? Can we expect people to understand?

We saw earlier that the minimum insight and implication of psychoanalysis is that human beings and their unconscious are the product of things in which they had no direct involvement and have been completely under the sway of conditions of which they have not the slightest awareness. Every human being's worldview and faculty of reason, if not entirely, at least a significant part of it, is formed under conditions heavily influenced by the unconscious. An unconscious that, as it happens, is beyond the control of human reason. In the most optimistic scenario, even if a person has caring parents, they still face deficiencies in their psyche that are a requirement of their humanity. It is as if being human is equivalent to having an existential void and a lack of awareness of one's own desires and wishes.

Now, let us suppose this being, who is so unknown to itself, tries to enter into a relationship with another and admit the other into its private sphere. How does it choose that other? Logically, its choice is shaped based on its seemingly known needs, but the continuation of that relationship proceeds based on needs that are not only unknown but are mostly in the process of being uncovered. That is, it is as if in every relationship, a person discovers a part of themselves. A discovery that seemingly causes a redefinition of themselves; a redefinition of their needs, goals, and worldview. When Jacques Lacan believed that in a conversation you might know what you said, but you never know what your audience heard, he was pointing to an important subtlety. Our audience understands our words with a different world, which may be miles away from what the speaker said.

One can even go further and say that we do not even know what we have said; because every utterance is like a seed that has a different effect on every person, an effect that was not even in the speaker's mind, and yields a result that is as if it shines a light on a part of the speaker's being. It is as if every interpretation of our words illuminates a part of a need or understanding within us, of whose existence we were previously unaware. This statement can be extended to other tangible human experiences: failure, victory, love, experience, and everything intertwined with humanity. Even the failure of each person differs from that of another person and from their own previous failures, and in the same vein, even the suffering of each person does not follow a constant pattern.

It is as if with different people, humans experience joys, sufferings, and emotions that they have experienced in another way with someone else. Consequently, sufferings are not constant either, so that a person can fathom the essence of their own sufferings. And a human being so indeterminate even to themselves, how can they claim to know and understand another who is equally unknown? A human being who sometimes, in the therapy room and in the presence of a psychoanalyst or therapist, reveals a personality that does not even fit into their own imagination.

A human being whose relationship with another is so effective in redefining and shaping their worldview, and for whom every desire and criterion in each different relationship could have set another path before them and made them a different person—how can such a person claim to understand and be understood? It is not far-fetched to say that such a human being, with this psychological and emotional geography, cannot be understood, and acknowledging this recognizes the minimum of the impossible.

This very cognitive and epistemic void, and the foggy space within every person, has a significant effect on them. It traps them in the illusion that perhaps they can find themselves in another, that the other can be their full-length mirror, and this very notion fuels their thirst for a relationship—a relationship in which, they believe, they can search for themselves in the other. As if others are their mirror, oblivious to the fact that there is no self to be found. This common notion that another person or a friend is one's full-length mirror is perhaps more akin to a myth than a reality about human beings. If myths and legends contain a trace of humanity's impossible desires, the wish to be understood in life or in love resembles a legend more than anything else, because neither the person who wants to be understood nor the one who wants to understand has any knowledge of themselves to begin with. Can such a human being even be understood? What is it that we want to understand? A person full of unknowns and mysteries resembles a humanoid mirage more than anything else. And this self-knowledge, whose aim and subject stretch back through the length of history, is itself a testament that this claim is practically unattainable, if not impossible. Being left alone with this unknowable and unknown thing demands great endurance, and Pascal's remark was not without reason: that a person cannot spend time alone in a room. Coping with such an unknown creature is a difficult task. It is as if people, by throwing themselves into a relationship, flee from the fear of confronting this existential loneliness. When Ludwig Wittgenstein said to his sister, 'You remind me of someone looking through a closed window who cannot understand the strange movements of a passerby. They do not know what violent storm is raging on the other side of the window, or with what hardship that passerby is keeping themselves upright,' he was touching upon the incomplete perceptions of humans. Upon this truth that a person is even incapable of understanding another's outward behavior. It is as if, very often, we see people from behind a window and have perceptions that are far removed from external reality, and sometimes there is no understanding whatsoever of what is happening. This very situation can be extended with even greater intensity to the human psyche. A person does not even know what has transpired within their own psyche, and with this unknown psyche, they seek to fulfill needs they also do not recognize. And one can realize that the understanding we thirst for and desire always occurs from behind a tinted glass, which is miles away from its existential truth—if such a truth even exists. There is essentially nothing to understand, nor any possibility of understanding. Perhaps the only effort a person can make is to draw closer to other people. A closeness not for understanding or being understood, but to make life more bearable. If every person has a private sanctuary, we must accept that we can only draw near to that sanctuary.