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With an Account of How Freedom Might Sometimes Be Possible for Some

Yogi in meditation
Do you have enough free will to read this essay?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The problem of free will has been described as ‘the most difficult and pressing problem in all of philosophy’—so I suggest you take your time over this essay.

In philosophy, so-called libertarians defend the kind of free will that the vast majority of people take for granted, that is, the kind of free will that makes us responsible for our choices, and thus for our lives, in a deep and meaningful sense.

However, libertarians are a minority among philosophers, who, for the most part, believe that this kind of free will is not possible or even intelligible, and that, like myth or magic (which is, in a sense, unfettered free will), it has no place in our modern, rational-scientific picture of the universe.

How could something that is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and that pervades every aspect of our lives be nothing more than a product of our minds? As the writer Isaac Singer (d. 1991) once quipped, ‘We must believe in free will—we have no other choice.’ Be this as it may, can a belief in free will, that is, in libertarian free will, be justified on rational grounds?

From the outset, it is important to distinguish the libertarian in matters of free will from the libertarian in matters of politics, who believes, broadly, that the role of government ought to be circumscribed to protecting individual liberties, at least insofar as those liberties do not conflict with the liberties of others. Although the free will libertarian need not share in the political libertarian’s ideal of society (many do not), there is a clear sense in which the political libertarian relies upon the existence of libertarian free will, which he or she, at least implicitly, takes for a given. Thus, if a belief in libertarian free will cannot be justified on rational grounds, neither can a belief in libertarian politics, or for that matter criminal justice, divine retribution, and much else besides.

Determinism

Given its importance to ordinary life, you’d expect libertarian free will to be popular among philosophers—but it isn’t, and this is why.

Given the physical state of the universe at any given point in time, and given the laws of physics which are universal and constant, it is impossible for the history of the universe to be any other than it is. In other words, all past and future events are written into the very fabric of the universe, which is merely ‘playing itself out’, albeit on a grand, cosmic scale.

Some 200 years ago, the polymath the marquis de Laplace transmogrified this concept of ‘causal determinism’ into a super-intelligent demon who could accurately predict the future, first, by knowing every physical fact about the universe, and, second, by applying Newton’s Laws to those facts.

Of course, Newtonian physics has since been superseded by quantum mechanics, which allows for indeterminism in the behaviour of elementary particles. Even so, quantum mechanics has not put paid to the initial concerns about causal determinism because (a) even if quantum mechanics is not itself to be superseded by a more comprehensive deterministic theory, indeterminism in the behaviour of elementary particles need not translate into indeterminism in human behaviour, and, (b) even if it did, the behaviour that resulted would be random and chaotic rather than free and responsible. 

Compatibilism

A widespread response to the problem posed by determinism is ‘compatibilism’, according to which freedom amounts to (1) being able to do something, and (2) not being prevented from doing that thing. Thus, I am free to run away if (1) I am able to run away, and (2) I am not prevented from doing so, for instance, by being held at gunpoint or locked up in a dungeon. According to the compatibilist philosopher Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), a person is free when ‘he finds no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do’. If this is freedom, then a person is free even if what he has the will to do happens to have been determined.

Many eminent philosophers, from Aristotle to Schopenhauer, might be said to support compatibilism. 

Children and the lower animals as well as men are capable of voluntary action, but not of choice. —Aristotle

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —Schopenhauer

But surely, you might say, freedom involves not only the ability to do something, but also the ability to do otherwise. The compatibilist’s response to this objection is to define ‘the ability to do otherwise’ in the same way that they defined freedom. ‘The ability to do otherwise’ amounts to (1) being able to do otherwise, and (2) not being prevented from doing otherwise. Had I wanted to do otherwise than run away, nothing would have prevented me from doing so. However, I did not want to do otherwise than run away (because what I wanted to do was determined), and, in this sense, I acted freely.

Still, even if the compatibilist account is able to capture surface freedoms involving the ability to do or not do something, it does not seem to capture the deep freedom of choice that most people associate with free will. When you and I talk about free will, we do not mean merely ‘unconstrained choice’, but also control over that choice. But the compatibilist would insist that this sort of strong, libertarian free will is simply incoherent: the same past cannot lead to more than one possible future, basta, un point c’est tout, end of the story.

Imagine that Emma, in her final year at college, is deliberating between careers: teaching on the one hand and investment banking on the other. After due consideration, she ‘chooses’ to go into investment banking. Given the same past—the same upbringing, the same beliefs and desires, the same thought processes—how could she possibly have ‘chosen’ otherwise? Emma could only have chosen otherwise if her past, that is, the past, had been different—but, of course, the past could not have been different for the simple reason that there is only ever one past. Even if she could have chosen otherwise, such a choice would seem inexplicable, and therefore arbitrary, in light of her upbringing, her beliefs and desires, and so on.

In essence, says the compatibilist, people have a confused notion not just of freedom, but also of determinism, which they associate with constraint or compulsion. Clearing up this confusion does not usually bring them round to compatibilism, because what they actually believe is that determinism is in itself incompatible with free will. In other words, they are incompatibilists. 

Indeterminism

It gets even thornier for the incompatibilists, in that their idea of free will is incompatible not only with determinism but also with indeterminism!

If undetermined events like quantum leaps occur by chance, and if free actions are undetermined events, it seems that free actions also occur by chance. But this is a contradiction in terms, since free and responsible actions cannot, by definition, occur by chance. If my actions are the result of undetermined events in my brain, they are random and chaotic, and undermine rather than enable my freedom.

Imagine that I am deliberating between fast food and a healthier but more time-consuming home-cooked meal, and that, at the outcome of this deliberation, I opt for the home-cooked meal. If my choices are undetermined, I might at this point, despite the process of deliberation that I have just undergone, suddenly and inexplicably ‘change my mind’ and plump for fast food. You might argue, along with the idealist philosopher GW Leibniz (d. 1716), that prior reasons merely ‘incline without necessitating’. But it is precisely because prior reasons inclined me towards the garden risotto that I chose it over the cheeseburger. Had I instead gone for the cheeseburger, this ‘choice’ would not truly have been my own.

Or, imagine that I have an exact counterpart, Neel*, who lives in another possible world which is in all respects identical to this one. One day, I succumb to the temptation to steal a bicycle, whereas Neel* resists this temptation—even though both of us have had exactly the same past up to that point. In the words of the philosopher Alfred Mele (b. 1951), ‘If there is nothing about the agents’ powers, capacities, states of mind, moral character and the like that explains this difference in outcome … the difference is just a matter of luck.’ 

Mind, Soul, and the Causa Sui

If they are to hold that free will is compatible with indeterminism, libertarians need to provide an account of how we might be able to act and act otherwise without it seeming completely arbitrary. After Descartes, who distinguished the immaterial mind from the material body, a common libertarian move has been to posit an additional factor such as the mind or soul that is not bound by the laws of physics. Although the mind or soul exists outside the material realm, it is able to intervene in the material realm to influence events—possibly by exploiting the indeterminism in the brain.

Some libertarians believe that such a Cartesian dualism of mind and body is the only possible solution to the problem of free will. But, putting aside traditional concerns about mind-body dualism, it is not at all clear that mind-body dualism is an effective response to the threat of indeterminism. If Emma’s decision to go into banking is no longer determined by the prior activity of her brain, then it is determined by the prior activity of her disembodied mind or soul. In other words, all that mind-body dualism achieves is to shift the problem to one remove, that is, from the brain to a (hypothetical) mind or soul.

All that remains to dualist libertarians is to appeal to mystery and claim that disembodied minds or souls exist in a realm that is beyond reason or science. This was, more or less, the line adopted by Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who argued that free will is presupposed by our practical and moral lives. Although reason and science can tell us about how things appear in the world (‘phenomena’), they cannot tell us about how they are in themselves (‘noumena’). Our noumenal selves, which govern our practical and moral lives, lie beyond the material realm of reason and science, and cannot be apprehended in those terms.

Another ‘additional factor’ strategy, the agent-causal strategy, consists in arguing that Emma’s choices are determined, not by prior events (determinism), nor by chance (indeterminism), but by Emma herself. This kind of ‘immanent’ causation brought about by the agent herself differs from the ‘transeunt’ causation brought about by events in that it involves a ‘prime mover unmoved’—in other words, an entity, at least in this respect, akin to God. But, of course, immanent causation is no less mysterious than Cartesian mind-body dualism or Kantian noumenal selves, and, like them, merely shifts the problem to one remove, in this case, to a prime mover unmoved, uncaused cause, or causa sui (Latin, ‘cause of itself’).

For Nietzsche (d. 1900):

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself… with just this nonsense. The desire for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated—the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society—involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

A Possible Way Out

The real challenge for libertarians is to furnish an account of free will that does not rely on mysterious forms of agency, but sits comfortably with our modern, rational-scientific picture of the universe.

The idea that freedom might lie in the control of attention is an ancient one. In the Indian tradition, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras locate liberation in mastery of the mind through concentration and meditation. Much later, in his Philosophy of Physiology (1779), the twenty-year-old medical student Friedrich Schiller argued that freedom lies in attention. More than a century later, William James developed a similar account in terms of an ‘effort of attention’.

So one more modern possibility is this. Neurotransmission, that is, electrical signalling in the brain, may be subject to quantum indeterminacies of a kind that could provide the leeway or ‘point of engagement’ for the exercise of free will. As demonstrated by Edward Lorenz (d. 2008), small changes in the initial conditions of a chaotic system can, through a snowball effect, result in much larger, if unpredictable, changes in that system’s behaviour. Potentially, the flap of a butterfly wing in Kyoto could result in a thunderstorm in Paris. Similarly, an effort of thought or concentration could sway or shepherd random and chaotic patterns of neurological activity so as to culminate in an undetermined action that is free in the strong, libertarian sense.

Most of the time, a person’s actions and corresponding brain activity would be determined by past events and the cumulative effects of those past events on the person’s patterns of thought. Most of the time, in fact, almost all of the time, the person’s actions would be determined by a commixture of neuroses, obsessions, learnt behaviours, socialisation, enculturation, and so on. But on certain occasions, such as when the person was genuinely torn between two competing choices, the degree of indeterminacy in their brain would rise to such a degree as to permit an undetermined action.

Such a window of freedom would be rare, but even a single free action (or non-action) could impact on all subsequent actions and completely alter the course of a life, and the lives affected by that life, and the lives affected by those lives… If Emma had freely decided to go into teaching instead of banking, she would have had a different set of colleagues and friends. She would have married someone whom she would not otherwise have met. Together, they would have had ‘other’ children, almost certainly in another house, and so on.

Are Some People Freer Than Others?

A corollary of this ‘effort of thought’ theory of free will is that some people are freer than others. First, people who are more imaginative, more independent, or more rebellious are freer than people who fall into conventional patterns of thought. Most people would not know possibility if it slapped them in the face; but a few actively seek to disturb fixed patterns of thought, thereby increasing the indeterminacy in their brain and so their latitude for freedom. Second, people who can ‘see into the future’, that is, people who have a high degree of insight into the potential ramifications of their choices, are freer than people who are unable or unwilling to project. Third, people who cultivate attention and concentration ought also to be freer. Indeed, this, and not bendiness, was the historical purpose of yoga. 

Of course, there is overlap between those who are mired in convention and those who are unable to see into the future (and who therefore lack intuition), since both conditions are mutually reinforcing, and both arise from the same ultimate source, namely, fear or cowardice. Conversely, there is a high degree of overlap between free thinkers and visionaries. Courage underpins both freedom of thought and freedom of action. In life as in chess, the best players are those who can see several steps ahead, and who can respond to ever changing circumstances with the boldest and most original moves.

Maybe you are not convinced by the ‘effort of thought’ theory, but if we are to rescue free will, which is essential if we are to take seriously the possibility of changing ourselves and our lives, it is probably the best we have to go on.

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A Psychiatrist’s Three-Step Test for Self-Deception

Woman looking into mirror.
Can you trust what you see?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Some time after the publication of Hide and Seek, I received a letter from a reader, asking:

Are common, ordinary things like seeing the bright side, a silver lining, or an opportunity in misfortune just feeble rationalisations to help us live in a comfortable illusion? Your example about ‘sweet lemons’, a rejected love interest explained away as a blessing in disguise doesn’t feel to me as an illusory or self-deceptive belief. If a cancer patient is glad that they can respect life more fully after getting sick, surely they’re not just dwelling in self-deception and rationalising away things, clinging to some mistaken belief.

Could you clear things up a little about the murky world of self-deception? It’s true that someone rejected for a job opening might say that they’re ‘keeping doors open’, that they got ‘life experience’ or that setbacks are a part of life, and this would allow them to feel better, but I’ve never considered this to be some sort of self-deception.

I replied: 

That’s a very good question. How do we know when we’re deceiving ourselves, rather than learning or growing from our experiences, or just making the best out of a bad situation? By its very nature, self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth, or the external, objective truth.

That a belief comforts us does not make it false; that it pains us does not make it true. What matters is whether we arrived at the belief because it fits the facts, or because we need the facts to fit the belief.

To establish the direction of fit between your beliefs and the world, here are three tests you can apply.

1. Feel It

First, trust your intuition, and ask yourself: ‘What does it feel like to react in the way that I’m reacting?’ Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Am I taking the welfare of others into consideration, or is it just all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or am I left feeling small, anxious, and a little ashamed?

2. Test It

Try to falsify the belief—that is, to prove yourself wrong. Self-deception doesn’t ‘add up’ in the grand scheme and can often be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the belief or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Ask others for their opinion. If they challenge or disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The nature of your reaction and its congruity can speak volumes about the character of your motives.

3. Project It

Finally, project the belief into the future and consider where it is likely to lead. Truth is constructive and adaptive, whereas lies are destructive or self-defeating. So how useful is the thought or reaction going to be for you? Are you just covering up an irrational fear to get by, or creating a solid foundation for the future? Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line?

Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make you free?

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Scapegoating

The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).
The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ego defence of displacement plays an important part in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group.

The scapegoats—often outsiders, immigrants, minorities, ‘deviants’, or other vulnerable groups—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their uncomfortable feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation. The creation of a villain necessarily implies that of a hero, even if both are purely fictional.

Sometimes it is the villain, or villains, who are in need of an even greater villain. Especially in a time of crisis, unscrupulous leaders and politicians can cynically exploit the ancient and deep-rooted impulse to scapegoat to deflect and distract from their own inadequacies and evade, or seek to evade, their burden of blame and responsibility.

The Ideal Scapegoat

An ideal scapegoat, whether a person or group, is sufficiently different to be blamed, sufficiently conspicuous to be noticed, and sufficiently vulnerable to be attacked.

A historical example of a scapegoat is Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI of France, whom the people called l’Autre-chienne—a pun playing on Autrichienne [Austrian woman] and autre chienne [other bitch]—and accused of being profligate and promiscuous. When the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette arrived in France to marry the then heir to the throne, the country had already been near-bankrupted by the reckless spending of Louis XV, and the naïve foreign princess soon became the unwitting target of the people’s mounting ire.

A scapegoat, such as Marie Antoinette, need not be entirely innocent. Indeed, some impression of guilt may make for a better scapegoat, providing a hook on which to hang greater grievances.

A scapegoat is often a person or group, but can also be an object, animal, or spirit. In fact, even human scapegoats are no longer regarded as fully human but are to varying degrees dehumanised and objectified. Some, such as witches and midwives in mediaeval Europe, are quite literally demonised. The dehumanisation of the scapegoat—which might, in the process, be transformed into a sacred or ritual object—makes the scapegoating both more potent and more palatable, and can even lend it a sense of pre-ordained, cosmic inevitability.

The Madness of the Crowds

According to the philosopher René Girard (d. 2015), owing to our crooked nature, envy gradually builds up in a society until it reaches a tipping point, at which order and reason cede to mob rule, chaos, and violence. To quell this ‘madness of the crowds’ which poses an existential threat to the society, an exposed or vulnerable person or group is singled out as a sink for all the bad feeling, and the bad feeling bred from the bad feeling. The scapegoat does not merely absorb aggression, but unites the aggressors and reduces their diffuse problems to a single, visible face.

After the defeat of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens in 403 BCE, Socrates, with his close links to prominent oligarchs such as Critias, who had been the first and worst among the Thirty, no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation made against him, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for the sufferings of the tyranny. The trial and death of Socrates, as related in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, still makes for compelling reading.

Once he is no more, a scapegoat may be totemised—and all the more so if he is also a martyr, that is, one who opposes or resists a belief or system of beliefs that is being imposed upon him. Today, Socrates is chiefly remembered by his death, with the Stoic Seneca going so far as to opine that ‘it was the hemlock that made Socrates great’ (cicuta magnum Socratem fecit). Socrates himself seems to have anticipated his totemisation, which is one reason he accepted the death sentence even though he could have avoided it, or later escaped. In Plato’s Apology, he seems almost to court death.

The Ultimate Scapegoat

The term ‘scapegoat’ is rooted in the Old Testament, more specifically, in Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus, according to which God instructed Moses and Aaron to sacrifice two goats every year. The first goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled upon the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest was then to lay his hands upon the head of the second goat and confess the sins of the people. Unlike the first goat, this second goat was not to be killed but released into the wilderness together with its burden of sin, which is why it came to be known as a, or the, scapegoat.

The altar that stands in the sanctuary of every church is a symbolic remnant and reminder of this sacrificial practice, with the ultimate object of sacrifice being, of course, Jesus himself. Upon seeing Jesus for the first time, John the Baptist is said to have exclaimed, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ (John 1:29). In Christian iconography, Christ is often depicted as the victorious Lamb of God of the Book of Revelation, with one leg hooked around a banner with a red cross—whence the name of one of Oxford’s most famous public houses, the Lamb & Flag.

The sacrifice prescribed in the Book of Leviticus prefigures that of Jesus, who played the role of the first goat in his human crucifixion, and the role of the second goat, the scapegoat, in his divine resurrection.

Scapegoating is so ingrained in our nature that we scapegoated God himself.

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Pain Is a Feeling but not an Emotion. Love Can Be Both.

Woman looking at herself in a mirror

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In brief, an emotion is an enduring psychological state, while a feeling is a conscious experience. An emotion such as love can give rise to many different feelings, while some feelings, such as pain, are not emotions at all.

‘Emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are often confused and assimilated. Even when they are distinguished, psychologists disagree about what they are. This is more than a quarrel over words. Unless we get the distinction right, we cannot meaningfully discuss our emotional lives.

What Emotions and Feelings Are Not

Many people use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ as if they were exact synonyms. But this obscures an important distinction between an emotion and the conscious experience, or ‘feeling’, of that emotion.

Some experts go almost to the opposite extreme, defining an emotion as an automatic bodily response and a feeling as the conscious experience or interpretation of that response. But this is to confuse an emotion with its physiological manifestations. A racing heart is no more an emotion than tears are grief. The same bodily changes can accompany very different emotions, or no emotion at all, as during exercise or illness. Conversely, it is not clear that every emotion need involve appreciable bodily changes.

Other experts distinguish emotions from feelings chiefly on the basis of consciousness, treating an emotion as unconscious and a feeling as its conscious counterpart. This is much closer to the mark, but still conflates an emotion with the experience of that emotion—and leaves unexplained the many feelings, such as hunger and pain, that are not emotions at all.

Much of the confusion arises because behind these two words lie not two concepts but four: emotional experiences, emotions or sentiments, traits, and feelings. If you’re a philosopher and didn’t want to get hung up on words, you could just call them A, B, C, and D.

The Example of Pride

If I say, ‘I am grateful’, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something; that I generally feel grateful for that thing; or that I am a grateful kind of person.

Similarly, if I say, ‘I am proud’, I could mean that I am currently feeling proud about something, that I generally feel proud about that thing, or that I am a proud kind of person. 

Let’s agree to call the first instance (currently feeling proud about something) an emotional experience, the second instance (generally feeling proud about that thing) an emotion or sentiment, and the third instance (being a proud kind of person), a trait.

It is common to confuse these three instances, especially the first and the second. But whereas an emotional experience is brief and episodic, an emotion—which may or may not result from accreted emotional experiences—can perdure for many years, and, in that time, predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. For instance, love can give rise not only to amorous feelings, but also to joy, grief, rage, longing, and jealousy, among others.

That’s why we can tell someone that we love them even while we are furious with them. In fact, the fury, which is the emotional experience, may arise out of the love, which is the enduring emotion. Whereas if love existed solely when we were consciously feeling it, we would fall in and out of love many times a day.

So What Is the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?

Now that we have our terminology in place, we are in a much better position to distinguish between an emotion and a feeling. 

An emotional experience, by virtue of being a conscious experience, is necessarily a feeling, as are physical sensations such as hunger, fullness, or pain.

Notice, however, that not all conscious experiences are also feelings, not, for example, believing or seeing—presumably because they lack a somatic, or bodily, dimension.

In contrast, an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences to which it gives rise, even though it may also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.

Thus, every emotional experience is a feeling, but not every feeling is an emotional experience. Pain is a feeling but not an emotion. Love can be both: we can be feeling love in the moment as a conscious emotional experience, while more enduringly being ‘in love’.

This is also why a feeling cannot simply be an interpretation of bodily changes: we do not have to interpret pain for it to hurt.

Now Let’s Start Talking

Now that we are conceptually clear about emotions, emotional experiences, feelings, and traits, we can start talking about our emotional lives without contradicting ourselves at every turn.

For example, because emotions need not themselves be conscious, some emotions, such as hating one’s mother or coveting one’s same-sex friend, might only be recognised after several years in psychotherapy.

If an emotion remains unconscious, this is often by repression or some more elaborate form of self-deception which builds upon repression.

Self-deception can also take place at the level of an emotional experience, commonly by misrepresenting the type or intensity of the emotional experience or misattributing its object or cause. Thus, envy is often construed as indignation, and Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) as sympathy. Fear of ghosts or ‘the dark’ is almost certainly fear of death, since people who have come to terms with death are hardly afraid of such things.

Thus, we can feel something without knowing quite what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, or even whom or what we are really feeling it about.

Emotions as Ways of Seeing

Beyond this, it could be argued that even the purest and most accurate of emotions is inherently self-deceptive in so far as it lends weight in our experience to one thing, or some things, over others, thereby clouding our perspective and the ‘bigger picture’. In that much, emotions are not objective or neutral perceptions, but subjective ‘ways of seeing’ that reflect our particular, contingent needs and preoccupations.

The lover notices what every other overlooks; the coward sees danger where another finds opportunity. To understand our emotions—and the relations between A, B, C, and D—is not merely to understand how we feel, but how we see the world—and ourselves in it.

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In Defence of the Cinderella Specialty

A Mazarine blue butterly
Psychiatry derives from the Greek psyche (butterfly or soul) and iatros (healing), and means ‘healing of the soul’. In Greek myth, Psyche’s lover was none other than Eros.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In my experience, most medical students enjoy learning about mental illness and talking to mentally ill people, who often have a refreshing knack for saying things exactly how they are. In a fit of inspiration, some students—particularly the more intelligent, creative, or quirky ones—confide that psychiatry is the only specialty that gives them the time and material to think about themselves, other people, and life in general.

They also like the lifestyle (in the UK): an hour for each patient, ‘special interest’ days, protected time for teaching, light on calls from home, and guaranteed career progression. In medicine they might triage yet another anonymous case of asthma, chest pain, or pulmonary oedema. In surgery they might do knee replacement upon knee replacement, up until the day they retire or collapse. But in psychiatry there can be no factory line, no standard procedure, and no mindless protocol: each patient is unique, and each patient has something unique to return to the psychiatrist.

I often come across those same students again, months or sometimes years later. After the smiles and the niceties, it transpires that they are no longer so interested in psychiatry. So what happened?

The students are never too sure, but I think I have an idea.

When I was a medical student in London, an American firm offered me a highly paid job as a strategy consultant in their Paris office, opposite the British embassy and the Elysée Palace. So I gladly left medicine and the many inconveniences of working in (and increasingly ‘for’) the National Health Service.

I had a great time in Paris, but the job itself turned out to be more about dealing with personality disorders than about having brilliant ideas. I quit after six months and freelanced as an English tutor to high-flying executives, bankers, venture capitalists, and that sort.

As my clients already spoke working English and merely wanted to improve their fluency, all I had to do was to make conversation with them. My lessons often turned into something akin to psychotherapy, as I realised that I could make them open their hearts and minds simply by listening to them. Although they seemed to have everything in life, they were deeply unhappy, and had rarely stopped to ask themselves why.

I wanted to find out why, so I decided to return to the UK, do my house jobs (internships), and specialise in psychiatry. I had always been far too ‘ambitious’ to consider psychiatry, but by then it had become abundantly clear that I didn’t want to pursue a career that didn’t allow me to think and feel, and to relate to others and to the world in a genuine and meaningful way. There are not many such jobs, but psychiatry—along with general practice, teaching, academia, and the clergy—is certainly one of them, and even, arguably, their archetypal form.

In short, I wanted to get paid to talk to people, read books, and study life—and it felt like robbery.

The following year while going about my house jobs I put up with all sorts of abuse from my colleagues in medicine and surgery. One of the other house officers (interns), by then a good buddy, took me aside one day and said with an alcoholic mixture of concern and disdain: ‘Why do you want to go into psychiatry? You’re a good doctor. Can’t you see you’re wasting your talents?’

It became very clear, first, that the stigma that people with a mental disorder are made to feel also extends to the doctors who look after them; and, second, that this stigma emanates most strongly from the medical profession itself, mired as it is in middle-class preoccupations and prejudices and, as a whole, far too grounded in neurosis not to be terrified of psychosis.

Of course, it is simply not true that psychiatry is ‘a waste of talent’. The term ‘psychiatry’ was first used in 1808, in a paper by Johann Christian Reil. Reil argued for the urgent creation of a medical specialty to be called ‘psychiatry’, and contended that only the cream of physicians would have the qualities required to join it. Psychiatrists needed to have not only an understanding of the body, but also proper learning and culture.

Indeed, a psychiatrist can change a person’s entire outlook with a single sentence, so long as he can find the right words at the right time. No protocols, no high-tech equipment or expensive drugs, no pain or side-effects, and no complications or follow-up.

Now that is talent, and one so great that I can only ever aim at it. And each time I fail, I always have medicine to fall back upon.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Madness.

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