Freedom And The Temptation To Not Care
“On my way here,” Ira said as we started our session, “I was thinking: what am I still doing here? Why am I still coming to therapy?” He shared the inventory he took, while walking to my office, of different parts of his life: his marriage, his work, his friendships, his family. “Everything seems fine,” he said, with a tone that sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. “As long as I don’t care about the things that bother me, it’s all good.”
Ira, an insightful and sensitive man who has been my patient for a few years, was right in some ways. His life was indeed much different than when we first met: he had become acquainted with parts of himself he disavowed, and felt more confident in his ability to work and love. At the same time, I wondered about what sounded like a very high-level survey of his life. “It sounds like you are working hard to look at your life from a distance,” I said, “as if not wanting to see some things up close.” The experience of seeing a face from afar came to mind, and how different things feel when we see every pore, every hair, every imperfection.
Ira (not his real name) considered what I suggested and, after thinking about it for a moment, agreed. We had talked before about how, despite all the hard work and growth from the past few years, some of his wishes, conflicts, and longings remained behind a fence – “like a construction site,” he had noted in the past, a metaphor we came back to from time to time.
We wondered about how questioning therapy might be a way to curb its threatening nature. As much as clinicians talk about therapy as a “safe space,” the reality is that it is a process where our most unsettling, painful, or terrifying experiences can show up at any moment. Continuing to look at himself closely and deeply through our work, we considered, could jeopardize Ira’s hard-won sense of peace and stability. As I heard him elaborate, I wondered why these questions were coming up now.
Our conversation took a turn into his personal relationships. Ira talked about the hurt and guilt he felt about a close friendship that had gone sour a few years earlier, to the apparent indifference of the other person. This topic was familiar territory for us, but I was struck when he said, with intense emotion, something he had not expressed before: “I envy the people who just don’t care.” Ira spoke of his wishes to detach from the pain of that loss, to be like his injuring friend, who seemed to be living their life unencumbered by the weight of their rupture.
The pain he experienced in that relationship had, unsurprisingly, echoes of early losses and old sorrows. “It must be so freeing,” he continued, “to live life without feeling hurt, without being disappointed or sad.” “All of which are parts of being human…” I noted. “Yeah, well, it sucks!” he responded briskly to my unhelpful comment. I realized that what I said inadvertently obscured, under a veil of normalization, Ira’s vulnerable expression of something else that is very human: the anger we can feel towards the distressing and difficult aspects of our own humanity.
As we tried to understand more about what he found so difficult, what sucked about being human, we went back to his wish to go around life not caring, untouched by loss or disappointment. “It would be so freeing,” he said again. I did not disagree with him this time but I observed: “That’s a very particular kind of freedom, one that would require you to imprison a part of yourself.” Ira nodded with his head and I noticed some sadness in his expression.
We continued talking about the feelings he wished he could free himself from. “Say all you want about empathy,” he said, “but it can be such a heavy burden.” I asked him what he meant and he reminded me that, at his work, the vast majority of his clients were working-class Hispanics. That community had been, by and large, living in intense fear and distress for the prior few weeks (our session took place in early February, 2025), having lost a basic sense of safety under an increased threat of harassment, mistreatment, and deportation.
“I’m not at risk, but hearing all this…I can understand how stressed and worried they are.” I listened to him trying to hold my own feelings about what is going on, my own rage, anxiety, and fear. I was feeling closer to Ira and appreciative for his solidarity and empathy, even if he felt it was burdensome. He then added, “sometimes I would like to just not care, to be like those people who don’t seem concerned about things that don’t affect them.” While I have my own opinions and feelings about “those people,” I could not blame Ira for his wish, or for the disappointment that it could not be fulfilled.
For Ira, the recognition of that wish was, I believe, part of the mourning process that defined much of our work. We can only truly empathize with the suffering of others if we can find that suffering within ourselves. Ira was able to empathize with his clients’ experiences not because of his identity, but because of some of his own personal history: the fear of unpredictable punishment, the burden of carrying other people’s projections, the loneliness of not belonging, and the pain of being blamed and misunderstood. Through our work together, Ira had become acquainted with how those experiences were part of his life and the person he became. His wish to not be burdened by the weight of empathy was, in a way, a wish for those experiences to have never happened.
As if he had heard these thoughts, Ira jokingly said, when reflecting on the impossibility of his wish, “I’d have to have amnesia!” A moment later, he brought up the famous case of Phineas Gage, a 19th century railroad foreman whose personality seemingly changed after he survived a rod destroying much of his frontal lobe. “Something like that would have to happen to me,” he quipped, in order to stop caring.
Ira’s comments brought me back to the notion of freedom we discussed earlier: freedom from difficult feelings and from concern for others. That kind of freedom, it seems, requires us to forget our history, to become amnesic, to forget what happened to us and within us. Our minds sometimes go to great lengths to forget, change, distort, minimize, or destroy our own history. As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, I am always curious about the ways in which my patients forget, often before there was anything to remember, and the ways in which they repeat what they cannot remember what could not be forgotten. Our nations and societies, too, work hard to forget their own history, as a collective refusal to recognize, accept, and mourn the often painful and at times atrocious reality of how they came to be.
That kind of freedom, one defined by the absence of pain, suffering, fear, concern, or despair, might also require, as in the case of Mr. Gage, destroying something within ourselves. Consciously or unconsciously disavowing uncomfortable, distressing, or painful aspects of who we are -our hurt, shame, aggression, dependency, hatred, envy, yearning, desire- limits the experience of our own humanity. We might split off unwanted parts of ourselves and locate them in others that will carry the burden of what we feel is undesirable or intolerable within us, particularly as a result of trauma. This narrows our ability to relate and empathize with the other, as that would require us to recognize the other in ourselves. When the failure to empathize, individually or collectively, becomes more severe, the Other becomes dehumanized, undeserving of any recognition or consideration. This is one of the ways in which dehumanizing others involves dehumanizing ourselves.
What kind of freedom can we aspire to if, in order to accomplish it, we must erase parts of our history, or if we need to exile and deport aspects of our own humanity? Or if, as a result, we end up considering others as “not-me,” rendering them invisible or inferior, and leaving us unable to relate to and empathize with them?
Rollo May, the existential psychologist, thought that the purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. In my view, the freedom that psychotherapy can offer is not founded on the ability to eliminate the challenges of being human, on the prospect of pure happiness or unlimited peace, or on the promise of not caring about our relationships and the world around us.
Rather, it is a freedom that allows us to embrace our full lived experience, to get acquainted with the intricacies of our inner world and the corners of our history, to recognize and find meaning in our wounds and our scars, to break from long-standing positions that leave us feeling stuck or disconnected, and to find, create, and reinvent ourselves from within. And, as Ira did, to recognize when it feels like it all sucks, and acknowledge the temptation of a numb, indifferent, frictionless life. Protecting and recovering our capacity for empathy is not only something we can do for others but also for ourselves since, as H.S. Sullivan reminded us, we are all more human than otherwise.