In flirtation one does not take risks, one only sustains their possibility. Here is how Freud (brilliantly) describes it:

“Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind.”

Why is it so difficult for us to really believe that we don’t know what we want ?!

It is a fundamentally useful Freudian insight that we are never coincident with the images we have of ourselves. And in a certain sense there are no selves, only families of images that we sometimes choose to collect as a self-image. Kristeva writes: “Even the soundest among us knows just the same that a firm identity remains a fiction.”

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Malcolm Bowie: Psychoanalysis, “is overwhelmingly concerned with the production and transformation of meaning”. Whatever cannot be transformed, psychically processed, reiterates itself. A trauma is whatever there is in a person’s experience that resists useful re-description.

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Bollas: the articulation of the self is the transformation of the self; to speak is to become different. Taking Freud seriously involves acknowledging “most of what transpires in psychoanalysis — as in life itself — is unconscious”. The aim is not so much understanding — finding out which character you are — but a freeing of the potentially endless process of mutual invention and reinvention.

For Bollas the so-called mental health, or rather, his version of a good life, entails the tolerance and enjoyment of inner complexity; the ability to use and believe in what he refers to as a kind of “internal parliament”, full of conflicting, dissenting and coercive views. There is no final resolution here but rather a genuinely political and psychic vigilance in the face of the insidious violence of over-simplification.

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Commitment to complexity ! How complicated we can allow ourselves to be?! Many people cannot bear the complexity of their own minds and so take flight into the collusive solace of coupledom, or family life, or group allegiance.