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Common Sense and Psychotherapy
On How We Construct Our World(s)
“I absolutely do not believe in common sense. There is sense, but there is no common variety. In all likelihood, not a single one of you hears me in the same sense as another. Furthermore, I endeavour to make it so that access to this meaning is not so easy, which entails you having to put something of your own into it.”
— Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital
Experience is so infinitely dense with potential sensory data that it could never be self-explanatory. So we create frameworks that help us engage our experiences. Our frameworks tell us what to focus in on and what to ignore. We gradually design our own frameworks, adopt those of others, and are socialized into frameworks which we may not even realize. We can often mistake our frameworks for descriptions of our experiences, but if that were the case they would always be woefully incomplete. In reality, they’re ways of engaging and responding to our experiences, and in that way are much more like games than descriptions. Frameworks entail religion, politics, philosophy, culture, relationships, and much more without ever being fully limited to any of these things.
Sometimes our frameworks clash with those of others, or they encounter…
