THE TRUE AND FALSE SELF

This psychological theory of the True and the False Self is the work of the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896–1971). In Winnicott’s eyes, we are all born with a true self. The baby’s true self isn’t interested in the feelings of others. It isn’t socialised. It screams when it needs to, even if it is the middle of the night or on a crowded train. It may be aggressive, biting and – in the eyes of a stickler for manners or a lover of hygiene – shocking and a bit disgusting. Winnicott added that if a person is to have any sense of feeling real as an adult, they need to have enjoyed a period of letting the true self have its way. Gradually, a false self can develop, which has a capacity to submit to the demands of external reality (school, work, etc.). Winnicott was not an enemy of a false self; he simply insisted that it belonged to health only when it had been preceded by a thorough earlier experience of an untrammelled true self. Unfortunately, many of us have not been given a chance to be our true selves. Perhaps our mother was depressed, or our father was often in a rage. Maybe there was an older or a younger sibling who was in a crisis and required all the attention. The result is that we will have learnt to comply far too early; we have become obedient at the expense of our ability to feel authentically ourselves. Therapy gives us a second chance. We are allowed to regress before the time when we started to be false, back to the moment when we desperately needed to be true. In the therapist’s office, safely contained by their maturity and care, we can learn to be real once more. We can be intemperate, difficult, unconcerned with anyone but ourselves, selfish, unimpressive, aggressive and shocking. The therapist will take it, and thereby help us to experience a new sense of aliveness that should have been there from the start. The demand to be false, which never goes away, becomes more bearable because we are regularly allowed, in the privacy of the therapist’s room, once a week or so, to be true.

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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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