On the many and obdurate moral psychological obstacles to self-awareness (or self-knowledge), happiness, and eudaimonia (‘human flourishing’) … or individuation, self-realization and human fulfillment (Part 1)

“One does not have to go all the way with Augustine and the theory of original sin in order to recognize that humans have a massive capacity to rationalize, deceive themselves, excuse themselves, convince themselves they are acting properly and sincerely, when their true motivations are often highly suspect. To take one example, it is all too clear that we rejig our assessments in our own favour: scarcely realizing it, when making decisions we interpret the balance of reasons in a way that is biased toward ourselves. I am not speaking here of the legitimate partiality that allows any sincere person of integrity to assign a certain reasonable weighting to his or her own self-interests and those of her loved ones, but rather to the distorting shadows cast by pride and vanity, and self-importance and fear and embarrassment and self-defensiveness and envy and greed and self-absorption and fantasies of power. Some contemporary moral philosophers, to be sure, write about these topics, and often they flatter themselves—or indeed quite rightly suppose—that they do so in an acute and insightful way; but one fundamental lesson of psychoanalytic thought is that the most articulate intellectuals are often the most resistant to self-awareness when it comes to their own case. That self-deception can operate right alongside the clearest intellectual grasp of all the salient features surrounding a decision is something that is not particularly easy to grasp without the personal kind of personal askesis that that makes it vivid.

The disciplines of psychoanalysis make available to the subject an understanding — one that is never final, but needs constant practical reinforcement through guided self-examination—of how present objects of choice can become invested with freight from the past, so that they take on a special significance which is opaque to the agent himself. [….] Change and growth require, if the psychoanalytic line is anything like correct, a radical vulnerability—a willingness to delve back into those early parts of our lives in which our very ability to value things, our very models of goodness and love and attraction and self-worth, were shaped and formed. That simple maxim, The child is father to the man, so rarely appreciated in its full significance by intellectualizing ethicists, tells us that we cannot overcome the obstacles to moral growth and fulfillment by intellectual analysis alone.

Nor, indeed, by intellect plus will-power.* For the other lesson of Freudian theory is that resolute determination very often does not do the job in the way we expect it to. Repression of desire, determination to ‘keep the passions in check,’ as some of the ancient philosophical programmes recommended, can simply lead to displacements of libido or psychic energy which may break out in different, but possibly even more serious ways. In a sense there is nothing new about this: the lesson is as old as Euripides’ Bacchae, and Freud’s genius was to make explicit what in one way we all knew already. But the lesson remains: we fantasize (and perhaps academics are ever more prone to this than most) that we are ‘mature,’ intelligent, rational beings who have our destiny in our own hands; but the child remains within us, and we fail to acknowledge it at our peril.” — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 142-143.

* On this see chapter II, especially but not only the section on “willing what cannot be willed,” in Jon Elster’s Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

A short list of suggested reading:

• Ames, Roger T. and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry (State University of New York Press, 1996).
• Barnes, Annette. Seeing Through Self-Deception (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000).
• Blackburn, Simon. Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Bryant, Edwin F., trans. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali [with commentary and insights from the traditional commentators] (North Point Press, 2009).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Desikachar, T.K.V. and Hellfried Krusche (Ann-Marie Hodges, trans.) Freud and Yoga: Two Philosophies of Mind Compared (North Point Press, 2014).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd ed., 2000).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Shogam Publications, 4th ed., 2010).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1998).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
• Dyson, Michael Eric. Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction and Human Behavior (MIT Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Epstein, Joseph. Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press/New York Public Library, 2003).
• Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception (University of California Press, 2^nd, 2000).
• Giannetti, Eduardo (John Gledson, trans.) Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
• Harris, William V. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2001).
• Hoffer, Axel, ed. Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion. (Karnac Books, 2015).
• Marar, Ziyad. Deception (Acumen, 2008).
• Mele, Alfred R. Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Miller, William Ian. Faking It (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Rochefoucauld, Duc de la (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959).
• Rorty, Amelie O. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
• Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Tickle, Phyllis A. Greed: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Wasserstein, Wendy. Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).

See too the following compilations available on my Academia page: (i) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, (ii) Dreams and Dreaming, (iii) The Emotions, (iv) Human Nature and Personal Identity, and (vi) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy.