As one challenges his or her sense of self or subjectivity, identifying less with the unitary ‘‘I’’ and more with the multiple, one can expect the same kinds of apprehensions one experiences on the analyst’s couch. The ego wants to believe in its own integrity, and will at times go to war with itself in order to create boundaries where perhaps none can exist. We are ‘‘comfortable’’ with things because we have domesticated them, or colonized them with language, a personal adaptation of a conventional range of significance. I ‘‘know’’ what my hands are because I have been taught how to count piggies on them, and how to use them to eat, play, and take care of myself. My hands have meaning. But just as a word repeated over and over in the
mind may be transformed into a ludicrous sound, my hand may grow unfamiliar, possibly even frightening or awe-inducing, when I stare at it long enough to let its physical presence overshadow its signification. A similar thing happens when one listens, by writing, to the organism which processes the language, rather than assuming a fixed role. And losing self-definition, the armor of the ego invites the anarchy of the real, if not to burst through the
surface, at least to trace its way back and forth just below, like a shark. It makes one wonder whether true ‘‘stage fright’’ is really anxiety over adequately constructing and playing out a role for an audience, or in discovering that the actor and stage don’t really exist, and that one is being watched by an outside and inside which are in many ways indistinguishable.