The Human Tragicomedy—
A Timeless Mess or Misguided Agency?
Author: Sara Ekenstierna
© 2025. Sara Ekenstierna. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Are Humans to be Envied or Pitied?
You have heard of history repeating itself. Lately, that adage has rung truer than ever, when across the globe, war of ideas and corruption are immanent. In one of the most important precursors of the modern novel,
La Comédie Humaine, French author Honoré de Balzac depicts the shadow-side of worshipping the mammon and the want of power in all its manifestations. Closer to a tragicomedy, Balzac’s work consists of over 90 completed works which emphasize the complexity of human nature and the profound immorality of a social structure that crushes the vulnerable while rewarding dishonest politicians and CEOs. He describes how social bonds break down and ethics vanish, as results of a rising new world order, following the French Revolution. Set in the 1830s and written two centuries ago now, the topics are highly relevant to our time and seem hauntingly universal.
Although alluding to Dante Alighieri’s
Divine Comedy, Balzac’s novel is a critique of things utterly mundane and human. Yet one cannot help but wonder, what might the gods make of all this, perhaps timeless, mortal mess? This question was explored in another important literary work, namely Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s
A Dream Play, published in 1902. Regarded as possibly his most important play,
A Dream Play serves as a forerunner to surrealism and dramatic expressionism. In it, Agnes, a daughter of the Vedic god Indra, descends to earth, originally curious about the
human experience, only to witness endless poverty, cruelty, and suffering, linked to everything from existential trials to everyday routine and family life. After Agnes herself gets wrapped up in a painful marriage, she returns to heaven, which symbolizes the awakening from a dream-like sequence. A dream which to us is life, played out between our biological birth and death. Throughout the play, Agnes famously repeats that humans are to be pitied. “Poor souls, I feel so sorry for them” she says. Pointing out that: “For the gods in heaven a year is only a minute.” To which the stage-door keeper replies: “And for us here on earth a minute can seem like a year…”
The script plays on the underlying conundrum of whether humans are to be pitied or envied. This question was asked already by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey and was more recently expressed by Brad Pitt in the role of Achilles, in the movie Troy. “The gods envy us” he concluded, “because any moment may be our last”. And while tales tell of the envy that the gods have of mortals, much has been written over the ages and across cultures about the weakness, wretchedness, and greed of humans too. Often resulting in the conclusion that we are best left to our own devices, fighting our battles till the end, as seems to be the inference drawn from
A Dream Play.
The Deterministic Death Drive
So, what is wrong with us? Why this voracious hunger for ruin? Sabina Spielrein, one of the first female psychoanalysts, first put forth the idea of the so-called
death drive in her paper ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being’. Sigmund Freud picked it up on it in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. The death drive to Freud, is the strive towards destruction, expressed through aggression, repetitions, and self-defeating behaviors. In the repetition or the eternal recurrence, behavioral patterns, determined by biology and milieu – in other words fate and cause; forces beyond our control – are cyclically repeated throughout a person’s life, or, in society as a whole.
Early Freudian psychoanalytical thinking tended to highlight the influence of outer factors when it came to the development of the individual and the formation of its character. A person is viewed as an entity driven by biological impulses and instinctual drives determined to unfold. The individual “copes” via a strive towards equilibrium and tension reduction. While psychoanalysis is usually held to arise from the intersection of a positivist and a hermeneutic framework, this reveals a partly deterministic interpretation of the self.
Philosophical perspectives that oppose such approach include phenomenology. Here, the subject of perception is rather understood as an embodied agent who stands in an intentional relation to the world. In early psychoanalysis, this relationality corresponds most clearly with Otto Rank’s approach, where intentionality takes center stage in the form of the individual’s creative will, operating as an autonomous force beyond mere environment, biological impulse and heredity. Therefore, while Freud saw in the repetition death's ultimate and unavoidable pull, Rank understood the individual as an autonomous representative of the creative will rather than a slave of the drives, of circumstance and fate. Consequently, Rank instead saw death as a possibility (cf. Achilles).
One of my oldest friends, the great Portuguese artist Francisco Da Costa Maya, whom I have known for three decades, died just four days ago as I complete this piece. Death is a sad loss, a door shut once and for all. We may never talk again, sing again, laugh again, and argue again in this life. But in this moment, I am also made aware of all the ways I am not living to my fullest potential. Death is a boundary but also a renewal and a call to the dance of life. Notwithstanding the wonder of life, Rank viewed it as an “experiment for discovering the secret of death”.
The Universality of Creativity
Rank’s emphasis on individuation as an expression of the creative life force clearly challenged a deterministic point of view in early psychoanalysis and psychology. Creativity is according to Rank a universal force: it is not only about works of art, or rare moments of awe, but our entire life is an art. Otto Rank (like Carl Jung and others) was part of Freud’s inner circle but dissented from the Freudian doctrine in the mid 1920s, to lay the foundation of our contemporary relational practice. Rank's psychology rejected a reductive biological view and contended that existential factors were more important to self-becoming. According to his theory, the inner world is absorbed from the outer through identification. It then develops into a power in its own right, which, next, influences and seeks to alter the external through projection, bringing its correspondence to the inner even closer. In other words, he sees reality as a greater whole (
Das Ganze in German, the All, or cosmos) which manifests and has bearing on the parts (people, atoms, rivers and so on). How things go from nothing to something, as when a person is born into this life, and then turn to nothingness again, like the Black Holes in space, is a mysterious process which at best can be existentially known as opposed to cognitively apprehended. We get glimpses of unknowable reality, through our
experiences in the here-and-now.
Rank, in the vein of William James, understood our relationship to the outside world as
will psychology and referred to it as creation instead of adaptation. The human being is an active participator in the process of making meaning of experiences, and ultimately in how the world comes-into-being. Its ability to turn potential into actuality rests upon how it manages to interweave narratives about itself and the world. Living well, nourishing personal growth, and achieving therapeutic change in whatever shape or form, be it psychoanalysis, ecotherapy, bibliotherapy, creative endeavor or love, is a creative decision that entails responsibility, courage and action.
Art, stories, myth and dreams, have a central role in this process, as bridges between the hidden and overt, subconscious and conscious, as Freud also observed. Jung elaborated on this by proposing that it offers a place from which a connection to the collective unconscious and archetypes may be inferred. Stories and reflection are paramount to the eternal process of integration through which people come to know and understand themselves, others and the world around, and by which we test and develop strategies. By stimulating the imagination, through which we create metaphors for our deepest urges, stories bring us closer to visualization, and subsequently also to manifestation. Entanglement with a writer’s imagination as you read, can for instance increase self-awareness and have therapeutic effects. Research has also shown that reading – in particular fiction – or engaging with works of art enhances the ability to identify and understand others’ mental processes.
The Problem of Duality
As Rank observed, and as later humanistic psychoanalysts like Charlotte Bühler also concluded, these processes are complicated by an inherent duality in life. One aspect of this is the dualism of human purpose. As humans we strive to be self-assertive, independent individuals on the one side. Yet we seek union and belongingness on the other. This paradoxical quest becomes a source for the conflict of opposites. For example, a person wants both independence and connection, because the will to separate correlates with the self-creative, self-assertive urge, while the will to connect aligns with the desire to give love and receive love. This contradictoriness is a part of our existence as embodied beings. A person may become overly symbiotic in a relationship, relinquishing their autonomy, or, they can remain at a “safe” distance, uncommitted. But the ability to integrate opposing forces demands something else of us. It requires that we embrace the diversity of experience. That, rather than endeavoring to rid myself of conflict and anxieties, I recognize the complementarity of all things. Complementarity exemplifies how duality, pain, and ambivalence, are not only inevitable aspects of life but also vital to creativity, personal development and growth. With this perspective, we may transform destructive conflicts into constructive experiences from which we learn something new. (Even if that
something new occasionally generates just a whole different set of questions, as opposed to complete answers.)
Another problem concerns the dualism of time. More specifically, the fact that we live in the present but also have a spontaneous orientation to the past and the future. This may play out as a conflict between fate and freedom. A person is more than biological determinants, one’s past, one’s parental connections and internalized representations, and yet, once bitten twice shy.
Managing the Dialectics
Self-creation, and the creation of new understandings of wider humanity, entails a continuous managing of the dialectic between opposing forces. In love, for example, it is the closeness and the distance, where, love endures, as philosopher Martin Buber put it, not in direct relation, but in “the interchange of actual and potential being”. On a societal level, it might be the resistance to polarization, and the embracement of difference, ambivalence, and uncertainty.
According to Rank, while the poles of purpose and time, of union and autonomy, of the eternal and the temporal, become sources of conflict, they are simultaneously pathways to transcendence, because the conflict provides a fertile ground for creative urge, growth, and transformation. “Transcendence” in psychoanalysis, as Rochelle Kainer has pointed out, does usually not refer to a traditional dualistic logic in which creature and creative nature, matter and mental life, are two separate forms of reality. Rather, it refers to moments in which a person is transformed to a more constructive and creative form of being. Think of all the post-divorce albums that have been produced (often being amongst the best), like Bruce Springsteen’s
Tunnel of Love or Fleetwood Mac’s song
Go Your Own Way. Think of Dylan’s
Time Out of Mind record which signifies his comeback from a period of creative blockage and personal illness, or, more recently, Doechii’s hit Anxiety.
Contemporary Western society offers a wide range of temporary reliefs and distractions from the inner struggles, posed by the dualism of life itself. While some Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism strives toward the individual freeing itself from suffering, several mystical teachings imply that it is when the seeker meets the Dweller on the Threshold as in
Zanoni, or like John of the Cross experiences “the dark night of the soul” that opportunity for progress is near. The process of suffering holds a transformational power. It motives a person to accept their vulnerability in the fragile moment of life, where paradoxically, they may step into a stronger version of themselves. In other words, and as Erikson intended by his
life cycles, growth and advancement from one life stage to the next, entails facing and embracing, challenge and contradictions within oneself. Thinking of it this way; without the proper resolution of previous conflicts, which would enable transition to ultimately new shared realities, history is doomed to repeat itself. This is possibly not due to a deterministic destructive drive in itself. But rather to our mindset and agency, with respect to the at-once enviable and pitiable conditions that constitute human reality. The upside is, like Erikson observed, that for each new crisis we get yet another chance to manifest a different reality.
References
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La comédie humaine [The human comedy]. L. Conrad.
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Bio
Sara Ekenstierna, PhD, is a writer and psychologist, researching the interface of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and creativity. She is the founder of Ekenstierna Psykologkonsult and Oakstar Coaching & Consulting. Sara a frequent speaker at conferences and is a member of the American Psychological Association, as well as the American Philosophical Association, and Institute of Noetic Sciences.
www.ekenstierna.com
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