Welcome to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Carl Gustav Jung proposed that everything that irritates us about others can lead us to understand ourselves. For him, others were a giant mirror into our own psyches. The great German writer, Hermann Hesse, suggested that disliking something in another is disliking something that we have, too.
Freud, Kraepelin, Schopenhauer, those Germans opened the door to our psychological lies. And it was a shock at the time. Jung joked to Freud on their maiden journey to America that they were bringing the plague to American. And if you subscribe to the idea that hell comes from the others, as Sartre proposed, it is a little depressing to have to let go of that and point the finger back inside for the real source of our problems.
The consequences, however, of maintaining that outward blame are severe. From nuking plants with toxic chemicals to ethnic cleansing to executing the "evil" ones, we pay a big price for our naive exteriorization.
Let's go the other way. The Sanity of Interiorizing our Lives, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
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