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We Are Never Alone

With astounding concision in a short story about chess, Zweig outlines a profound psychological theory: that a human being’s greatest resource - the ability to reflect upon himself and his actions - is also his greatest vulnerability.

Experience alone, without the capacity to reflect upon it, provides rigid rules for responding to situations which never quite repeat themselves. Reflective ability creates the ability to cope with entirely novel conditions through the power to re-shape the rules, to imagine alternative experiences. By standing, as it were, outside ourselves, we are able to create a context for ourselves, and consequently meaning.

On the other hand this reflective ability implies a “self fragmentation into the white ego and the black ego�� and the potential for an “induced schizophrenia�� or, more generally, for debilitating mental illness. Pushed to an extreme of sensual deprivation, Zweig suggests, we may be able to save ourselves from insanity through imagination. But this route to salvation is dangerously close to a different kind of insanity. We are tempted to move from an absence of meaning to an obsessive singular meaning which dominates the self that creates it.

The implication of course is that neuroses are purposeful, even heroic responses to difficult circumstances. Having used these neuroses successfully, they threaten to become habitual. And it is at that point we need some sort of friendly helping hand to avoid disaster. Not quite Freudian therefore, but very Viennese.

Postscript: An interesting recent philosophical piece on the same general idea may be found in Sloman and Fernbach’s The Knowledge Illusion: /review/show...