One does not learn the art of psychology, one lives and experiences it, for no science will give you the key to the mysteries of the soul. One cannot become a good psychologist without turning oneself into an object of study, evincing daily interest in the complexity of one’s own case. To be initiated into the mysteries of the other, you must first be initiated into your own. In order to be a psychologist, you must be sufficiently unhappy to understand happiness, so refined that you could become a barbarian at any moment, and so intensely desperate that you do not know whether you live in a desert or in the midst of a fire. Protean, equally centripetal and centrifugal, your ecstasy will have to be esthetic, sexual, religious, and perverse.
Fine psychological understanding is the product of a life of self-contemplation, a life which sees itself in other lives as if in so many mirrors; for a psychologist, all men are fragments of himself. The psychologist’s contempt for others contains a grain of secret and unlimited self-irony. No one practices psychology out of love: it is rather a form of sadism, a desire to annihilate the other by taking possession of his intimate being, by stripping him of his mysterious aura. Quickly exhausting men and their limited resources, the psychologist is easily bored, for he is not naive enough to have friends and is too self-conscious to have lovers. Skepticism is not the beginning but the natural end of psychology. It is nature’s punishment for this violator of mysteries, this supremely indiscreet person who, having invested too few illusions in knowledge, ends in disillusion.
A little knowledge is delightful; a lot, disgusting. The more you know, the less you want to know. He who has not suffered from knowledge has never known anything.
Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
Fine psychological understanding is the product of a life of self-contemplation, a life which sees itself in other lives as if in so many mirrors; for a psychologist, all men are fragments of himself. The psychologist’s contempt for others contains a grain of secret and unlimited self-irony. No one practices psychology out of love: it is rather a form of sadism, a desire to annihilate the other by taking possession of his intimate being, by stripping him of his mysterious aura. Quickly exhausting men and their limited resources, the psychologist is easily bored, for he is not naive enough to have friends and is too self-conscious to have lovers. Skepticism is not the beginning but the natural end of psychology. It is nature’s punishment for this violator of mysteries, this supremely indiscreet person who, having invested too few illusions in knowledge, ends in disillusion.
A little knowledge is delightful; a lot, disgusting. The more you know, the less you want to know. He who has not suffered from knowledge has never known anything.
Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
