SehnSucht

Sehnsucht is a specific kind of longing in which a person feels a sense of incompleteness while sensing that that thing that could make them feel complete is out there, somewhere, hauntingly close and yet elusive, just beyond our ability to grasp it.

In sehnsucht, there is a sense of something that’s on the edge of conscious awareness. It can be like remembering that you’ve forgotten something, but without being able to remember exactly what it is that you have forgotten. Another version of sehnsucht is a feeling that a certain place or object holds within it some potential for a better life, without understanding explicitly how that improvement might take place.

Full Transcript:

Jonathan Cook:

Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that celebrates the full range of subjective experience.

This winter, I’ve been feeling kind of thin. Until now, this is a specific emotional state that I have not yet included on the list of emotions I’ve been compiling, but it’s the best word I can think of to describe what I’ve been feeling.

To be thin is to not have much substance to spare. A thin thing is easy to poke through, and often is easy to see through too.

Thick things can become thin through inadequate nutrition, or by being stretched. My thin feeling comes from this second kind of strain. Recently, I feel pulled in many directions all at once, and I worry that there’s not enough of me to give adequate attention to any of those directions.

This personal feeling is seeping into my podcasting. I worry that I won’t be able to give the emotions of this podcast the attention that they deserve. What they deserve is a thick desxcription.

“Thick description” is a term that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz used to describe an ideal kind of ethnographic research. The goal of ethnography is to understand other people’s cultural perspectives. For Geertz, to do that thickly meant considering manifestations of culture from multiple perspectives, accepting that no single interpretation of it can be considered as even close to complete. Thick description involves putting singular theoretical perspectives in the company of people’s own ideas about who they are and what they’re up to. It allows for competing models of what’s really going on, acknowledging that there could be even more happening out of view.

To achieve thick description, Clifford Geertz called upon ethnographers to look at their research subjects from different angles. That’s what I’ve tried to do with this podcast, but I’m warning you that this episode might feel a little thin. One of the ways I try to achieve thick description is by including the voices of several people talking about an emotion, each from their own point of view. This episode is lacking that multiplicity, featuring only one guest.

This admission of a thin episode that fails to meet my own standards violates one of the unspoken cultural norms of podcasting, which is that a podcaster should edit out all the glitches, the pauses, the awkward moments. Most podcasters are attempting in some way to become influencers, and influencers are supposed to fake it ‘til they make it. They always look fabulous. They always sound full of energy. They only talk about their successes.

This podcast is about emotional authenticity, however, and so instead of pretending to be thick when I’m really feeling thin, I want to let you in on what’s really going on. I have enough experience, and I know enough about myself, to be confident that this thin phase won’t last. I know that I’m not yet out of thick times to compensate for the thin, and while things are thin, I’d rather not make it than fake it.

Still, I admit that I also feel impatient. I want the thick times to come now. I yearn for a version of this podcast that I’ve held as an ideal in my mind for years now. I have held a sense of what this podcast ought to be, even though I have not yet attained anything close to that vision. It feels as if there is an ideal version of this podcast that already exists somehow, if only in the form of its potential, a place in the universe of communication that I ought to be able to fill. I feel the reality of that space. I yearn to reach it, but it remains out of reach.

Those of you who have attempted to realize a vision may understand the feeling I’m trying to describe. The Germans, it turns out, have a name for it. They call it sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a specific kind of longing in which a person feels an incompleteness while sensing that a thing that could make them feel complete is out there, somewhere, hauntingly close and yet elusive, just beyond their ability to grasp it. It they could only reach it, they would finally feel right.

That’s what philosophers and psychologists say about sehnsucht, at least. They also say that there is no single word in English that effectively translates the full depth and complexity of what sehnsucht means.

Last week, I mentioned Tim Lomas, and his book The Happiness Dictionary, which explores the language of positive experience. In that book, Lomas writes that the etymology of sehnsucht “implies an ‘addiction’ or commitment to yearning itself, as opposed to pining for a particular person or thing,” defining sehnsucht, on the basis of a psychological survey, as a “diffuse, general longing: a dreamy sense that life could be better than it is.”

Such may be the meaning of sehnsucht in the aggregate, but what does an example of this emotion look like in the context of an actual person’s life?

I’ve been trying to pierce this cultural mystery, but I only know a few of the most simple words in German. I’ve been wondering whether what the psychologists and philosophers say about sehnsucht really matches the way that most speakers of German understand it.

So, for the last three years, I’ve been looking for people who speak German who can explain sehnsucht to me. This quest has been an almost complete failure. Most people I know who speak German say that they aren’t really sure what sehnsucht means.

An exception is Lior Locher. If you’ve been listening to this podcast from the start, you’ve met Lior before. They were in the very first episode, talking about their experience of the emotion of friluftsliv as a child in the foothills of the Alps.

Lior is also the only person I’ve been able to find who has been able to speak to me about the feeling of sehnsucht. Here’s what they say about when they began to experience this feeling.

Lior Locher:

I think for me it was probably teenage years, maybe a little earlier. So this kind of, yearning in English is obviously not the right word because we're talking about the differences, but this kind of wanting, you know, reaching out for something energetically, you know, it's kind of you're in one spot, and you see something over there or you have a hunch that something might be over there, and you want to either extend yourself to get there, so it does feel very stretchy and tuggy, if that makes sense. It feels like you hope that that other thing will add something to your life, maybe not necessarily complete you, but be another really key puzzle piece that adds something that you can't otherwise have, and you don't know exactly what the puzzle piece is. So sehnsucht is not necessarily super specific. It's not like, you know, a pizza order, something like that, but you do have this hunch that this thing you're kind of after, you're having sehnsucht for, or person will add something.

Jonathan Cook:

I was struck by the way Lior described sehnsucht as something like a hunch. That seems to be one of the distinctions between sehnsucht and more general feelings of yearning. With sehnsucht, there is a sense of something that’s on the edge of conscious awareness. It can be like remembering that you’ve forgotten something, but without being able to remember exactly what it is that you have forgotten. Another version of sehnsucht can be the feeling that a certain place or object holds within it some potential for a better life, without understanding explicitly how that improvement might take place.

Lior explains that the transformation sought under sehnsucht is in a sense something that’s already in our hands, if only we could realize how to activate it. In this sense, sehnsucht might be something like what Dorothy experienced in the Wizard of Oz, longing for the ability to get home when the ruby slippers she needed to do so were on her feet the whole time. In that case, what Dorothy really needed was to go through the effort of her journey through the land of Oz. Getting what she wanted from the start would have deprived her of the growth that emerged from her struggles to find it.

In this sense, sehnsucht evades direct tactics of problem solving, because people in sehnsucht don’t merely need to achieve their literal goals. Like the statue in the Maltese Falcon, our explicit objectives can turn out to be mere MacGuffins, something that compels us to begin a quest that is much bigger than at first we comprehend.

Lior explains,

Lior Locher:

For me with sehnsucht, you're still in the same point where you started, so you're not looking to move yourself towards something. So, you know, longing for me would be, you're trying to get somewhere else, so you're moving from where you are as you're kind of chasing after the thing, whereas for me, sehnsucht, you're still here and the stretch comes because you're trying to get all the way to where the other thing is without actually moving. So, it does kind of expand and then it's almost about you want to find it and bring it back and kind of reintegrate it rather than shifting from where you are and just running over to the other thing.

Jonathan Cook:

Lior observes that in sehnsucht, the typical separation between the self and the outside world cracks apart. We come to realize that our efforts to reach someplace or someone else is actually a way to reach some part of ourselves from which we have become estranged.

Lior Locher:

You can have sehnsucht for something you haven't met yet, but it feels like, you know, on some level, like sometimes you meet a person and you've met them for three minutes and you want to say, "Where have you been all this time?" as if you'd always known them and if you know if it was just kind of temporarily a little bit misplaced. So, I think sehnsucht is a bit like that, I think, on some level or some part of you knows that that part should be closer or was closer, or maybe in a different time, in a different universe, and a different I don't know, was there and you want some of that back.

Either it's an obvious trying to get something back that was there before in the sense of it was objectively there, and now it isn't, and you hope it'll come back or the person will come back or it's almost like it's across different times and space where it feels like you're doing that, even though objectively, you don't sort of have any evidence in your life that that was together, but it feels like it kind of should have been.

Jonathan Cook:

Sehnsucht begins as a muddled sort of yearning, but once we reach the object of our sehnsucht, the experience can be mindblowing. So, Lior gives a more concrete example: The idea they once had, as a teenager in Germany, that living in London or Boston would enable them to become the kind of person they always felt they could be.

Lior Locher:

Before I was living in the UK and London specifically, I think London almost became a representation for me for a group of friends or a group of people, a type of culture, a type of activity. So, it almost became like a cluster of something, and I was kind of having sehnsucht for that cluster, and then that became that became that. So, I do have sehnsucht for Boston occasionally, and that is very much a mix of the people, some of the activities, the Cape, you know, like all kinds of like weird and wonderful random things, and they're not like each individual element wouldn't be big enough for a sehnsucht, but all of them bundled together, I think can be a sehnsucht for Boston.

I was there on a school trip at age 11, and it was the first place I'd been to where I never felt out of place. I felt it was such a diverse environment. There was so much happening culturally, and it was just really, really exciting, I mean, to be fair, I've also like this was one of the few big cities I'd ever been in. It just felt like there was going to be space for everyone, including me, and that feeling never really left.

Jonathan Cook:

For Lior, London was something to yearn for before they even knew what it was. Can anyone really know a place as large as London, with all the people it contains? What Lior saw within London was a space to belong, with a mix of people diverse enough to allow for whatever they might need to become.

This feeling of sehnsucht is something that Lior has felt personally, although they also acknowledge that there is an intellectual tradition embracing sehnsucht in Germany, not just among writers, but in music and art as well.

Lior Locher:

It's enough of a cultural thing that people will know what that is. Germany also has, it does have a deep Romantic tradition, so if you know, if you read like Goethe and Schiller and all of that, so you know, people, there were parts of history where it was quite common for people to sit together and read poetry to each other and cry and, you know, be a lot more emotional than what people stereotypically associate with Germany. I think sehnsucht is also an interesting one because it's culturally very appropriate in that it does have the depth. But it's also very internalized, so you can have sehnsucht, and people on the outside wouldn't necessarily see, you know, you're carrying that around with you or what the specifics are. So, sehnsucht is very much an inside job.

I guess if you don't act and you just carry it as a romantic ideal and you just carry it in your heart, that's almost safer because then you'll never know how deluded you actually might have been because it never needs to face up to sort of the messy reality, and that definitely happens, you know, people idolize, idealize things without putting them to the test of reality.

Jonathan Cook:

I wasn’t able to find another person from Germany to explain the emotion of sehnsucht to me, but then, searching for something that isn’t within easy grasp is a big part of what sehnsucht is all about.

Besides, what did I think I might find upon hearing another German speak to me about their sehnsucht? I can’t say specifically. Every time I talk to someone about their emotional experience, I prepare myself for surprises. There are patterns and structures to emotion, but our subjective feelings are as much about the exceptions as the rules.

Sehnsucht doesn’t fit easily within the culture of online life and podcasting. We are supposed to present ourselves as having something special to say, as knowing something that others would be entertained by, which might even be a source of wisdom.

This podcast, Stories of Emotional Granularity, isn’t about what we know. It’s about exploring new territories where we can’t be certain what we will find. I began this podcast a year ago without any definite sense of the emotional landscape it would survey. I had a feeling that there was something worth exploring, but I didn’t really know where I was going with it. You could say that this podcast is itself an example of sehnsucht.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just being vague. Perhaps I’m just not sure where I’m going. It could be that I don’t really understand sehnsucht at all.

If you know the feeling of sehnsucht, and feel that the coverage I’m giving it here doesn’t tell the full story, or is somehow off the mark, don’t let that feeling fester. Get in touch with me, and tell me about your sehnsucht. Help me follow up with an episode about sehnsucht that’s thicker, and more complete. I feel sehnsucht for an understanding of sehnsucht, and perhaps you can help me take the next step on this quest.

In the meantime, next week I will be reviewing a smartphone app called How We Feel. It’s one of many apps that claim to be able to help people examine their emotions scientifically.

Until then, thanks for listening.