David Davis

"only the impossible, as we know, is addictive"

You can set a sundial by it: 6–12 weeks after something bad happened, my body will take a vacation from functioning correctly. Like Kafka’s bug man, I will awaken one morning in a state of anxiety that slowly, excruciatingly clarifies into a realization that something is wrong.

Nowadays, my autoimmunity flares are usually mild, and with a little effort—rest, medication, a depressingly bland diet—my symptoms will disperse. Some joint pain and an upset stomach aren’t so bad, not when compared with the years of my life when they were at their worst, a fever pitch of suffering that prevented me from holding down jobs, staying awake in class, even regulating my body temperature. And yet somehow, these reminders are worse than the pain they hearken back to. How could that life ever have been worthwhile? I wonder, indulging in the coward’s rhetoric. If that were true, even a little, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to stay alive.

In “On Risk and Solitude”—found in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life—Adam Phillips writes movingly and persuasively about the developmental importance of risk-taking. For the adolescent, the pursuit of risk is an exercise in “fearless passivity,” a surrender of the self that echoes the dependence of infancy while simultaneously striving to differentiate itself from it. In risk-taking, he suggests, the adolescent is communicating the questions that his infant self might have asked of the mother, had he the capacity.

It is not that the adolescent is attempting to “own his body”…as part of his separation from the mother, nor is he simply taking over her caregiving aspects. He is testing the representations of the body acquired through early experience. Is it a safe house? Is it reliable? Does it have other allegiances? What does it promise, and why does it refuse?¹

With this essay, Phillips challenges the historical pathologization of risk-taking in psychoanalytic literature, speculating as to what we might call the “positive” reasons for so-called sexual perversions: perhaps, he says, these perversions are a way of keeping alive the risk-taking part of the self, the “fearless passive” who “both knows and refuses to know” that there comes a point in treatment (/in our lives) when we must do the thing we most fear.

“We create risk,” Phillips writes, “when we endanger something we value.” Perhaps risk-taking is also the reverse-engineering of being alive. I’m endangered, therefore I am; I’m entrusting myself to the unknown, therefore I have something to protect.

Over these past four years of DAVID, I’ve written a lot about risk: emotional, sexual, artistic, interpersonal; the risks of having an identity, of heavy S/M, of dyke cruising. I’m on the record regarding risk’s potential role in a good life as I understand it, but I’ve never felt unconflicted on this point. It is easy to assume responsibility for everything, to find every fault within oneself, and in so doing to use risk not as enrichment, but as avoidance, depersonalization, abandonment. In this way, we engage in the fantasy of control, and fantasies, as we know, are characterized by their impossibility. A fantasy can never come true.

Naturally, Phillips has plenty to say about that, too: compulsive risk-taking is “always constituted by a fantasy of what has already been lost—only the impossible, as we know, is addictive.” Reading this, I was reminded of the epigraph I included in my first novel, by the French writer Robert Pinget: “When you’re expecting bad news you have to be prepared for it a long time ahead so that when the telegram comes you can already pronounce the syllables in your mouth before opening it.”

I love control and I hate control, a contradiction for which I have often castigated myself. By way of psychoanalysis, a discipline about which I still know very little, Phillips suggests the possibility of understanding this as something other than a paradox. He ends another essay, the luminous “First Hates: Phobias in Theory,” with these words: “the aim of psychoanalysis is not to cure people but to show them that there is nothing wrong with them.”

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1. Bolding mine.