Desire in Life & in Creativity

Desire in Life and in Creativity – How do you stop the repetition and build a professional creative life you will love

This year I launched Milano Club as a members-only club for professional creative people who want to find a way to build a professional creative life they will love. The first webinar in Milano Club was about the compulsion to repeat unproductive situations for ourselves without knowing why. I chose this topic as the first for us to discuss because I talk with so many professional creative people who feel that they have no control over their circumstances and that the situation they find themselves in again and again is something put upon them.

That the hardship of professional creatives is imaginary is, of course, only partly true since there is a structural tendency that it is not the creative people who gain from the economic value creation. Musicians aren’t the ones earning the most from being played on Spotify and architects aren’t the ones who gain the most from rising real estate prices.

But there is also another dynamic taking place that has nothing to do with reality but with what Freud called the compulsion to repeat.

The compulsion to repeat

Most people know the feeling when you once again find yourself in a situation that catches you and holds you back from going all in on what you desire. For some people this is the situation where they once again see themselves being too late with answering an important email or not well enough prepared for a presentation. For others it can be the situation where they refuse to accept a responsibility and find themselves standing outside the group.

Situations like these take a lot of creative energy and hold us back from attaining that which we truly desire. They keep us trapped in a dilemma that feels impossible to resolve. The dilemma between being in a situation you know by heart and trying to establish a new situation for yourself that you do not know the emotional value of yet.

Freud described the compulsion to repeat as a process originating from the unconscious. And as a result, the subject deliberately places him- or herself in distressing situations, and thereby repeats an old experience. The subject does not recall the original situation but on the contrary has an impression that the situation is fully determined by the circumstances of the moment.

This means that when we feel that our circumstances hold us back we interpret the circumstances as distracting us because we unconsciously create situations for ourselves that help us relive a situation that once felt good.

You are not the master of your own house

The compulsion to repeat stems from the fact that different parts of us are drawn to different things. Whereas the ego wants to master life, wants to be better and learn, the id – the unconscious drive that influences us sometimes without us even noticing it – only wants to feel pleasure but pleasure in so many different ways. The id wants to establish a special tension that feels good and reject what is not pleasurable. When we experience the compulsion to repeat and see ourselves ending up in the same unproductive situation again and again it is when the id drives us toward a known feeling of a pleasurable tension and refuses to go through the stages of feeling something unpleasant that every change and learning process entails.

But as Lacan says this is why we have to “open the space of desire” and instead of betting on what naturally drives us choose our desire, or as he states transform our relationship to our desire, so that instead of being fooled by our desire we take ownership over a “decided desire” or a “determined desire.”

So the question you have to ask yourself if you want to build a professional creative life you will love is: How do I accept the sometime conflicting drives in my life and how do I build a life where they can coexist?

At the monthly webinars in Milano Club you will as a member be guided through a reflection process that helps you realize why you repeat situations that hold you back and what desires in your life you have to integrate for you to get past your dilemmas and love your professional life.

Milano Club is a members-only club for professional creative people with more than 5 years of experience who want to work with themselves in relationship to their work, want to change the professional roles they are in or want to develop the relationships they tend to establish with stakeholders.

You can find more info at our website: milanoclub.org.