This is one of the risks of taking on the role of the defender: if the dream is to lose yourself in a cause, you might wake up one day and realize that you’ve succeeded, and that there’s hardly anything left of you. Women, who are socially conditioned to be selfless, can be particularly susceptible to a version of heroism that sucks them dry.

Created during the European wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the self was intended from the outset to offer human beings a vision of their lives that would restrain the human tendency to deploy violence in the name of the sacred.