Flights

TRAVEL PSYCHOLOGY: LECTIO BREVIS I

At airports over the past few months I’ve come across some scholars who, amidst the din of travel, between departure announcements and boarding calls, organize little lectures. One of them explained to me that it was part of a worldwide (or perhaps EU-wide) educational outreach programme. So at some point I decided to linger in view of the screen in the waiting area and the small group of curious listeners.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ began a young woman, nervously adjusting her colourful scarf, while her companion, a man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, prepared the screen that was hanging on the wall. ‘Travel psychology studies people in transit, persons in motion, and thus situates itself in opposition to traditional psychology, which has always investigated the human being in a fixed context, in stability and stillness – for example, through the prism of his or her biological constitution, family relationships, social situations, and so forth. In travel psychology, these factors are of secondary, not primary importance.

‘If we wish to catalogue humankind in a convincing way, we can do so only by placing people in some sort of motion, moving from one place towards another. The fact of the repeated emergence of so many unconvincing descriptions of the stable, fixed person appears to call into question the existence of a self, understood non-relationally. This has meant that for some time in travel psychology there have been certain prevailing voices claiming that there can be no other psychology besides travel psychology.’

The little cluster of listeners shuffled restlessly. A vociferous group of tall men distinguished by their sports team’s colourful scarves – a clan of fans – had just passed by. At the same time, there were still people coming up to us, intrigued by the screen on the wall and by the two rows of chairs set out. They would sit down for a moment on their way between gates or in between wandering around the airport shops. Evident on many of their faces was exhaustion and disorientation in time: you could tell they’d be glad to take just a little nap, and they must not have been aware that around the next corner there was a comfortable waiting room with armchairs you could sleep in. Several travellers had stood up when the woman began talking. A very young couple was standing locked in an embrace, listening with rapt attention as they tenderly stroked each other’s backs.

The woman paused briefly, then started up again: ‘A fundamental concept in travel psychology is desire, which is what lends movement and direction to human beings as well as arousing in them an inclination towards something. Desire in itself is empty, in other words it merely indicates direction, but never destination; destinations, in any case, always remain phantasmagoric and unclear; the closer we get to them, the more enigmatic they become. By no means is it possible to ever actually attain a given destination, nor, in so doing, appease desire. This process of striving is best encapsulated in the preposition “towards”. Towards what?’

Here the woman glanced out over her glasses and cast her pointed gaze about the audience, as though awaiting any form of confirmation that she was addressing the right group of people. This was not to the liking of the couple with two children in a pram, who exchanged a look and pushed their luggage onwards, moving down to take a gander at the imitation Rembrandt.

‘Travel psychology has not cut all ties with psychoanalysis…’ the woman continued, and I suddenly felt sorry for these young lecturers. They were talking to people who had wound up here by accident and who did not look particularly interested. I went over to the vending machine to get myself a cup of coffee, added a couple of sugar cubes, trying to revive myself, and by the time I returned, it was the man speaking instead.

‘…foundational idea,’ he was saying, ‘is constellationality, and right away the first claim of travel psychology: in life, unlike in studies (though in fact in scholarship, too, much gets overtaxed for the sake of order) there exists no philosophical primum. That means that it is impossible to build a consistent cause-and-effect course of argument or a narrative with events that succeed each other casuistically and follow from each other. That would merely be an approximation, in the same way that an approximation of the earth gives us a grid of latitude and longitude. When in reality, in order to reflect our experience more accurately, it would be necessary instead to assemble a whole, out of pieces of more or less the same size, placed concentrically on the same surface. Constellation, not sequencing, carries truth. This is why travel psychology envisions man in equivalently weighted situations, without trying to lend his life any – even approximate – continuity. Human life is comprised of situations. There is, of course, a certain inclination towards the repetition of behaviours. This repetition does not, however, mean that we should succumb in our imaginations to the appearance of any sort of consistent whole.’

The man looked out over his glasses at his listeners, uneasy, no doubt wanting to ascertain whether they were actually listening. We were listening, attentively.

At that moment a group of travellers with children ran past; they must have been late for their connecting flight. This unfocused us a little, we looked for a moment at their flushed red faces, their straw hats and souvenir drums and masks and shell necklaces. The man cleared his throat a few times to bring us back to order, gathering air into his lungs, but then looking back at us he let it out again and fell silent. He flipped through a few pages of his notes and finally said:

‘The history. Now a few sentences on the history of the field. It developed in the postwar years (in the fifties) out of airline psychology, which arose in conjunction with the growing number of airplane passengers. At first it dealt with the particular problems connected with passenger movement – the functions of task forces in emergency situations, the psychological dynamics of flight – then it expanded its area of interest in the direction of the organization of airports and hotels, the appropriation of new spaces, the multicultural aspects of travel. In time it branched out into distinct specializations, like psychogeography, psychotopology. Clinical branches came about…’

I stopped listening. The lecture was too long. They ought to dispense this education in smaller doses.

Instead I observed a man, poorly dressed, all rumpled, no doubt in the middle of a long journey. He had found someone’s black umbrella and proceeded to inspect it. But it turned out that the umbrella was unusable. Its wires were broken, and the black covering couldn’t be extended. Then, to my surprise, the man began to meticulously detach the umbrella’s covering from the rods and end-pieces, which took him some time. He did it fully concentrated, standing still amidst the flow of crowds of travellers. When he had finished, he folded up the material into a cube, placed it in his pocket, then disappeared into the stream of people.

I turned then, and went on my way as well.