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The Psychology of Self-Deception

Narcissus, by Caravaggio.
Narcissus meets himself. Or does he?

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

How well do you know yourself? Probably not as well as you think. Much of what we believe about ourselves is shaped by psychological processes whose very purpose is to prevent us from knowing ourselves. These processes are known as ego defences.

In psychoanalytic theory, ego defences are unconscious processes that we deploy to defuse the fear and anxiety that arise when who we think we are or who we think we should be (our conscious ‘superego’) comes into conflict with who we really are (our unconscious ‘id’).

For instance, at an unconscious level a man may find himself physically attracted to another man, but at a conscious level he may find this attraction flatly unacceptable. To defuse the anxiety or tension that arises from this conflict, he may deploy one or more ego defences.

For example, (1) he might refuse to admit to himself that he is attracted to a man. Or (2) he might superficially adopt attitudes and behaviours that are diametrically opposed to those of a stereotypical homosexual, such as going out for several pints with the lads, banging his fists on the counter, and peppering his speech with loud profanities. Or (3) he might transfer his attraction onto someone else and then berate him for being gay.

In each case, he has used a common ego defence, respectively, (1) repression, (2) reaction formation, and (3) projection. Let’s go through each of these in turn.

Repression and Denial

Repression can be thought of as ‘motivated forgetting’: the active, albeit unconscious, ‘forgetting’ of unacceptable drives, emotions, and ideas. Repression is readily confused with denial, which is the refusal to admit to uncomfortable aspects of reality. But whereas repression relates to mental stimuli, denial relates to external stimuli, to things that are ‘out there’. For example, if my partner is cheating on me, I can fail to recognise this (denial), or initially recognise it but then keep it right out of my mind (repression).

Distortion

Repression can also be confused with distortion, which is the reshaping of reality to suit one’s inner needs. For instance, a person who has been beaten black and blue by his father no longer recalls these traumatic events (repression), and instead sees his father as a gentle and loving man (distortion). In this example, there is a clear sense of the distortion building upon the repression, and at the same time buttressing it. Like this, ego defences often build upon one another—into something resembling Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Reaction Formation

Reaction formation is the superficial adoption—and, often, exaggeration—of emotions and impulses that are diametrically opposed to one’s own. A possible high-profile case of reaction formation is that of a certain US congressman, who, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, introduced legislation to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. The congressman resigned when it later emerged that he had been sending sexually explicit messages to a teenage boy. Other, classic, examples of reaction formation include the covert alcoholic who extols the virtues of abstinence, and the privileged student who attends and even organises anti-capitalist rallies.

Projection

Projection involves the attribution of one’s own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and impulses to others. Like distortion, projection involves repression as a first step, since unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and impulses need to be repudiated before they can be re-assigned. Classic examples of projection include the envious person who believes that everyone envies them, the person with fantasies of infidelity who is convinced that their partner is cheating on them, and the covetous person who lives in constant fear of being dispossessed.

Splitting

Just as common is splitting, which involves the division or polarisation of beliefs and people into good and bad by perceiving only their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for instance, when left-wingers caricature right-wingers as selfish and narrow-minded, and right-wingers left-wingers as hypocritical and irresponsible—or ‘deplorables’ and ‘elites’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘rednecks’. Other classic examples of splitting are the religious zealot who divides people into blessed and damned, and the child of divorcees who idolises one parent while blocking out the other. Splitting defuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp a complex and nuanced state of affairs by simplifying and schematising it and making it easier to process.

Idealisation

Similar to splitting is the ego defence of idealisation. Like the positive end of splitting, idealisation involves overestimating the positive attributes of a person, object, or idea, while skirting over its negative attributes. More fundamentally, it involves the projection of our needs and desires onto that person, object, or idea.

A paradigm of idealisation is infatuation, when love is confused with the need to love, and the idealised person’s negative traits are glossed over or even recast into a positive light. Although this can make for a rude awakening, there are few better ways of relieving our existential anxiety than by manufacturing something that is ‘perfect’ for us, be it a piece of equipment, a place, country, person, or god.

Intellectualisation

If in love with someone unavailable or unattainable, it may be more convenient to intellectualise our love, maybe even by thinking of it in terms of idealisation! In intellectualisation, uncomfortable feelings associated with a problem are repressed by thinking of the problem in cold or abstract terms. I once received a phone call from a junior doctor in psychiatry in which he described a recent in-patient admission as ‘a 47-year-old mother of two who attempted to cessate her life as a result of being diagnosed with a metastatic mitotic lesion’. A formulation such as ‘…who tried to kill herself after being told that she is dying of cancer’ would have been much better English, but all too effective at evoking the full horror of this poor lady’s predicament.

Rationalisation (Sour Grapes and Sweet Lemons)

Intellectualisation should not be confused with rationalisation, which is the use of feeble but seemingly plausible arguments either to justify something that is painful to accept (‘sour grapes’) or to make it seem ‘not so bad after all’ (‘sweet lemons’). For example, a person who has been rejected by a love interest might convince himself that she rejected him because she did not share in his ideal of happiness (sour grapes); and also that her rejection is a blessing in disguise insofar as it has freed him to find someone more suitable, or ‘play the field’ (sweet lemons).

Displacement and Sublimation

While no one can altogether avoid using ego defences, some ego defences are considered more ‘mature’ than others: not only because they involve some degree of insight, but also because they can be adaptive or useful. If a person is angry at his boss, he might go home and kick the dog, or he might instead go out and play a good game of tennis. The first instance (kicking the poor dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is clearly an immature ego defence. The second instance (playing a good game of tennis) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into socially condoned and often productive activities, which is a far more mature ego defence.

Altruism

There are a number of mature ego defences, like sublimation, that can be substituted for the more primitive ones, like displacement. Altruism, for instance, can in some cases be a form of sublimation in which we deal with our issues by stepping outside ourself and helping others. By concentrating on the needs of others, people in altruistic vocations such as medicine, nursing, and teaching may be able to permanently push their own needs into the background. Conversely, people who care for a disabled or elderly person may experience profound anxiety and distress should this role be removed from them.

Humour

Another mature ego defence is humour. By seeing the absurd or ridiculous aspect of an emotion, event, or situation, we are able to look at it in a less threatening light. If laughter is proper to man, this must be because we, of all animals, have the most developed unconscious. The things that we laugh about the most are: our errors and inadequacies; the difficult challenges that we face around personal identity, social relationships, and death; and incongruity, absurdity, and meaninglessness. These are all deeply human concerns: just as no one has ever seen a laughing dog, so no one has ever heard of a laughing god.

Asceticism

Further up the maturity scale is asceticism, which is the denial of the importance of that which most people fear or strive for—and so of the very grounds for anxiety and depression. If fear is, ultimately, for oneself, then the denial of the self removes the very grounds of fear. People in modern societies such as ours are much more anxious than people in traditional or historical societies, no doubt because of the strong emphasis that modern societies place on the self as an independent and autonomous agent, that is, as an ego or ‘I’.

Who, Then, Am I?

There are a great many ego defences, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them are a reflection of our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defences, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it.

If a castle amounts to no more than its fortifications, what are those fortifications protecting but themselves?

The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. To know ourselves, then, is not to peel back our defences until we arrive at some core self, but to become more conscious of those defences and, in time, to refine them.

Such self-knowledge, if we have the courage for it, can awaken us to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us, and free us to achieve our fullest, highest potential as human beings. Perhaps, in the end, that is what a person is: their degree of openness—whereas a highly defended person is more like a bugged robot.

The greatest oracle of the ancient world was at Delphi, and there, inscribed on the forecourt of the temple of Apollo, was a simple two-word command:

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Know thyself.

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The Love Triangle That Ended in Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche, Paul Rée and Lou Salomé brandishing a whip
‘You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!’ —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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

Three would-be free spirits, two marriage proposals, and one book.

In March 1882, the writer Paul Rée travelled to Rome to join a community of free spirits. There, he met the 21-year-old Lou Salomé, who was travelling with her mother following the death of her father, Gustav von Salomé, an ennobled Russian general.

Nietzsche rejoined them in April, after three weeks in Messina, Sicily. Nietzsche and Salomé first met, of all places, in the grandeur of St Peter’s Basilica. The 37-year-old Nietzsche was captivated by her charm and intelligence, and enjoyed reading to her and Rée from his newly published Gay Science.

Love Triangle

Nietzsche asked Rée to deliver a marriage proposal to Salomé, without knowing that Rée had himself proposed to her. Salomé rejected both proposals, suggesting instead that she, Rée, and Nietzsche form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of some monastery or other edifice in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

On 5 May, Salomé and Nietzsche ascended Monte Sacro, with its romantic views over Lake Orta and San Giulio Island. Nietzsche described this pilgrimage of sorts as ‘the most exquisite dream of my life’. Later, he wrote to Salomé, ‘Back at Orta, I conceived a plan of leading you step by step to the final consequence of my philosophy—you as the first person I took to be fit for this.’

He proposed to her a second time in Lucerne’s Löwengarten. Later that day, they had their photograph taken with the reluctant Rée in a photographer’s shop. This photograph, with Salomé brandishing a whip, is almost certainly the most famous picture in all philosophy.

From Heartbreak to Masterpiece

On 5 November, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, or why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, ‘So I really am going into utter solitude.’ He never saw Salomé or Rée again. After hiding in Leipzig for some days, the pair had made for Berlin.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent letters mentioning overdoses and suicide to Salomé, Rée, and Overbeck. To Overbeck, he wrote: ‘My whole life has crumbled under my gaze… the barrel of a revolver is for me now a source of relatively pleasant thoughts.’

On Christmas Day, he wrote again to Overbeck: ‘This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.’

Nietzsche did, of course, find the alchemical trick. On 14 February, he journeyed from Rapallo to Genoa to post the manuscript of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to his publisher. It’s his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterwards was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, the prophet Zarathustra, who is a thinly veiled alter ego of Nietzsche, advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In doing so, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes: the Superman (Übermensch), the Will to Power, and Eternal Return.

Nietzsche’s Alchemical Trick

Sublimation is considered by many to be the most ‘mature’ or ‘successful’ of all ego defences. Let me give you a couple of examples.

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. But the second instance (going out for a long run) is an example of sublimation, which can be defined as the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities.

If someone finds out that she’s been cheated upon, 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 poet were one day to be remembered, would that not be the sweetest revenge of all?

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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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Is Desire a Form of Madness—or the First Step on the Ladder of Love?

Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by 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 8 September 2026.

For the Apostle Paul, marriage has, it seems, no higher purpose than the containment of lust:

For I would that all men were even as I myself… But if they cannot contain let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

Lust is the strong, passionate desire for something: not only sex, but also food, drink, money, fame, power, or knowledge, among others. Even so, owing to the historical resonance of Matthew 5:27-28, lust has come to be associated almost exclusively with sexual desire:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: 

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

There are many reasons for which we might desire sex, for example, to be close to someone, to hold on to or manipulate that person, to dominate that person, to injure a third party, to injure ourself, to define ourself, to feel alive, to pass the time, to make a child, or to gain some advantage such as money or preferment. But with lust, sex is contemplated primarily for itself, or, more precisely, for the pleasure that it may procure.

It is possible to seek out sex for itself without this desire being lustful. For the desire to be lustful, it has to be disordered, that is, inappropriately strong or inappropriately directed—although what counts as inappropriate is, ultimately, a value judgement that varies according to person, time, and place. People who experience lust without acting upon it are lustful without being lecherous; but if they act upon it, especially repeatedly or habitually, they are both lustful and lecherous.

King David was undone by his lust for the bathing Bathsheba, and Bill Clinton, while still the most powerful man in the world, was impeached following his affair with a young White House intern. In the Divine Comedy, souls that have committed the sin of lust are blown around in a whirlwind that symbolises their lack of self-control. More recently, MRI studies have found that patterns of brain activity in people experiencing lust are similar to those in addicts receiving their fix.

No surprise, then, that reason and philosophy are a poor defence against lust. In Greco-Roman art, Eros/Cupid is depicted as a child, and the ithyphallic (erect) satyrs are only half-human. According to mediaeval lore, when Alexander the Great found Phyllis (by some accounts, Alexander’s wife) riding Aristotle like a horse around the garden, he exclaimed, “Master, can this be!” Quick on his feet, Aristotle replied, “If lust can so overcome wisdom, just think what it could do to a young man like you.”

Shakespeare went so far as to compare lust to a form of madness, for instance, in Sonnet 129:

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action… 

… 

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had

Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so…

But it is not just that lust can, at times, overcome reason. For Schopenhauer, the sexual impulse is the most powerful manifestation of the Will, the blind striving that directs all human behaviour. This idea is certainly borne out by modern advertising, which seems mostly about suggesting that buying a particular product will help us to obtain the objects of our lust. In contrast, no one ever made a fortune by peddling restraint or wisdom. It is sometimes said that everything is about sex, except for sex itself, which is about power—or would that be the other way round? 

Even the Holy Church, when seeking to express ecstatic communion with God, could do no better than Bernini’s orgasmic Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy, held that, so long as we are enthralled to lust, we can know no peace or happiness.

In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, Krishna declares that, along with anger and greed, lust is one of the three gates to Naraka, or Hell. When the warrior Arjuna asks him by what one is impelled to sinful acts ‘even unwillingly, as if engaged by force’, he replies:

It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born from contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world… Therefore, O Arjuna, best of the Bharatas, curb in the very beginning this great symbol of sin—by regulating the senses, and slay this destroyer of knowledge and self-realisation…

Lust, in the broader sense of coveting or craving, is also at the heart of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:

1. Suffering (dukkha) is inherent in all life. 

2. The cause of all suffering is lust. 

3. There is a natural way to eliminate all suffering.

4. The Noble Eightfold Path is that way. 

Lust, taught the Buddha, can be eliminated through attaining a higher level of consciousness. This idea can also be found sporadically in the Western canon. For instance, the poet Charles Baudelaire (d. 1867) went so far as to suggest that artists should never have sex: ‘Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another—and the artist never emerges from himself.’

As well as being harmful to the subject, lust is harmful also to the object. Lust is the only appetite that is for a person rather than an object, but a person qua object rather than qua person, shorn of human qualities such as dignity and agency. The lustful person is unconcerned about the blossoming of the object of his lust. More than that, he will act against her best interests to feed his appetite, and, with his appetite sated, discard her as ‘one casts aside a lemon which has been sucked dry’. These acerbic words belong to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who held that a person should never be treated as a means-to-an-end but only ever as an end-in-herself.

It is in the nature of lust that it seeks to possess or ‘have’ the other, to incorporate and degrade the other by undermining her integrity and autonomy. In One Fat Englishman (1963), a novel by Kingsley Amis, the protagonist says that, when it comes to sex, his aim is ‘to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.’

Lust, in the words of Shakespeare, is ‘a waste of shame’. To hide that shame, many cultures magic up a male demon who lies upon sleepers to have sex with them. This incubus (and the less prevalent female equivalent, or succubus) is made to carry the blame for embarrassing nocturnal emissions, accusations of abuse or adultery, and even unexplained children. Another response to the shame of lust, much more prevalent in our culture, is to pass off lust as… romantic love. Unlike lust, love is respectable, even commendable. We look on approvingly at a pair holding hands or hugging, but turn around for the police as soon as they start acting out their lust.

Love is the acceptable face of lust, but the love that is lust in disguise is arguably even more perverse and destructive, and, in that sense, even more shameful, than the lust that knows its game. How to tell lust and love apart? While lust is hasty, furtive, and deceitful, love is patient, measured, and constant. While lust is all about taking, love is all about sharing. And while lust is all about degrading and destroying, love is all about building. Lust can lead to love, but is a poor start and a poor basis, akin to choosing one’s favourite book by the picture on the cover.

There is nothing wrong with sexual desire per se, and none of us would be here without it. Sexual desire is a life force, to be enjoyed and even celebrated. But, as with alcohol, the problems start when it turns from servant into master. Unfettered lust is especially unbecoming in the elderly, because, as the saying goes, there is no fool like an old fool.

Lust is hard to extinguish, but can more readily be redirected. If Kat is having a bad day, she can take out her frustration on anyone or everyone who crosses her path—the receptionist, her colleagues, her partner—or she can instead discharge all her nervous energy into the novel that she is writing. This second instance of anger displacement, working at her novel, is also an instance of sublimation, the channelling of unproductive or destructive forces into socially condoned and often constructive activities. As Baudelaire put it, ‘the more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes.’

For Plato, lust is the first step on the ladder of love and not to be shunned or shunted. In the Symposium, the lover begins with one beautiful body, before recognising that its beauty is shared by other bodies. From beautiful bodies, he rises to beautiful souls, practices, forms of knowledge, and finally Beauty itself. Desire is not suppressed but educated, redirected from the particular and perishable to the universal and eternal.

Lust contains its own cure, so long as one is able and willing to learn.

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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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The Psychology and Philosophy of Altruism

A proud beggar
Is everything about us selfish and self-interested? Or can we sometimes do the right thing for the right reason?

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.

Is it possible to do something for another person without, at some level, doing it also for ourselves? Even the most selfless of acts may bring pleasure or pride. If so, can true altruism be said to exist?

Altruism is ordinarily defined as unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Like ‘empathy’, ‘altruism’ is a modern term, coined by the philosopher Auguste Comte (d. 1857) from the French autrui, which itself derives from the Latin alteri (‘other people’).

The classical notion that most nearly approaches altruism is almsgiving, which derives from the Greek eleos (pity) and means ‘to give charity’. In Christian theology, charity is, properly speaking, the love of man for God, and through God, for his fellow men.

Altruism as an Ego Defence

Altruism can be read as an ego defence, a form of sublimation in which we deal with our problems and anxieties by stepping outside ourselves and helping others.

By concentrating on the needs of others, people in altruistic vocations such as medicine, nursing, and teaching may be able to permanently push their own needs into the background, where they can more easily be ignored or forgotten. Conversely, people who care for a young, disabled, or elderly person may experience profound anxiety and distress should this role suddenly be removed from them.

Altruism as a defensive operation ought to be distinguished from true altruism, the one being primarily a means of covering up uncomfortable feelings, the other of achieving some external or impersonal end such as alleviating hunger or poverty. 

Psychological Egoism

However, many psychologists and philosophers have argued that there is, in fact, no such thing as true altruism—a position sometimes referred to as ‘psychological egoism’.

In The Dawn (1881), Nietzsche argues that that which is called ‘pity’ is not selfless but variously self-motivated.

Here, Nietzsche is in effect agreeing with Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric defines pity as a feeling of pain caused by an evil that befalls one who does not deserve it, ‘and that might well befall us or one of our friends, and, moreover, befall us soon.’ In other words, we only pity someone insofar as they are relatable.

In an insightful aside, Aristotle adds that people feel pity for their similars and acquaintances, but not for those for whom they feel as they do for themselves. The pitiful, says Aristotle, should not be confounded with the terrible: Amasis wept at the sight of his friend begging, but not at that of his son being led to death.

The acts that we call altruistic are self-interested, if not because they relieve anxiety, then perhaps because they lead to pleasant feelings of pride and satisfaction; the expectation of honour or reciprocation; or the greater likelihood of a place in heaven; and even if neither of the above, then at least because they relieve painful feelings such as the guilt or shame of not having acted.

Is True Altruism Possible?

This argument has been attacked on various grounds, but most pointedly for its faulty, circular logic: ‘People who perform altruistic acts benefit from those acts. Therefore, altruistic acts are performed for the benefit of the people who perform them.’

The bottom line, I think, is this. There can be no such thing as an ‘altruistic’ act that does not involve some element of self-interest, no such thing, for example, as an altruistic act that does not lead to some degree of pleasure or pride. Therefore, an act should not be written off as selfish or self-motivated simply because it includes some inevitable element of self-interest. The act can still be counted as altruistic if the ‘selfish’ element is accidental; or, if not accidental, then secondary; or, if neither accidental nor secondary, then at least un-determining.

Each year in the UK, around a hundred people donate a kidney to a stranger. These remarkable individuals probably derive considerable satisfaction from having donated a kidney, but it does not follow that they did so in order to obtain that satisfaction.

In short, an act is altruistic if we would have done it anyway, regardless of what it happened to bring us.

Only one question remains: how many of our so-called altruistic acts can meet this criterion for true altruism?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception and  Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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