Sublime

And so the so-called self is what we have come to call, in William James’s phrase, ‘a divided self’; and after James and Winnicott, a true and false self, or a self in language, in fantasy, but perhaps, or really, no self at all. A self and its absence co-existing, in its most modern form and formulation. A self always, at least, having to manage c

We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.

We organise much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls.

“I am not fully known to myself because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others.”

how we are multiple and confabulatory, skating on the thin ice of sanity, all of us a battleground for the invisible forces of our own subconscious minds.

This sense of self is actually a transitory, discontinuous event, which in our confusion seems to be quite solid and continuous.

“you don’t have to be controlled by your concept of yourself.”

For Freud, the self is – rather than a soul with an eternal nature – a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires,

a typically English attempt to restore a balance.