A foundational ideal of psychoanalysis is that there is something unsolvable, something outlandish, something irrevocably unfathomable, about living and understanding one’s own life. Psychotherapy helps us develop a more adaptive story about what we can’t seem to understand about our own lives, and what it is, exactly, in our lives that we can’t seem to talk about. There is a danger that without feedback from others, especially those trusted others whom we know have our best interests in mind, we will suffer from the belief that the  stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are unassailable, adamantine facts. 

The reality is that our stories of ourselves are fictions that demand to be deliteralized. Surely you’ve had the experience of being at a family reunion, a wake, a wedding or some such thing, telling stories about the past, when an older acquaintance or relative interrupts to say, “it didn’t happen that way at all!” We have no choice but to live our lives forward while at the same time, our history, our biography, is constructed backwards. The stories we tell about our lives are unconsciously meant to mislead–both others and ourselves. We are constantly trying to unknow what we already know about ourselves; we unconsciously create the illusion of a life that makes sense (in either a positive or negative way) so that we won’t have to face the much more complicated and messy truth. And it seems very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to face the truth of ourselves without a support network of caring people invested in our well being. We need fellowship; it helps us to see ourselves more clearly and compassionately.

Sometimes people come to know the gap between the unlived life and the lived life as a kind of hell. Were there a hell, this is as good a definition of it as any, for hell is not to be found in some distant place or afterlife, but exists right here and right now, formed by the cast of mind through which we see the world and others and especially, it seems, ourselves. There are only a few ways out of hell; one way is quite common and over-used by many in contemporary life: fail to attend to the hell and become so much a part of it that one no longer sees it. An alternative way, although challenging to be sure, demands that one live seeking out the sublime encounter, a way of living and thinking that attempts to place one, more often than not, uncomfortably outside of one’s self-satisfied, cozy belief systems. This way out of hell requires one to disregard the easy pleasures of self-indulgence, self-certainty, and self-righteousness, and instead be determined to recognize who and what voices, in the midst of hell are not hell, and subjecting them to rigorous examination, supporting them to be recognized and valued, thereby create a space for them. In the creation of such a space, one experiences the extraordinary, the beguiling, and the sublime, rendered all the more wondrous for their difficult acquisition. The voices that are not hell are truly the voices calling us to fellowship. 

Forsaking the easy pleasures of the unlived life for the harder pleasures of fully living the life one has is a difficult and daunting challenge. One must be able to see both the lived and the unlived with some degree of hard-won clarity, and move between and among the lived and unlived lives. Much of living consists of embodying the imaginal, seeing what’s possible and living as much as one can, those aspects of the unlived life that bring more significance, more substance, more love, more nobility, into the life one is living. 

Reflecting upon, without longing for, the unlived life offers the opportunity to bring more of what Aristotle called eudaimonia–a flourishing, a sense of well-being and nobility regardless of circumstance–into the living of the only life we have. The purpose of living, as I see it at least, is to try and make what is implicit in the imagination explicit in living. This aspiration, this striving, this becoming, is the abiding, one might even say heavenly, gift embedded in the unlived life.

Best regards, Bradley Olson, Ph.D. About Brad  Bradley Olson, Ph.D., is the editor of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast series. Dr. Olson is a Depth Psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona; his work with clients is heavily influenced by his interest in Jungian Analytical Psychology, literature, and Mythological Studies.