Sublime

‘Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality; for it, everything that works is real’ (Jung 1931b: para. 111).

Remember that your heart beats “self-so” — and, if you give it a chance, your mind can function “self-so,” although most of us are afraid to give it a chance.

In the arena of self-knowledge, psychotherapy may be the single most useful intervention of the last 200 years. It is a tool and, like all tools, it finds its purpose in helping us to overcome an inborn weakness and to extend our capacities beyond those originally gifted to us by nature.

Philip Rieff, a mid-twentieth-century psychologist and philosopher, foresaw this trend in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

philosopher and psychologist William James expressed an insight that is so simple yet so profound that it changes how we view ourselves: “A new life is but a new mind.”

The sociologist George Herbert Meade called this “the interiorized other.” That is to say, we have a kind of interior picture, a vague sense of who we are, and of what the reaction of other people to us says about who we are. That reaction is almost invariably communicated to us through what other people say and think, but soon we learn to maintain

Indeed, he repeatedly stated that the “social bases of self-respect” were the most important primary goods, since “without [self-respect] nothing may seem worth doing.”

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?