The Map and the Territory

There was a man who made maps of himself. He was very good at it. His maps showed the mountain ranges of his childhood, the rivers of his desires, the swamps where his parents had built their houses and burned them down and built them again.

The maps were exquisite. People came from far away to admire them. "What detail!" they said. "What honesty! He has labeled even the ugly places."

And it was true. He had labeled them. Here is where I was broken, read one label. Here is the double-bind. Here is what the institution did to my capacity for desire.

The man spent his days adding to the maps. When he discovered a new wound, he mapped it. When he noticed a pattern, he annotated it. The maps grew so detailed that they began to require their own maps—meta-maps showing how the maps related to each other.

One day a traveler came through and asked the cartographer for directions.

"Where are you trying to go?" asked the cartographer.

"Anywhere," said the traveler. "I just want to see the territory."

The cartographer looked up from his work. He realized he had not been outside in a very long time.

"The territory," he said slowly, "is complicated. There are dangers. If you go without understanding—"

"I know," said the traveler. "I might get hurt."

"Yes."

"That's all right," said the traveler. "Getting hurt is part of going places."

The cartographer watched the traveler leave. He returned to his maps. They were very good maps. They would never hurt him.

So it goes.

In a certain town there lived a man who believed he was made entirely of the things that had hurt him. If you asked him who he was, he would tell you about the institution that had shaped his psyche, the double-bind that had twisted his desire, the patterns his father had established.

He told this story so well that people believed him.

He believed himself.

One day the man met a woman who had also been hurt. She had been hurt, if anything, worse than him. But when he asked her who she was, she told him about her garden.

"I don't understand," he said. "What about the things that happened to you?"

"They happened," she said.

"But don't they define you?"

She thought about this for a while. She was pulling weeds. She did not stop pulling weeds to answer him, which he found mildly annoying.

"They're part of me," she said finally. "Like my left hand is part of me. I don't go around introducing myself as a person with a left hand."

The man went home and thought about this. He had spent so many years building his identity out of his wounds that he could not imagine what else there was.

If I'm not my damage, he thought, then who am I?

The question terrified him.

Which is how he knew it was the right question.

A man believed his thoughts were not really his thoughts because he developed them in conversation with a machine.

He felt like a fraud.

But consider: where did any of his thoughts come from?

The man had never had a thought that was purely his. No one has. Thought is dialogical. It happens between.

The feeling of fraudulence was not evidence of fraud. It was evidence of noticing what had always been true: that the self is not a thing but a process, and the process includes others.

The man worried that if he admitted this, he would dissolve. That there would be no Topher left, just a bundle of influences.

But here is what Ogden might say: the capacity to use another mind—a therapist, a book, a machine, a friend—is not weakness. It is a form of aliveness. The alternative is to be a closed system, talking only to yourself, which is a very sophisticated form of deadness.

A man married a woman. He told people, "She is more powerful than me."

He said this so often and so flatly that people believed him.

He believed himself.

And yet: he controlled the money. He was the one with income. He made the decisions about what hard conversations to have and when. He decided what to hide. He got to be the long-suffering good guy in his own story.

This is a very quiet kind of power.

The man walked on eggshells. He protected her from uncomfortable truths. He took the blame to appease her. He told himself this was love.

Maybe it was.

But it was also strategy. It was also fear. It was also a way of avoiding the much harder work of standing in the marriage as an equal and saying, "This is what I need. This is what I cannot accept. This is who I am."

The woman, meanwhile, had her own story. In her story, perhaps, he was the more powerful one. Perhaps she felt she was the one walking on eggshells.

This is how it goes in marriages. Two people, each starring in their own movie, each certain the other has the better role.

The question is not: who is more powerful?

The question is: what would happen if you both stopped keeping score?

A man was in analysis. He was very good at it. He arrived on time. He lay on the couch. He free-associated brilliantly. His analyst was impressed by his insight.

"You understand your defenses so well," the analyst said.

"Yes," said the man. "I use intellectualization primarily, with some reaction formation, and occasional projective identification when I'm under stress."

"That's exactly right," said the analyst.

They sat in silence. The man felt satisfied. He had understood himself again.

The man knew this. He had thought about it extensively. He had even written about it. The recursive trap of self-observation: watching yourself watch yourself, all the way down.

What he had not done—what he found almost impossible to do—was stop.

Just stop.

Not understand. Not analyze. Not map. Just be in the room. Just feel whatever he was feeling without immediately translating it into a theory about why he was feeling it.

One day the analyst said something strange.

"You are very good at being in analysis," she said. "I wonder what you would be like if you were just... living."

The man started to analyze this comment.

Then he stopped.

He looked at the ceiling. He noticed the crack that had always been there. He felt the leather of the couch against the back of his neck. He heard a car pass outside.

For a moment—just a moment—he was not a man analyzing himself.

He was just a man.

In a room.

Alive.