An essay by Thomas Geßner

Sometimes I feel like that blue fish in the South Seas you have probably heard of. One morning his neighbour asked him how he liked the water that day. The blue fish replied, startled: ‘What water? This sets the scene for my attempt to explore the zeitgeist and its role in the interplay between the collective and the individual. We need to leave the water for a few moments to perceive something of the zeitgeist that surrounds us.

Can you remember the last time you looked at your mobile phone? Was it ten seconds ago, two minutes ago or yesterday? I did it two minutes ago. I wanted to see how cold it was outside. Seven degrees below zero. And I wanted to check if I was free next weekend. Calendar, emails, messages, WhatsApp, blood pressure app, 1,000 hours of music, 27 photo albums including the last memorable meals, a camera, a video camera, a voice recorder, YouTube, hundreds of addresses, American military technology (GPS) and its applications in maps and city plans, location services and movement profiles, the internet with its cookies (which still conjure up vegetable peelers on my mini screen after I searched for them once two weeks ago), a fitness app (unused), my train timetable with tickets and delay notifications, a tuning device, a magnifying glass, a flashlight, an alarm clock – and a phone: Really. The one thing I still resent about my phone is that you can’t shave with it. A built-in hairdryer would also be handy.
The mobile phone: a symbol of freedom and an addictive substance in one, a declaration of independence in physical form and the wet dream of every secret service. My gateway to the world and therefore the keystone of the invisible wall that irretrievably separates me from the world. The mobile phone, with its connection to everything and everyone, gives me the greatest pleasure of symbiosis. At the same time, it leaves me all alone, because the connection is virtual, it exists only in my imagination, in the technical-abstract space of the digital world. In reality, I sit alone with myself, staring at a screen that is much too small. I could even talk to it. The phone answers with a soft voice, but there is no one there. Or is there?

I can think of no better illustration of the spirit of the times than the mobile phone and its incomprehensible place in our everyday lives. So I could stop my little investigation here. The difficulty, however, is that by simply using my mobile phone, I am not saying anything about the spirit of the times, but simply embodying it. I am the spirit of the age’, in a variation on the definition of the state attributed to Louis XIV. I cannot be anything but the spirit of the age; I cannot write about it without it guiding my fingers. For I and you and all of us here are its creatures, while we are constantly creating and shaping it with our everyday lives. I would have to find a place outside of time to be able to say anything about the present and its spirit, about what animates and inspires it. This ‘place’ exists, it is always there, but more on that later. First, I want to look at the two terms that make up the word ‘zeitgeist’: ‘time’ and ‘spirit’.
When I think of ‘spirit’, a Hebrew word comes to mind: ‘Ruach’, the ‘Spirit of God’. At the beginning of Genesis, ‘Ruach’ hovered ‘over the waters’ when the earth was still ‘a waste and a void’. God breathed His ‘Ruach’ into the nostrils of man, whom He later formed from clay, and ‘man became a living being’. In ancient times, when the Greek language became necessary to classify the Hebrew-Aramaic Jesus in Europe, the ‘ruach’ of God was understood with the help of the Greek word ‘pneuma’. Like its Hebrew counterpart, it denotes a mixture of quality and activity: ‘living’ and ‘breathing’. The English translation of ‘pneuma’ is ‘spirit’, in the sense of ‘breathing vitality’. The question of the current ‘Zeitgeist’ now changes: Where, how and in what way does this time have its breathing vitality?
To see something of this, let us look at the other part of ‘Zeitgeist’: What is ‘time’? In the physical sense, ‘time’ seems to be an expression of the law of conservation of energy, namely in its basic function of entropy (read on, it’s not what it seems): Energy always relaxes from a higher, more concentrated level to a lower, less concentrated level. An example: the waiter has just placed a fresh cup of coffee in front of me, hot and steaming. It would never occur to this coffee to become even hotter by drawing energy from its surroundings, such as the air in the café. It does the opposite: it adapts to its surroundings, releasing heat energy and slowly reaching the temperature of the air in the room. To do this, it needs an unimaginable number of tiny moments, one after the other. In each of these moments, my coffee releases a tiny amount of energy, while the surrounding air (or my stomach) absorbs this tiny amount. My stomach gets warmer, as does the air in the café. It is this sequence of moments of energy balance that we call ‘time’.
Since the Big Bang, physical time has emerged from the phenomenon of energy balance, and it is always moving towards relaxation. Another function of the flow of energy from concentration to relaxation is called ‘space’. It provides space for the movement of energy balance. Space also ‘flows’ towards energy/relaxation: the universe seems to be expanding at an ever increasing rate. Time and space are the conditions within which anything can exist at all, for example us humans and our world. The ‘spirit of the times’ would thus be limited to our ‘breathing vitality’ in the present space-time window of the nearly fourteen billion year old universe.
Now ‘breathing vitality’ and ‘physical time’ are two ‘things’ that belong to different worlds. Physical time (like physical space) is the basic building block of the world of form, i.e. what is there. Breathing vitality is formless; it is not there, but it unfolds in what is there, in us humans, for example. The moments when I perceive the coffee hitting my tongue and its warmth caressing my stomach take place outside of time. They are my ‘life’, not my ‘time’. Time’ (and ‘space’) are physical processes. Vitality is what perceives these processes and takes place in or through them. In other words, ‘vitality’ is my essence, ‘time and space’ make up my present form: a middle-aged male Central European.
When you live in the moment, you are in the ‘now’, which is outside of time. Time’ and ‘space’ are actually something different from our ‘breathing aliveness’ itself. You can feel this difference when you allow yourself to be completely absorbed in something without consciously thinking about it, when your breathing aliveness can lose itself in something that is happening right now, flow away and find itself again. Then you do not feel time; it is just gone, vanished in an instant. Be it in the company of a loved one, with a good book, engaged in an exciting activity, or with thoughts, ideas, feelings, physical perceptions, etc. Modern science calls this phenomenon ‘flow’; most spiritual schools call it ‘life’.

Dependence and Control Where do the collective phenomena of our present have their essence, their vitality, their soul, and how do they affect our individual lives? In other words, what is the spirit of the age doing to us? It seems to me that the spirit of our time has its vitality, its soul, in the realm of the virtual. It lives in mental images, in collective ideas about ourselves, about others and about the world. The spirit of our time gives us a clear goal: the greatest possible control over ourselves, over others and over the world. Its ideas (and thus the ideas of most people alive today) about existence are derived from this goal of total control. In addition, our Zeitgeist has the peculiarity of keeping itself in the dark about both its goal and the ideas that guide it. The spirit of the age is constantly deceiving itself. It does not know that it is a control freak and that it uses its ideas about reality to protect itself from the real reality of life, even to seal itself off from it. The spirit of the age lives in symbiosis with itself. It cannot distinguish itself from its goal of control and its resulting ideas about life. It is completely unaware of itself and therefore completely unknown. The spirit of the age is a stranger to itself.
I am not complaining, I am simply observing and describing what I see. Complaining about the state of things is a gesture of perceived powerlessness and is itself part of the standard repertoire of the current Zeitgeist. How did the Zeitgeist arrive at its goal of total control? How do I even come to believe that this is its goal? And what form does this goal take in the collective imagination of our time? Control’ refers to our natural behaviour to avert powerlessness and thus danger to life as long as we feel dependent on our environment. It is the main instrument of dependent, unconscious love, i.e. our survival instinct.
I can only briefly outline what I believe is happening here: during childhood we live in emotional dependence on our primary group, the family. The most important thing for children is the subjectively felt, unrestricted sense of belonging, because it means safety from the mortal danger of being lost. Our emotional conscience informs us at all times whether we still belong, i.e. whether we are safe. Then we feel innocent and have a ‘clear conscience’. If our belonging is threatened, i.e. if we unconsciously perceive a threat to our life, we feel guilty and have a ‘bad conscience’. This dynamic was discovered and described by Bert Hellinger (Hellinger, 2001).
With the help of our conscience, we stay within the safe boundaries of the environment on which we depend, guided from within. We unconsciously say to it: I will do anything for you, no matter what it costs me, because if you are well, I will stay alive. Emotional dependence leads us to confuse ourselves with our environment and to relate everything that happens in the primary group to ourselves. We live in emotional symbiosis with our parents and siblings, sometimes with our grandparents or even earlier generations. All of this is inevitable, often leading to incredible adaptive responses in childhood and ensuring that we ultimately survive our childhood dependency. Emotional dependency gives rise to a way of perceiving oneself and the world that is precisely suited to this situation. Wilfried Nelles (2009) describes it as ‘we-consciousness’ or ‘group-consciousness’. The inner echoes of this period of emotional dependency and the associated, sometimes traumatic, survival patterns populate the fields of pastoral care, therapy and counselling, and of course that of constellation work.
But we cannot remain children; we have to leave the nest. This movement into our own lives is still largely overlooked because its echoes are at the heart of the current zeitgeist. The space for adolescent development that opens up after childhood is, so to speak, the water in which the blue fish swim. In individual lives, childhood ends when sex hormones flood our bodies. Puberty begins. While children’s space for development was relatively clearly defined by their emotional attachment to their family, adolescents are faced with two conflicting tasks: on the one hand, they have to leave their family in order to follow their reproductive instinct. In doing so, they endanger the child they once were. They take it out of the family and deprive it of its vital sense of belonging. On the other hand, young people will do everything in their power to prevent this inner child from ever feeling as powerless and helpless as it once did.
Young people, and the sense of self that they are developing, must therefore find a way to live their own lives outside their family of origin, while at the same time preserving the inner sense of belonging to that family for the child they once were. Young people try to grow up without feeling guilty. They have to build an autonomous self, an individual life, without violating the rules of childhood, of belonging, of emotional conscience, and thus without endangering their inner life. This is both necessary and impossible. It is only possible if one deceives oneself about life. We help ourselves with a trick: we take the whole emotional coordinate system of childhood with us as secret luggage when we leave the house of childhood. We transform the emotional environment on which we depended as children into an unconscious inner environment over which we now rule in such a way that the physical and psychological memories of significant childhood events, i.e. our inner child, can continue to belong to us without being endangered.
The trick takes place below the ‘radar’ of our conscious awareness. It ensures our survival as long as we remain an inner child. Directly on the ‘radar’ of conscious perception, exactly the opposite happens: we try to deal with the emotional dilemmas of our childhood past (there are no emotional dilemmas other than those of childhood) by means of rational distinctions, and to do everything exactly the opposite of how we did it then, in order to avoid them in the future. In order to do this, we need to transform the powerlessness of childhood into power, i.e. real effectiveness, both towards ourselves and towards others and the world. Thinking gives us the tools to do this. With its help we can create rational models capable of reflecting on and understanding the emotional turmoil of adolescence.
The means of turning powerlessness into power is called control. We control ourselves, others and the world with the help of thinking, with the help of our intellect. In doing so, we inevitably fall for our rational models of life and take them for reality. We identify with them to such an extent that they become a collective phenomenon, something like a collective belief. The zeitgeist considers the reality of life to be constructible and therefore changeable, but this is obviously an inevitable and unavoidable stage in the development of collective youth. In our Zeitgeist I see youthful dependent love at work.
By ‘dependent love’ I mean all the physical, emotional and mental adjustments we make from the moment of conception in order to survive in an environment we perceive as dependent. Dependent love has three stages: physical (the womb, the unborn child), emotional (the family, the child) and mental (one’s worldview, youth). The unborn child makes these adaptations by taking shape. In childhood they become tangible as emotions, including love. In adolescence they dominate our thinking. Conscience, as a ‘life-saving indicator of belonging’, operates at every stage of dependent love: in physical fulfilment (the womb), in the emotional landscape (childhood), and in intellectual loyalty to rational ideas (adolescence). By analogy with youth, the current zeitgeist unconsciously makes itself dependent on its ideas about life, and behaves towards these ideas as children do towards their parents: loyalty to them corresponds to secure belonging, and secure belonging in turn corresponds to turning away from the danger to life.
In what follows, I would like to explore how, from my point of view, adolescent dependent love functions in a collective context, or in other words, where and how the ‘breathing vitality’ of our present manifests itself. To do this I will examine three prominent ideas of the Zeitgeist. These are collectively effective inner models of reality: ‘freedom’, ‘functioning’ and ‘solution’.

Freedom For Byung-Chul Han, a Korean professor of philosophy in Berlin, the project of ‘freedom’ has failed in the modern achievement-oriented society. It begins as a feeling of ‘Yes we can’, but is regularly subordinated to the power of capital. Before I continue, I would like to point out that I am using the language of psychological observation here, not the language of politics, morality or law.
Freedom in the psychological or spiritual sense is not possible as long as one wants to ‘escape’, be it from a previous dependency, a tradition that has become too restrictive, a threat, or whatever. Freedom in the psychological or spiritual sense has no conditions, either external or internal. For example, the phrase ‘When I have achieved this or that, or left it behind, then I will be free’ ties freedom to a condition: ‘When I have enough money, when I finally move out of my parents’ house, when the walls come down, when the oppressed of this earth finally unite (according to my plan), when climate change or crime or war (or, more recently, the coronavirus pandemic) are finally combated globally, then I will be free’. Although all these goals seek a combination of greater freedom of movement and greater security, they have nothing to do with freedom, but with autonomy.
Autonomy, living according to one’s ‘own law’, always looks to the past to free itself from it. As a result, it remains connected to the powerless ‘then’ right up to the present, precisely because it tries to overcome it and ‘let go’ of it. Autonomy remains backward-looking; it needs the past for orientation and thus secretly for security. The collective idea of autonomy is actually misleadingly called ‘freedom’ in public discourse: ‘free from …’, ‘civil liberty’, ‘democratic freedom’. It insists on more freedom with the same security as in the unfree ‘then’, or even with more security, and celebrates when it has achieved or defended this feeling. Autonomy convinces itself that it is true freedom, so that it does not have to acknowledge that it is merely a reversal of dependence on ‘then’. Its favourite toy at the moment seems to be the aforementioned mobile phone, preferably the outdoorsy ‘Jack Wolfskin’ version, with which one can photograph the magnificent sunset in the Himalayas or the great food at the Chinese restaurant next door and symbiotically multiply it on social media. The Internet seems to me to be the technical embodiment of intellectual symbiosis with our rational models. It is a precise, albeit virtual, reification of our unconscious. It is collectively accessible but remains unrecognised. Its impulse to control thus becomes effective on a mass scale and at the same time uncontrollable. I owe Wolfgang Giegerich the decisive impulse to perceive our technical environment as the current form of our collective unconscious.
Freedom has no conditions and no security. Freedom moves within the technical-digital environment without confusing itself with it. It comes from that ‘place’ outside of time from which the blue fish could perceive water as such: from immediate liveliness, from the present moment. My present moment does not belong to ‘time’, as we have seen, but is simply my life as it is happening now. Freedom can happen in this moment, completely independent of external or internal circumstances. It does not emancipate itself from anything, it does not fight against anything, it does not have to let go of anything or resolve anything. It simply lives. It comes from the growth instinct that urges us to evolve. In my views on unconscious love I call this phenomenon ‘self-love’. It connects us to our inner vitality, to our essence.
Freedom in this sense plays little part in public discourse. Unlike autonomy, freedom would undermine the zeitgeist because it recognises its models as such and prefers to rely on realities rather than fantasies. It trusts the natural flow of life more than the (futile) control of it. Freedom always feels secure, so it does not need to be dependent on any environment. Freedom can simply act out of the moment. It is not accessible to thinking, to rational internal modelling, nor is it comprehensible, but rather transcends them. One expression of this freedom is the phenomenological approach to composition. It surrenders to what appears in the present moment without further intention or concept. It can gradually extend to one’s personal lifestyle. But then one becomes a stranger among strangers.

Function A particular form of control is the idea that one’s self, other people or even technical things like washing machines must function, i.e. behave in accordance with a pre-determined attribution. For me to ‘function’, the defining attribution must be more powerful than me. It must refer to someone on whom I am subjectively dependent for life and death. Functioning’ means that I adapt my actions, feelings and thoughts so that I can survive in this dependency. It exercises control in two directions: I control myself so that, for example, as a child I can continue to belong to my family, or as a teenager I can remain true to my inner life models, such as my ideals. And I control my environment so that it will keep me, allow me to belong and thus survive. As a child my ‘environment’ would be my family. As a teenager, my ‘environment’ is created by transferring my unconscious and emotionally internalised family onto everything I see, i.e. myself as my ‘environment’ (such as my physicality), others (such as my romantic partner) and the world (such as the environment).
This leads the zeitgeist to see everything that works as healthy or okay, and everything that does not ‘work’ as weak, sick or crazy. The currently dominant concept of illness as ‘malfunction’ comes from this idea, as does the idea of ‘trauma’ as disorder, when ‘trauma’ is actually the exact opposite, a life-saving way of dealing with threatening disturbances. The zeitgeist always wants to eliminate ‘disturbances’, whether in medicine, politics or the environment.
The idea of ‘functioning’ inherently contains the compulsion to optimise, since, for example, the inner image of a ‘functioning’ self constantly encounters me as a real person and then has to try to adapt this reality to my inner image. This also happens in a collective context, where things are constantly being ‘intensified, optimised, made more flexible, more effective, adapted, renewed, made sustainable and competitive’; they are being ‘designed, planned and implemented’. In a psychological sense, these are without exception control movements to ‘get a grip’ on the realities of existence according to an inner model or image. Control over one’s own life also includes control over one’s appearance through sport, surgery and cosmetics, over physical and mental functionality (i.e. health and performance), over gender, age, and so on. It also includes the idea of success in the sense of effectiveness in one’s desired sense, the idea of free will, fulfilling relationships, fulfilling work, etc. Finally, the supreme discipline in the field of optimisation is called ‘saving the world’. It is the training ground for dictators of all kinds.
Of course, in optimising, the spirit of the age loses sight of the essential realities of existence. These realities or ‘inconvenient truths’ include the actual existential dependencies of human existence, such as the unavoidable dependence on a certain basic balance in the remnants of our natural environment, such as breathable air, clean water, non-toxic soil and enough insects to pollinate crops. It also includes the facts of life, such as birth, death, gender and skin colour, which simply happen to us without our being able to change them in the slightest: it is in them that life ‘happens’ to us. This includes the simple fact that we are all human beings, born of a woman, with a right to live, dependent on belonging and security for many years, and that all of this cannot be overturned even by the most absolute (and therefore deadly) models of the zeitgeist, as manifested in various religious, cultural and political extremisms. The Zeitgeist does not see these human commonalities, as the news on our mobile phones shows us every minute.
Understandably, there are now calls for a ‘solution’, for some kind of definitive optimisation of our own functioning. The search for the ‘solution’ can be seen here as the best-disguised control mechanism of the zeitgeist. Naturally, it has found a prominent place in its workshop, namely in therapy and counselling.

Solution First, we look for the solution in the time from which we want to break away: the past. The current difficulties of the zeitgeist arise precisely because it confuses the present reality with its own (survival) models. Its models fit the ‘then’; they saved us then, but they are no longer valid and, above all, no longer necessary. A wise person once said that the only thing we can learn from history is that we can learn nothing from it. This sounds fatalistic, but only from the perspective of the Zeitgeist and its ideas of optimisation. From outside the Zeitgeist, this is the simple and above all inescapable truth of dependent love, a truth of our time. Any ‘learning’ beyond this, i.e. unlearning the model survival patterns of our Zeitgeist, can only happen in the context of the present moment and its relative security, as opposed to the threatening ‘then’.
So I think it is a mistake to explain today’s unhappiness with certain events or horrors of the past, such as what happened to us as children, or what our parents or grandparents did or experienced. Today’s unhappiness comes from the way we still react internally to the past when we encounter something similar. It comes from our present survival instinct, which does not allow the horrors of the past to fade away, so that we remain prepared for similar situations. On the contrary, looking back in search of answers, hoping to find solutions to today’s problems by analysing the causes of the past, can further reinforce the symbiosis with the ‘past’ and the unconscious identification with the survival and adaptation reactions that were helpful at the time.
The incessant (and unconscious) gaze into the past is part of adolescent youth. They have no choice but to get away from it and protect themselves by all means from ever experiencing anything like it again. The collective equivalent of this is the programme of the Enlightenment and thus the foundation of so-called Western values. It is called ‘breaking free from self-imposed immaturity’. Of course, this essentially adolescent programme constantly clashes with the unconscious need for belonging and security of the childishly emotional group consciousness, as we can clearly see in the earlier refugee debates and the current coronavirus debates, right up to the crisis of populism and extremism in Europe.
The dilemma between belonging and autonomy cannot, in principle, be resolved as long as one wants to resolve it. The ‘solution’ is to leave it unresolved, to leave the past where and how it was, and to turn to the present. The present is the only secure anchor for doing therapy or counselling beyond the problem and the solution, or for doing constellation work that takes us out of the zeitgeist, its confusions and limitations, and reconnects us with life as it happens through us. The zeitgeist itself is blind, as is everything that comes from dependent love. It does not see what is at stake in the moment; it cannot perceive what life is giving or demanding at the moment. Life provides abundant resources for all, and at the same time the possibility of ruining our continued existence as a species through excessive consumption of those resources. Life gives beauty and joy in the present to everyone. At the same time, it offers the possibility of completely overlooking or even eradicating both.
It seems to me that the collective zeitgeist is like individual puberty: the main thing is to survive it. With a bit of luck, in real life you can reach your inner self and enjoy it. I like my mobile phone, by the way. When I was a kid, I always dreamed of having a little portable TV so I could watch Lassie under the covers. Nowadays Lassie is everywhere, but you can’t tell the blue fish.
First published in the PdS yearbook ‘Influences of the World’ 2018, V&R. Slightly adapted for this blog.

Literature Geßner, Thomas (2018). How we love. And what we do or avoid doing for love. Cologne: Innenweltverlag.
Giegerich, Wolfgang. (1988). The Psychoanalysis of the Atomic Bomb. An Essay on the Spirit of the Christian West. Volumes 1 and 2. Zurich: Schweizer Spiegel Verlag.
Gresser, I. (2016). The Tiredness Society. Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin. DVD. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag.
Hellinger, Bert (2001). Conscience and Soul. Practice of System Constellation, 2, 9-15.
Nelles, Wilfried (2009). Life has no reverse gear. The Evolution of Consciousness, Spiritual Growth and Family Constellations (2nd edition). Cologne: Innenweltverlag.
Nelles, Wilfried (2018). Life Happens. How Therapy and Spirituality Can Meet. Opening volume of the series Neue Psychologie. Cologne: Innenweltverlag.