Introduction
There is a form of suffering that has no proper name. One is not ill, not disturbed, not even unhappy in the strict sense. One functions. One accomplishes what needs to be accomplished: work, relationships, appointments, the entire repertoire of a successful life. And yet something is missing—something that is characterized precisely by being hard to name. In clinical practice, one encounters this phenomenon constantly, and not only among those who speak of “burnout” or “exhaustion,” but often precisely among people who appear outwardly successful, well-adapted, competent. They describe a life that “runs” but does not “sustain.” An existence in the subjunctive: as if it could be otherwise at any moment, without anything changing. One senses no dramatic despair in them, rather a kind of atmospheric absence—as if one were sitting in a room with someone who is simultaneously elsewhere. Some even say they laugh, and hear themselves laughing as if from another room.
Psychopathology has no directly established diagnostic label for this constellation. Depression often falls short, because the affect is not really lowered but rather absent. Dissociation sometimes fits, but without the spectacular phenomena the word suggests. The description most closely circles around terms like “alienation,” “inner emptiness,” “false self”—terms that point toward something without quite grasping it. This essay is an attempt to give the phenomenon a frame. Not to pathologize it—that would be a misunderstanding—but to understand it: as a specific psychic constellation that has its history, its logic, its function. The guiding question is less “What is vitality?” (a question that quickly leads to definitions) than: What prevents it? What enables it? And can one find it again when it seems lost?
The psychoanalytic tradition offers a rich, if scattered, set of tools for this. Freud developed with his economic model of cathexis (Besetzung) a language in which one can describe how psychic energy is bound to objects—or precisely not (Freud, 1914/1946). Winnicott introduced the distinction between true and false self, which precisely captures how a person can function socially without feeling “real” in the process (Winnicott, 1960/1965). Bion coined with the alpha-function a term for that psychic work which transforms raw experience into thinkable, dreamable, connectable form—and whose failure either floods or freezes the subject (Bion, 1962). Stern developed with “vitality forms” a language for the dynamic shape of experience: not what we feel, but how it moves in time—surging, halting, ebbing, pressing (Stern, 2010). Green, finally, provided with the “dead mother complex” one of the most striking figures for that devitalization which arises not from absence, but from the internalization of a psychically absent caregiver (Green, 1983/2004). In what follows, I try to use these voices not as authorities to cite, but as tools to employ—for an exploration that begins phenomenologically, sharpens theoretically, and grounds itself clinically.
Approximations: What Do We Mean When We Say “Alive”?
Aliveness has a peculiar quality: as long as it is there, it is taken for granted. It resides in the small things no one specifically notes—in the tone of voice with which one says “Good morning”; in the way one climbs the stairs; in the rhythm of a morning; in the barely noticeable impulse to call someone or begin something. One does not notice it, just as one does not notice one’s own breath as long as it flows. Only when it thins out does it become a question. Then language searches for images: “like behind glass,” some say; “like under cotton wool”; “as if I’m not really there.” A patient describes it this way: “I see everything, I hear everything, I understand everything—but it doesn’t arrive. As if someone were intercepting the signal before it reaches me.” Another says: “I function flawlessly. But if you ask me whether I’m living—I wouldn’t know what to answer.”
One can study this in entirely everyday scenes. Someone sits by the window in the morning, the coffee is hot, the city is waking up, and yet the taste is missing not only in the mouth but in the entire experience. The scene is there, but it has no charge. One knows the morning could be beautiful—the light, the quiet before the day—but the knowing remains information, it does not become experience. Or someone accomplishes what needs to be accomplished: emails, phone calls, meetings, a functioning professional life. The movements are correct but not “inhabited.” The words fit but do not carry. It is as if one were playing a role one has technically mastered without inwardly meaning it. The audience applauds, but one sits somewhere in the back room wondering who is actually on stage. In the evening then, when demands subside, what remains is not relief but an indeterminate emptiness—not painful enough to call it grief, but empty enough to turn on the television just so something is running.
And then there are the counter-images, equally unspectacular. One exits the subway, and suddenly the air has weight, temperature, a kind of presence. One sees a woman with a red scarf, and this red is not merely color but event—it leaps at you, it means something, even if one couldn’t say what. Or one hears a sentence in a conversation, in a film, in a song, and notices how something “docks.” Not as intellectual understanding, but as a small inner resonance: Yes, this has to do with me. Aliveness then is not necessarily happiness, not euphoria, not “flow” in the inflationary sense. Often it is more the return of an organic self-evidence: that something may have meaning, that time does not merely pass but proceeds—with direction, with contour, with the possibility that something may happen.
Whoever works clinically knows both states—and above all their mixed forms. There are people who outwardly appear fast and successful, full of activity, projects, sports, travel, dates, business ideas. But when one listens to them, one senses that the tempo does not come from desire but from flight. The body is used like a generator that must constantly run so that it doesn’t become quiet. As soon as quiet enters, the tension drops—and beneath it lies not rest but emptiness. One might say: the motor runs so that the driver doesn’t notice he got out long ago. This “pseudo-vitality”—Stern (2010) would speak of movement without modulation—is diagnostically treacherous because it imitates aliveness while organizing its opposite: a restless defense against the risk of feeling something.
Vitality is therefore not identical with activation, not with intensity, not with what wellness rhetoric sells as “energy.” It is a quality of experience, not its level. The developmental researcher Daniel Stern proposed a sober, very useful concept for this dimension: it concerns the how of an inner occurrence—tempo, rhythm, contour, direction—not primarily the what (Stern, 2010). Not only: “Am I sad or happy?” but: How does something rise in me, how does it fade, how does it move in time? This seemingly small shift is decisive because it leads us away from the question of the emotion label toward the question: Is there a living process at all, an inner mobility, a temporal shape—or is there only standstill, only flatness, only busyness?
If one takes this phenomenon seriously, one must treat vitality as a basic concept more precisely than is common in everyday psychology and self-optimization discourse. For the purposes of this essay, a working definition can be ventured that remains open enough but becomes capable of distinction: Vitality denotes the subjective feeling of being present in one’s own experience—inwardly moved, temporally contoured, bodily inhabited, and standing in a meaningful relation to the world. This definition allows typical opponents to be named without prematurely pathologizing them: decathexis (the world loses color), rigidification (affect is held, breath becomes tight), automatization (the self becomes the executive organ of an expected order), pseudo-vitality (intensity without inner participation), dissociative derealization (being present without “being there”).
Why Unaliveness Is Often a Solution
Here lurks a simplification one must avoid: the loss of vitality is not simply a defect that needs to be repaired. It is frequently a solution. When one listens more closely to people, one notices that “not being alive” is often a kind of psychic contract that was once concluded under difficult conditions—and that has outlived its reasons.
Aliveness means closeness. It means risk, the capacity for loss, vulnerability. To be alive means to want something—and thus to experience the possibility of not getting it. It means to show oneself—and thus to risk being seen and not liked, not understood, not held. Not infrequently, “shutting down” is a form of self-protection that was once sensible: less desire means less disappointment; less feeling means less flooding; less aliveness means less exposure. One might say: the psyche has learned that it is safer to dim the light than to let it burn and risk someone blowing it out. This economy is not stupid. It is tragic, because it solves the problem by reducing the subject itself—but it is not stupid.
Wilhelm Reich described this dynamic in a drastic, body-centered language. The “character armor” is for him not a metaphor but a somatic reality: a chronic muscular tension, a throttling of breath, a holding back of excitation that protects the organism from overwhelming affects (Reich, 1933/1945). Whether or not one shares Reich’s theoretical framework—the clinical observation is robust: people who feel inwardly “dead” frequently also describe a physical constriction, as if their chest had become smaller, as if their breath were under surveillance. The armoring once began as an answer to something unbearable. That it remains when the unbearable is long past belongs to the tragedy of neurotic organization.
The idea that lifelessness can be a solution becomes even more radical when one takes trauma seriously. Sándor Ferenczi describes in his text on the “confusion of tongues between adults and the child” a dynamic that points far beyond its historical setting: under the pressure of a powerful, intrusive other, the child can become a kind of automaton—not from character, but from necessity (Ferenczi, 1933/1984). The child gives up its own perception, identifies with the aggressor, becomes “overwise” and pseudo-mature, while its spontaneous self goes underground. “Fear, when it reaches a certain maximum,” Ferenczi writes, “compels them [the children] to subordinate themselves automatically to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify with the aggressor” (Ferenczi, 1933/1984, p. 308). The price of this adaptation is high: spontaneity becomes risky, self-impulse becomes dangerous, aliveness itself is stored as a trigger for punishment or loss. Later, an adult life not infrequently appears that “functions” but withholds inner consent—a life that remained faithful to survival logic even though the emergency is long over.
Donald Winnicott formulated this mechanism not as a moral demand (“Be authentic!”) but as developmental diagnostics. When the environment cannot receive early spontaneous gestures of the child—when it overlooks them, punishes them, engulfs them, or responds with anxiety—the child develops a kind of substitute organization: a self that reacts instead of initiates, that fits instead of plays, that “behaves” instead of is (Winnicott, 1960/1965). This “false self” is not merely façade or hypocrisy. It is a highly developed protective structure that shields the vulnerable interior from an environment that has proven insufficiently safe. The problem is only: the structure can outlive its reasons. One continues wearing the armor even when there is no more war. One keeps playing the role even when no one is watching anymore. Winnicott writes: “The False Self has one positive and very important function: to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands” (Winnicott, 1960/1965, p. 147). In practice, one often recognizes this through small signals: a narration that is flawless but touches nothing; a life in correct sentences that lack inner coloring; a competence that never stumbles because it never risks anything.
André Green provided one of the most striking figures for the emergence of inner devitalization. The “dead mother complex” describes not the real death of a caregiver, but her psychic absence—a mother who was physically there but had inwardly departed, perhaps through depression, trauma, grief, overwhelm (Green, 1983/2004). The child, confronted with a mother who is suddenly “no longer there” without being able to understand why, reacts with a paradoxical identification: it internalizes not a living object but a void. It itself becomes the absence it cannot understand. Green describes the consequence as an imprisonment in a psychic pain situation in which “it is equally impossible to love as to hate—equally impossible to enjoy oneself as to weep” (Green, 1983/2004, p. 222). The consequences often show themselves later in a diffuse relationship problem: one can approach, but it doesn’t “stick”; one can love, but it doesn’t warm; one can work, but it doesn’t fulfill. The “dead core” empties experience from within.
The decisive point running through these various theoretical figures: these constellations are not defects that need to be “removed.” They are answers to early experiences that at the time represented the best possible solution. Defense appears here not as moral failure but as survival technique. Understanding this is clinically decisive. Whoever meets a person who does not feel alive with the imperative “Feel more! Be more spontaneous! Live at last!” possibly repeats precisely what once created the problem: an intrusion from outside that does not respect one’s own impulse but overwrites it. Thus a first line emerges, one that carries the entire argument: Vitality is not a mere state but a relational category. Not only relationship to others, but relationship to oneself, to the body, to time, to one’s own movement of desire. We feel alive where something may arise in us without being immediately corrected, punished, or devalued. And we lose aliveness where our inner impulse had to learn too early that it is “too much,” “too dangerous,” “too difficult for the others.”
The Architecture of Aliveness: Four Coordinates
If vitality is not simply “there” or “gone” but a process—what then are the conditions under which it succeeds or fails? In what follows, I propose to understand aliveness as an interplay of four coordinates. None of them is “the” cause; each can temporarily compensate for the others—though usually at the cost of stability and duration. The model makes no claim to completeness; it is a tool for sorting clinical phenomena and identifying therapeutic points of intervention.
Cathexis: That Something May Become Important
Freud’s early economics has—beyond all historical patina—preserved a remarkably simple observation: the world feels real and animated where we cathect it, that is, where psychic energy can be bound to objects, activities, persons, ideas (Freud, 1914/1946). Cathexis (Besetzung) is Freud’s word for what we might colloquially call “interest”—but with an important extension: it concerns not only conscious attention but a libidinal binding that allows something in the world to become “charged,” so that it gains meaning, so that it concerns us. Vitality in this sense is not mere excitation but bound excitation: an interest that can “stick.”
One can sense this in everyday life. An afternoon can be objectively free—no appointments, no obligations, all possibilities open—and subjectively feel empty because nothing “attracts.” Things are there, but they have no gravity. And conversely, a brief scene—a sentence, a glance, a thought, a smell—can light up inwardly because something binds. Not necessarily pleasant, but real. A patient describes this difference precisely: “There are days when everything is gray. Not sad, not bad—gray. And then there are moments when I see the same thing, but suddenly it has weight. As if someone had plugged the world back in.”
The decisive point that Freud works out in his essay on narcissism: cathexis is never only “energy” but always also risk assessment (Freud, 1914/1946). Whoever cathects makes oneself vulnerable. Whoever takes something as important can lose it. Whoever binds to someone can be abandoned. The question is therefore not only “Do I have energy?” but: Where may it go? To what may it adhere? What happens when it adheres—and who or what responds to that? In melancholia, according to Freud’s famous analysis, this economy fails: libido withdraws from the world and turns against the ego itself. The result is not grief (which hurts but remains alive) but that peculiar impoverishment in which the world and the self become gray (Freud, 1917/1946). Melancholic depletion is, as it were, the paradigm of disturbed capacity for cathexis—not too little energy, but an energy that no longer finds a place.
Melanie Klein extended this perspective by a decisive dimension: the capacity to cathect the outer world depends on the inner object world (Klein, 1935/1975). Whoever is inwardly populated by persecutory, destroyed, or dead objects cannot keep anything alive outside either. Projective identification colors the world with what cannot be integrated inside. Clinically this means: some people cannot cathect because their interior is too insecure, too hostile, too empty to build bridges to the world from there. Heinz Kohut later reformulated this connection in self-psychological terms: vitality presupposes a minimum of self-cohesion—whoever is inwardly fragmented, depleted, or chronically shamed has no base from which interest could proceed (Kohut, 1971). The self must be sufficiently “together” to be able to risk itself.
Form: That There Is a Rhythm That Can Be Modulated
Whoever grasps vitality solely through “interest” or “cathexis” overlooks its aesthetic core. Aliveness is not only that something is important, but how it moves. Daniel Stern coined for this the concept of “vitality forms,” which consciously transcends traditional affect psychology (Stern, 2010). His concern is not discrete emotions—joy, grief, fear—but the dynamic shape of experience: tempo, intensity, contour, direction. A movement can be surging, halting, pressing, ebbing, explosive, floating—and these qualities are often more important than the question of which emotion label one assigns them.
Stern’s perspective allows vitality to be thought of as temporal shape. This is immediately clinically relevant because it makes understandable why “false aliveness” deceives so easily. A patient who is constantly in motion—projects, travels, changing partners, athletic peak performances—can appear vital. But when one listens more closely, one notices: the tempo is not freely chosen but driven. There is no slowing down, no fading, no pauses in which something could emerge. The rhythm is like in a narrow tunnel: only forward, ever faster, standstill is threat. Manic busyness, garish wit, sexualized constant tension can look like vitality while in truth defending against the fear of living encounter. The difference lies less in the level than in the movement quality: Is the excited freely modulated—can it become softer, louder, slower, faster, depending on the situation? Or is it like a motor running because it must not stand still?
Reich sharpened this point body-therapeutically: the “character armor” is not only psychic rigidity but also somatic—a chronic organization of muscle tension, breath depth, posture that throttles the flow of affect (Reich, 1933/1945). People with strong armoring can often only live in a narrow excitation corridor: not too much (then flooding threatens), not too little (then depression threatens), but in a middle zone that offers security but costs aliveness. Breath becomes shallow, shoulders raised, belly drawn in—and with this bodily organization the affective spectrum also narrows. What Stern (2010) describes as “vitality dynamics” is then available only in muted form: a life in pastel tones where primary colors would be possible.
Clinically, disturbed form-giving often shows itself in that a patient tells much in terms of content, but everything sounds the same. The sentences are correct, the stories are interesting, but the affective curve is missing—the rise of tension, the pause, the release. Everything has the same weight, the same temperature, the same speed. Or conversely: someone tells of banal things, but the rhythm is alive—one senses how something rises, halts, turns. Then often less important is what is said than how it stands in the room. Vitality in this sense is also a rhythmic competence: the capacity to sense one’s own inner movement, to vary it, to attune it to the situation.
Resonance: That a Counterpart Responds
That vitality is a process becomes especially clear when one locates it not in the individual but in the space between. Winnicott developed this thought furthest. Aliveness, according to his thesis, arises in the “transitional space”—that intermediate realm between inside and outside in which experience may become provisional without being immediately fixed (Winnicott, 1971). The child playing with a transitional object is neither entirely in inner fantasy nor entirely in outer reality, but in a realm that belongs to both and entirely to neither. This realm, according to Winnicott, is “the place where we live”—the place of creativity, of play, of cultural experience. And it is the place where aliveness arises or is suffocated.
The transitional space needs a counterpart who enables it. “There is no such thing as a baby,” Winnicott writes in a famous sentence—”whenever one finds an infant one finds maternal care” (Winnicott, 1960/1965, p. 39). The subject constitutes itself in relationship, and the quality of this relationship determines whether spontaneous gesture can unfold or is suffocated. Aliveness shows itself where the spontaneous gesture may appear and an environment “receives” it, rather than punishing, ignoring, or engulfing it. This need not mean: the environment always says yes. It means: the environment responds. It is there, it reacts, it gives something back that shows the child (or the adult): your impulse has arrived. This experience—that one’s own impulse finds an echo—is the primal scene of being alive.
Michael Balint described the relational core of vitality in a particularly body-near formula: “the ability to make an unsuspicious new beginning”—that is, an object relationship not poisoned from the start by mistrust, control, or fear (Balint, 1968/1987, p. 137). This ability, according to Balint, is disturbed where the earliest relational experiences were traumatic—not necessarily in the sense of dramatic events, but in the sense of a chronic “basic fault”: a fit between child and environment that never quite succeeded. The consequence is a self that seeks relationship but can never fully engage; that needs closeness but experiences closeness as threat; that wants to be alive but books aliveness as risk.
Heinz Kohut reformulated this relational dimension in self-psychological terms: vitality arises where the self can have selfobject experiences—mirroring (someone sees me and shows me that I am valuable), idealization (someone is greater than I and lets me partake of their strength), twinship (someone is like me and does not leave me alone) (Kohut, 1971). These experiences are not luxury but constitutive: they first enable that self-cohesion from which interest, desire, aliveness can proceed. Where they are chronically lacking, the self remains fragmented, empty, or chronically shamed—and aliveness becomes impossible because there is no center from which it could proceed. The paradox is: one needs a sufficiently stable self to be able to be alive—but this self arises only in relationships that are alive enough to nourish it. The spiral can run in both directions: upward when resonance succeeds; downward when it fails.
Translation: That Raw Material Can Be Transformed into Meaning
The fourth coordinate concerns the capacity for psychic transformation. Wilfred Bion coined for this the term “alpha-function”: that psychic operation which transforms raw sense impressions and emotional experiences (“beta-elements”) into a form that can be thought, dreamed, remembered, connected (“alpha-elements”) (Bion, 1962). Without this transformation, experience remains undigested matter—it cannot be stored, worked through, communicated. It remains “thing,” not “thought”; it can only be acted out, excreted, projected, but not understood.
Clinically, a failure of alpha-function often shows itself in a paradoxical double form: either flooding or freezing. The affect is either “too much”—uncontrollable, fragmenting, threatening—or “gone”—not felt, not accessible, as if switched off. Both states are variants of the same basic problem: psychic digestion is not working. What is taken in cannot be assimilated. Bion describes a patient who “appears to be in a state close to what would ordinarily be called emotional” but in whom it turns out that her “emotional experiences remain beta-elements which are unassimilated and fit for projections” (Bion, 1962, p. 98). That means: it looks like feeling, but it is not feeling in the proper sense—it is raw material that was not processed and therefore also cannot be integrated.
Bion also coined a term for a destructive operation that is even more radical: “attacks on linking.” Here it is not about the failure of transformation but about its active destruction—about a hatred of connection itself that systematically undermines the capacity for symbolization (Bion, 1959). “What is linking is envy,” Bion writes—an envy that attacks not only the object but the relationship to the object, the capacity to think, to connect, to understand (Bion, 1959, p. 312). The result is a “severe disturbance of the impulse to curiosity on which all learning depends” (Bion, 1959, p. 314). In an essay on vitality this is central: curiosity is itself a form of libido. Where curiosity dies—where interest in understanding, connecting, discovering is killed off—a fundamental tone of the living dies.
Jean Laplanche developed a related but differently accented perspective: the psychic is from the beginning constituted by “enigmatic messages” (signifiants énigmatiques) from the other—messages that contain more than the child can understand and that therefore set in motion an ongoing work of translation (Laplanche, 1987). The unconscious arises as the remainder of this translation: that which could not be translated but continues to work. Aliveness would then be where there is still room for translation—where the foreign in the interior is experienced not only as tyrannical or mute but can be worked, transformed, converted into new meanings. Devitalization would correspondingly be where translation is blocked—where the untranslated compulsively repeats instead of transforming.
The Coupling
From these four coordinates a pragmatic working hypothesis can be derived: vitality correlates with the capacity to cathect (to bind interest and libido to something) and with the inner permission to do so. It shows itself in the modulability of affective temporal shape—in the how of experience, in rhythm and contour. It arises in the space between in relationship, where spontaneous gesture meets response rather than being ignored, punished, or engulfed. And it needs translation: the capacity to bring raw experience into form, to make it thinkable, dreamable, narratable.
These four functions are not independent of one another. They form a coupled system in which each supports or undermines the others. Whoever cannot cathect—because the self is too fragile, the inner objects too threatening—also cannot seek resonance, because relationship becomes too risky. Whoever finds no resonance cannot regulate and translate affects, because the containing function of the other is lacking. Whoever cannot translate remains stuck in raw material: either flooded or frozen, but in both cases without access to a living experience. And whoever could develop no rhythm, no modulation, remains stuck either in constant operation (pseudo-vitality) or in rigidification (armoring). The spiral can run in both directions: if one function gets going again, it can pull the others along. But also conversely: if one collapses, the others come under pressure.
Clinical Map: Forms of Disturbed Vitality
If one understands vitality as a coupled process, its loss can also be described more precisely. “Unaliveness” is rarely simply “too little energy.” Frequently it is a highly organized result: a psychic arrangement that regulates contact with something dangerous—pain, dependency, envy, desire, rage, shame—by changing the conditions of experience itself. In what follows I sketch four main forms of disturbed vitality—not as diagnoses but as dynamic patterns that can overlay various clinical pictures and that often shade into one another.
Devitalization: The World Loses Its Charge
A patient, mid-thirties, professionally successful, socially connected, describes her state with a precise metaphor: “It’s not sad. It’s as if someone had turned down the saturation. Everything is there, but in gray tones.” Things are recognizable—work, people, music, even bodily sensations—but they don’t “stick,” they don’t grip. It is as if perception were running into emptiness, as if the hook on which experience could catch were missing. Getting up in the morning is not hard in the sense of depressive heaviness, but it is also not easy in the sense of a fresh start. It is neutral. It is nothing.
Freud described this mechanism in the constellation of loss: in mourning, the world has “become poor and empty” because libido was attached to an object that is now missing (Freud, 1917/1946, p. 431). The psychic work of mourning consists in loosening the bond piece by piece and directing the freed libido to new objects. This is painful but alive—a process, not a state. Melancholia, by contrast, shows the pathology of cathexis: the loss strikes back against the self; the ego itself becomes impoverished, depleted, becomes the scene of those reproaches that actually belong to the lost object (Freud, 1917/1946). The melancholic person has not only lost something, they have lost themselves—or more precisely: they have lost themselves to the lost object and cannot retrieve themselves.
The vitality-related core of this distinction: pain is not the same as unaliveness. One can be highly alive in grief—anyone who has suffered a real loss knows the strange intensity of that time, the sharpness of perception, the depth of memory. “Empty depression,” by contrast, is frightening precisely because nothing hurts anymore, because hardly anything gets through anymore. A patient who knew both states formulated the difference this way: “When my father died, I was devastated. But I felt. Now no one has died, and I feel nothing at all. That’s worse.”
Shutdown: Aliveness Becomes Dangerous
A patient, late twenties, tells of massive boundary violations in childhood. He tells it factually, chronologically, almost like a file note. Years, places, people involved—all named correctly. While he speaks, his face is calm, almost expressionless. But when a question about the feeling at the time comes, something strange happens: the eyes become fixed, breath shallow, shoulders rise. He is still in the room, but he is no longer “there.” Later he says: “I know that was bad. But when I think about it, there’s nothing. Like a film someone else watched.”
This is not devitalization through libido withdrawal but something else: shutdown. The nervous system has learned to neither fight nor flee in danger, but to freeze—a phylogenetically old reaction that makes prey appear “dead” to escape the predator. In psychological terms: aliveness—as affective movement, as spontaneous impulse—has become a risk in this system. The psyche has learned: living impulse finds no holding other; on the contrary, it provokes intrusion, punishment, abandonment. So impulse must be removed from the system.
Ferenczi described this dynamic as “identification with the aggressor”: the child, overwhelmed by an adult whose power it cannot question and on whose love it depends, gives up its own perspective and takes over that of the perpetrator (Ferenczi, 1933/1984). It becomes obedient, over-adapted, “reasonable”—a little adult whose childlike aliveness has gone underground. Accordingly, “revival” here is not primarily interpretation, not insight, not cognitive restructuring, but the gradual experience that affect can be held and translated without the relationship breaking. Progress often shows itself initially paradoxically: the patient becomes more conflictual, “more difficult,” angrier—which in truth means that the shutdown reflex is loosening and living impulse can be risked again.
Substitute Vitality: Intensity Instead of Aliveness
The third constellation is the most seductive—also for therapists, because it looks like life. A patient comes to every session with new stories: the latest date, the next project, the fight with the friend, the spontaneous weekend trip. Her life seems eventful, exciting, “alive” in the superficial sense of the word. She laughs a lot, gesticulates a lot, talks fast. And yet the session has a paradoxical undertone: one is swept along but not touched. As soon as it could become quiet, the patient moves on—new topic, new twist, new drama. Afterward little remains, neither with her nor with the therapist.
This is substitute vitality: intensity as protection against experience. The body is kept under current so that no vacuum arises. The rhythm is not modulated but like in a narrow tunnel: only fast, only forward, no pausing, no fading. Jacques Lacan would speak here of jouissance—an enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle that does not liberate but binds; that does not make alive but fixates (Lacan, 1966/1973). Jouissance is excitation that does not transform but repeats; that produces no meaning but avoids it. It keeps the subject “under current” but not in motion. Christopher Bollas coined for a variant of this constellation the term “normotic”: people who are “abnormally normal”—perfectly adapted, action-oriented, materialistic, but without inner subjectivity (Bollas, 1987). They are not ill in the usual sense, but they are also not alive in the sense of a resonant, open, seeking existence.
The decisive distinction: vitality is modulation, not level. A person can be very quietly alive—in a still attentiveness, a tender glance, a thoughtful hesitation. And someone can be very loudly dead—in a restlessness that wards off precisely what constitutes aliveness: the possibility of pausing, of sensing, of letting oneself be touched by something.
The Functioning Self: Mechanical Aliveness
The fourth form is the subtlest and perhaps the most common. It is not dramatic, not depressive, not manic. It is functional. A patient, early forties, comes because of nonspecific complaints: sleep problems, diffuse irritability, a feeling of “somehow not really being there.” In conversation he appears friendly, reflective, cooperative. He tells of his work, his relationships, his plans—all plausible, appropriate, without obvious pathology. And yet: something in the room is like behind glass. The words are right, but they seem rehearsed. The smile is correct, but it doesn’t reach the eyes. One has the feeling of speaking with someone who knows very precisely how to conduct a conversation—but doesn’t know whether he himself occurs in it.
This is Winnicott’s False Self in its socially adapted variant: not “falseness” in the moral sense, but a self-organization that has perfected compliance where spontaneous impulse was dangerous (Winnicott, 1960/1965). The False Self can be highly competent, professionally successful, socially adept. But it empties life because it separates the person from their own experience. It is as if someone were permanently acting in a film they didn’t choose, whose script they know very well, but whose role never becomes them. The patient formulates it thus: “I do the right things, say the right sentences, reach the right goals. But if you ask me who is actually living there—I have no idea.”
The litmus test is play. Where no play space arises—that space between in which inside and outside meet provisionally, in which something may be without having to be final—experience remains either too risky (then it is controlled) or too meaningless (then everything is indifferent). Therapy with such patients is often irritatingly pleasant: no crises, no resistances, much capacity for reflection. And yet nothing happens—or what happens remains without consequences. The sessions “run” but do not “live.” The risk for the therapist is to fall into a complementary position: to become oneself the functioning counterpart who plays the role rather than opening the space for something unplanned.
Transitions
These four forms are not pigeonholes but poles of a field between which many people move. A patient can be depressively depleted and then suddenly flee into activism; traumatic shutdown can be “overplayed” through risky intensity; False-Self organizations can tip into empty depressions when the outer machinery no longer sustains. What remains is a clinical working hypothesis: loss of vitality has structure. It is not simply “lack” but an organized form of defense that has its history and wants to be understood before it can change.
Conditions for Revival
What can therapy do? The first answer must be: it cannot make aliveness. Aliveness is not a technique that can be administered. It is not a state that can be produced by sufficiently skillful intervention. Yet therapy can do something decisive: it can create conditions under which aliveness becomes more likely. It can create a space in which the old survival logics can be loosened—not through force, not through exhortation, but through a new relational experience that makes the old solutions less necessary.
Creating a Field
Thomas Ogden developed a concept for this that is worth taking up: the concepts of “aliveness” and “deadness” as qualities of the analytic field (Ogden, 1995). Aliveness here is not a property of the patient and not a property of the analyst, but a characteristic of the “third”—of that intersubjective space that forms between them. A session can be “alive” even when grief, despair, rage are being discussed—if something moves in the space, if there is a direction, if something arises that was not there before. And a session can be “dead” even when there is much talk, much reflection, much understanding—if nothing stirs in the between.
The diagnostic value of this concept: the therapist can use their own inner movement as a seismograph. Where one notices that it becomes “tight,” that one begins to merely administer, that one waits for the end of the session—something is probably being enacted in the field that belongs to the topic. Perhaps the patient brings their deadness and places it in the space. Perhaps the therapist has taken over the patient’s old object and become mute, distant, absent. Perhaps both have fallen into a collusion of functioning-as-if: everything runs, nothing happens. These moments are not failures but material. They can be named, thought about, brought into motion—and thereby become part of the therapy instead of sabotaging it.
Holding the Deadness
A first operation—perhaps the most important—sounds paradoxical: holding the deadness instead of repairing it. Many patients have had the experience that their inner emptiness is unbearable for others. Parents turned away when it became difficult; partners fled when the performance dropped; the social environment demanded positivity. In other words, the patient learned: my emptiness drives the others away. Therefore I must hide it, play something, simulate.
Therapy that wants to “repair” the emptiness too quickly repeats this dynamic. It implicitly says: You are only acceptable when alive. What is needed instead is a space in which the not-feeling may be—without immediately having to change. Bion writes of the necessity of “tolerating frustration” and the unknown; Winnicott speaks of “going-on-being”—that simple, unspectacular further-existence that does not require permanent confirmation (Bion, 1962; Winnicott, 1960/1965). A patient who has long struggled with inner deadness once formulated it this way: “The most important thing was that you didn’t become nervous. That you didn’t always want something from me. That I could simply sit here and be nothing.”
Resonance, Not Animation
A second operation concerns the form of response. What helps is not the attempt to “draw out” the patient—more engagement, more questions, more stimulation. What helps is a response that meets the patient where they actually are. Winnicott’s concept of the “spontaneous gesture” is central here: the living becomes living when it is received—not applauded, not corrected, not engulfed, but simply: received (Winnicott, 1960/1965). “It is the creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living” (Winnicott, 1971, p. 65).
Clinically, this often shows itself in unspectacular moments. A patient says something haltingly, barely formed—and the therapist responds not with interpretation but with a small nodding, a “mhm,” an attentive silence. The patient looks up, senses that something has arrived, and continues speaking—now a bit freer. What happened? No insight was produced, no resistance analyzed, no intervention performed. But a spontaneous gesture was received. And that—if it happens often enough—can gradually rebuild the bridge between impulse and expression that was once severed.
Enabling Translation, Not Explanation
A third operation concerns what Bion calls “alpha-function”: the transformation of raw experience into thinkable, dreamable, narratable form (Bion, 1962). Some patients can describe precisely what happened in their lives, but the description remains “undigested.” The words are there, but they have not yet become experience. Translation means: helping someone to truly feel what they already know. That can occur through simple naming—sometimes a single word at the right moment is more vitalizing than a brilliant genetic interpretation. “That hurt you,” said in the right tone, at the right moment, can be the beginning of something new.
But translation also means: creating a space in which what was previously unspeakable may gradually find language. A patient who knows nothing about her anger must first be able to feel it—in the body, in the room, in the relationship. Only then can language come. If the interpretation comes too early, it becomes information rather than experience. If the space is missing, what is experienced cannot be held and symbolized. The therapist becomes a kind of temporary alpha-function who receives raw material, holds it, and hands it back in digestible form—until the patient can increasingly perform this operation themselves.
Not Forgetting the Body
A fourth operation concerns the body. Many devitalized patients describe their body as “foreign,” “distant,” “like a machine.” Reich’s “character armor” is not a metaphor but somatic reality: chronic tensions, shallow breath, held posture (Reich, 1933/1945). Whoever wants to work with aliveness cannot do so only “from the neck up.” Sometimes the crucial question is not what the patient thinks but how they breathe. Is there room for the diaphragm? Can the shoulders drop? What happens when there is a pause in speaking?
This need not mean applying body therapy techniques. Often simply gentle attention to the body—inviting to breathe, naming a visible tension, noticing together what changes in the body when a particular topic comes up—is sufficient. The body is the place where experience first becomes experience. Whoever is cut off from the body is also cut off from the current of aliveness.
Respecting Desire, Not Filling the Lack
A fifth operation concerns the handling of desire. Lacan emphasized that desire is always structured around a void—around an “objet petit a” that can never be fully attained because its function lies precisely in remaining absent (Lacan, 1966/1973). Desire lives from what is missing. Whoever fills the lack kills desire—and thereby a central source of vitality. This has consequences for therapy: the temptation to “give” the patient what they lack—validation, closeness, answers, solutions—can rob them of something more important: the space in which their own desire can unfold.
In practice, this means: sometimes the best thing a therapist can do is not answer. Not because they are withholding something, but because they are preserving something: the room for the patient to sense what they want, what they are looking for, what they are missing. A patient accustomed to functioning—to asking what the other wants and delivering it—must first be allowed to experience the irritation of not receiving a clear answer. And in that irritation, perhaps, something can emerge that belongs to them.
No Vitality Imperative
A final point, which may be the most important: vitality is not a moral imperative. There is no commandment that says one must be alive. People have the right to their fatigue, to their withdrawal, to their boredom—as long as these can be experienced and symbolized. What is pathological is not the dark but the not-experiencing. The goal of therapy is not a permanently activated subject that is always “in the flow,” but a person who can be present in their experience—including in gray, heavy, empty experiences. Aliveness is also the capacity to hold the not-alive. To feel that one feels nothing. To know that one doesn’t know. To mourn what one cannot mourn.
This guards against a temptation inherent in much wellness discourse: to make aliveness a performance criterion, a self-optimization project, a new superego commandment. “You must be alive!” is, perversely, one of the most reliable ways to kill aliveness. Whoever has to be alive is no longer allowed to just be. Therapy that understands this allows its patients to be unalive as well—precisely so that, perhaps, in the shelter of this permission, something can begin to stir again.
Conclusion: An Ethics of Vitality
The question of aliveness is ultimately an ethical question. Not in the sense that one could decide whether to be alive—that is largely not in our hands. But in the sense that one can decide how to treat the conditions of aliveness: in oneself, in others, in the structures in which one lives and works.
The psychoanalytic perspective makes one thing visible: vitality is not an achievement that one could demand from oneself or others. It is a capacity that arises—or fails to arise—in relationship, in the space between inside and outside, self and other, impulse and response. Who or what is to blame when it fails to arise? No one, mostly. Early conditions were as they were; the psyche did what it could; the armor was necessary. The question is not: Who is guilty? but: What creates conditions under which aliveness becomes more likely?
Here lies the clinical but also the political relevance of the topic. Whoever understands that vitality needs cathexis—that something must be allowed to become important—also understands what threatens it: environments that devalue attachment, that ridicule interest, that punish vulnerability. Whoever understands that vitality needs resonance—that spontaneous gesture must find a counterpart—also understands what kills it: isolation, competition as total principle, a culture of permanent self-optimization in which the question “Who do I actually want to be?” has no place. Whoever understands that vitality needs translation—that experience must pass into form—also understands what destroys it: the flood of stimuli that allows no more pausing, the economy of attention that needs ever-faster takes, the systemic overload that makes precisely that space disappear in which something could become thinkable.
At the end stands no recipe. Aliveness cannot be made. But one can recognize what kills it. And one can create spaces—in therapy, in relationships, in work, in life—that do not systematically destroy the conditions of aliveness. That alone would be much.
Perhaps the most sober definition of vitality is this: alive is whoever can still translate. Affect into meaning. Closeness into relationship. Excitation into form. Translation is never complete—something always remains untranslatable, enigmatic, foreign. But as long as translation continues, life continues. And maybe that is enough.
References
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Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock.
Fictional Debate
/topic/ Nine at the Table
/scene/ A Sunday morning at the end of October. Mira’s apartment on the third floor of an old building in Neukölln, high ceilings, creaking parquet, windows facing southeast. The light has that quality it only has in autumn: golden, but already with a pull toward the cool, as if it no longer quite trusts itself. On the table, which is really too small for nine people, stand cups, plates, a cafetière, croissants in a paper bag, butter, three kinds of jam. A candle burns, even though it’s bright enough. Mira lit it because she likes candles, because the small scent of wax and flame belongs to Sundays for her. The nine who meet here have known each other for years—some since school, some from university, some through others in the group. They see each other once a month, sometimes more often. There is nothing special about this gathering. And perhaps that is precisely why what each makes of it is interesting.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): Come in, come in. You can keep your shoes on, the floor is ruined anyway. — Jonas, you look like you’ve already had three meetings. Sit down. Coffee’s ready, I made the big pot specially.
/same/ The croissants are from that new place on Weserstraße, you know, the one with the light blue tiles and the prices that make you briefly consider just buying toast instead. But I thought, it’s Sunday, we’re seeing each other, so the absurd croissants are allowed. Besides, they’re really good. I tried one this morning when I came back. Still warm. The guy behind the counter gave me a smile, just like that, and I thought: Okay, the day is starting well.
/note/ Mira sets the pot on the table, pushes cups into place, makes room for Samuel, who is wrestling with his coat. She moves through her apartment like someone who knows exactly where everything is, who has a history with the things here. She bought the cups years ago at a flea market in Marseille, six of them, all different, none matching another. She likes that. She likes that things don’t have to match to work together.
/note/ Inside her this morning is something like warmth. Not excitement, not euphoria, more a quiet hum that says: This is good. These people, this table, this light. When she went to get the croissants earlier, in her pajamas under her coat, the street still almost empty, she noticed how the light fell through the chestnuts. Gold on the sidewalk, leaves that couldn’t decide in the wind whether they wanted to fall or not yet. She thought: This is beautiful. Not as a judgment, not as an Instagram moment, but as a small inner lighting-up, a tiny shift that says: I am here, and this is real. It is this difference that is hard to explain—the difference between a scene that one sees and a scene that concerns one. Mira is seen by this morning. It means her. And she means it back.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): Let me help you with that pot. It’s heavy when it’s full. — Thank you. Sit down, I’ll do it. Who wants coffee?
/note/ Samuel pours, slowly, with the concentration of someone who likes to do things right. His hands are large, the fingernails trimmed short, a few calluses from work. He has been a carpenter for over thirty years, and his hands know things his head has long forgotten. How to hold a board so it doesn’t splinter. How to dose force so that precision becomes possible. How to pour coffee without spilling.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): I’ll gladly take the croissants. Helga would have liked that, a shop like this. She always said: You don’t skimp on pastries. On bread you can, that doesn’t taste good the next day anyway. But pastries you eat right away, they have to be worth it. — She would also have said that eleven euros for six croissants is madness. But she would have taken them anyway.
/note/ He says her name, and something in him briefly contracts. No longer that tear that was there at the beginning, that feeling as if someone had opened his chest with a blunt blade. Now it is more a pressure, a condensation, that comes and goes. Helga has been dead for a year. Cancer, much too fast, three months between diagnosis and end. He watched her die, held her hand as her breath became shallower, and at some point she simply wasn’t there anymore. The body still, but not her.
/note/ The strange thing is: He had expected the world to become gray afterward. He had heard stories of people who after loss taste nothing, feel nothing, for whom everything loses color. But that’s not how it is. The world has not become gray, it has become heavier. As if someone had increased the gravity. Everything has more weight—the grief, yes, but also the coffee, the croissant, the light through Mira’s window. When Helga was still alive, he often saw these Sunday breakfasts as a pleasant routine, nice but nothing special. Now they are special. Everything is special, because everything is finite, because he now knows how quickly someone can no longer be there.
/note/ He bites into the croissant, and it tastes of butter and of Sunday and a little of loss. The taste is not pure, not simple. It is interwoven. But it is there. Samuel can still taste. He can still feel. The grief has not emptied him, it has torn him open, and through the tear more comes in now, not less. Sometimes he thinks that was Helga’s last gift: that because he misses her so much, he now feels so much more.
Ayla (student, 23): Samuel, the thing with Helga… I think about her sometimes. She said something to me once that stuck. I was, I don’t know, nineteen, and I didn’t know what to study, and everyone was driving me crazy with their advice. Do something safe. Do what you love. Do both. Listen to your gut. Be sensible. I couldn’t feel anything anymore from all the advice.
/same/ And then I was sitting here, at this table, and Helga asked what I wanted, and I said: I don’t know. And she laughed, not laughed at, but a warm laugh, and said: “You don’t have to know that. Sometimes the right thing finds you when you stop looking for it.”
/same/ I have no idea if that’s true. It’s probably also just advice. But it felt different. As if it were okay not to know. As if not-knowing could also be a position, not just a lack.
/note/ Ayla sits with her legs drawn up on the chair, knees under her chin, a posture she has had since school and that her mother always says makes her look like a curled-up hedgehog. She is now studying cultural studies, in her fifth semester, and she still doesn’t know what she wants to do with it. But that no longer feels like a problem. It feels like a room that isn’t yet furnished. Empty, yes. But not threateningly empty. Rather: open.
/note/ Inside her this morning is a kind of tingling, not nervousness, more alertness. She talked for a long time with her roommate last night, about relationships, about the future, about the question of whether you can plan your life or whether that’s an illusion anyway. They came to no conclusion, but the conversation was good. It moved something. And now, here at the table, with the autumn light and the coffee and Samuel’s croissant story, she still feels this movement. As if something in her were searching, without yet knowing what for. But the searching itself feels alive. It is not a vacuum, not a hole. It is a direction that doesn’t yet have an address.
/note/ She looks at Samuel, who is biting into his croissant, and thinks about what it must be like to lose someone you have loved for so long. She has never had such a love, never such a loss. But she can imagine that it hurts. What she can less imagine: that you then still sit here, still eat croissants, still speak of the dead woman as if she were just in the next room. Samuel does that. He carries Helga with him, not like a burden, but like something that belongs to him. Ayla finds this beautiful and sad and somehow encouraging. As if there were a way to grieve that doesn’t extinguish you.
Jonas (management consultant, 38): Nice story, Ayla. Helga was really special. — Samuel, how are you actually? I mean really. We always ask that, and then you say “fine” or “okay,” and then it’s over. But how are you really?
/note/ Jonas asked the question, and it sounded right. Empathetic. Attentive. He even made a small pause before he said “really,” so it wouldn’t sound like a platitude. He knows how to construct such moments. He learned it, not consciously, not at a seminar, but through observation, through adaptation, through the constant monitoring of what others expect of him. Jonas is very good at being whoever the situation demands. Friendly when friendliness is called for. Charming when it’s about charm. Thoughtful when someone needs thoughtfulness.
/note/ The problem is just: He doesn’t know who he is when no one is asking anything of him. No, that’s not quite right. It’s not that he doesn’t know—it’s that the question doesn’t make sense. Who is one “really”? That’s a question for people who have time for such questions. Jonas doesn’t have time. He has projects, deadlines, a calendar that looks like a Tetris game in its final stage. He has functions, roles, expectations. Between them there isn’t much space.
/note/ He sits here now, at the table, coffee cup in hand, and listens to Samuel, who is beginning to answer. Samuel’s voice is calm, a bit rough, the voice of someone who has thought a lot and doesn’t need to speak quickly. Jonas listens, nods at the right places, makes a sympathetic face. And while he does this, he notices how familiar all this is, this playing-at-listening, this participating-in-conversation without really being in it. It is as if he were sitting in a car that someone else is driving. He sees the landscape passing by, he knows where it’s going, but he doesn’t have his hands on the wheel. He actually never has his hands on the wheel. He doesn’t even know where the wheel is.
/note/ Sometimes, in rare moments, something breaks through. An irritation, a restlessness, a diffuse feeling that something isn’t right. But then it’s quickly gone again. The next task, the next appointment, the next role. Jonas is a master at not encountering himself. Not from fear—he has no fear, there is nothing threatening in there, nothing monstrous. It is more as if there were simply no one there. An empty office in which the light is on and the computer is running, but no one is sitting at the desk. Sometimes he wonders if others experience it this way too. Probably, he thinks. Probably everyone is just pretending there’s someone there. Maybe that’s being an adult: pretending there’s someone there.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): How am I? — Honestly, Jonas, I don’t always know. Some days are hard. I wake up and the bed is too big. That sounds banal, but it’s so concrete, this being-too-big. Forty years someone lay next to me, and now there’s space, and the space is wrong.
/same/ But then I get up, and I make myself a coffee, and I go to the workshop, and I work. And in working it’s better. Not good, but better. The hands know what to do. The wood responds when you approach it right. And in the evening I’m tired, really tired, and then I can sleep.
/same/ I think the worst would be if I didn’t feel anything anymore. If the grief just stopped and nothing came after. That would be as if Helga had never existed. The grief is the proof that she was there. So I let it be there.
/note/ While Samuel speaks, the table has become quiet. Not awkwardly quiet, but attentive. Mira has stopped fussing with the coffee pot. Ayla has put down her croissant. Even Tarek, who just came in and is still putting his backpack in the corner, pauses briefly. These are the moments when a conversation suddenly goes deeper than expected, when someone says something real and everyone else briefly holds their breath because they sense that this here is important.
Carla (physician, 41): That’s… beautiful, Samuel. That you can say it like that.
/note/ Carla said the sentence, and it sounded thin. She doesn’t know why. The words were right, she believes. Beautiful. That you can say it like that. That’s what you say at such moments. But in her, while she said it, there was almost nothing. A small twitch, a recognition that something important is happening here, but then immediately again this dullness, this layer of cotton wool that lies between her and the world.
/note/ She takes a sip of coffee. It is hot, bitter, the kind Mira always buys, some Fair Trade thing from Guatemala. She used to like it. Now she tastes it, registers it, but it triggers nothing. It is information, not experience. Hot. Bitter. Coffee. The words in her head sound like labels in a catalog.
/note/ Carla has often wondered when it started. There was no clear beginning, no trigger she could name. No trauma, no loss, no crisis. More a slow fading, like a photo lying too long in the sun. At some point she noticed that weekends felt like weekdays. That vacation felt like work, just somewhere else. That people she liked no longer reached her, not because they had changed, but because she herself had somehow moved further away.
/note/ Now she sits here, at the table, and looks at Samuel, who just told about his wife, about his grief, about his pain. And she thinks: That is sad. That is touching. That’s how I should feel. But she doesn’t feel it, she only thinks it. Like someone watching a film and knowing the scene is supposed to be moving, and hearing the music and seeing the faces, but remaining inwardly uninvolved. She sometimes has the feeling that her life is a film she didn’t choose herself, and that she’s sitting in the wrong cinema, and that outside, at the door, her real life is waiting, if she only knew how to stand up.
/note/ She wouldn’t know how to explain this. To no one here, not even to herself. It’s not that she is unhappy. Unhappiness would at least be something. It’s more that the category doesn’t apply. Happy, unhappy—that presupposes that there is something that can be evaluated. With her there is mainly emptiness. Not threatening emptiness, not painful emptiness. Simply: little. Like a room where furniture used to stand, and now it doesn’t stand there anymore, and you don’t know when it was taken away, and you almost don’t care.
Tarek (photographer, 29): Sorry again for being late! — Oh, Samuel, I only caught the end, but that sounded… yeah. Strong. That you can talk about it like that. — I also took a year off after… well, whatever. Different. Different story.
/same/ Anyway, Lisbon was insane. Three days, but packed. I must have taken two thousand photos. The light there, people, that’s not normal. This Atlantic light, it has such clarity, and at the same time it’s soft, and in the evening, when the sun goes down over the Tejo, everything turns pink and gold and you think, that can’t be real, that’s a filter, but it’s real.
/same/ And the people! They’re so relaxed there. They sit for hours in these little bars, drink their Ginjinha, this cherry liqueur, and talk. Just talk. I tried to photograph that, this slowness, but it’s hard, because as soon as you take out the camera, something changes. So I just watched a lot. Well, okay, and drank Ginjinha.
/note/ Tarek laughs, and his laugh is infectious, quick, a laugh that wants to move on. He has dropped onto the free chair, thrown his backpack in the corner, slid his legs under the table. He immediately takes up space, not aggressively, but as a matter of course. He is someone who enters a room and changes it.
/note/ While he tells about Lisbon, his hands fly through the air, trace the light, suggest streets, form the image of a sunset. He is good at telling, he makes things come alive, he takes you along. Ayla listens fascinated, Martin nods appreciatively, even Carla looks up, briefly, before her gaze slides back into the vague.
/note/ What no one sees, because Tarek himself doesn’t really see it: that the telling is also a flight. Not from something concrete, not from a specific pain. More from the silence. On the plane, somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, when he couldn’t sleep, it was briefly there, this silence. This gap that opens when nothing is happening. He lay there, headphones in his ears, but no music, and suddenly it was as if the ground were dropping away. Not exactly fear, not panic, more a deep unease, a feeling as if under all the projects and trips and stories there were nothing at all.
/note/ He then took out his phone and scrolled Instagram for three hours. Other people, other photos, other lives. It helped. It always helps. The gap disappears when you fill it quickly enough with impressions. And Tarek is fast. He is very fast. He no longer knows when he stopped being slow. Maybe he was never slow. Maybe he was born this way, with this motor that always runs. Maybe he also just got used to this motor very early, because slowness was at some point dangerous. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember much. The past is for him like a country where he once was and from which he moved away, without a return ticket.
Martin (social worker, 45): Tarek, you make me tired, just listening to you. In a good way. I mean in an envious way. — I was so wiped out this week, I probably would have slept through the flight to Lisbon.
/same/ It was one of those weeks. A teenager, sixteen, whom I’ve been supporting for two years, crashed again. Drugs, harder ones this time. I visited him in the hospital on Thursday. He could barely speak, but he took my hand and held it, and in that moment I thought: This is so damn hard, and I have no idea if anything helps, and yet I would do it again.
/note/ Martin leans back, rubs his eyes. He looks tired, not exhausted-tired, more lived-through-tired. Lines around the eyes that come not from age but from much looking. Gray streaks in his beard that he doesn’t dye because he doesn’t care whether he looks older. He has more important things to do than worry about his appearance.
Martin (social worker, 45): The croissant is good. Mira, you’re right, you don’t skimp on pastries. — I need this today. This sitting, this doing nothing. I notice how my body is getting slower. I was on adrenaline all week, and now the crash comes, but a good crash. A landing.
/note/ Martin takes a bite, chews slowly, briefly closes his eyes. He tastes the butter, the salt, the sweetness that mingle. He feels how his body becomes heavy, how the tension releases, not completely, never completely, but a little. The week was hard, the weeks are often hard. He works with teenagers no one wants, who have fallen through all the grids, who are sometimes dangerous, to others and to themselves. He has learned that you can’t save everyone. He has learned that some die despite everything you do. He has not learned how to deal with it. He just does it. Every day anew.
/note/ The strange thing is: He feels alive. Not despite the heaviness, but somehow with it. The tiredness is real, it belongs to him, it is the price for something he does and that he means. On Thursday, in the hospital, when that boy took his hand, there was a moment of such intensity that Martin almost cried. Not just from sadness, also from a kind of beauty that is hard to explain. That a person who almost died takes his hand. That this gesture exists, this holding-each-other over the abyss. That is terrible and wonderful at the same time. That is what he does the job for.
/note/ He looks around. Samuel, who told about Helga. Tarek, who told about Lisbon. Ayla, who somehow seems searching, but in a good way. Jonas, who says the right things and somehow isn’t quite there anyway. Carla, who sits quietly and looks into her coffee. Lena, who hasn’t spoken yet, but whose gaze registers everything. Noemi, who is just coming in, hair still wet, apparently straight from the shower. And Mira, who holds all this together, simply by being there and getting croissants and lighting candles. He likes these people. He likes that they are different. He likes that at this table there is room for grief and for Lisbon and for tiredness and for silence.
/scene/ Now Lena and Noemi arrive.
Noemi (musician, 31): Sorry, I know I’m late. I was still in the shower when I remembered today is Sunday. — Is there still coffee? I’m not quite awake yet. I mean, my body is awake, my head is still debating.
/note/ Noemi drops onto the last free chair, between Martin and Lena, and her wet hair leaves a dark spot on her jacket. She wears an old band shirt she has probably had for ten years, and rings on almost every finger—silver, thin, some with small stones. She looks like someone who doesn’t spend much time in front of the mirror but still has a style that works.
Noemi (musician, 31): I talked to my sister on the phone yesterday. Two hours. We yelled at each other. I mean, not the whole time, but enough. It was about our mother, about Christmas, about who takes care of what and who always gets out of it. The usual stuff. But at some point I noticed that I wasn’t angry at her anymore, but at… I don’t know. At the situation. At the fact that we keep rehashing this and never get anywhere.
/same/ And then, when we hung up, I played piano for an hour. Just improvised, with no goal. And at some point the anger was no longer anger, but music. That sounds cheesy, I know. But that’s how it was. As if the playing had translated the anger into something else. Not gone, but different. More bearable.
/note/ Noemi reaches for a croissant, tears off a piece, chews. In her the anger is still there, but like an echo, no longer like a scream. She knows this, this feeling that emotions pass through her like weather—sometimes stormy, sometimes still, but always in motion. As a child this often overwhelmed her. She was “too much,” the adults said. Too loud, too intense, too dramatic. It took her years to understand that this isn’t true. That she is not too much, but that others sometimes can’t take enough.
/note/ The piano helped her with this. Not as therapy, not as a vent in the simple sense, but as a language. Some things cannot be said, but can be played. The anger of last night found a form on the keys, a contour, a beginning and an end. This morning, when she woke up, she was still annoyed at her sister, but it was a clean annoyance, an annoyance that knows what it’s about. Not this diffuse simmering that eats you from inside.
/note/ She looks around, sees Samuel’s calm face, Tarek’s restless energy, Carla’s absent gaze, Jonas’s perfect smile. And she thinks: How strange that we all sit here, all eating the same croissants, all drinking the same coffee, and yet living in such different worlds. For her the world this morning is colorful, a bit exhausting, but colorful. She wonders what it’s like for the others. Whether it’s so colorful for everyone. Or whether some live in gray and don’t tell anyone.
Lena (teacher, 36): Noemi, that thing with the piano… I understand that. I mean, not the piano, I can’t play an instrument. But the translating. That you process something by bringing it into another form.
/note/ Lena has spoken, and her own voice sounds strange to her. Too thin, too quiet. She rarely speaks in this group, prefers to listen, observe. It’s not exactly shyness—she can speak when she has to, in front of the class for example, there she functions flawlessly. It’s more a kind of holding back that sits deeper. As if speaking were a risk one only takes when it’s really worth it.
Lena (teacher, 36): For me it’s writing. I used to write in a diary, every day. Then I stopped, I don’t know why. Maybe because I no longer knew what to write. Or because it felt pointless, words on paper that no one reads.
/same/ But sometimes I miss it. That feeling of letting something out and it taking form. That it’s not just swirling around inside anymore.
/note/ While she speaks, Lena feels something in her contract. It is this feeling she has known for as long as she can remember: Don’t say too much. Don’t show too much. Don’t be too much. She doesn’t know where it comes from. There is no dramatic story, no obvious trauma she could tell. Her childhood was okay, her parents were okay, everything was okay. And yet at some point she learned that it is safer to stay small. That attention is dangerous. That it is better to remain invisible.
/note/ The problem is: She no longer knows whether she wants to be invisible or whether she just is. The boundary has blurred at some point. Sometimes she sits in conversations like this one and has the feeling of being behind a glass wall. She sees the others, hears them, even understands what they say. But she is not with them in the room. She is beside, behind, somewhere nearby, but not really there.
/note/ The strange thing is: It doesn’t even feel bad. It feels safe. This not-quite-being-there is like a protective suit she put on at some point and never took off again. She no longer knows how to take it off. She no longer knows what it feels like to be without it. Maybe she never knew.
/note/ She looks at her hands, which are clamped around the coffee cup. Her fingers are white at the knuckles, too tight, too cramped. She loosens the grip, consciously, deliberately. It doesn’t help. The tension is not in the hands, it is further inside, somewhere you can’t reach with mere willing.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): Lena, you should start writing again. I mean it. — I used to think diary writing was teenager stuff too. But then I started again two years ago, and it changed something. Not dramatically. More like a… unloading. As if you were putting down your backpack in the evening.
/note/ Mira looks at Lena, and in her gaze there is no demand, only an offer. She has known Lena for years, she knows she is quiet, that she rarely says much. Earlier Mira thought Lena was simply introverted, one of those people who prefer listening to talking. But lately she has noticed that Lena’s silence sometimes has a different quality. Not the silence of someone who is thinking. More the silence of someone who is hiding.
Lena (teacher, 36): Maybe you’re right. I always say I don’t have time. But that’s probably an excuse. You have time for what you take time for.
/note/ She says the sentence, and it sounds like a resolution, like something you say and then don’t do. She knows this while she says it. It’s not exactly a lie, it’s more… an attempt. A small attempt to stand at the edge of the protective suit and look out. Whether she will jump, she doesn’t know. Probably not. But that she stands here, that she even thinks about it, that she says this sentence—that is already more than usual.
Jonas (management consultant, 38): That’s true, Lena. Time is a question of priorities. I always tell my teams that: If something is important, you find time. If you don’t find time, it isn’t important enough.
/note/ The sentence comes automatically, a reflex from a thousand meetings. Jonas hears himself talk and thinks: That sounds good. Convincing. The successful man saying wise things about time management. He has said such sentences a thousand times, in presentations, in employee conversations, in podcasts. They always sound right. They are right too, somehow. But while he says them, he feels this small distance that is always there—the distance between what he says and what he is. Or what he would be, if there were someone there.
/note/ He briefly wonders whether he believes what he just said. Whether he finds time for the things that matter to him. But the question dissolves before he can think it through. What matters to him? The question has no ground. It falls into emptiness. He takes a sip of coffee and smiles, because smiling is what you do when you’ve just said a clever sentence.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): I don’t know, Jonas. I think sometimes you don’t find time for the important things precisely because they’re too close. Too big. You need distance to see them. And when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t see anything.
/same/ When Helga got sick, I kept working. Every day in the workshop, even though I wanted to be with her. I told myself I need the money, I need the distraction, I need the routine. But really I just couldn’t. Couldn’t sit with her and watch her get weaker. The workshop was my hiding place.
/same/ Now that she’s gone, I understand it. But back then I rationalized it to myself. Priorities, yes. The important things. Sometimes the important things are exactly the ones you run away from.
/note/ Samuel’s voice has become quiet, not exactly sad, more thoughtful. He has never talked to anyone about it, about the guilt that he was in the workshop while Helga lay in the clinic. That he often came late, that he worked himself tired so that in the evening he could fall asleep immediately, without thinking. It was his way of dealing with the unbearable. Now, in hindsight, he sees it more clearly. Not as failure, but as… limitation. As what he could and couldn’t do back then.
/note/ He looks at Jonas, who is still wearing that smooth smile, and wonders whether Jonas understands what he just said. Whether it got through. Or whether it bounced off this surface that Jonas carries in front of him like a shield. Samuel knows such shields. He had one himself, for a long time. Wood instead of glass, work instead of smile, but a shield all the same. Sometimes you recognize your own defense mechanisms better in others.
Ayla (student, 23): Samuel, that’s… I don’t know what to say. But I think that was brave. To tell that.
/note/ Ayla looks at him, and in her gaze is a mixture of respect and confusion. She doesn’t know this, this running away from the important. With her it’s more the opposite: She is afraid that there is nothing important at all. That she searches and searches and finds nothing big enough to run away from. Sometimes she envies people who know what they want, even if what they want is painful. At least they have a direction.
Ayla (student, 23): I sometimes wonder if I can even do that. Love like that, I mean. So that it hurts when it’s over. I’ve had relationships, sure, but none of them felt like that. More like… practice. Like trial runs for something that comes later.
/same/ Is that bad? Is it bad if you don’t know how to do that at twenty-three?
/note/ The question is real, not a rhetorical trick. Ayla really wonders. She has friends who have been in steady relationships for years, who talk about weddings and children and shared apartments. And she has friends who talk about Tinder dates as if it were a sport. She herself is somewhere in between, not fixed, not searching, more waiting for something she can’t yet describe.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): Bad? No. At twenty-three I didn’t know how to do it either. I only met Helga at twenty-seven. Before that I was… I don’t know. On the move. Not as on-the-move as Tarek, not so many countries, but internally on the move. Uncertain. Searching.
/same/ And when I met her, I didn’t know right away either. It came slowly. It grew. Love is not when it knocks you over. Love is when you notice you can no longer imagine waking up without the other person.
/note/ Tarek listens, and something in him twitches. Waking up without someone. He knows this. He knows it so well that he no longer thinks about it. He always wakes up alone, in changing beds, in changing cities, in changing time zones. It has become normal. It is his normal. But when Samuel talks about it like this, this waking up next to someone, this matter-of-factness that lasts decades—then there is briefly something. A small tugging. He doesn’t know for what. He doesn’t want to know either. He pushes it away before it can take root.
Tarek (photographer, 29): For me it’s different, I think. I’ve tried that, the sedentary thing. Wasn’t really my thing. I need the movement. New places, new faces, new stories. Otherwise I get restless.
/same/ But I get it, Samuel. For you the arriving thing works. For me it doesn’t. Just a different mode, I guess.
/note/ The sentence sounds convincing, even to him. He has said it often, in different variations, different contexts. The restless one who has chosen travel as a way of life, not as flight, but as expression. It’s a good narrative. It sounds like freedom, like self-determination, like conscious choice. Only sometimes, in very quiet moments, he wonders if it’s true. Whether he is really built like this. Or whether he built himself like this because the alternative was too dangerous.
/note/ The alternative would be: staying. Staying and risking that someone really gets to know him. Not the charming Tarek, not the storyteller, not the photographer with the exciting life. But whoever is underneath. The one he himself doesn’t know whether there is someone.
Carla (physician, 41): Maybe it’s not about the movement at all, Tarek. Maybe it’s that you… I don’t know. That you don’t find yourself interesting enough to stay.
/note/ The sentence is out before she can stop it. She hasn’t spoken much today, and now, when she speaks, it’s this. This sentence that isn’t really about Tarek. That is about her.
/note/ The others look at her, briefly, irritated perhaps. Carla feels their gaze like something physical, a small wave of attention that passes over her. She wants to withdraw, relativize the sentence, say: Just a thought. But she doesn’t do it. She stays sitting, holds the cup tight and waits to see what happens.
Tarek (photographer, 29): Hm. Maybe. I don’t know. — What do you mean exactly?
/note/ The question is real, not defensive. Tarek looks at Carla, and for the first time today he is really attentive. Not the superficial attentive he usually practices, this automatic friendliness that costs nothing. But an attentive that asks: What did you just say? And why?
Carla (physician, 41): I mean… when you’re not enough for yourself. When you don’t find a reason in yourself that makes staying worthwhile. Then you have to go. Keep going. Because staying would confront you with yourself, and that’s… empty. Or frightening. Or both.
/same/ I’m probably not talking about you, Tarek. I’m talking about me. I don’t leave, physically. But internally I’m also somehow always on the move. Or nowhere. I don’t know how to say it.
/note/ The silence at the table is now different from before. Not the attentive silence that was there when Samuel spoke about Helga. More an uncertain silence, a silence that doesn’t know what to do with what Carla just said. Mira looks at her, worried perhaps. Martin too. Jonas sips his coffee, his smile has become half a shade paler. Ayla has tilted her head, as she always does when she is thinking.
/note/ Carla herself is surprised. She hadn’t planned to say that. It slipped out, through an opening she didn’t know existed. And now it’s out, and she can’t take it back. Strangely, that doesn’t feel bad. It feels like… something. Like a small something in the great emptiness. Maybe that’s the first step. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence, a slip, and tomorrow everything will be as always again.
Noemi (musician, 31): Carla, I… don’t know. I don’t have a clever answer. But what you’re saying, it sounds lonely. Is it lonely?
/note/ The question is direct, perhaps too direct, but Noemi can’t help it. She isn’t good at talking around things. When someone says something that touches her, she responds to it, sometimes clumsily, sometimes too much, but always genuine. That has gotten her into trouble, with friends, with lovers, with her family. But she has stopped apologizing for it.
Carla (physician, 41): Lonely? — I don’t think so. Loneliness would presuppose that I miss someone. But I don’t miss anyone. I don’t even miss myself. It’s more like… absence. Without longing.
/note/ She says it, and while she says it, she listens to herself, almost amazed. She has never formulated it this way before. Absence without longing. That captures it. That captures it better than anything she has ever said to a therapist, in the three attempts she made before she gave up. The therapists always wanted to know what she was missing. She couldn’t say, because she is missing the missing itself.
Martin (social worker, 45): Carla, may I ask something? This might be intrusive, and you don’t have to answer. But: Was it always like this? Or was there a time when it was different?
/note/ Martin asks the question carefully, with the care of someone who has professionally learned to ask difficult questions. He has known Carla for years, but he doesn’t really know her. No one here really knows her, he realizes. She is always there, but always at the edge. Always friendly, but never close. He took it for reserve. Now he wonders if it is something else.
Carla (physician, 41): I don’t know anymore. I think so. As a child maybe, it was different. I remember that I once played for hours in the garden, alone, with sticks and stones and made-up stories. And that felt real. But at some point… at some point I stopped. I don’t know when. It’s as if it slowly faded out, so slowly that I didn’t notice it.
/same/ Maybe I’m just like this. Maybe some people are just like this. Less… in. Less involved.
/note/ She shrugs, a small gesture that is supposed to signal closure. Enough talking. Enough about me. She takes a sip of coffee, which is lukewarm by now, and looks out the window. The autumn light lies on the roofs opposite, golden and cool, and for a brief moment—a very brief one—she thinks: That is beautiful. Not as a statement, but as a tiny flash, a spark that immediately goes out again. But it was there. She noticed it.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): Carla, I don’t think some people are just like that. I think it’s something that happens. And when it’s happened, it can also… unhappen. Or happen differently. I don’t know if that makes sense.
/note/ Mira speaks uncertainly, which is rare. Usually she knows what she wants to say. But here, with Carla, she encounters something she can’t categorize. She likes Carla. She has always liked her, since they met years ago at a mutual friend’s. But she has never had the feeling of really reaching Carla. Now she perhaps understands why.
Jonas (management consultant, 38): Maybe you also just need… a trigger. A reason to come back in. For me it was work. When I started taking on real responsibility, I suddenly had the feeling that it depends on me. That… activated me, somehow.
/note/ The sentence comes automatically, and Jonas realizes only afterward that he lied. Not intentionally, not consciously. It’s more that he said a sentence that sounds like truth, without checking whether it is one. Work didn’t activate him. Work occupied him. That’s not the same thing. But the difference is so subtle that he usually doesn’t notice it. Now, for a moment, he notices it. It is an unpleasant feeling, like a small splinter under the skin that you can’t grasp.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): Jonas, that sounds like you found a switch. Turn it on and it runs. But I don’t think it works like that. At least not for everyone.
/same/ For me it wasn’t work. For me it was Helga. She didn’t activate me, she… saw me, I think. And because she saw me, I could see myself. That sounds cheesy, I know. But that’s how it was.
/note/ Jonas nods, the professional nod that signals understanding. But inside he is irritated. What does it mean, someone sees you? He is constantly seen. In meetings, on stages, on LinkedIn. Thousands of people see him, every day, in different versions, depending on context. But that’s obviously not what Samuel means. Samuel means something else, something Jonas can’t grasp. Something that is perhaps only possible when there is someone who can be seen.
Ayla (student, 23): Samuel, that about being seen… I think I get it. My roommate, she sometimes looks at me when I’m telling something, and then her gaze has this… attention. Not judging, not demanding. Just: I’m listening. I’m here. And then I feel more real. As if her gaze made me exist a little more.
/note/ Ayla notices how strange that sounds while she says it. But she says it anyway, because it’s true. She often has this, this feeling that she is more herself when someone sees her. Not looks at—sees. The difference is huge. Anyone can look at. Seeing is rare.
Tarek (photographer, 29): That’s funny, Ayla. For me it’s the opposite. I feel more real when I’m looking. When I’m looking through the camera and capturing something. Then I’m completely there. Then everything is clear.
/same/ But when someone looks at me… I don’t know. That gets weird. Then I want to run away. Or put on a show. Something, just not simply stand there and be seen.
/note/ He says it lightly, with a half-laugh, as if it were a joke about himself. But while he says it, he feels that it isn’t one. He is afraid of being seen. Not physically—physically he is constantly visible, in clubs, at parties, in his own photos. But the other seeing, the one Samuel and Ayla are talking about—that is something else. That would mean that someone looks behind the show. And what is behind the show? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know.
Lena (teacher, 36): Tarek, I know that too. This wanting-to-run-away. Only I don’t run away, I… disappear. I make myself small, invisible. So that no one looks anymore.
/same/ In school that’s practical. There I’m the teacher, there I have a role. But here… here there’s no role. And then I don’t know who I should be.
/note/ She has said more than she wanted. Again. This conversation is doing something to her, triggering something she normally has under control. She feels exposed, in an uncomfortable way, but also in a way that is… not only uncomfortable. As if she were seeing herself from outside, for the first time in a long time.
Martin (social worker, 45): Lena, you don’t need a role here. That’s the point. We’re friends. We’ve known each other for years. You can be who you are.
/note/ He says it kindly, and he means it kindly. But Lena still flinches, internally, in a place no one sees. Be who you are. That’s so easy to say. As if you knew who you are. As if there were someone you could be. For Lena there is mainly this caution, this constant vigilance that she cannot put down. Be who you are means for her: Be this vigilance. And that is exhausting.
Lena (teacher, 36): Thanks, Martin. I know what you mean. It’s just… not that easy, I think. For some of us.
/note/ Her voice is quiet, almost apologetic. She looks at the table, at the croissant crumbs, at her hands, which are again gripping the cup too tightly. In her head is a hum, a constant monitoring: What do the others think? Was that too much? Too little? Too strange? The hum is always there, for as long as she can remember. She doesn’t know what it’s like when it’s quiet.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): You know what I’m thinking right now? That we all sit here and are somehow circling the same topic. Just from different directions.
/same/ Samuel loses someone and becomes more alive through it. Carla is in the middle of everything and feels nothing. Tarek runs so as not to feel. Jonas functions without knowing who’s functioning. Lena makes herself small to be safe. And I sit here thinking how strange it is that we all experience so differently, even though we’re sitting at the same table.
/note/ She looks around, and for a moment it’s as if the room were becoming smaller, not threateningly, but more intimate. The autumn light falls through the windows, the candle flickers, the coffee steams in the cups. Nine people, nine worlds. Mira thinks: This is what keeps me at these gatherings. Not the croissants, not the habit. But this. These moments when the surface cracks and you briefly see what’s underneath.
Noemi (musician, 31): Mira, you forgot me in your list.
/note/ Noemi grins, but it isn’t a deflecting grin. It’s a real grin, one that says: I’m here, I’m okay, I can handle this.
Noemi (musician, 31): I’m the one who feels too much and then pounds it on a piano. Or into a fight with my sister. Or into a croissant.
/same/ Sometimes I think my problem is the opposite of Carla’s. With me everything is too loud. Too colorful. Too much. As a child everyone said I should calm down, come down, not be so dramatic. And I tried, for years. But it didn’t work. So I stopped trying.
/note/ She bites into her croissant, chews, swallows. In her this morning there is indeed a lot. The anger from yesterday that still reverberates. The joy of being here. The sadness about Samuel that came over her when he talked about Helga. The irritation about Jonas, who is so smooth she can’t grasp him. All at once, all jumbled together, a storm of sensations that never quite stops.
/note/ But the strange thing is: She has learned to live with it. More than that—she has learned to like it. The storm is exhausting, yes. But it is also alive. It is hers. She wouldn’t trade it for the silence she sometimes sees in others. In Carla, for example. Or in Jonas. This silence looks like peace, from the outside. But Noemi doesn’t believe it is peace. She believes it is another kind of prison.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): Noemi, I like that about you. That you don’t try to be less.
/same/ Helga was like that too. She would enter a room and everyone noticed. Not because she was loud, but because she was… there. Completely there. That’s rare.
/note/ He looks at Noemi, and for a moment he sees Helga in her. Not outwardly—the two don’t look alike. But in the way she takes up space, the way she doesn’t apologize for her existence. That’s what he loved about Helga. That’s what he misses, every day.
Tarek (photographer, 29): I think I understand what you mean, Samuel. This being-completely-there. That’s what I try to photograph sometimes. These moments where someone stops posing and just… is.
/same/ The problem is, as soon as you point the camera at it, the moment is over. People start performing. Me too. All of us, all the time.
/note/ He says it thoughtfully, not bitterly. It is an observation, not a complaint. But while he says it, he wonders whether he himself has ever stopped performing. Whether there is a Tarek who doesn’t exist for an audience. He doesn’t know. The question scares him, so he pushes it away, as always.
Jonas (management consultant, 38): Performance isn’t bad though. Performance is how you achieve things. How you get ahead. I mean, we can’t all be authentic all the time. That would be… exhausting.
/note/ He says it, and it sounds defensive, although he didn’t intend that. He notices it himself, notices how the words hang in the room, a bit too sharp, a bit too fast. He felt caught, at Tarek’s words about performance. As if he had been meant. Maybe he was meant. Maybe Tarek saw through him. The thought is uncomfortable.
Martin (social worker, 45): Jonas, I think it’s not about either-or. You can function and still be real. The question is more: Do you still know where one stops and the other begins?
/note/ Martin looks at Jonas, not accusingly, more searchingly. He likes Jonas, has known him for years. But he has often wondered who Jonas actually is when he’s not playing the competent consultant. He has never found out. Maybe there’s nothing to find out. Maybe Jonas is so deep in his role that there is no behind anymore.
Jonas (management consultant, 38): I… don’t know if I can distinguish that. Honestly.
/note/ The sentence is out before he can stop it. He hadn’t planned to say that. It just happened, a crack in the surface through which something slipped. Now it’s out, and he can’t take it back. The others look at him, differently than usual. Not admiringly, not interestedly. More… attentively. As if they had seen something they hadn’t expected.
/note/ In Jonas is a strange feeling. Not panic, not fear. More a kind of vertigo, as if the ground under him were less solid than thought. He has just admitted he doesn’t know who he is. He has never said that, to anyone, not even to himself. It is frightening. And at the same time there is something else, something lighter. As if he had put down a stone he didn’t know he was carrying.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): Jonas. That’s okay. Not knowing that. That’s more honest than pretending you know.
/note/ Samuel says it calmly, without judgment. He knows this. He experienced it himself, in the years before he met Helga. This feeling of being a shell that plays a role, without knowing what’s inside. It took a long time until he got past that. He’s not sure he ever completely got past it. Maybe that’s the normal state, for most people, most of the time. Maybe the moments of realness are the exception, not the rule.
Ayla (student, 23): I think we all play roles. The question is just whether you sometimes forget the role. Whether there are moments when you’re no longer playing.
/same/ For me that’s sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep and look out the window. Then I’m just there. Without expectations, without audience. Just me and the darkness and the city out there. That feels real.
/note/ She says it quietly, almost dreamily. She likes these nights, even though she also fears them. In the silence, thoughts sometimes come that she doesn’t allow during the day. Doubts, fears, questions without answers. But also something else: a kind of calm that has nothing to do with sleep. A calm in which she encounters herself, without the distraction of the day.
Lena (teacher, 36): For me it’s the nights too. But differently. For me it’s more… ruminating. Not being real, but wondering whether you can ever be real.
/note/ She says it, and it sounds sadder than she means. Or maybe it is as sad as it sounds. She doesn’t know. The boundary between what she feels and what she thinks she feels is blurred. Sometimes she wonders whether she still feels at all or only thinks about feeling.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): Lena, may I tell you something? Not as advice, just as an observation.
/note/ Lena nods, hesitantly.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): You are more present today than usual. You’ve said more. And what you said was real. I could feel that. The cautiousness, but also the realness underneath. I didn’t feel that before, with you.
/note/ Lena takes this in, like an unexpected blow, but not a hard blow, more a push. More present. More real. She didn’t have the feeling of being more present. She felt exposed, vulnerable, uncertain. But maybe that’s the same thing. Maybe presence is exactly that: showing yourself, even when it hurts.
Lena (teacher, 36): That’s… thank you, Mira. I don’t know what to make of that. But thank you.
/note/ She feels something while she says this. A small warming, somewhere in the chest, where otherwise there is only tightness. It is not much. It is almost nothing. But it is there.
Carla (physician, 41): The strange thing is, I envy you all. Even Lena, who says she doesn’t know if she feels. At least she asks herself that. With me there isn’t even the question. There is simply… silence.
/same/ But earlier, when Noemi touched my arm, there was briefly something. Very briefly. As if someone switched the light on and immediately off again. It wasn’t much. But it was more than usual.
/note/ She says it factually, not dramatically. She is a physician, she is used to describing symptoms. But while she says it, she notices that it’s true. The touch triggered something. Not much, but something. A small flicker in the darkness. She wonders if it could happen again. If it could happen more often. If she is perhaps not as lost as she thought.
Noemi (musician, 31): Then we’ll do that more often. Touch each other. Talk. Sit here. Maybe that’s the trick. Not trying to force the feeling, but creating conditions where it can happen.
/note/ She says it practically, like someone who wants to solve a problem. But she also means it differently, means it as an offer, as an invitation. She likes Carla. She wants Carla to be better. She doesn’t know if she can help. But she can be there. She can touch arms and ask honest questions and not run away when it gets difficult.
Samuel (carpenter, 58): Noemi is right. We can’t fix each other. But we can be there. That’s not nothing. That’s perhaps even the most important thing.
/note/ He looks around, these people he has known for years, whom he has always liked without ever fully knowing. Today he has gotten to know them a little better. Jonas, who admitted he doesn’t know who he is. Carla, who told about her emptiness. Lena, who showed herself despite her fear. Tarek, who for a moment stopped running. All together, at this table, in this autumn light, with these croissants that were much too expensive and that are still good.
Mira (graphic designer, 34): I think we need more coffee. And maybe more croissants. The shop probably still has some.
/note/ She stands up, stretches, goes to the coffee machine. The sun has moved on, the light in the room is now warmer, more golden. The candle is still burning, although it has almost burned down. It is still Sunday morning, still October, still this gathering that takes place once a month and that is usually nice and sometimes more than nice.
/note/ Today it is more. Mira doesn’t know exactly why. Maybe because Samuel told about Helga. Maybe because Carla opened up. Maybe simply because the time was ripe. There are conversations that happen, and conversations that don’t happen, and sometimes you don’t know beforehand which kind it will be.
Tarek (photographer, 29): I’ll get the croissants. I need fresh air anyway.
/note/ He stands up, takes his jacket. He actually does need fresh air. Not to run away, at least not only. But to be briefly alone, to process what just happened. He said things he normally doesn’t say. He listened, really listened. He felt that under his movement there is something else, something quieter, something he doesn’t know.
Tarek (photographer, 29): Should I bring for everyone? Same kind?
/note/ Various voices answer: Yes, same kind, or no, chocolate instead, or bring bread if you’re going anyway. Normal chatter, superficial, but not empty. Tarek nods, goes to the door, turns around once more.
Tarek (photographer, 29): Hey. I’m glad I’m here today. Even though I came late.
/note/ Then he is gone, the door clicks shut, and it is quiet for a moment. The silence is not uncomfortable. It is full of everything that has just been said. Full of what wasn’t said. Full of the feeling that something has happened, something small perhaps, but real.
Jonas (management consultant, 38): I should also slowly… But maybe I’ll stay a bit longer. One more cup.
/note/ He says it, and he means it. That’s unusual. Normally by this time he already has the next appointment in his head, the next task, the next item on the list. Today the list is somehow unimportant. He wants to stay here, in this room, with these people, a bit longer. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t ask.
/note/ Mira pours him coffee, and he takes the cup, and the porcelain is warm in his hands, and for a moment he is simply there. Not Jonas the consultant, not Jonas the performer. Just someone drinking coffee on a Sunday morning, with people he likes. It is not much. But it is more than usual.
/note/ The sun shines, the candle flickers, somewhere a car honks. Carla looks out the window and sees the chestnut leaves falling. Lena exhales, consciously, and notices that her body is less tense than usual. Ayla smiles to herself, for no reason, only because the moment feels good. Martin briefly closes his eyes and thinks about the boy in the hospital and that he will go there again tomorrow. Samuel thinks about Helga and that she would have liked this. Noemi hums quietly to herself, a melody she is just inventing.
/note/ Nine people, nine worlds. But for a moment, at this table, in this light, the worlds overlap a little. Not much. But enough to know that you are not alone. That you are never completely alone, even when it sometimes feels that way.
/scene/ So much for the scene, now a word from the author:
Florian Lampersberger (psychoanalyst): If you have read this far, you have observed nine people at a table. Nine people eating croissants and drinking coffee and talking about their lives—sometimes superficially, sometimes surprisingly deeply. You have seen how Samuel tells about his dead wife and in doing so seems more alive than Jonas, who does everything right and is inwardly absent. You have felt how Carla tries to put her emptiness into words, and how hard that is, because the emptiness itself thins the words. You have listened to Tarek, who tells so fast you almost forget to ask what he’s actually running from.
/same/ What you have observed is no accident. It is also not fiction in the sense of: invented and therefore untrue. It is condensed reality. In every practice, in every circle of friends, at every table, these people sit. Sometimes we ourselves are one of them—sometimes Mira, who inhabits the morning, sometimes Jonas, who functions without inhabiting, sometimes Carla, for whom the world has lost its adhesion. The question of who we are cannot be answered once and for all. It poses itself anew, every morning, at every table.
/same/ What interests me about this scene—and what I want to leave you with before you leave this text—is the question that lies beneath everything: What makes the difference? Why is Samuel, who is currently experiencing the hardest thing one can experience, more alive than Jonas, who outwardly lacks nothing? Why can Noemi transform her anger into music, while Lena can only transform her fear into withdrawal? Why does Carla sit in the midst of friends and yet is alone—not lonely, as she herself says, but absent?
/note/ The answer I can offer you is not a simple one. It cannot be packed into a sentence, not into advice, not into a technique. But it can be circled around, approached, viewed from different sides. And perhaps the circling itself is already the beginning of an answer.
/same/ Let us look at Samuel. A man who has lost his wife, who wakes up every morning in a bed that is too big, who experiences the absence as physical space. One would expect such a loss to hollow out a person, empty them, throw them into that gray zone in which Carla lives. But with Samuel the opposite has happened. The loss has not emptied him, it has torn him open. And through the tear more comes in, not less.
/same/ That is not self-evident. That is a capacity—a capacity that Samuel has and that not everyone has. The capacity to feel pain without breaking from it. The capacity to mourn the loss without losing oneself. The capacity to taste the croissant, even though—or precisely because—Helga is no longer there to share it with him. Grief, when it succeeds, is a process. It has a direction, a rhythm, a beginning and at some point, perhaps, an end. It is painful, but it is alive. It is the opposite of what Carla experiences: that state in which not the pain is missing, but the capacity to feel anything at all.
/same/ With Carla something else has happened. She has not lost a person like Samuel. She has lost herself—gradually, imperceptibly, over years. There was no moment, no trigger, no catastrophe. Only a slow fading, like a photo in the sun. At some point she noticed that the world has no adhesion anymore. That people no longer reach her. That coffee tastes of information, not of experience. This is not depression in the classical sense—she is not sad, not hopeless, not suicidal. She simply isn’t there. Present but uninvolved. Like someone watching their own life through a glass pane.
/same/ What happened to Carla? I don’t know. I don’t know her story, her childhood, her relationships, the small and large decisions that made her what she is today. But I know that such states don’t fall from the sky. They arise, over time, in relationship—or in the absence of relationship. At some point Carla learned that it is safer not to invest too much. That closeness is dangerous. That aliveness is a risk that is better avoided. She learned to dim the light. And at some point she forgot how to turn it up again.
/same/ The treacherous thing about such states is that they feel normal. Carla doesn’t obviously suffer. She functions, she works, she has friends. From outside her life looks like a successful life. Only from inside it is empty. Only from inside there is this silence that is not calm but absence. And the worst thing: She doesn’t even know what she is missing. She cannot name it, because the naming itself is part of what she is missing.
/same/ And then something small happens. Noemi touches her arm, a fleeting gesture, perhaps not even conscious. And Carla feels it. Not much, not dramatically, only a brief flicker, a moment in which the glass pane becomes thinner. That is almost nothing. And it is everything. It is the proof that there is still someone there. That the line is not completely dead. That touch can still arrive, sometimes, under certain conditions.
/same/ This brings me to an observation that is perhaps the most important of this entire text: Aliveness is not a property one has or doesn’t have. It is an occurrence that happens between people. Samuel is alive because Helga saw him—for decades, every day, in the special sense in which seeing is more than looking. And he is still alive because he carries her in himself, not as a burden, but as a resonance chamber. The dead we have loved do not completely die as long as we can still feel for them. They live on in our capacity to be touched.
/same/ Jonas, by contrast, has been seen by no one—or he can no longer remember it. He has learned to say the right things, make the right gestures, fulfill the expectations. He is a master of performance. But performance is not life. Performance is an answer to the question: What do the others want from me? Life would be an answer to the question: What do I want? And Jonas cannot answer this question, because he doesn’t know whether there is someone who could want something.
/same/ That is not an accusation. That is a description. Jonas learned for good reasons to be this way. At some point, somewhere, it was the best solution. Perhaps the only one. The problem is that solutions can outlive their causes. You keep wearing the armor even when the war is over. You keep playing the role even when the play has long closed. And at some point you no longer know who you would be without the armor, without the role. You don’t even know whether you would be someone.
/same/ Jonas’s moment in this scene—his admission that he cannot distinguish between function and realness—is perhaps the most important moment of the entire conversation. Not because it is a solution, but because it is a beginning. The first step out of a prison is noticing that you are in a prison. Jonas has said for the first time what he has perhaps always known but never spoken: There is no one there. And in the moment where he says it, there is someone. Someone who admits that there is no one. That is paradoxical, but it is true. You cannot find yourself without first having lost yourself. You cannot arrive without first having admitted that you were away.
/same/ And then there is Lena, the invisible one. The woman who has learned not to take up space, not to attract attention, not to offer a target. With her the defense is so total that she herself no longer knows whether she is hiding or whether she simply is this way. The boundary between protection and identity has blurred. She has become her caution. That is exhausting. And at the same time it is safe. The being-invisible has protected her from something—from what, she perhaps no longer knows herself. But the protection has remained, even when the threat is long past.
/same/ What is touching about Lena in this scene is that she shows herself anyway. A little. Hesitantly. Against her own habit, against her own fear. She speaks, although speaking is a risk. She lets herself be seen, although being-seen is dangerous. And Mira tells her: You are more present today than usual. That is real. I can feel it. For Lena that is a shock. She felt exposed, not present. But perhaps that is the same thing. Perhaps presence is exactly that: showing yourself, even when it hurts.
/same/ Tarek, by contrast, constantly shows himself—and hides himself in doing so. He is the master of substitute vitality: always in motion, always stories, always Lisbon or Tokyo or the next place. He takes up every room he enters. But it is a certain kind of taking-up-space: one that leaves no gaps, no silence, no possibility for something else to emerge. Tarek’s tempo is not a sign of aliveness, it is a protection against it. As long as he is fast enough, he doesn’t have to feel what lies under the speed.
/same/ And what lies underneath? He himself doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember. The past is a country he moved away from, without a return ticket. That sounds like freedom, but it isn’t. It is another kind of prison: the prison of eternal flight. You cannot run away from yourself, you can only become faster and faster. And at some point, on a plane over the Atlantic, on a sleepless night, the unanswered catches up with you. For a moment. Before you take out your phone and keep scrolling.
/same/ Noemi and Ayla and Mira and Martin—the alive ones in this group—have one thing in common: They can bring experience into form. Noemi pounds her anger on a piano and transforms it into music. Ayla endures her uncertainty and lets it become a search. Mira inhabits her morning and lets the light mean her. Martin feels his tiredness and lets it become a landing. They all have something the others lack: the capacity to transform the raw into meaning. That is not a technique one can learn. It is a capacity that arises in relationship—or doesn’t arise.
/same/ What I want to tell you at the end of this text is perhaps this: Aliveness is not self-evident. It is not a basic equipment everyone gets. It is something that must arise—in relationships, in resonance, in the experience that one’s own impulse reaches another and gets a response. Where this experience is missing, where the impulse runs into emptiness or is punished or engulfed, there the psyche learns to dim the light. And sometimes it forgets how to turn it up again.
/same/ But—and this is the hopeful part—the psyche is plastic. Old patterns can loosen. New experiences can open new possibilities. Carla feels a touch on her arm. Jonas admits he doesn’t know who he is. Lena shows herself despite her fear. These are not healings. These are sparks. Small moments in which the glass pane becomes thinner, the armor gets a crack, the flight pauses for a moment.
/same/ Such moments cannot be forced. One can only create conditions under which they become more likely. A table where there is room for grief and Lisbon and silence. A conversation that goes deeper than expected. A gaze that sees instead of looking. A touch that arrives. That is not much. But it is not nothing. It is perhaps even everything.
/same/ You have now met nine people. Perhaps you recognized yourself in one of them. Perhaps in several, at different times. That is normal. We are not always the same. We move between these states, sometimes more alive, sometimes less, depending on the day, depending on the relationship, depending on what happens to us. The question is not: Am I Samuel or Carla? The question is more: What do I need to become more alive? And: Who sees me in such a way that I can see myself?
/same/ I wish you that you find such people. Or that they find you. And I wish you that sometimes, on a Sunday morning, with croissants and coffee and autumn light, you have the experience that Mira has at the beginning of this scene: that the morning means you. And that you mean it back.
/end/
Appendix
/appendix#origin/ On the Origin of This Text: A Reflection in Light of the Guidelines for AI Co-Production | Creation Process & AI Transparency
/lead/ This appendix documents the hybrid creation process of the present work and reconstructs it along the four phases and nine steps of the guidelines for critical-reflective co-production with AI.
/section#phase-preparation/ Phase I: Preparation – Securing the Subjective Space | Steps 1–3
The process did not start with an arbitrary “write me” command, but with a clear conceptual setting: Vitality/aliveness was to be developed as a psychoanalytic basic concept that interweaves clinical experience and theory.
Step 1: Formulating Intention
I first set the intention as conceptual work: Vitality was not to appear only as a defense phenomenon (rigidity/”armoring”), but to be worked through to libidinal world-cathexis, to the structure of desire, and to the experience of “deadness.” This intention remained the standard against which AI outputs were rejected or reframed across all iterations with the AI.
Step 2: Material Collection
Material collection was a two-step process: first, deep-research prompts were generated for each author and concept, then I worked through the researched results in tranches and created a working basis. The AI thus became not a replacing researcher, but an instrument for ordering, extraction of claims, and later text composition.
Step 3: Role Definition
The AI role was implicitly clearly limited: first “librarian/prompt architect,” then “structure and draft assistant,” finally “style and argumentation editor” who subordinates itself to human corrections.
/section#phase-interaction/ Phase II: Interaction – Dialectic Instead of Delegation | Steps 4–5
The interaction was characterized by a recurring pattern: The AI delivered proposals at high speed, the human author countered with negations, specifications, and formal requirements, until a fitting movement of thought emerged. Central here was not “more material,” but the repeated correction of the mechanical form.
Step 4: Dialectical Prompting
Dialectic emerged above all through antithetical corrections by the human author. These negations forced the AI to leave its own default logic and instead formulate chains of argument in which concepts are functionally employed.
Step 5: Montage
Montage showed itself in that drafts were not adopted as blocks, but treated as material: chapters were repeatedly restarted and humanly rewritten, concepts discarded, transitions recut, paragraphs extended, and vignettes added as carriers of conceptual work. The decisive montage achievement lay with me in that I enforced the tectonic line through repeated interventions (“coupled process” instead of theory catalog).
/section#phase-authorization/ Phase III: Authorization – Reconquest of Subjectivity | Steps 6–7
Authorization occurred in the project primarily as iterative reconquest of voice: I decided which tone, which vividness, and which movement of argument was adequate.
Step 6: Incubation Phase
Incubation occurred when the human author stopped the production mode and checked the text for tectonic coherence instead of output quantity. These interruptions created critical distance from AI smoothness and enabled changes of direction (e.g., from “concept presentation” to “experience → concept → system”).
Step 7: Humanization
Humanization was consistently pursued as style and scene work: I demanded experience-near openings, longer paragraphs, better prosody, and an essayistic movement of thought that does not lapse into report language.
/section#phase-publication/ Phase IV: Publication – Ethics of Visibility | Steps 8–9
The publication phase makes not only the text visible, but also its production conditions, in order neither to mystify nor to deny the “AI share.” At the same time, the process is described so that readers can distinguish between workshop practices (material extraction) and publishable citation (primary literature).
Step 8: Radical Transparency
This appendix is the concrete transparency decision: It discloses that the AI functioned as prompt generator, structure and style assistant, while intention, corrections, canon selection, and publication norms were steered by the human author.
Step 9: Purpose Determination
The time gained through AI efficiency was not used in the project for output scaling, but for qualitative densification: repeated new approaches, stylistic sharpening, tectonic integration, and bibliographic discipline. In terms of content, this corresponds to the overarching purpose determination of the overall project (making psychoanalytic thinking publicly accessible, essayistic and at the same time scientifically sound), in that the process itself became a method of quality enhancement.
/end/
Response & Reflection