A Therapeutic Journey

If we have properly sobbed, at some point in the misery an idea—however minor—will at last enter our mind and make a tentative case for the other side: We’ll remember that it would be quite pleasant and possible to have a very hot bath, that someone once stroked our hair kindly, that we have one and a half good friends on the planet and an interest

Decades may pass. It’s not uncommon for the most serious mental conditions to remain undiagnosed for half a lifetime. We simply don’t notice that we are, beneath the surface, chronically anxious, filled with self-loathing, and close to overwhelming despair and rage. This too simply ends up feeling normal.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott made a distinction between what he termed a “true” and a “false” self. In order to be healthy, a baby and developing child needs to be allowed to express and experience its true self: that is, it has to be honest about its actual wishes and desires, without fear of censorship or any pressure to compromise. If it i

It is a sign of the supreme wisdom of small children that they have no shame or compunction about bursting into tears. They have a more accurate and less pride-filled sense of their place in the world than a typical adult: They know that they are only extremely small beings in a hostile and unpredictable realm, that they can’t control much of what

Whereas past ages resigned themselves to offering modest destinies to most of their citizens, modernity has insisted that everyone—whatever their background or families of origin—should be capable of realizing the most stellar feats. No longer should anything—education, background, race, creed—stand in the way of ambition. This has been in its way

The vulnerability is both touching and—when you remember how damaged certain adults are—appalling. You can do anything with little people. Tell them you are their friend and then burn their hand, give them a lollipop and then separate them from their parents, whisper to them late at night that no one must ever know about this and ruin them for life

Ferdinand Hodler, The Disappointed Souls, 1892. Hodler wasn’t painting any one scene. He intended his work as an allegory of modern society as a whole, with its absence of community, its lonely cities and its alienating technologies. But in this very depiction lies the possibility of redemption. We will start to heal when we realize that we are in

We will have liberated ourselves from the madness of the age when we can look on loud and heroic lives—perhaps led by people we once knew—and with good faith say that this is not for us, that we are happier where we are, because we at last understand what we really require to survive mentally: cosiness, connection, and an ongoing lack of drama.

We are the insane ones and they will always fly the flags of health, rationality, and balance. They feel sorry for us from afar: We are the proverbial drowning man and they the observer on dry land. Loving companions bear no such hints of superiority. They do not judge us as beneath them when we lie crumpled in our pyjamas at midday because they do