Why Do I Procrastinate? The Psychoanalysis of Not Doing What You Have to Do

This essay first appeared in Turkish. The English version is my own.

I

Common explanations of procrastination fall into two kinds. One is moral: the procrastinator is lazy, weak-willed, undisciplined. The other is technical: the procrastinator cannot manage time, set priorities, break tasks into small pieces. The first produces guilt; the second, calendar apps, productivity techniques and new lists. Both lack the same thing: they do not explain that the procrastinator mostly knows very well what needs doing, and cannot do it precisely while knowing.

Psychoanalysis asks the question from another place. If someone keeps not doing something he says he wants to do, perhaps part of him does not want that thing, or its consequences. Or part of him finds that doing it sets off a fear, a prohibition, a loss he is not aware of. Seen this way, procrastination is not a deficiency but a solution: a way of holding a conflict in suspense without deciding. The undone task remains a place where everything is still possible.

II

Literature’s most famous procrastinator is Hamlet. His father’s ghost tells him that his uncle Claudius murdered his father and took the throne by marrying his mother, and asks him to take revenge. Hamlet swears to do so. But throughout the five acts of the play he keeps putting the act off: he wants to test whether the ghost is telling the truth, he stages a play, and when he finds Claudius praying he does not kill him, thinking that killing a man at prayer would send him to heaven. Hamlet’s problem is not cowardice; elsewhere in the play he kills Polonius behind the curtain without a moment’s thought. There is only one thing he cannot do.

Freud explained this waiting in a famous footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams. Hamlet, for Freud, can do anything except take vengeance on the man who killed his father and took his place beside his mother, because that man has realised the repressed wishes of Hamlet’s own childhood. To punish Claudius would be to punish himself. What stops Hamlet is not an external obstacle to revenge but the reflection of his own desire that he sees in Claudius.¹

In 1959, in his sixth seminar, Lacan devoted a long reading of seven lessons to Hamlet and took Freud’s interpretation a step further. For Lacan, Hamlet’s tragedy is the tragedy of desire: Hamlet is a subject who cannot find his own desire, who remains caught on the desire of the Other, above all his mother’s. He lives not in his own time but in the Other’s; to act, he always waits for someone else’s sign, someone else’s hour. At the end of the play Hamlet does perform the act, but only once he himself has been mortally wounded, when he has nothing left to lose.² Perhaps this is the deepest form of procrastination: waiting for one’s desire to come from someone else instead of owning it.

III

Russian literature’s most famous procrastinator is Oblomov, the hero of Ivan Goncharov’s novel of 1859. The novel opens with Oblomov deciding one morning to get up off his sofa; he has not managed it by the end of the first part. Oblomov has important business, the running of his estate, letters, decisions; he leaves it all for tomorrow. The Russian critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov, in a famous article written the same year, asked “What is Oblomovism?” and read Oblomov as the symbol of the illness of an era, a class. But the novel also shows that Oblomov’s sofa is as much a refuge as a comfort: in Oblomov’s dream lies the warmth of his childhood, of a world in which his mother met every need and nothing was asked of him. To get up off the sofa is to leave that world.

Oblomov shows another face of procrastination: doing a task is answering a demand, and sometimes what one does not want to answer is not the task itself but the demand. In his 1908 paper “Character and Anal Erotism”, Freud suggested that in some people orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy appear together, and that their origin lies in an early struggle over the child’s body, over its faeces, that is, over giving or not giving, holding back or letting go.³ By giving or withholding when he wishes, in response to his mother’s demand, the child holds power for the first time. Some adult procrastination is like a repetition of this old scene: what a teacher, a boss, a family, a partner expects is not given precisely because it is expected. Procrastination is a no that cannot be said in words.

IV

Perhaps the most common form of procrastination is the one intertwined with perfectionism. To finish a piece of work is to present it to the world, to open it to judgement. An unwritten thesis is flawless; an undelivered project can still be extraordinary; an unbegun book is the best of all books. The procrastinator often fears not that what he will do will not be good enough, but that it will be only one thing, reduced to one of infinite possibilities. An act is limited; procrastination preserves the limitless.

Lacan distinguishes the two great forms of neurosis by their relation to desire. The obsessional subject protects his desire by making it impossible; each time he comes close to what he wants, he finds a new condition, a new preparation, a new check. The hysterical subject protects her desire by keeping it unsatisfied; at the very moment of obtaining something, she wants something else. In his Rome discourse of 1953, Lacan ties the obsessional’s waiting to Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave: the obsessional waits for the master’s death; his real life will begin only once the master is dead and he is free. But the master does not die, and the waiting becomes life itself.⁴ One question a great procrastinator can ask himself is this: what am I waiting to end, whom am I waiting to leave, what permission am I waiting for?

V

None of these explanations says that everyone procrastinates for the same reason. Psychoanalysis’s first lesson is, on the contrary, that every symptom is singular, that a person’s procrastination takes on meaning only within his own history. But some questions can help one hear what a particular procrastination is saying. What do I put off, and what do I never put off? If I finish the task I am putting off, what happens, who says what, what do I lose? For whom am I doing this? When I finish it, what comes next?

These questions sometimes bring unexpected answers. A student realises that finishing her thesis will free her from her family’s home, from their expectations, and that she both fears and wants this. A writer realises that when he finishes his book his mother will read it and learn something he has never told her. An employee realises he has not prepared the report needed for his promotion because the promotion would put him in his father’s place, the place of a father he did not love. These realisations do not end procrastination at once; but they give it another name. Procrastination is no longer laziness but a question.

Procrastination can sometimes also be the sign of something deeper: depression, an anxiety disorder, a difficulty with attention and focus. If someone is being crushed in important areas of life, work, study, relationships, under the weight of things he keeps failing to do, rather than trying to solve this alone he should talk to a professional. Psychoanalytic work does not promise to eliminate procrastination with a technique. What it offers is to hear the desire and the fear procrastination carries, and to look together for a place where a person can own his desire, where, instead of waiting like Hamlet for the hour of the Other, he can act in his own time.

Notes

1. S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1900, chapter five, the analysis of Hamlet in the section on Oedipus. Freud’s interpretation was later developed at length in Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). ↩︎
2. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation (1958–1959), ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: La Martinière / Le Champ freudien, 2013, the lessons on Hamlet of March–April 1959. ↩︎
3. S. Freud, “Charakter und Analerotik” (1908), Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 9. ↩︎
4. J. Lacan, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse” (1953), Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966. Lacan says that the obsessional subject, in the position of the slave awaiting the master’s death, lives a deferred life. ↩︎

References

• Dobrolyubov, N. A. (1859). Chto takoye oblomovshchina? [What is Oblomovism?]. Sovremennik.
• Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. Deuticke.
• Freud, S. (1908). Charakter und Analerotik. Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 9.
• Goncharov, I. A. (1859). Oblomov. St Petersburg.
• Jones, E. (1949). Hamlet and Oedipus. Gollancz.
• Lacan, J. (1966). Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse. In Écrits. Seuil.
• Lacan, J. (2013). Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation (1958–1959). La Martinière / Le Champ freudien.
• Shakespeare, W. (1603). Hamlet. London.