With a greater sense of our right to exist, we may become better able to articulate how it feels to be us. Instead of just resenting another person’s criticism, we might explain why we believe they have been unjust to us. If we are upset by our partner, we don’t need to accuse them of being evil and slam doors. We’ll know to explain how (perhaps

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What helps enormously in our attempts to know our own minds is, surprisingly, the presence of another mind. For all the glamour of the solitary seer, thinking usually happens best in tandem. It is the curiosity of someone else that gives us the confidence to remain curious about ourselves. It is the application of a light pressure from outside us

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In an emotionally healthy childhood, the child can see that the good carer isn’t either entirely good or wholly bad and so isn’t worthy of either idealization or denigration. The child accepts the faults and virtues of the carer with melancholy maturity and gratitude—and in doing so, by extension, becomes ready to accept that everyone they like

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Importantly, in an emotionally healthy childhood, plenty goes wrong. No one has staked their reputation on rendering the whole story perfect. The carer does not see it as their role to remove every frustration. They intuit that a lot of good comes from having the right, manageable kind of friction, through which the child develops their own

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We may think of egoists as people who have grown sick from too much love, but in fact the opposite is the case: An egoist is someone who has not yet had their fill. Selfcenteredness has to have a clear run in the early years if it isn’t to haunt and ruin the later ones. The so-called narcissist is simply a benighted soul who has not had a chance to

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We are checking the news to keep the news from ourselves at bay; we are working on a project as an alternative to working on our psyches. What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is doing, but their way of doing it, and in particular their desire to avoid any encounter with certain sides of themselves. We are addicts whenever we

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It was the philosophers of ancient Greece who first identified these problems and described the structural deficiencies of our minds with a special term. They proposed that we suffer from akrasia , commonly translated as “weakness of will,” a habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right.

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