When we look around at our society today, it is hard to escape the truth of this judgment. It is especially through the experiences of alcohol, drugs, and sex that most of us are able to re-create a state of undivided consciousness, of the primary satisfaction of unity with our environment.

Food, romantic love, religious ecstasy, and even video screens (televisions or home computers) also serve to produce the same effect. In a sense, these things are not as secondary as they might seem, since their effect is so dramatic in their ability to make the nemo go away (for a while). The conflict, the a-Voidance, gets melted down in short order and, for reasons that I believe are rooted in our bodies, we seek that experience desperately.

Many of us, of course, back away from going the drug or alcohol route, or at least from doing so completely, and as a result our lives are filled with activities designed to cover up the emptiness Fowles refers to. We raise children, pursue careers, go to football games, or write books (not that these things cannot be done in a nonneurotic way). We especially knock ourselves out trying to get other people to love us, so that somehow we will be able to love ourselves. But in the end, it is "looking for love in all the wrong places," as one popular song puts it. Sandor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, wrote that our real aim in life is to be loved, and that any other observable activity is really a detour, an indirect path toward that goal. All of this follows from the emptiness at the core.