#28. The mountain lake principle

This essay will take you 8 minutes to read

Imagine a mountain lake. It’s vast, ample waters are fed by multiple streams, rivers, and underwater fountains. On the other hand, many streams, and even rivers, come out of it, taking the water out. The water level can pulse between seasons, or for other reasons, and in general, you understand that, lake aside, the incoming currents are feeding the outgoing ones. But there is no direct relation, no unique causation between each particular incoming stream, and some corresponding outgoing one. You can’t say: this spring upstream feeds this river downstream of the lake. That’s a useful metaphor in psychology, which comes about more often than you think.

First, let’s talk about resistance. When dealing with psychodynamic resistance, the mountain lake principle explains why it’s so hard to get rid of your preferred type of resistance, be it procrastination, addiction, porn, food, or anything else. See, forms of resistance are like rivers going out of the lake—they dig their own channels, and the longer they keep going, the easier it is to fill them. If Jack usually runs away from responsibility into YouTube and social networks, it’s damn hard to prevent that, because there is no single reason why he does that. I mean, there is a reason each particular time. Right now, Jack is scrolling because he’s avoiding work, and an hour ago, he was avoiding talking to his wife, and an hour before that, making a doctor’s appointment. But whatever the reason—whatever source of resistance feeds the lake, it will go out through the channel that has dug itself the most formidable waterbed.

Meaning, any attempt to generalize “you do this unhealthy behavior because of this reason” is mostly futile to begin with. An addict doesn’t use because his mother didn’t love him, or his career didn’t go the way he wanted. He uses because of anything, everything, because the second his lake of anxiety starts filling up, it immediately feeds the stream of his addiction. It can be a lack of love from his mother, a lack of career success, or a taco that’s not tasty enough.

This is why there are no universal advices in psychology, and anyone who tries to give it is either a fraud, making money selling easy-looking but useless fluff, or a traumatized person, high on their successes, generalizing their unique experience, assuming it’ll fit everyone the same way. Or both. There is no specific “cure” for procrastination, or addiction, or gambling, or self-harm, or any other neurotic symptom, or form of resistance. There are, however, general principles from which you can derive a specific approach for one particular person, at least in a particular moment. Sort of like there is no universal antibiotic, but there is a universal way to deal with bacterial infections, based on diagnostics and subsequent tailoring of the medicine.

Thus, to deal with unhealthy behavior, you can’t just focus on symptoms, for they aren’t representative of the problem. They are representative only of the culture and the situation you lived in when developing them. Jill grew up being abused by her mother, who saw her as a housemaid since she was five. To avoid the overbearing labor, while not causing the mother’s wrath, she developed hypochondria as a way to hide behind imagined health issues. Ever since then, she has maintained hypochondria as the primary way of dealing with stress and responsibilities. But no matter how long you study Jill, or how sure you are of that etiology of her symptom, you can’t say even about her that if she’s being hypochondriac, that means she’s avoiding her mother. By now, it can happen for any reason. Even fewer reasons you have to say that people with hypochondria in general have it for the same reason. The symptom just isn’t correlated with the reason it appears. You can’t point to a splash of water in a river and say, “This came from that other river upstream of the lake”. Just doesn’t work this way.

So what does work, and how to use it? Well, in psychodynamics, we don’t look for cause-and-effect in the sense that “you’re showing this sort of resistance, you only show it when dealing with this topic”. But there still is cause-and-effect. It just doesn’t work on specific types of causes and effects; it works on timing. There is a reason why psychodynamics is called that way—dynamics is literally in the name of the game. Much like when you see new streams going out of the lake, or at least old ones overflowing, you can ask yourself, “Which incoming stream has fed this flux?” You can do the same with psyche. If Jack started exhibiting new forms of resistance or neurotic symptoms, or even just doubled down on his favorite ones, it’s time to look around his life in the past few days and see what happened. That’s why psychodynamic sessions begin with a week’s overview by the client.

Another way to think about it is this: imagine Jack has 10 sources of income (lucky bastard), and he buys things. Can we say that Jack bought thing A with the money from source 1? Well, we can technically trace each specific dollar, but then again, who’s to say that he didn’t use the money from source 1, which he usually needs for life expenses, because this time, source 3 brought more, and he could provide for himself with it? So, while technically the money did come from the account of source 1, the reason is source 3? The only way saying things like “Jack buys thing A with the money from source N” becomes meaningful is if A costs more than every other source provides, and only source N gives Jack enough to cover the cost. But that exception holds true in counseling as well: sure, if there’s one major source of stress in the client’s life, it’s safe to say that their most prominent, high-amplitude symptoms and forms of resistance stem from it. But that’s a temporary exception, not the rule.

This idea is a distant cousin of Freud’s explanation of why dream books don’t work. Granted, he himself, in true Freudian self-contradictory fashion, did try to make something of a dream book, explaining what various things might symbolise. But the initial idea—until he tried to ignore it—was that each symbol is unique, individually created, and can be meaningfully analyzed only in the context of its appearance in the life of a particular individual. No “banas are penises” or “vases are vaginas” rules actually exist in psychoanalysis; these are hints at the directions where to look, not factual statements about the nature of each symbol of that type.

So, symptoms and resistance aren’t tied—except for some major influx of stress—to a specific cause or reason. What about the opposite? What about the libido and its manifestations? Well, it works the same way.

Libido, or the energy of life (yes, and sex), is, in psychodynamics, the driving force of our productive activity. Freud said that a healthy person is one who can do two things: love and work. So to love and to work, i.e., do things with delayed gratification, you need libido. Those are the outgoing streams: your duties, your care for others, and your passion for closeness with someone; that’s what libido is spent on. Where does it come from? What are the incoming streams in the lake of libido? Satisfied needs do. You’re hungry—you eat—you become more libidinous, meaning you have more libido. You can do more productive work, or honest loving. You feel insecure—you achieve safety—you get libido. You sleep, you meet your goals, you get praised by people you respect, you do things you’re good at, or learn to be good at new things—whichever need you fulfil—you get the reward of increased libido. If that need was frustrated, that is. If you stuff yourself with more food than you need, you’re going to feel worse, not better.

So with the lake of libido, all the same logic applies. Unless there’s one major, obviously more significant than all others success, that feeds your libido, and one most demanding, grueling, productive thing you do, in which case—yes, we can attribute that exact source of libido to that exact use of it. All the other cases do not allow this kind of attribution. You can’t say “Jack works productively because he does sports” any more than you could say “Jill has hypochondria because she doesn’t want to do the dishes”. It just doesn’t work: there’s a whole reservoir, a lake between the source and the consequence, which is fed by other sources, and feeds other consequences. And, much like with resistance and neurotic symptoms you’d have to seriously drain every incoming fountain before seeing the outgoing streams wither, the logic with libido is the same, only of the opposite polarity. You don’t need a specific libido source to do productive work. “I can’t work if I don’t X” is nonsense. Most of the time, you don’t need something specific to maintain your productivity and affection; you are naturally equipped to make do with any source. I did this back when I worked as a business trainer: one of the exercises I frequently used was to have the participants write a list of their sources of libido—everything that they do, or can do, that improves their mood, or strengthens their motivation. Starting with remembering that they have a child to take care of, and all the way to how comfy the fluffy slippers are at home. People wrote dozens of points, some hundreds. We usually seriously underestimate and ignore the abundant ways we can support our libidinous activities.

So why is it important? Because my goal, as I like to remind my clients, isn’t improving their lives, it’s improving their psyche transparency. Helping them understand what they are really doing, and why. And the way to do it is to look in the right place. Stop trying to trace problems to causes by their nature, assuming, or taking at face value wild assumptions about the reason you have this particular unhealthy behavior, or lack a healthy one. And start looking for causes by their dynamics, basically—by timing. When something changes—which is always—look around, ask yourself, and verify with your counselor (or at least a trusted social circle)—what has happened recently that could’ve led to the change? That’s the way to really understand your inner world.

Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh

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