Free The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman Page A

conventional sense, was a misunderstanding. The point, instead, was to learn how to stop trying to fix things, to stop being so preoccupied with trying to control one’s experience of the world, to give up trying to replace unpleasant thoughts and emotionswith more pleasant ones, and to see that, through dropping the ‘pursuit of happiness’, a more profound peace might result. Or, rather, that wasn’t the ‘point’, exactly, because Magid objected to the notion that meditation had a point. If it did, he seemed to imply, that would make it just another happiness technique, a way of satisfying our desire to cling to certain states and eliminate others. This was all deeply confusing. What would be the point, I wondered, of doing something pointless? Why would anyone try to end the pursuit of happiness, if not to become happy – in which case, wouldn’t they still be pursuing happiness, only by more cunning means?
    Barry Magid practised psychiatry in a large, sparsely furnished room on the ground floor of an apartment block near Central Park, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was unlit save for a desk lamp, and its two leather chairs were placed unusually far from each other, against opposite walls, so that Magid’s head seemed to loom out at me from the dark. He was a tall, owlish man in his early sixties, with wire-rimmed glasses, and when I asked him a rambling question about Buddhism and non-attachment, he looked at me with mild amusement. Then he started talking about something else entirely.
    What I really needed to understand, he told me, was the myth of Oedipus. In Magid’s view, the famous tale of the ancient Greek king – who kills his father and marries his mother, bringing disaster to his family and his city, and prompting him to gouge out his eyes – was the perfect metaphor for what was wrong with pursuing happiness. This had little to do with the ‘Oedipus complex’, Freud’s theory about boys secretly wanting to have sex with their mothers. The real message of the myth, Magid explained, was that struggling to escape your demons was what gave them their power. It was the ‘backwards law’ in mythologicalform: clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to eliminate all possibility of an unhappy one, was the cause of the problem, not its solution.
    You may be familiar with the story. When Oedipus is born to the King and Queen of Thebes, his horrible fate – that he will kill one parent, and marry the other – has already been foretold by an oracle. His mother and father, desperate to ensure that this never comes to pass, persuade a local shepherd to take the newborn, with instructions to abandon him to the elements. But the shepherd can’t bring himself to let Oedipus die; the child lives, and subsequently becomes the adoptive son of the King and Queen of Corinth. But when Oedipus confronts them, some time later, with the rumour that he is adopted, they deny it – so when he hears about the oracle’s terrible prophecy, he assumes that they are the parents to whom it refers. Resolving to escape the curse by putting as much distance as possible between himself and the couple he takes to be his parents, Oedipus travels far away. Unfortunately, the faraway place at which he arrives is Thebes. Thereafter, fate drags him to his inevitable end: first, he becomes involved in an unlikely dispute over a chariot, and kills its occupant, who turns out to have been his father. Then he falls in love with his mother.
    One obvious reading of this myth is that you can never escape your fate, no matter how hard you try. But Magid preferred another. ‘The quintessential point,’ he told me, ‘is that if you flee it, it’ll come back to bite you. The very thing from which you’re in flight – well, it’s the fleeing that brings on the problem. For Freud, our whole psychology is organised around