The shrink [psychotherapist Antonia Macaro] …
Any self-knowledge project is under threat from the large amount of psychology research telling us that most of our functioning is unconscious. Nothing is spared – feelings, attitudes, personality, motives. We think we are not angry or jealous when it is clear to everybody else that we are. We really believe we love someone before realising we really don’t. We take an instant dislike to a person with no awareness that it’s because they remind us of a horrible maths teacher, or we fail to realise it’s the smell of croissants that has moved us to give money to a beggar.
The case may well be overstated: having limited access to our inner workings isn’t the same as having no access at all. But even if the springs of actions are shrouded in mist, some insight is still possible. We just have to seek to supplement our internal perspective with a slightly more detached one, taking into consideration how other people see us, the role of the context we’re in and even what the research tells us about how little we know ourselves.
Making the implicit a little more explicit, throwing our world view into slightly sharper relief, can still help us to gain more control over our choices, which is, after all, what self-knowledge is all about.
The sage [philosopher Julian Baggini] …
Just as it is common to hear people say that you cannot love others unless you first learn to love yourself, Plato warned that you must know yourself before you can hope to understand less accessible aspects of reality. On this view, it is a neat linguistic accident that “metaphysics” starts with “me”.
Yet the cleverest philosophers, psychologists and artists are evidently not always blessed with pellucid self-awareness. And even if specialists in human understanding can’t see themselves truly, what hope is there for the rest of us?
More than we might think, if we can learn from the mistakes of lumbering intellectual giants whose fatal flaw is often complacency and over-confidence. Experiments have suggested that if people are primed to believe that they can make objective judgments about others, they actually become more likely to be swayed by prejudices and stereotypes. […]
The result can be a fixed and limited image of self that leaves out other elements, such as core values, cultural assumptions or unreflective impulses.
And that’s where hope lies for the rest of us. Perhaps what we most need to know ourselves is honesty and humility, which expertise tends to erode rather than strengthen. If that’s the case, then when it comes to self-knowledge, amateurs who are fully aware of their limitations might be better equipped to succeed than over-confident professionals.
Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini’s book ‘The Shrink and The Sage’ is available in paperback.