Why can ambition leave us stuck?

Now, I tend not to be the biggest fan of psychoanalysis, but the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (cracking name) wrote a book called Three Forms of Failed Existence in 1956. In it he identifies three ways your life can essentially go off the rails. The first of these is Verstiegenheit, which roughly translates as extravagance. It comes from the German sich versteigen, which basically means climbing your way into a dead end.

Imagine you’re a climber on a rock face, and you climb to a point where you get stuck. It’s so steep that you can’t go any higher, but it’s also so precarious that you can’t really scramble down without help. You’re stuck. And Binswanger says that human existence is “intrinsically fraught with the possibility of sich versteigen.” It’s just a fundamental part of being a human being.

Now, this wasn’t just a poetic metaphor. He was very influenced by Heidegger, and Heidegger saw human existence through the lens of Dasein. The way Binswanger translates this is that you’ve got two axes. You’ve got height, which is the dimension of your ambitions, your lofty ideals, the possibilities you might have, looking for a higher perspective on life. And you’ve also got breadth, which is your accumulated life experience: your everyday friendships, the shared reality you live in. Binswanger says it’s breadth that gives height a base to stand on. And what you need, if you’re going to be psychologically healthy, is a balance between the two. You need height and you need breadth. He calls this an anthropological proportion.

In Verstiegenheit, that proportion’s gone. It’s snapped, because you’ve climbed higher than your base can support. Now you’re hanging off a cliff, clinging to a tiny ledge of abstract ideas, and you’ve lost all contact with the ground. Because it’s so precarious, you can’t adapt, you can’t develop, you can’t find your way back down. You’re stuck up the mountain.

Binswanger saw psychotherapy (which, like I said, I’m not a huge fan of) as a rescue operation. Its goal, quoting him, was “to bring the patient safely back down to earth from his extravagance. Only from this point is any new departure and ascent possible.”

What he wasn’t saying, and this is important, was “play it safe”: live a timid, safe life where you never climb high or push yourself. He thought ambition was a really important part of human freedom, and of a good, well-lived life. But you’ve got to be careful of that balance. You can climb pretty much as high as you want, as long as you widen your existential base at the same time. If you don’t have the base to build from, you’re going to get in trouble. You’re going to get stuck. But if you do, crack on and away you go. Development, for Binswanger, means you need vertical and horizontal capacity in what you’re doing.

Lightly tidied for reading. The quotations are from the translations named below.