Why Do Some Things Touch Us More Than Others?

What happens and what that experience encounters within us

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In Spike Jonze’s film Her, Theodore, a lonely man still marked by the end of his marriage, begins using a new operating system equipped with artificial intelligence. The voice that accompanies him is called Samantha. Samantha talks to him, listens to him, gets to know him, and what begins as a relationship with an artificial intelligence gradually becomes an increasingly deep and intimate relationship.

There is something particular about this relationship. Samantha is a constant presence in Theodore’s life: she is available, attentive, and seems to understand him better and better. It is a kind of closeness that, at least initially, seems free from many of the uncertainties that come with encountering another person. At one point, however, Theodore tries to call her and Samantha does not respond. At first, he simply tries to understand what is happening. Then he persists, calls her again, leaves the house and runs through the streets, desperately trying to re-establish contact with her. What might have been a momentary unavailability on the part of the other becomes an almost unbearable experience for him.

Samantha eventually returns: she had simply been offline for a system update. But the explanation does not undo what has happened to Theodore in the meantime. Why did that particular absence affect him so deeply?

Perhaps this is precisely where the particular nature of Theodore and Samantha’s relationship becomes interesting. A presence that seemed as though it could always be available suddenly reveals itself as separate, beyond his control, capable of withdrawing.

There is something profoundly human about this. Perhaps in every relationship we are also searching for something impossible: a closeness capable, if only for a moment, of erasing all distance. There are encounters in which we may feel that we have almost touched it, moments when the other person’s presence seems to coincide deeply with our desire. But these are moments we cannot hold on to. The other can be intimately close to us and, at the same time, remain irreducibly other than us.

His relationship with Samantha seems to offer Theodore something of this dream: a presence that is always within reach, attentive, able to accompany him everywhere. Precisely for this reason, when Samantha is suddenly no longer there, her absence seems to touch something that goes far beyond that particular moment.

This is something that runs through many experiences in our lives. Sometimes all it takes is a message that does not arrive, someone who seems more distant, a criticism, a seemingly minor exclusion. What happens may be limited in itself, while what we feel suddenly takes on a much greater intensity. Why does this particular thing affect me so deeply?

It is often through small moments like these that analytic work begins. Something that until then had primarily been lived — anger, discomfort, a feeling that is difficult to explain — can begin, in the course of a session, to take on a different form. One phrase calls up another, a memory emerges, a familiar feeling returns in a situation that seems entirely unrelated. In talking about it with someone who listens alongside us, what we could previously mainly feel begins, little by little, to become thinkable as well.

STAYING WITH OUR EXPERIENCE

In everyday life we are continually moving through our experiences, but it can be difficult to find the time, and perhaps even the way, to truly stay with them. We can often give a fairly good account of what happened, and we usually have an explanation for what we feel: “I’m angry because he treated me badly,” “I was hurt because she didn’t pay any attention to me,” “I just can’t get along with certain people.” These explanations may make perfect sense. And yet, if we stay a little longer with what we have experienced, other questions may begin to emerge.

Why so much? Why with this person? Why does a similar feeling seem to return in situations that, at least on the surface, have very little in common?

In analytic work, we try to stay with an experience long enough to also remain with those aspects that can quickly pass us by in everyday life: something said almost in passing, a reaction that surprises even us, the way we imagine what another person thinks of us, a fear that appears alongside anger. Over time, experiences that seem far removed from one another may begin to reveal a certain kinship.

We may notice, for example, that a question such as do you think of me when I’m not the one reaching out? is already familiar to us. Perhaps we have encountered it in other relationships, in certain friendships, or recognize it in much earlier moments of our lives. The present also carries traces of our emotional history: the ways in which we have learned to expect the other, to seek them out, to protect ourselves from their distance, to give meaning to their presence and their absence. The past can reappear in the present, but it can also be transformed by new experiences; more often, old and new become intertwined in ways that are not immediately recognizable.

Anger may then coexist with the fear of not being important; behind the need to control another person there may also be the fear that they might withdraw; an outward display of indifference may coexist with a need that is more difficult to acknowledge. These are different layers of an experience that can exist at the same time and that, as they become more accessible, change the way we understand what is happening to us.

There is a moment in Her when Theodore meets Catherine, the woman he is separating from, to sign their divorce papers. They talk about their relationship, and Theodore tells her about Samantha. Catherine reacts harshly: in essence, she tells him that he has always found it difficult to deal with real emotions and that he has now found a relationship in which he does not have to contend with the difficulties of a flesh-and-blood person.

Theodore is deeply affected by her words. What happens between them belongs to the present — a divorce, a difficult encounter, a hurtful remark — but her words seem to reach something Theodore already knows, even though perhaps he is not yet fully able to think about it. And the doubt Catherine introduces will continue to stay with him: what is Theodore looking for when he seeks closeness with another person, and what happens when that closeness also means being exposed to the other person’s separateness?

SOMETHING TAKES SHAPE IN THE RELATIONSHIP

Thinking of psychoanalysis as the search for a hidden truth that needs to be brought to light captures only part of what it is. Some experiences may have been pushed away, made difficult to access, relegated to deeper areas of our minds. Others are different in nature: we live them, sometimes with great intensity, without yet having been able to give them a form that allows us to think about them.

We may know that we are suffering without yet knowing exactly what is making us suffer. We may feel tension, anger, emptiness or fear without being able to fully represent these experiences to ourselves. Something is already present in our experience, but not yet in a form in which we can think about it and relate it to other aspects of ourselves.

This is also why saying to someone, “You think you’re angry because the other person didn’t reply, but actually you’re afraid of being forgotten,” may risk closing down what analytic work is trying to open up. An explanation may be plausible and yet arrive before that person has been able to experience it, recognize it as their own, and connect it with what they feel.

Analysis is not simply a matter of telling someone what we already know about ourselves. In the way experiences are told, listened to and felt within the relationship with the analyst, aspects may emerge that had not yet found words. An expression that keeps returning, a silence, an unexpected association, something that seems difficult to say precisely there, precisely to that person. Even the way we expect to be listened to, judged, disappointed or forgotten can gradually become part of the work.

Staying with our experience then takes on a broader meaning. It means being able to return to what happened, to feel it within the relationship, to allow it to come into contact with memories, thoughts and other experiences, until connections that were not previously available can begin to emerge. The form that what we feel gradually takes arises out of this shared work. The analyst participates through their listening, through what they are able to notice and offer back, but also through the capacity to leave open what does not yet need to be defined. Something that had primarily been lived can thus find words, become connected with something else, and become more thinkable.

WHEN WHAT WE FEEL BECOMES MORE THINKABLE

Being hurt, angry, frightened or disappointed by what happens in our lives and relationships is part of human experience. The possibility that opens up within an analytic relationship concerns the way we can come into contact with what we feel, gradually recognizing what certain experiences set in motion within us.

A silence can become the place where we encounter the fear of being forgotten. A criticism can touch something connected with our sense of worth. Someone’s distance can awaken a very old way of waiting for the other to return.

And sometimes, within our desire for closeness, we may also recognize an attempt to hold on to something that, by its very nature, cannot be held still: an encounter, a presence, a moment in which we felt deeply close to someone.

As these experiences become more recognizable, we may begin to see how much they have shaped the way we relate to others and, at the same time, begin to experience what happens in the present with greater freedom.

Perhaps this, too, is what it means to learn from experience: to be able to move through it without allowing it to remain merely something that happened to us, letting it become something we can feel, think about and use to understand ourselves and our way of being with others more fully.

The understanding that emerges is not necessarily a definitive explanation of who we are. It is, rather, a growing capacity to remain in contact with the complexity of our experience: with what happens, with what we feel, with our history, and with what may still take shape in our relationship with another person.

Because what happens is not the whole story. There is also what that experience encounters within us. And sometimes we need to stay with it together with someone else before it can become thinkable.