Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm believed well-being includes a “clarity of awareness of oneself and the world.” This involves recognizing one’s own situation and the broader global circumstances of life as it is.

The psychiatrist thought few attain the state some call mental health. 

Instead, in Fromm’s opinion, many buttress themselves with defense mechanisms like rationalization, denial, projection, and repression. These allow them to turn away from the part of life that is hard to bear. Others use distractions to achieve the same result via entertainment, sex, drugs, and alcohol.

How can this be? What is to be made of seeing the world by the grace of excellent vision in a literal sense and yet modifying or distorting its nature without knowing it?

The idea is not as strange as it sounds. Life experiences and inborn dispositions create optimists, pessimists, and some too young to have an outlook. All arrive at the state of things from a different perspective. 

Born decades apart in various countries, raised with capable or limited parents, and having dissimilar health and wealth leads to more perspectival points of view.

Likewise, man is more or less able to understand the character of being, having inherited the sheer brain power to do it. In a complex world flooded with fake news, however, the vision of the truth becomes cloudy and impaired.

Many people of faith believe with certainty in a particular version of an unseen God. This runs up against the estimate that there are over 4000 religions, raising the question of which one, if any, has all the answers.

Atheists or agnostics, like the religious, wonder about the fundamental nature of existence and how they should live. The hard part is whether there is a single correct take on the character of life on this planet and what might come after death in addition to burial.

Much as people use common languages, language is sometimes imprecise and misunderstood. Staying on the subject of religion, sizeable numbers of people who read holy books with matching words disagree on what they mean. A similar dilemma exists between jurists who interpret the U.S. Constitution.

The five senses, as astonishing as they are, put some homo sapiens at odds. Thus, individuals might disagree on whether the same fish dish is tasty or unpleasant or whether a person is attractive. Perhaps you find the temperature perfect while your spouse feels a chill.

None of this includes the impact of emotions on beliefs and opinions, with politics and religion being among the foremost areas of intense, split-second reactions on a high boil. Differences are known to reach the point of thinking the other is evil, even among the faithful who have been told to love their neighbor.

Francis Bacon, the 17th-century English statesman and philosopher, claimed that human intellect and judgment were error-prone, like a concave mirror rather than the flat one used when brushing hair. Therefore, an element of a therapist’s job might be to help patients whose defense mechanisms cause frequent warped reflection within their minds.

Smoothing and flattening that glass is possible. Eliminating all the curves is quite a different thing. 

Would humanity be better off without any psychological defenses? Would a frank and unflinching view into a perfect mirror bring the human race to its knees or raise it?

Not that mortals have total control over making personal changes since the unconscious works in secret, and much else in the form of personality comes with each soul’s birthday package on Day One of life.

Psychologists agree that the agency to recreate ourselves is incomplete. The version of a man who fancies himself in one particular way cannot be entirely reinvented. 

Without psychological defenses, taking too big a gulp of the world would risk leaving adults as vulnerable as children. At a minimum, mankind needs these fortifications to deal with the frustrations of living.

What is humanity left to do with the incomplete toolbox it opens to greet each day and its hope to behold and share the same joy in searching the distant horizon?

Common folk harmonize themselves about many things, including time and place, and disagree concerning others, all the more because technology and knowledge are expanding so fast. 

Suppose no one envisions the peopled earth as it is or perceives events exactly as his neighbor. In that case, one can only conclude that the globe contains as many different versions of the home planet and its dominating species as there are inhabitants.

Beyond measuring accepted characteristics such as height and weight, everyone has individualized ideas about what is outside and inside himself.

Without universal agreement on the nature of things, living and otherwise, it becomes hard to think even Shakespeare understood all this. Nonetheless, yours truly hazards the idea that the playwright came close in the following:

Prospero, the magician/hero of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, is the speaker:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. 

Dream on.

==========

The top image is Exoplanet GJ 486 b (Artist Concept) Using the Webb Space Telescope.

It is followed by a Full Moon on Lake Michigan with the Railing of White Shoal Lighthouse Near Mackinac, MI, 2023, by Laura Hedien. With appreciation to Laura for her kind permission to post it: Laura Hedien Official Website.

Next comes Reflections on a Rainy Day by Tomascastelazo.

Finally, Sweet Dreams, AI Art by David S. Soriano. The last two pictures are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.