What Does It Mean to Become Unhinged in “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat?

What Does It Mean to Become Unhinged in “Winter Dreams” and “The Overcoat?

Your Writing Assignment

In a 1,000-word essay, develop an analytical thesis that explores the psychological state of being unhinged in the stories “Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol. An analytical thesis should give insight into the causes and effects behind the characters’ state of being unhinged. You should refer to the two stories and a credible online source for your Works Cited page.

Introduction to Being Unhinged: We Are Our Own Worst Enemies

Few things matter more in this world than in learning how to not be our own worst enemies. We destroy ourselves through self-induced fears that can cause so much anxiety as to kill us more than the things we’re afraid of such as having a heart attack while going to the dentist or undergoing an angiogram. The procedures don’t kill us. Our fears do.

The second way we become our own worst enemy is by desiring things that are worthless or at least not as valuable as our overestimation of them. We sacrifice our time, money, and sanity for some Holy Grail that turns out to be something cheap and transitory, a fleeting desire for someone we put on a pedestal, a material acquisition that promises elevated social status, a desirable “lifestyle” that proves boring and empty.

We tend to blow things out of proportion, either in our fears or desires, because we crave drama. We crave drama because we’re bored. We’re bored because our lives our empty, and either we cannot accept the emptiness as an ok thing or we cannot accept the emptiness because we think there’s something more, some kind of higher purpose or meaning.

For some people, finding higher purpose or meaning is really important for getting them out of their selves, from freeing themselves from their self-centeredness and their nagging sense of anxious restlessness.

But other people don’t need a sense of higher purpose. They accept the meaninglessness of their lives with surprising tranquility and manage to live in the present and be engaged with their interests and stay connected to friends and family. For such people, a sense of connection and engagement with the present is the closest thing they have to “meaning.”

But most of us lack this peace of mind and tranquility to engage in life. Most of us have personal demons inside us that make us our own worst enemy. Most of us blow our fears and desires out of proportion. Most of us are compelled, against our notion of free will, to become unhinged, dislocated, and broken.

Most of us unhinge ourselves, hit rock bottom, then analyze how we unhinged ourselves, and then we spend the rest of our lives trying to repair ourselves, making ourselves “the project.” We read self-help books, we go into therapy, we go into counseling, we explore various religions, we attempt to connect with some group or purpose that is larger than ourselves.

Some of us feel “fixed.” Some of us, in spite of evidence to the contrary, convince ourselves that we’re “fixed,” and we want to share our “fixed self” with the world and the manner in which we “fixed” ourselves when in fact we are quite broken. Some of us get even more dislocated, broken, and lost than before we tried to fix ourselves.

Some of us, in a perverse way, enjoy being unhinged because we crave the drama of being broken and being dislocated, and this broken state of being is all we know.

For most of us, we don’t even know how we reached this broken state. Nor do we know we’re broken. Our broken state is our normal because it’s all we know. We don’t know, nor can we even imagine, what it would be like to not be broken.

Most of us lack the metacognition and self-awareness to even have this conversation with ourselves. Most of us are smart enough to have this conversation, but we don’t know how to begin. Or we’re too scared to explore this facet of our existence, preferring instead to live on the surface, to escape what we’re doing, to avoid our examining the motivations for our behavior.

However, it seems reasonable, beneficial even, to analyze our tendency to self-destruct, to become unhinged. It’s in our self-interest to study our self-destructive process, its causes and effects, with the hope that perhaps we could curtail this self-destruction.

Knowing our self-destructive ways is no guarantee that we will stop our self-destructive inclinations. They may persist in the presence of our keen self-awareness of them. But it would seem reasonable and in our self-interest to at least start the conversation about our self-destructiveness. It would seem reasonable that it’s better to know what makes us tick than to remain ignorant of our inner workings. So with that in mind, let us look at what it means to be unhinged.

Being Unhinged

When we study the psychological condition of being unhinged, we are talking about the state of being overcome by enormous fear and anxiety, being disconnected from our core self, losing our sense of self-possession, having no free will, being governed by compulsion, and being unable to engage and connect with the present.

Being unhinged, we live far too much “inside our head,” and lack the corrective communications we would have if were more connected to other people and able to listen to their warnings and admonishments.

When we live too much inside our head, we find that our unhinging is the result of exaggerated or disproportionate assessments that result in enormous fears and anxieties.

Unable to get outside our head, we become unhinged because we suffer from “demonic” possession. We are not talking about demonic possession in the religious sense; rather, we are talking about demonic possession in the obsessive sense. Something has possessed us, and we in turn have become obsessed with this thing that has gone deeply inside us.

Some example of things that obsess people who become unhinged:

1. Gambling, drinking, working out, anorexia, any addiction
2. Finding one’s “true love”
3. Vaulting ambition
4. Greed
5. Jealousy
6. Envy
7. Gluttony
8. Lust
9. Materialism like acquiring a Mercedes or a Rolex
10. Dreaming of the perfect life, with the perfect house, the perfect spouse, and the perfect image that conforms to everything you’ve heard is the perfect life
11. Vindication: proving to others that you were right all along
12. Revenge
13. Any attempt to substitute basic needs with false substitutes such eating a gallon of rocky road ice cream to fill the ache and emptiness of loneliness.
14. The quest for your Holy Grail even if the alleged grail is a mirage or a chimera
15. Creating the “perfect body” so people will love and admire you
16. Becoming a towering intellectual so people will be in awe of your daunting intellect
17. Creating some artistic vision
18. Fearing vaccinations or wheat products because you read on the Internet, without testing the credibility of your sources, that vaccinations and wheat products will “disease” and “kill” you
19. Any kind of paranoia derived from reading dubious Internet sources
20. Extreme pessimism
21. Extreme optimism

Often we would like to talk about the causes of being unhinged, but we become frustrated because our sense of being possessed and obsessed seems inexplicable. We say, “It just happened.”

But in fact, there are certain personalities that are more vulnerable to being unhinged:

1. Proud
2. Narcissistic
3. Self-pitying
4. Eccentric
5. Introverted
6. Depressed
7. Highly imaginative, creative people
8. Highly sensitive, fragile people
9. People with Asperger’s syndrome
10. People on the bipolar spectrum
11. People who feel “emotionally damaged” from some past trauma
12. People who are overwhelmed with past demons
13. People who are heartbroken over a lost love
14. People who are heartbroken over God and have lost their faith
15. People who are heartbroken with life and feel disappointed with this place people call Planet Earth, what for them is a living hell
16. People who are desperate for answers to the tormenting questions that plague their existence

Often in the condition of being unhinged, we are chasing a mirage that we wish to obtain in the future, we are disconnecting with our present through addictive and compulsive behavior, and we are in a state of anxiety from our frustration at not being able to possess our chimera or mirage.

We all become unhinged from time to time, but what separates an unhinged person from the rest of us is the frequency and chronic nature of being in the condition of being unhinged.

We can break down the condition of being unhinged in the following eight distinguishing characteristics.

One. The first characteristic is our delusional self that creates false justifications for irrational behavior. “This thing is so cheap I can’t afford NOT to buy it.” “By buying the Seiko SBDX017 for two thousand dollars, I’ll stop buying six-hundred-dollar watches every four months or so, so that over a five-year period, the two-thousand-dollar Seiko will save me seven thousand dollars. I can’t afford NOT to buy the Seiko.”

Two. The second characteristic is fear of facing our personal shortcomings, what amounts to having someone hand us our butt on a stick. The disparity between our self-image and our true self is too frightening for most of us to bear. We’d rather live with a flattering self-image. We’d rather believe we’re not wasting our lives on nonsense. We’re so desperate to avoid the truth of our personal shortcomings that we engage in diversionary behavior (avoiding the truth through various distractions and escapism) that makes us unhinged.

Three. Related to the second, the third characteristic is the intoxication that overcomes us when we become an image of mythology, celebrity, fame, or power to others so that we see ourselves, not for who we really are, but through the lens of those who worship our mythical self.

Four. The fourth characteristic of becoming unhinged is desire for some mirage or chimera that rips us apart from our powers of reason.

Five. The fifth characteristic of becoming unhinged is obsessive-compulsive behavior that compromises our sense of self-possession and free will.

Six. The sixth characteristic embodies all of the previous four, the state of disconnection, which causes intense anxiety and panic. We are desperate to not feel this disconnection, and we will resort to any extreme to not feel this anxiety. Our extreme behaviors exacerbate our condition, making us more anxious and feeling compelled to be even more extreme, thus creating a vicious cycle.

Seven. Not knowing one is unhinged is a key characteristic. In other words, the unhinged lacks the metacognition and self-awareness to recognize that he is unhinged.

Eight. The eighth and most striking characteristic is the enormous anxiety and fear that afflicts us and in turn makes us unhinged.