SPLITTING AND INTEGRATION

Melanie Klein (1882–1960) was a Viennese psychotherapist who studied the deep-seated human tendency for splitting. Throughout life, but particularly in infancy, we are confronted by frustrations and disappointments. We are let down and hurt by people we long to rely on. These frustrations can feel so intolerable, we defend ourselves by splitting people into the purely good and the purely bad. We denigrate certain characters entirely so as to preserve a pure hope around others. Everyone who annoys us becomes evil; everyone who gratifies us is perfect. The therapeutic response to splitting is to gently move us towards what is known as integration. With the help of a therapist, we learn sympathetically to see why we made a split but then slowly and painfully start to acknowledge a more complex reality. A parent can be annoying in some ways yet loveable in others; someone can criticise us without being mean or stupid; we ourselves can have many genuine failings and yet still be quite good people. Splitting is often observed in romantic life, where we can move from person to person, always falling deeply in love and then abruptly detaching ourselves when we discover a flaw. Therapy teaches us to tolerate the ambivalent nature of everyone – not least ourselves. We can admit we’re wrong without feeling too humiliated. We can properly apologise and accept the apologies of others. The world becomes a little greyer, but also a lot more bearable.

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AGAINST SKIING HOLIDAYS

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a normal person in search of a holiday will enjoy skiing; they will delight in bracing mountain air, thrill at going down mogul dotted slopes and feel pleasantly exhausted after a day of parallel turns. This assumption about pleasure joins a host of others proposed by the modern world. Normal people will equally enjoy white wine, the Amalfi coast, the novels of Margaret Atwood, dogs, high heels, small children, Miami beach, oral sex, Banksy, marriage, Netflix and vegetarianism. We may legitimately delight in all of these elements; the issue lies in the immense pressure we are under to do so. The truth about ourselves may, in reality, be a great deal more mysterious than the official narrative allows. Whatever our commitments to decorum and good order, we may in our depths be far more distinctive than we’re supposed to be. We may — once we become sensitive to our faint tremors of authentic delight and boredom — hate the idea of jogging, the the...

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CLASSICISM

At present, our culture is dominated by a Romantic outlook; its predecessor, and in many ways its more deserving alternative, is a Classical view of life. Classicism is founded upon an intense, pessimistic awareness of the frailties of human nature and on a suspicion of unexamined instinct. The Classical attitude knows that our emotions can frequently over-power our better insights, that we repeatedly misunderstand ourselves and others, and that we are never far from folly, harm and error. In response, Classicism seeks via culture to correct the failings of our minds. Classicism is wary of our instinctive longing for perfection. In love, it counsels a gracious acceptance of the ‘madness’ inside each partner. It knows that ecstasy cannot last, and that the basis of all good relationships must be tolerance and mutual sympathy. Classicism has a high regard for domestic life; it sees apparently minor practical details as deeply worthy of care and effort; it doesn’t think it would be degrad...

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IMPOSTER SYNDROME

PHILOSOPHY In many challenges, both personal and professional, we are held back by the crippling thought that people like us could not possibly triumph given what we know of ourselves: how reliably stupid, anxious, gauche, crude, vulgar and dull we really are. We leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be anything like the sort of people we see lauded around us. The root cause of impostor syndrome is a hugely unhelpful picture of what other people are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we fail to imagine how deeply flawed everyone else is beneath a more or less polished surface. The impostor syndrome has its roots in a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited...

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