Nehaveigur

I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the twentieth century so terrible.

Werner Herzog: Every Man for Himself and God Against All

It’d be silly to be entirely opposed to introspection. I doubt consciousness would be possible without it and awareness of our inner lives is the only way to improve ourselves, but what’s the optimum level? How much time and mental effort should we spend on analyzing our souls? I believe many of us exceed the optimum and spend too much of our attention on navel-gazing. There’s the opportunity cost, but there’s also not that much to be gained: Our minds may be less rich than we like to think and our family histories may not be that important. There are also those who are harmed by therapy. For example, there are cases of parent-child estrangement caused by irresponsible therapists counseling grown-up children to over-emphasize their parents’ flaws, leading to broken-off relationships and ruined families.

I’ve never experienced psychoanalysis or any other type of therapy first-hand, but I know plenty of people who have, and I agree with Herzog that in most cases it’s not doing them much good. The increasing number of mental health counselors in schools, college campuses and even workplaces isn’t a net positive. There are without doubt those who have clinical mental illness who benefit from increased access, but this needs to be weighed against those who waste their money on time on therapy without deriving a benefit.

By the way, the idea that too much introspection is harmful may not just be applicable to us as individuals, but also to society as a whole: Is it possible that there’s such a thing as too much navel-gazing for nations?