The Neurotic Turn by Charles Johns

Author:Charles Johns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Neurotic Turn
ISBN: 9781910924662
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Sleeping

We tend to think of walking as something just automatic and natural; we forget that we had to learn how to walk and that walking involves a very deliberate and active stance on our parts. This presumption of “givenness” is true of our attitude toward sleeping probably to an even greater degree. We think of sleep as something we undergo, not something we do. Obviously, to some extent this is true inasmuch as sleep is the letting go of our immediate agency. But this letting go involves a significant degree of agency and commitment nonetheless. Our different situations involve different relations of activity and passivity, and sleep has its own distinctive version of this.

Like walking, sleeping draws attention to our privacy, the singularized character of our existence. Unlike walking, however, which is an activity of putting our singularity forward into the world, and reshaping our situation according to our singular agency, sleeping is a withdrawal of this singular agency; it is leaving the world to carry on without the deliberate input of ourselves. Since it has this discernable significance, we should see that it is, then, still a response to the world, and it is experienced as such: it is a handing over of the reins, so to speak, to the world, with the expectation that one can pick the reins up again upon reawakening. Sleeping is thus an interpretation, a gesture, and a recognition: to sleep is to recognize the world as a reliable place, to trust it.

A neurotic inability to sleep is therefore a plausible response to a world that is not remembered in the form of “trustworthy”. To be unable to sleep is to be unable to rest, to have a situation in which shutting down is not acceptable, not safe, which suggests that what is missing in the person’s world is a basic context of trust: to sleep would be to let down one’s guard, and guarding is only an issue in a world that has a threatening form. A woman who has been a victim of rape and a victim of incestuous advances by her father finds that she cannot sleep; furthermore, despite a strong desire to confide in others about her difficulty, she finds herself afraid to talk about this, afraid to admit to the problem. Both problems of sleeping and of speaking about it can be seen as memorial practices, as ways of remembering that “they will take advantage of vulnerability”: she lives out the interpretation of the world as one in which one must not show weakness; one must not trust one’s situation. The importance of this trust is further shown by her simultaneous desire to share this experience through talking and, indeed, by the fact that she can sleep in the company of close friends. Indeed, the confiding can be an ambivalent flirtation, a gesture toward a sexual intimacy that is, for the woman, a confused emblem of both trust and betrayal. While such a problem of trust need not be

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