by Gary Borjesson To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment—whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. —Carl Jung, lecturing on Nietzsche 1. Friendship Born of Self It is commonly, and truly, said that you can only love someone as well as you love yourself. For many of us, myself included, this is a hard teaching. As Jung says in the epigraph, we hope that we can love others without figuring out how to love ourselves, but eventually “it comes back on us.” The love I’m talking about is friendship. (It should come as no surprise that philosophers and psychologists haven’t looked to familial or romantic relationships as exemplars of enlightened love!) I want to explore how this curious relation between befriending ourselves and befriending others works. Along the way I show how we can use our discoveries to become better at both. The notion that loving others depends on loving ourselves is not new. Aristotle discusses how the kind of friend we are to ourselves will be reflected in the kind of friendships we have with others. Where there is “internal conflict,” where, as he puts it, “souls are divided against themselves,” they will not be able to love themselves, or others. I think of people I’ve known who end up in therapy because a friend or partner made it clear that the relationship would be over if they didn’t address their depression or anxiety or addiction—examples of how internal discord causes troubles for others. 2. It’s Mutual, Actually But friendships don’t just reflect who we are. Who we are, and how we show up in relationships, depends also on how we have been treated by others. If you grew up with a hypercritical rejecting mother, your attachment pattern and personality will reflect this. In other words, our way of being with others is informed by the way others have been with us; in particular, by how attentive and attuned (friendly) early caregivers were. So, as we say of friendship, it’s a two-way street. Our friendships tend to reflect who we are, but who we are also reflects how we’ve been related to. This mutuality radiates inward and outward. Thus Plato and Aristotle don’t just relate self-harmony to harmony in friendship, they note that these intimate harmonies can be difficult to establish when there is discord in larger social and political orders. That’s why, at the level of family, it’s hard to have a secure attachment pattern if our parenting wasn’t good enough. Moving outward, it’s why, as Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke illustrates so vividly, bad political orders like communism and fascism make friendship harder. Closer to home, many therapists have patients whose discord is exacerbated by the political discord and chaos in the US. The Greek view that flourishing depends on establishing inner and outer harmony profoundly influenced modern psychology. Freud was acquainted with at least some of Plato’s metaphors for the organization of the psyche. Two prominent examples are Socrates comparing the parts of the soul to the parts of a city in the Republic; and in the Phaedrus he compares it to a charioteer and two horses. Freud would begin thinking of the psyche in terms of id, ego, and superego. His method of psychoanalysis aimed at roughly the same goal the Greeks sought through philosophic friendship: becoming aware of the soul’s psychodynamics, and using this awareness to reduce the conflicts and suffering, so as to become better friends to ourselves and others. In a further deepening of this mutual relation, the greatest development in psychoanalysis after Freud has been the ontological shift from an egoic individual psychology to a relational one. (My essay, How to Start Thinking about Attachment, explains what led to this shift.) Many recent models of therapy take up these themes. Internal Family Systems (IFS), for example, explores how roles found in the external social order have analogues in roles played by parts of the self. For instance, if you were raised in a ‘family system’ characterized by a critical attitude and emotional aloofness, chances are you’ll have internalized a fierce inner critic. As you might guess, the therapy involves befriending all the parts. In a phrase that could have been taken from Plato or Aristotle, an adage of IFS is that ‘there are no bad parts, just good parts in bad roles.’ 3. Some Uses of Friendship As I’ve said, friendship exemplifies the ideal way of relating to ourselves and others, one that prizes awareness, free choice, mutuality, and justice. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, we’re even invited to think of friendship as the ideal way of relating to Jesus. (Thinking about the son of God as our best friend puts being imago dei in a fresh light!) As we explore the uses of ‘friendship,’ keep in mind that this refers both to self-friendship and friendship with others. How can we use what we know about friendship to better our relations? First, notice that because friendships are active and dynamic, they are always pointing in a direction and providing feedback as to how they, and we, are doing. Think for example of some important partnerships or friendships in your life. Now ask yourself whether, overall, the relation is in a virtuous or vicious cycle, or holding pattern. When a friendship is going well, it’s typical to feel enlivened and empowered by it, and to seek more of the friend’s company. When it’s not, we often feel demoralized, even dragged down or made worse. For instance, someone trying to recover from an addiction is worsened by the company of a friend who is still using and encouraging them to start again. Next, it’s helpful to notice whether you’re more introverted or extroverted, whether you’re more inclined to spend time with yourself or with others. For introverts in therapy, it can be hard to accept that the path to being on better terms with ourselves leads through developing our relations with others. Returning to this essay’s epigraph, both Jung and Nietzsche famously embraced the struggle to know and love themselves. Yet in Nietzsche’s case, and perhaps in Jung’s, this inner work was easier than the outer, interpersonal work. For extroverts, on the other hand, who tend to find being with others more attractive, the path often leads in the other direction, toward the solitude and introspection needed for getting to know and befriend themselves. In psychotherapy, some patients need to be encouraged to lean more inward, others to lean more outward, the common aim being integration—more harmony and friendship. It’s worth noticing here how difficult and unsentimental the true endeavor of befriending ourselves is, contrary to a tendency of therapy culture to prefer coddling patients to challenging them. The tough love starts with accepting that if we want things to change, we have to change. It’s not enough to have bright ideas for what others need to be doing better! Even if abusing alcohol is our partner’s problem, still, we have to figure out how best to respond. But talk of change, much less making changes, meets resistance. Which is where our awareness of mutuality can encourage us, by reminding us that where friendships are concerned, it is rarely accurate or useful either to blame ourselves or to view ourselves as blameless victims. If we tend to blame and shame ourselves for our difficulties, it’s useful to recall how early attachment relations and environment have shaped us, contributing to why we behave as we do—for better and worse. In short, it’s useful to remind ourselves of the complex dialectical weave in which we are embedded. To illustrate, I’ve worked with patients who honestly saw their habitually critical and demanding attitude toward others as totally reasonable—“it’s what I hope for from others,” as one patient said when I noted how harsh she sounded when talking about her son. But as she has become aware of how distorted and unreasonable her so-called reasonableness has turned out to be, she’s pained at how unfair she’s been to others. But she’s also relieved because (no surprise by now) she had been treating herself in the same critical demeaning way. What a relief, then, to explore how this critic was actually a defense meant to protect her: keeping her ever-vigilant by rehearsing every way she had screwed up, and anticipating every way she might be about to. In general, seeing how we habitually relate, and where this come from, usually leads to more empathy. This in turn can help us nudge parts like that inner critic into a better role—much as we might talk to a friend about how their well-meaning but misplaced feedback (or critical attitude) isn’t working for us. Ideally, friends love us as we aspire to love ourselves. Good therapists treat their patients with the same warm and friendly, but also honest and challenging, mindset that they hope the patient can eventually bring to themselves and their relationships. Ideally, our friends recognize and love our good qualities, while also expressing their concern about our tendency, say, to be overly critical or to dominate conversations. Let me close with a further note about friendship’s dual aspect as warm and loving, yet guided by the cooler spirit of awareness and concern for justice. This combination gives friendship its unique character, and contributes to the virtuous cycle I’ve been describing, in which we are more able to know and love ourselves as we come to know and love others, and vice versa. On the cooler side, in Plato’s dialogues we see Socrates encouraging the open dialectical mindset of friendship in his young interlocutors, while discouraging the warmer romantic, competitive, or adversarial alternatives. As the philosophers knew, it’s more challenging and even painful, as Jung notes in the epigraph, to face that “glowing red-hot iron” of who one actually is. Yet doing so is the path to true love—to more genuine and intimate connections with ourselves and others. I think of the woman I mentioned, so fiercely critical, and the way she felt when she apologized to her adult son for how she’d spoken to him in their last conversation, but really for much of his life. He’d responded to her apology with such heartfelt gratitude that she felt simultaneously heartbroken and hopeful. Heartbroken to know the trouble she’d caused her beloved son, but hopeful, as she said, that she and her son could now become friends. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.