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The idea that individual self-development is an important pursuit is a comparatively recent one in human history; and the idea that the arts are vehicles of self-expression or can serve the purpose of self-development is still more recent.
Other individuals find it difficult to be authentically themselves even in the presence of their spouses, lovers, or closest friends and relatives. Such individuals, whilst not going so far as to construct a false self which entirely replaces the true self at a conscious level, have an especial need to be alone which goes beyond the occasional demand for solitude referred to above.
In an interview which he gave for the Paris Review when he was ninety-one, Wodehouse was reported as saying: ‘I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.’
Psychotherapists, especially those trained in the school of Jung, often suggest to their patients that, when feeling overwhelmed by rage or despair, they should attempt to paint or to draw their feelings, or at least write down what they are experiencing.
The ideally balanced person, therefore, might be supposed to find the meaning of his life both in his interpersonal relationships and in his interests.
The sense of perfect harmony with the universe, of perfect harmony with another person, and of perfect harmony within the self are intimately connected; indeed, I believe them to be essentially the same phenomena.
About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives.
