You finally buy the thing you have wanted for months. For a few days, perhaps a few weeks, it works. Something inside you settles. There is usually a rush of excitement. You feel more confident about your purchase. Then the feeling fades, and another object takes its place in your imagination.

We usually explain this pattern as materialism or poor self-control. If you are a Marshmellow Test’s fan, you perhaps might say that it is a lack of delayed gratification. Perhaps we tell ourselves to be more grateful. Perhaps we promise to spend less, simplify our lives, or stop comparing ourselves with other people. Those responses may truly help, for sure. But they leave some questions unanswered. One of those is: Why does the desire to be filled return so quickly?

In 1990, psychologist Philip Cushman offered a troubling answer. He argued that the self studied by American psychology was not a universal fact of human nature. According to Cushman, it was, rather, a historical creation, shaped by a particular culture and economy at a particular moment.¹ He called it the empty self.

I recently returned to Cushman’s writing, and one idea kept making its way back to my musing: perhaps many of the desires we treat as personal weaknesses are signals of a relational hunger. As a result, we keep trying to fill the self because the bonds that once helped to form and sustain it have grown fragile.

But, how did the self became hungry?

Cushman traces a change in the Western understanding of the person. The Victorian self, at least in its dominant cultural form, was imagined as a deep interior filled with dangerous desires. Those desires had to be restrained. Sigmund Freud’s theories of repression and sublimation made sense within that world, at the time.

And by the middle of the twentieth century, the problem had changed. The self was no longer imagined primarily as something unruly that needed restraint based on Freud’s propositions. It became something incomplete that needed attention, affirmation, stimulation, and endless improvement.

The self stopped being something that needed to be restrained and became something that needed to be filled.

Cushman connects this psychological change to the rise of consumer culture. An economy built on continuous consumption needs people to keep wanting. Somehow companies began to remedy and quench the thirst for satisfaction, but it cannot last too long, otherwise they count the loss. The purchase should relieve the ache while preserving the conditions that will produce the next desire.

This does not mean that every purchase hides a psychological wound. Nor does it mean that people in earlier societies lived with deep and uncomplicated belonging. Actually, communities can nurture people, but they can also exclude, shame, and control them, as I am sure you know. Traditions can also carry wisdom across generations, and they can preserve injustice.

Still, Cushman’s central insight is difficult to dismiss. Because when community and shared sources of meaning lose their organizing power, people often experience the loss as a private deficiency. A social wound becomes a personal problem. We say, “Something is wrong with me,” when part of what is wrong may lie in the world between us.

That private sense of deficiency takes many forms. It can appear as low self-worth, chronic dissatisfaction, loneliness, or the feeling that life has not quite begun. Some people respond by buying. Others keep achieving. Some continually looksmaxx their bodies while others modify or redesign their careers, relationships, or public identities.

Ultimately, the object changes. But the ‘fragile’ hope beneath it remains remarkably stable: perhaps this will finally make me feel whole.

Sometimes relief is mistaken for repair

What struck me most was not Cushman’s criticism of advertising. Most of us already know that advertising cultivates desire. His more unsettling argument concerns psychotherapy.

Advertising and psychotherapy are very different practices, and therapy has brought healing to countless people. Cushman’s concern was of a different kind. According to him, both professions can be asked to relieve a form of distress whose causes extend beyond the individual. Neither a product nor a clinical hour can, by itself, rebuild a neighborhood, restore a trustworthy institution, or give someone a community in which they belong.

Yet the pain produced by these losses still enters the consulting room. It still appears in the marketplace. Because the deeper source cannot easily be repaired; unfortunately people receive substitutes of that hope. Advertising offers an identity through products. Therapy can sometimes offer an identity through identification with an admired therapist or therapeutic ideal.

A therapist with a biologism orientation would want to reduce the drive to its neurological or bodily mechanisms. A therapist guided by empiricism would focus on measurable symptoms and evidence-based methods for changing them. A functionalist would ask what purpose the desire serves and whether it helps the person adapt. A humanist would explore the person’s unmet needs, freedom, meaning, and capacity for growth. An idealist would attend to consciousness and the ideas through which the person constructs reality.

Each orientation reveals something important that sadly directs attention away from other parts of the person’s experience. The therapist’s orientation therefore shapes what the distress becomes in the consulting room, as it can be oriented as a bodily drive to regulate, a symptom to measure, a behavior to modify, a need to understand, or an inner reality to interpret. What may remain unseen is the social and relational world that produced the hunger. My point is that a person can learn to manage the ache without recovering the community, tradition, place, or sacred bond whose absence helped create it.

Cushman called this the lifestyle solution.

He did not dismiss the healing power of the therapeutic relationship. A trustworthy therapist can model ways of relating that a person has never experienced. Such a relationship can help repair wounds formed in other relationships. But Cushman also recognized a danger. A person desperate to belong may attach to anyone who appears able to quiet the hunger.

This helps explain why charismatic figures can become so powerful. For example, we’ve all seen examples of political leaders, spiritual authorities, celebrities, or romantic partners may seem to possess the coherence we lack. We begin by admiring the person. Soon, we borrow the person’s language, desires, and view of the world. Belonging, as it emerges, becomes available, but only at the price of compliance.

When you pay attention carefully, you realize that the wound and the exploit are made of the same material. Our need for belonging and connection make healing possible. It can also make us vulnerable to manipulation.

Perhaps this is what our hunger may be telling us

In my own work on human flourishing, I keep coming back to a simple insight and argument. And that is the fact that no one builds a good life from inside themselves alone. We become who we are through others — our relationships with people, the places that hold our lives, and the sacred realities through which many of us understand our existence.

This is why I think of flourishing through three forms of psychosocial processes: attachment to God, attachment to people, and attachment to place. These enduring connections answer different dimensions of human longing. They give us somewhere to turn, someone to belong with, and a world in which our lives can take root.

When these bonds are ruptured or weakened at the same time, the self does not remain untouched. As I have argued in many of my writings, we become unmoored. The resulting hunger may then tether itself to whatever is available: another purchase, a new achievement, an admired personality, or a leader who promises instant belonging.

I do not think this means that desire itself is the enemy. Desire can carry information. Sometimes it is necessary; I once desired to have a PhD — a desire without which I would be capable of articulating these thoughts. However, the urge to acquire, achieve, or merge with someone more powerful may reveal a bond that is missing. The problem begins when we repeatedly use substitutes to soothe a need they cannot meet.

This also helps explain why self-esteem alone cannot sustain a person. We need a stable sense of worth, but worth cannot be maintained through constant attention to the self. We need to be known. We need to matter to someone. We need places where our presence carries a history and our absence would be noticed, hopefully.

May be theology has some answers for us

A theological worldview can orient us to a different outlook. It can treat relationship with the Sacred as more than a set of beliefs, a coping strategy, or a psychological representation of some sort. It can also attend to how people experience the Sacred as present, responsive, trustworthy, distant, or silent.

This is important because belief about God and bonding with God are not the same experience. A person may affirm every correct doctrine and still feel alone before God. Another may struggle intellectually while continuing to reach toward God with trust. The difference appears in how a person lives, suffers, hopes, and receives love.

Attachment to God, people, and place is not another lifestyle product. It cannot be purchased as a ready-made identity. These bonds grow through a sense of presence, trust, repair, shared practices, and time.

They are not automatically healthy. People can become tethered to controlling religious communities, destructive leaders, and places of war conflict organized around exclusion. The important question is not simply whether we belong somewhere. We must also ask what our belonging is making of us. Does it make us more truthful, more responsible, and more capable of love?

A question worth asking

When you feel the pull to acquire, achieve, reinvent yourself, or merge with someone more powerful, what might that desire be trying to tell you?

Is it leading you toward a bond you genuinely need, or toward something that will medicate the ache without healing its source?

The empty self does not need another thing poured into it, but a relationships in which it can become a self at all.

Perhaps the next time we feel that familiar pull toward another purchase, achievement, reinvention, or admired figure, we should pause before condemning the desire. The desire may be carrying a message worth unpacking.

It may be telling us that what we are missing cannot be bought because it is not an object.

It is a bond.

1. Philip Cushman, “Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology,” American Psychologist, 45(5), 1990, pp. 599–611.