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The Psychology and Philosophy of Ambition

Our highest achievement may not be what we accomplish, but who we become along the way.

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

Essay revised on 22 July 2026.

‘Ambition’ derives from the Latin ambitio, ‘a going around (to solicit votes)’, and, by extension, ‘a striving for honour, recognition, and preferment’. The word originated in the Roman practice of canvassing for political office by going around among citizens and voters.

Ambition might be defined as a striving for some kind of achievement or distinction, and involves, first, the desire for such, and, second, the willingness to work towards it even in the face of adversity or failure. To be ambitious is to achieve first and foremost not for the sake of achievement itself (which is to be high-reaching) but for the sake of distinguishing oneself from others. Were we the last person on earth, it would make little or no sense to be ambitious.

Ambition is often confused with aspiration. But unlike mere aspiration, which has a particular goal for object, ambition is a trait or disposition, and, as such, is persistent and pervasive. Having achieved one goal, the truly ambitious person soon formulates another at which to keep on striving.

Ambition is often spoken of in the same breath as hope, as in ‘hopes and ambitions’. If hope is the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening, ambition is the desire for achievement combined with the willingness to work towards it. The opposite of hope is fear, hopelessness, or despair; the opposite of ambition is ‘lack of ambition’, which is not in itself a negative state.

The Ancient Debate

Perhaps it is even the preferable state. In the East, ambition is seen as a vice or evil that, by miring us in worldly pursuits, holds us back from the spiritual life and its fruits of virtue, wisdom, and tranquillity. In the West, in contrast, ambition is lauded as a precondition of success, even though the Western canon broadly falls against it.

For instance, in the Republic, Plato says that, because they are devoid of ambition, good people shun politics, leaving us to be ruled by bad people and their petty ambitions. Even if invited, good people would refuse to rule, preferring instead to hide away in their studies and gardens. To force them out, Plato goes so far as to advocate a penalty for refusing to rule—perhaps something for us to consider in this day and age, if there are still any good people left.

Aristotle had a more nuanced take on ambition. In his Ethics, he defines virtue as a disposition to aim at the intermediate between excess and deficiency, which, unlike either extreme, is a form of success and therefore worthy of praise. Thus, in the sphere of ‘fear and confidence’, those who run headlong into every danger are rash, while those who flee from every danger are cowards, whereas courage lies in the intermediate or mean—the famous ‘golden mean’. Similarly, in the sphere of ‘minor honour and dishonour’, Aristotle names ‘ambition’ as the vicious excess, ‘lack of ambition’ as the vicious deficiency, and ‘proper ambition’ as the mean.

Aristotle’s virtues and vices. In case you’re wondering, the sphere of ‘major honour and dishonour’ concerns not ambition but pride.

To this day, we speak of ambition after Aristotle, as ‘healthy ambition’, ‘unhealthy ambition’, and ‘lack of ambition’. Healthy ambition can be understood as the measured striving for achievement or distinction, and unhealthy ambition as the disordered striving for such. While healthy ambition is constructive and enabling, unhealthy ambition is destructive and inhibiting, and, thus, more akin to greed.

The Psychology of Ambition

The highly ambitious are sensitive to failure, and experience almost constant dissatisfaction or frustration. As with Sisyphus, their task is never accomplished; and, as with Tantalus, their prize is always out of reach. Just as Tantalus had a rock dangling over his head, so the ambitious have the noose of failure hanging about their neck.

The fear of failure checks the ambition of all but the most courageous—or rash—of people. For just as mania can lead into depression, so ambition can lead into anguish and despair. To live with ambition is to live with fear and anxiety, unless, that is, the weight of our ambition can be alleviated by gratitude, which is the feeling of appreciation for all that we already have. Although gratitude is especially lacking in future-focused people, ambition is much less toxic if, even without it, life can still seem worth living.

We are not ambitious unless we are willing to make sacrifices—even though the end of our ambition may not be worth them, and not just because it may never be attained or approached. It could even be argued that, with pure, naked ambition, the end is never worth the sacrifice. Fortunately, ambition is rarely pure but usually admixed with unselfish aims and motives, even if these may be more incidental than deliberate and determining; and it may be that our greatest achievements—indeed, man’s greatest achievements—are all, or almost all, accidents of ambition. Simply put, society will not support our ambitions unless they are prosocial.

In that much, ambition is like the carrot that goads the donkey that pulls the cart. Studies have found that, on average, the ambitious attain higher levels of education and income, build more prestigious careers, and, despite the nocuous effects of their ambition, report higher levels of overall life satisfaction. Owing to bad luck and poor judgement, most ambitious people sooner or later fall short of their ambitions, but that still lands them far ahead of their less ambitious peers.

The Origins of Ambition

Why are some people more ambitious than others? To cut a long story short, ambition is a complex construct born out of a host of factors, including parental role models and expectations, birth order and sibling rivalries, fear of failure and rejection, feelings of inferiority or superiority, intelligence or lack thereof, past achievements, competitiveness, envy, anger, revenge, and the instinctual drives for life and sex.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, ambition can be understood as an ego defence, serving, like all ego defences, to enforce and uphold a certain idea of the self. Rather than ambition, which is a sophisticated defence, those who lack what it takes to put themselves out there are more likely to respond with less mature defences—for instance, by rationalizing that ‘life is unfair’ or that they are ‘less of a leader and more of a team-player’. If their ego is much bigger than their courage, they may become dismissive or even destructive, the latter also being a means of drawing attention or sabotaging themselves to provide a ready excuse for their lack of success: ‘It’s not that I failed, it’s that…’

A defence that merits particular attention in the context of ambition is sublimation, which is among the most mature and successful of all ego defences. If a person feels angry with his boss, he may go home and kick the dog—or he might instead go out for a long run. The first instance (kicking the dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature and destructive ego defence. The second instance (going out for a long run) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities.

If someone discovers that she’s been cheated on, she might fly into a rage and cut up all her partner’s clothes—or she might instead write a poem to explore and express how she feels. And if the poem, or the poet, were one day to be remembered, would that not be the sweetest revenge of all?

A third example of sublimation, more pertinent to ambition, is the person with sadistic or homicidal urges who joins the military to provide an outlet for those urges—or who, like Justice Wargrave in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, becomes a hanging judge who doles out the death penalty to murderers. In the novel’s postscript, a fishing trawler dredges up a bottle just off the Devon coast. The bottle contains the confession of the late Wargrave, in which he reveals a lifelong sadistic temperament coupled with a fierce sense of justice. Though he had longed to torture, terrify, and kill, he could not bring himself to harm innocent people. So instead, he became a hanging judge and thrilled at the sight of convicted (and guilty) criminals trembling with fear.

Beyond Ambition

In life, few things are either good or bad. Rather, their good and bad depend on what we are able to make out of them. People with a high degree of healthy ambition are those with the insight and strength (strength that is often born out of insight) to control the blind forces of ambition, that is, to shape their ambition so that it matches their interests and ideals, and to harness it so that it fires them without also burning them or those around them.

The purpose of work is not to further our own interests, even if it is only a house in the middle of the woods that we seek, but to help others and move humanity forward—which is, in any case, the best way of furthering ourselves. The highest wisdom, born out of humility, is perhaps that it is not necessary to be ambitious to be high-reaching, or to feel alive. Indeed, it is often our conventional ambitions that are holding us down—even, that are killing us.

People shrink or expand into the degree and nature of their ambitions. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

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A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Attempts to Explain Sadomasochism

Saint Sebastian: martyrdom or ecstasy? Guido Reni, c. 1615.
Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni (c. 1615).

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

Essay substantially revised on 29 August 2026.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I am human, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.
—Terence

Many people think of sadism and masochism merely as perversions. In fact, these tendencies exist on a continuum, and are present, to some degree, in all of us.

Sadomasochism can be defined as the taking of pleasure, often sexual in nature, from the inflicting or suffering of pain, hardship, or humiliation. It can feature as an enhancement to sexual intercourse, or, less commonly, as a substitute or sine qua non.

The infliction of pain or hardship incites pleasure, while the simulation of violence can serve to express and deepen attachment. Indeed, sadomasochistic activities are often instigated at the behest, and for the benefit, of the masochist, who orchestrates the activities through subtle cues.

Consensual sadomasochism should not be confused with simple acts of aggression. While sadomasochists seek out pain in the context of love and sex, they do not do so in other situations, and abhor uninvited aggression or abuse as much as the next person.

Sadomasochistic practices are very diverse, although one study identified four distinct patterns or clusters: hypermasculinity, infliction and reception of pain, physical restriction, and psychological humiliation. Interestingly, the study found that homosexual males tended more to hypermasculinity, whereas heterosexual males tended more to humiliation.

A Brief History of Sadomasochism

‘Sadomasochism’ is a portmanteau of ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a compendium of sexual case histories and sex-crimes, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who coined the terms, spoke of basic tendencies to sadism in men, and to masochism in women. Modern surveys indicate that sadistic and masochistic desires are common in both men and women, with, however, sadism being commoner in men and masochism commoner in women.

Krafft-Ebing named ‘sadism’ after the Marquis de Sade, author of Justine, or The Misfortune of Virtue (1791); ‘masochism’ he named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs (1870):

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Through man’s passions, nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

The terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ may be of the nineteenth century, but the activities they denote are as old as the rocks. In his Confessions (1782), the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau admits to the pleasure that he derived from childhood beatings, adding that ‘after having ventured to say so much, I can shrink from nothing’. And shrink he did not: ‘To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments…’ 

In Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the only Roman novel to survive complete, Fotis slips into her lover’s bedchamber, produces a whip from beneath her clothes, and invites him to punish her.

The Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century, contains an entire chapter devoted to ‘blows and cries’. ‘Sexual relations,’ according to this Hindu sacred text, ‘can be conceived as a kind of combat… For successful intercourse, a show of cruelty is essential.’

The physician JH Meibom formulated the first theory of masochism in his Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery (1639). According to Meibom, flogging a man’s back warms the semen in the kidneys, which then flows down into the testicles, leading to sexual arousal. Other early theories of masochism centred upon the warming of the blood, or the benefits of sexual arousal in mitigating physical pain.

Krafft-Ebing never connected sadism and masochism, because he understood them as stemming from different sexual and erotic logics. But in Three Papers on Sexual Theory (1905), Freud observed that sadism and masochism often come together (no pun intended). Finally, in 1913, the psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger married the terms.

Freud understood sadism as a distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexual instinct, and masochism as a form of sadism directed against the self—and a graver ‘aberration’ than simple sadism. He remarked that the tendency to inflict and receive pain during intercourse is ‘the most common and important of all perversions’ and ascribed it (as much else) to arrested or disordered psychosexual development. He paid scant attention to sadomasochism in women, either because he thought of sadism as a problem of men, or because he thought of masochism as the natural inclination of women.

In Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the physician Henry Havelock Ellis argued along similar lines that there is no neat divide between sadism and masochism. By restricting sadism and masochism to the sphere of eroticism, he severed their historical link with abuse and cruelty.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze pushed back against Freud and Havelock Ellis. In his essay Coldness and Cruelty (1967), he contended that sadomasochism is an artificial term, and that sadism and masochism are in fact separate and distinct phenomena. Deleuze provided fresh accounts of sadism and masochism, which, despite being fluent in French, I struggled to comprehend. His point, I think, is that the sadist seeks a victim, whereas the masochist seeks—and in an important sense creates—a despot. For the sadist, a masochist is not a genuine victim.

Sadomasochism Explained

If the experts agree on anything, it is that sadomasochism is one of the great mysteries of the human condition. Here, I propose a number of explanations, none of which are mutually incompatible.

Most obviously, the sadist may derive pleasure from feelings of power, authority, and control, and from the ‘suffering’ of the masochist.

The sadist may also harbour a conscious or unconscious desire to punish or desecrate the object of sexual attraction (or a stand-in for the object of sexual attraction, or for an original object of sexual attraction) for having aroused his desire and thereby subjugated him, or for having frustrated his desire or aroused his jealousy.

Sadism can also serve as a defence. By objectifying a partner, the sadist does not need to handle his or the partner’s emotional baggage, and is able to discount the sex as next to meaningless: a mere act of lust rather than an intimate, vulnerable, and pregnant act of love. The partner becomes a trophy, a mere plaything, and while one can own a toy and knock it about, one cannot fall in love with it or be hurt or betrayed by it.

In some cases, sadism might also represent a species of displacement, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, shame, and guilt are discharged onto a third party, who serves as a scapegoat.

For the masochist, taking on a role of subjugation and helplessness can offer a release from stress or the burden of responsibility or guilt. It can also evoke infantile feelings of vulnerability and dependency, which can serve as a proxy for trust and intimacy. Moreover, the masochist may derive gratification from earning the approval of the sadist, fulfilling his fantasies, commanding his undivided attention, and, in that sense, controlling him.

For both the sadist and the masochist, sadistic or masochistic desires may arise through conditioning, if domination or submission becomes associated with sexual arousal.

For the couple as a unit, sadomasochism can be seen as a means of intensifying normal sexual relations (pain releases endorphins and other hormones), leaving a mark or memory, testing boundaries, rebelling against social norms and expectations, giving form and expression to psychological realities, building trust and intimacy, or simply playing.

Sadomasochism in Ordinary Life

And what about you, dear reader? It’s easy to think that this sort of stuff only applies to a handful of ‘deviants’, but the truth is that we all harbour sadomasochistic tendencies. Just think, for example, of casual, ‘normal’ behaviours such as love-biting, tickling, or teasing.

Sadomasochism can also play out on a psychological level. In every relationship or almost, one partner is more attached or dependent than the other. Characteristically, the more attached partner is ‘the one who waits’.

Thus, the philosopher Roland Barthes (d. 1980):

Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. (L’identité fatale de l’amoureux n’est rien d’autre que: je suis celui qui attend.)

The likely outcome of this asymmetry of desire is that the less attached partner (A) becomes dominant, while the more attached partner (B) becomes submissive in a bid to please and seduce. Sooner or later, A feels stifled and takes distance, but if he or she ventures too far, B may threaten to go cold or give up. This in turn prompts A to flip and, for a time, to become the more enthusiastic of the pair. But the original dynamic soon re-establishes itself, until it is once again upset, and so on ad vitam æternam.

Domination and submission are elements of every relationship or almost, but that does not mean that they are not tedious, sterile, and, to echo Freud, immature. Instead of playing at cat and mouse, lovers need to be able to rise above that game, and not just by getting married. By learning to trust each other, they can dare to see each other as the fully-fledged human beings that they truly are, ends-in-themselves rather than mere means-to-an-end.

True love is about respecting, nurturing, and enabling—whatever else may happen on a Sunday—but how many people have the capacity and maturity for this kind of love?

And, of course, it takes two not to tango.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Life in Epicurus' garden
Life in Epicurus’ garden

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

Essay lightly revised on 21 August 2026.

Why do we garden? We spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort digging, planting, pruning, watering, and weeding, only to have to do it all over again. Yet gardens have been with us since the beginnings of civilisation, serving not merely as sources of food but as expressions of power, religion, philosophy, and our relationship with nature.

Ineni, architect to Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1492 BCE), had his garden painted into his tomb, along with a list of all the trees within it—presumably, so that they might be accounted for in the afterlife.

Ineni’s garden included:

  • 170 date palms
  • 120 doum palms
  • 73 sycamore figs
  • 31 persea
  • 16 carob
  • 12 grapevines
  • 10 tamarisks
  • 8 willows
  • 5 figs
  • 5 pomegranates
  • 5 garland thorns
  • 2 moringas
  • 2 myrtles…

A grand garden of this sort symbolised control and mastery over nature, a haven of peace and plenty, of order and beauty, by which to project the status, power, and temperament of its owner. Other, more famous, examples include the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Gardens of the Real Alcázar in Seville, and the Gardens of Versailles.

The garden could also have a religious or philosophical message or dimension. For example, the Old Testament’s four rivers of Eden are represented by four watercourses in Islamic paradise gardens, and four paths in Christian cloister gardens. The Zen garden, by hinting at hidden principles, serves as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.

The Gardens at Versailles reflect a rationalist, Cartesian vision of God-given ideas and principles for the intellect to apprehend, whereas English landscape gardens are more in the empiricist mould, presenting nature as a stream of sensory experiences skirting across the blank slate of the mind.

In either case, the garden represents a taming of nature, from dark and deadly forest, or disease-infested swamp, to an extension of our living space: open and structured to still our minds, but retaining enough mystery to sustain our interest and even, perhaps, capture our imagination.

Trees as Symbols

Individual plants too can have a meaning. English churchyards often feature yew trees, which are poisonous, dark, and evergreen, and symbolise both death and immortality. A yew tree is commonly found near the lychgate, where, prior to the advent of mortuaries, the dead awaited burial while mourners kept vigil.

In the ancient world, the palm tree symbolised victory, peace, and bounty, while the cedar of Lebanon symbolised pride, majesty, and dignity. Both also stood for righteousness, as in Psalm 92:12: ‘the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree, grow tall like the cedar of Lebanon.’ Today, Cedrus libani is the national emblem of Lebanon, and a symbol of the peaceful Cedar Revolution of 2005.

Trees can also be planted to mark an important occasion, which is why British royals are often asked to brandish a shovel. In an annual tradition, the Friends of my local park purchase a noteworthy tree and invite a dignitary such as the Lord Mayor to plant it.

A New Religion?

Today, gardens and gardening are more popular than ever. Millions of people in the UK garden, whether in a garden, on an allotment, or simply on a balcony.

The BBC’s flagship Gardeners’ World, presented by Monty Don, attracts millions of viewers—which, in the UK, is many more people than go to church.

Community garden projects and ‘guerrilla gardening’ are on the rise, as are garden towns and villages. A few years ago, one of my neighbours organised for thousands of daffodils to be planted on a neglected and overlooked common, transforming it into a Wordsworthian idyll for the selfie generation. I wonder, do they know that ‘daffodil’ is Narcissus in Latin?

Screenshot of Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter
Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter. Narcisse, moi?

Good for Mind and Body

Gardening is more and more recognised, and even prescribed, for its health benefits. These include increased muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness; improved sleep and diet (if you grow your own produce); reduced stress, anxiety, and depression; a greater sense of community and belonging; and better self-esteem.

You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: some of these benefits accrue simply from visiting a garden, or even just looking over one—although it probably helps to notice and mentally engage with the greenery.

Researchers in Korea randomly assigned hospital patients recovering from thyroidectomy to rooms with plants and flowers, and rooms without, and found that the test group fared significantly better, asking for less pain relief and requiring less time in hospital. So yes, it makes sense to bring flowers, and, at home, to have indoor plants.

Even street trees greatly benefit our health. An American study looking at the city of Toronto found that, for cardio-metabolic conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity…), an increase of just 11 trees per city block had a comparable effect to an increase in annual personal income of USD 20,000.

How might gardening help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.

In 1920, a mentally strained Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the post of assistant gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey, explaining in a letter to a friend that he had been longing for ‘some kind of regularized work which, of all the things I can do in my present condition, is the most nearly bearable…’

Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is an attack on the highly abstracted, convoluted, and strained philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz (whom I nevertheless love), and famously concludes with the phrase ‘we must cultivate our garden.’

The Gardening of the Soul

In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers describes this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or phenomenology, as it is sometimes called—as ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.’

Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees…

If gardening makes us feel better, it also makes us into better people. It is a moral education, a school of life, instilling virtues such as pragmatism, patience, perseverance, reliability, and humility, which then transfer out into other spheres.

In his treatise on agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato is quite clear that farmers make the bravest and strongest soldiers, and that, of all men, they are ‘the most highly respected, most stable, and least hated (minime invidiosus).’

In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Socrates compares the wise man to the good husbandman, who is careful to scatter the right seed in the right soil in the right season. Similarly, the good teacher is careful to sow the right words in the right soul at the right time. For Plato, the Divine Teacher, teaching is the gardening of the soul.

Building on these notions, Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) founded his philosophical school in a garden just outside Athens. The Garden sought to return to an agricultural golden age of harmony, community, and self-sufficiency—to ground a flourishing life in the midst of a flourishing garden.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ 

Time Made Visible

A garden is a microcosm of the outside world. Gardeners are acutely aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature: which flowers are in their prime, when to plant out the seedlings, when and how and how much it last rained. Just as music is time made audible, so the garden is ‘time made visible’ (Clive James).

Winter is difficult, yes because it is dark and cold, but also because time is no longer structured by a succession of flowerings and fruitings. Time becomes amorphous, to be entertained and endured rather than savoured and celebrated like the season of magnolias, cherry blossom, rhubarb, plums, or chestnuts.

More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and, later, to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits and flowers of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year-round to create Arcadian moments of perfection.

But moments are all they will ever be. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?), but when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus concludes: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

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To Have Another Language Is to Have Another Self

Ambrose McEvoy, The Ear-Ring (1911).
Ambrose McEvoy, The Ear-Ring (1911).

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

Essay substantially revised on 23 August 2026.

It can come as a surprise to many people in the UK and US that speaking more than one language is the norm rather than the exception. In prehistoric times, most people belonged to small linguistic communities, and had to speak several languages to trade with, and marry into, neighbouring communities.

Still today, remaining populations of hunter-gatherers are almost all multilingual. Papua New Guinea, a country smaller than Spain, counts some 850 languages, or about one language per 10,000 inhabitants. In countries such as India, Malaysia, and South Africa, most people are bilingual or better. Even in the world at large, polyglots outnumber monoglots. And with the advent of the internet, contact with foreign languages has become increasingly frequent, even for the most linguistically isolated of monoglots.

In sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth I could speak at least nine languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. A few days after her death in 1603, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli wrote back to his Doge and Senate:

She possessed nine languages so thoroughly that each appeared to be her native tongue; five of these were the languages of peoples governed by her, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, for that part of her possessions where they are still savage [lo scozzese per quella parte de’ suoi possessi dove sono ancora selvaggi], and Irish. All of them are so different, that it is impossible for those who speak the one to understand any of the others. Besides this, she spoke perfectly Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian extremely well.

No wonder the ‘Virgin Queen’ didn’t want to get married.

Cognitive and Economic Benefits

To speak a language competently implies knowledge of the culture associated with the language. Multilingualism is closely linked to multiculturalism, and, historically, both came under attack with the rise of the nation state. In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the British Prime Minister Theresa May stated: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’—as though that were somehow deviant or problematic. Human beings, and their tongues, are far older than any nation state.

Still today, some people believe that teaching a child more than one language can impair the child’s linguistic and cognitive development. But what’s the evidence? According to several studies, people who learn another language do significantly better on standardised tests. Language management calls upon executive functions such as attention control, cognitive inhibition, and working memory, and it appears that bi- and multilingual people are better at observing, multitasking, and problem solving. They also have a larger working memory, including for tasks that do not involve language.

Being multilingual can also improve judgement. According to one study, people who think through a moral dilemma in a foreign language come to much more rational, or utilitarian, conclusions—perhaps because certain words lose some of their emotional weight, or because the problem is seen from a different cultural perspective or processed through different neural channels. So, if you have a second language, you can use it, like a good friend, to check yourself.

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism, disputed though they are, also extend to health. A study of hospital records in Toronto, Canada, found that bilingual people were diagnosed with dementia on average three to four years later than their monolingual counterparts from a similar educational and occupational background. Another study in Northern Italy looking at people at the same stage of Alzheimer’s disease found that the bilingual people were on average five years older, and had stronger connections between the brain areas involved in executive function. Over in India, a study of 600 stroke survivors found that the bilingual ones had a much better outcome. Specifically, 40.5% of the bilingual patients had normal cognition compared to just 19.6% of the monolingual ones. Of course, multilingualism is entangled with education, occupation, and other confounding factors, but the direction of the effect is difficult to doubt.

And then there are the undisputed economic benefits. High-level bilingualism has been linked to higher income, even after controlling for confounding factors such as educational attainment and parental socio-economic status. Over the course of a forty-year career, this additional income might add up to a pension fund. Of course, the overall economic impact of multilingualism is much greater than the sum of the higher earnings of multilingual speakers. Switzerland’s multilingual heritage has been estimated to contribute as much as 10% of GDP, whereas lack of language skills in the UK could be costing the British economy around 3.5% of GDP in lost output.  

Personal, Social, and Cultural Benefits

Being bilingual may have important cognitive and economic benefits, but it is usually the personal, social, and cultural benefits that multilingual people are keenest to emphasise.

Many bilingual people feel that the way they are, and the way they see the world—and even the way they laugh and love—changes according to the language that they are speaking. In the 1960s, Susan Ervin-Tripp asked Japanese-English bilingual women to finish sentences in each language, and found that the women came up with very different endings depending on whether they were speaking English or Japanese. For example, they completed ‘Real friends should…’ with ‘…help each other’ in Japanese, but ‘…be frank’ in English. ‘Who’s your favourite writer?’ ‘What do you want to eat for dinner?’ ‘Shall we break all the rules?’ Ask a question in one language, and you get one answer; ask the same question in another language, and you might get a different one. ‘To have another language,’ said Charlemagne, ‘is to have another soul.’

Translation dictionaries seem to assume that languages are made up of corresponding words, but even when that is more or less the case, the equivalencies have different connotations. Compared to ‘I like you’ in English, je t’aime in French is a far more serious proposition. George Carlin once joked that ‘meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat—but, of course, it doesn’t. Owing to a certain je ne sais quoi, some things are more readily expressed in one language than in another. By code-switching, multilingual speakers can increase their range of expression and perhaps even their range of thought. In the words of Wittgenstein: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’

Certain languages are better suited to certain purposes, for example, English is great for science and technology, French is better for cooking and complaining, and Latin is best for praying and formal rites of passage. Multilingual people are free to pick and choose, maybe along the lines of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: ‘I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.’ Charles V did not get on with the German lords and preferred to live in Spain, sitting on the newly created Spanish throne by right of his incarcerated mother, Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca)—things I know because I speak Spanish. And after a few glasses of fino, I’m almost fluent.

The more languages we learn, the easier it becomes to learn languages. But learning a language also strengthens our first language. For instance, one study found that Spanish immersion significantly improved children’s native English vocabulary. More broadly, learning a language casts light upon our first language and language in general, increasing our appreciation of language and ability to communicate. ‘You speak English beautifully,’ wrote Robert Aickman in The Wine-Dark Sea (1966), ‘which means you can’t be English.’

Just before writing this article, I asked my social media followers the following question: ‘If you are bi- or multilingual, what do you most value about that fact?’

And here are some of their responses:

  • The freedom to access different cultures plus the possibility to read many authors in original version!
  • Being fluent in a couple of other languages has given me insight into other ways of seeing the world. That helps empathy, and openness.
  • I appreciate the cognitive advantages being multilingual has offered. Also the connections with culture, history, and the knowledge acquired.
  • Language is knowledge. Always useful to be a little less ignorant.
  • It feels as if I can switch into two different modes and think from different perspectives.
  • I’m more outgoing in one language than another. It’s not just that I speak differently—I feel like a slightly different person.
  • My voice, gestures, and even sense of humour change when I switch languages.
  • Difficult or intimate things can be easier to say in my second language. There’s a little more distance between the words and me.
  • Being more tolerant—new language = new culture, new and different perspectives/access to more information.
  • That I can talk wine with twice as many ppl.
  • It gives me patience and understanding for those who want to articulate, but have difficulty conveying what they really mean.
  • The fact that I can fully understand and communicate in another language (Afrikaans) makes me feel good.
  • It gave me an understanding that ‘thoughts’ don’t come into my head in a language at all. Thoughts come as ‘ideas’. Only when I have to verbalise my ideas, I have to use a language.
  • I’m bilingual in India. There’s nothing special about it here. Know a ton of people who are trilingual. In India, multilingualism starts becoming impressive if the language count’s above like five or something.
  • Obviously, being able to speak about people in elevators without them knowing what’s said. 😉
  • Having a variety of options when cussing.

Every language on this earth has its own rules and conventions, its own sounds and rhythms, its own beauty and poetry, its own history and philosophy. Every language on this earth is another way of being human, another way of being alive.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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By |

We Cannot Touch Without Being Touched

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail), c. 1508–12.
The space between us. — Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail), c. 1508–12.

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

Essay substantially revised on 26 August 2026.

Convicted murderer Peter Collins died of cancer after 32 years in a Canadian prison. In that time, he became a champion of prison rights, and made a short film called Fly in the Ointment about a prolonged period that he spent in solitary confinement:

Somehow, I felt [my wife’s] fingers on my leg. Shocked and excited, I opened my eyes only to realize it was a fly walking on me. I was greedy for human touch so I closed my eyes and pretended it was her fingers. I tried to stay perfectly still because I didn’t want to frighten the fly off and be left alone.

After that, Collins would bite his cheek and apply a mixture of his own blood and saliva onto his skin, to attract the flies that had become his only source of living touch.

The Need for Touch

Owing to smaller household sizes, greater migration, higher media consumption, longer life expectancies, and an increasing fear of touch, people today are more corporally disconnected than at any other time in human history.

Just like we crave food when we are hungry, or crave sleep when we are tired, so we crave touch when we are lonely—for, at least historically, to be alone is to be exposed and vulnerable.

Notice the ancestral wisdom transmitted through language. When someone is out of our social orbit, we do not say that we are out of sight, but out of touch; and we feel that we ought to reach out and make contact.

More than a mere superfluity or indulgence, human touch is, like food and sleep, a visceral need that is increasingly being met by third parties such as hairdressers, massage therapists, and even professional cuddlers. Maybe this is why the hug has been gaining ground over the simple handshake. Recently, a 21-year-old dinner guest I had never met greeted me with a hug, when, previously, a handshake and bottle of wine would have been more expected.

During the covid lockdowns, it was not so much that people were lonely, since they could still interact at a distance or remotely, but that they could not physically touch one another, not even to shake hands. People who lived on their own may have gone for several months without any human touch at all—leading, among others, to a surge in demand for puppies. A video call, AI chat, or pornography might alleviate loneliness, but no amount of technology could satisfy or abolish the need for touch.

Is Touch Taboo?

As a wine taster, I used to think that smell was the most neglected of our senses. But in our society, touch is even more so, because more taboo.

In the 1960s, Sidney Jourard, a psychologist at the University of Florida, observed the behaviour of couples in coffee shops around the world. He found that, in the space of an hour, couples in Puerto Rico touched each other 180 times. This compared to 110 times in Paris, just twice in Florida, and not at all in London. Jourard also found that French parents and their children touched one another three times more than their American counterparts.

The fear of touch in northern, Anglophone countries is deep-seated. In Victorian England and nineteenth-century America, people took to the language of flowers, or floriography, to fly feelings that could not otherwise have flown. In a book on child-rearing, first published in 1928, the influential American psychologist John B. Watson (made famous by his Little Albert experiment) advised:

Never hug and kiss [your children], never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight… In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly. You will be utterly ashamed at the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.

Still today, many people flinch if the person returning their change accidentally brushes their hand. Maybe that is why the hug greeting is gaining ground, as a kind of legitimate pretext for properly touching someone—albeit only twice per visit.

Men and Touch

The fear of touch is generally much greater in men. Touch is seen as soft and effeminate, and many men are keen to appear macho or at least masculine. With women, they worry that their touch will be interpreted as a sexual advance. With other men, they fear that it will raise questions about their sexuality, or that it will feel awkward, or that it will be rejected, or that they might enjoy it a little too much. With children, they fear that it might raise suspicions of paedophilia—especially now that many schools operate a strict no-touch policy. I recently visited my old school in Switzerland, a once noble building which, with all its new fences and barriers, now looks like a prison. What a time to be young!

So with the exception of handshakes and the occasional awkward ‘man hug’, men must forego touch, especially warm, intimate touch, simply to reassure everyone, and perhaps also themselves, that they are decent, manly men.

As they take their first steps out of the warm embrace of their parents, boys might try to meet their need for touch through rough interaction with other boys. Probably, that’s what all the punching at aforesaid school was about. As they grow older, they may, often out of sheer desperation, fumble into a relationship, putting all their physical needs into the hands of just one other young and inexperienced person.

This puts a lot of pressure on their partner and relationship, and reinforces the link, and ambiguation, between touch and sex. But the two are not the same. Our libido can be assuaged with our hand in a way that our craving for touch cannot: as every sex worker knows, many people who think they are hungry for sex are in fact hungry for skin. But it is possible to separate the two, even with people to whom we feel sexually attracted.

The Benefits of Touch

To undermine the taboos surrounding it, I’m going to build a positive case for touch.

Touch is the most primitive of all the senses. It is the first sense to develop in utero and is already present from just eight weeks of gestation. With a surface area, in adults, of around two square metres, our skin is the largest organ in our body.

In a controversial experiment of the 1950s, the psychologist Harry Harlow offered maternally deprived infant rhesus macaques a choice between two inanimate surrogate mothers made of wire and wood: one bare, and the other covered in cloth. The monkeys preferred the cloth-covered surrogate to the bare one, even when the bare one carried a bottle of food.

In 1994, the neurobiologist Mary Carlson, one of Harlow’s former students, travelled to Romania with the psychiatrist Felton Earls to study the effects of severe deprivation on the decretei children who, in the years of Ceausescu, had been abandoned to understaffed orphanages. Typical findings included muteness, blank facial expressions, social withdrawal, and bizarre stereotypic movements—behaviours very similar to those observed in socially deprived primates.

More recent studies have reinforced the developmental importance of childhood physical contact, which has been associated with, among others, better performance on cognitive and physical tests, a stronger immune system, and reduced aggression. All other things being equal, premature infants that receive a course of massage therapy gain a lot more weight and spend less time in hospital.

It is possible, quite literally, to ‘hug someone better’. In adults, the benefits of touch include: reducing stress, lifting mood and self-esteem, strengthening interpersonal bonds, improving cognitive function, and boosting immune function. These effects are mediated by hormonal changes, not least a reduction of the stress hormone cortisol and a surge in the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin. Seen in this light, the kiss on the forehead or the hurting part is much more than just a kiss.

The benefits of touch accrue to the giver as much as to the receiver, for it is impossible to touch without also being touched: people who give out ‘free hugs’ in public places are, of course, also having their hugs returned.

Even self-massage reduces stress levels, which helps explain why we are constantly touching ourselves: wringing our hands, rubbing our forehead, brushing our hair and scalp, stroking our neck and upper back, and so on. But as Peter Collins knew only too well, self-touch is not the same as the touch of another.

Compared to children, adults are less dependent on touch, but older adults, who tend to be more alone, more vulnerable, and more self-aware, are likely to need considerably more skin contact than their younger counterparts—which is why, sometimes, my elderly patients won’t let go of my hand. Therapy animals have become common in care homes, and, despite a lifetime of inhibitions, residents can be encouraged to hold hands or rub each other’s shoulders.

The Uses of Touch

Just as we use speech and gestures to communicate, so we use touch. Words can say, ‘I love you’, but touch can also say how and how much, and, at the same time, ‘I respect you’, ‘I need you’, and ‘thank you’. For a long time, scientists thought that touch served merely to emphasize a verbal message. But now it is clear even to them that touch can be the message, and that it can be more nuanced and sophisticated than either speech or gestures, and more economical to boot. What’s more, touch is a two-way street, and a person’s reaction to our touch can tell us much more than their words ever could. Finally, while words can lie, or be taken for granted, primal touch is much more difficult to ignore or discount. Lying to someone while holding their hand is psychopath territory.

No surprise, then, that touch can also serve to convince and motivate, so long, of course, as it is natural and appropriate.

One study found that two-thirds of women agreed to dance with a man who touched them on the arm while making the request; but when the man kept his hand by his side, his success rate fell by as much as half.

Students who, upon returning a book, had their hand brushed by the librarian reported higher levels of satisfaction with the library and life in general, even when the touch went unnoticed.

NBA teams with players who touched one another more, for instance, by high-fiving or hugging, went on to win more games, with the more tactile players performing best.

Pupils who had been touched by a teacher tended to participate more in class activities (shame about those no-touch policies); patrons who had been touched by a waitress tended to tip her more generously; shoppers who had been touched by a store greeter tended to spend more time in the store…

As a psychiatrist, I try to shake hands with all my patients and often use comforting touch in moments of distress—almost invariably to good effect. Touch relaxes the patient, makes her feel that she has been seen and heard, and builds a bond of trust. It makes her, and me, feel more human, and, as a result, I think, we remember each other.

In another essay, I argued that all love consists in reaching out beyond our own being towards those things that lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. Touch is the physical expression of that reaching out, when the boundary between self and other ceases to separate and begins to connect. This explains why touch is taboo, and why we do not want to be touched by just anyone.

In Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, God and Adam reach out towards each other, their fingers separated by the smallest of gaps. Everything is contained in that space: separateness, yearning, anticipation, connection, and the very spark of life. It is, after all, through the most absolute touch that we all came to be.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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References

  • Peter Collins, Fly in the Ointment. Retrieved from http://www.solitarywatch.com. Posted on 13 July 2015.
  • Watson JB & Watson RA (1928): Psychological Care of Infant and Child. WW Norton & Company, Inc.
  • Carlson M and Earls F (1999): Psychological and endocrinological sequelae of early social deprivation in institutionalized children in Romania. Chapter in The Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation, edited by Carol Sue Carter et al.
  • Jillian Anthony for TimeOut New York: 39 percent of your coworkers masturbate at the office, according to our survey. Posted on 21 December 2015.
  • Kraus MW et al (2010): Tactile communication, cooperation, and performance: an ethological study of the NBA. Emotion 10(5):745-9.
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  • Stephen R & Zweigenhaft R (1985): The effect on tipping of a waitress touching male and female customers. Journal of Social Psychology 126:141-142.
  • Hornik, J (1992): Tactile stimulation and consumer response. Journal of Consumer Research 19:449-158.