HW 30- Psychological and Philosophical

Humans instinctively crave to be filled. They want to fill their stomachs rather than empty because that means hunger, like their stomach this is a hole that continually needs to be filled. This might be filled by a (constant) stream of love (don’t people feel empty when someone they love dies?), being needed, creating a sense of themselves, or a type of heroism. Some things fill the hole better and longer than others. The hole is like your stomach, you have to keep feeding it, because after it digests whatever you feed it, it’s “empty” again. But defining emptiness like this, it can be seen as a need, that we need to be met and when its not we’re looking for things that will meet it. Emptiness is then interpreted as a lacking.

Buddhism however believes that the emptiness and acceptance of emptiness is enlightenment. Emptiness is a key concept in Buddhist philosophy. Buddhists define emptiness as a state of mind. Once your mind is empty you can see the world clearer, better, and deeper. So in Buddhism, rather than seeking to be filled, Buddhists seek to empty out their minds so their mind has space to fill more things. Like drinking a cup of water, you need the cup to be empty to fill it with more water (Fu). Meditation is an important tool used in Buddhism to achieve this state of mind. In Buddhism, emptiness is defined as a state of being rather than nonbeing (nothingness).

This kind of emptiness is interpreted differently than the kind we have been talking about in class. That’s the problematic and magical nature of words; they often hold more than one meaning to the one saying it and to the one listening. The kind of emptiness we’ve been talking about in class is more emotional. It wasn’t clarity of mind, but a need that wanted and needed to be filled: for attention, for love, for someone to believe in you or look up to you. It really depends on what sense of emptiness we are talking about. In what sense is it used? In what sense does it mean? What sense do we hear it? What sense is it interpreted? The answers to these questions will be different if we are talking about different things.

Sigmund Freud believes the source for the sense of emptiness we have been discussing in class stems from separation from the mother at the womb and the trauma of being born. That the kind of attachment a child forms to their mother or caretaker is instinctual and being separated from them causes them to feel anxiety. What the child seeks afterwards is a sense of connection again. Anna Freud, his daughter and a psychoanalyst herself has some similar points. From her own observations, she found that although babies are completely dependent on a mother-figure, they did not seem to need a particular person to fulfill that function and quickly re-adjusted after separation. It is only when they are around 3 years old that the effect of separation was found to be particularly traumatic. They then externalize their grief from their separation and seek out to meet this need by finding substitute affections among peers when parents cannot give them this. Anna also observed that being buried under rubble was not as tramatic for children than a comparably brief separation from the mother. This reaction and feeling of emptiness is primal and biological, rather than learned, and it’s a instinctive need that people have to have a connection. Both Anna and Sigmund Freud argues that this feeling’s origin comes from the separation from the mother-figure.