The School of Life: An Emotional Education

Here there is no such call. Like a parent who doesn’t need a small child to reciprocate, the therapist voluntarily forgoes equality in the relationship; they won’t talk of their regrets or insist on their anecdotes. They simply want to help us find what is best for us, understood on our terms. They won’t have a preconceived view of how we’re meant

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 develop a manic reliance on something, anything, to keep our darker and more unsettling feelings at bay.

Folly The wise know that all human beings, themselves included, are never far from folly. They have irrational desires and incompatible aims, they are unaware of a lot of what they feel, they are prone to mood swings, they are visited by powerful fantasies and delusions – and are always buffeted by the curious demands of their sexuality.

Marriage is a state-sanctioned legal construct, fundamentally linked to matters of property, progeny and pension entitlements – a construct which aims to restrict and control how two people might feel towards one another over fifty or more years. It places a cold, unhelpful, expensive and entirely emotionally alien frame around what is always going

The art of living is to a large measure dependent on an ability to understand our thorns and explain them with a modicum of grace to others – and, when we are on the other side of the equation, to imagine the thorns of others, even those whose precise locations or dimensions we will never know for certain.

There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand (thanks to the miracles of the Industrial Revolution). We are, astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we’re encouraged to think we are.

Sex in which two people can express their defiling urges is, for Proust, at heart an indication of a quest for complete acceptance. We know we can please others with our goodness, but – suggests Proust – what we really want is also to be endorsed for our more peculiar and dark impulses. The discipline involved in growing up into a good person seeks

We are living the wide-open present through the narrow drama of the past. It is a complicating factor that our imbalances don’t cleanly reveal their origins, either to our own minds or, consequently, to the world at large. We aren’t really sure why we run away as we do, or are so often angry, or have a proud, haughty air, or break every deadline, o

art is a tool that can help release us from our numbness and provide for catharsis in areas where we have for too long been wrong-headedly brave.