Sublime

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,

Neuroception suggests that the body can work below the level of awareness to give us information at an implicit level. Jamie has long told her clients, “Your body will alert you to what’s going on ten steps before you even realize that anything is the matter.” This teaching exemplifies neuroception. In keeping with the theme of this chapter, more t

The social self, on the other hand, is the part of you that developed in response to pressures from the people around you, including everyone from your family to your first love to the pope. As the most socially dependent of mammals, human babies are born knowing that their very survival depends on the goodwill of the grown-ups around them.