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.’
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