The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life

Humans have the remarkable and perhaps unique ability to think about our own thoughts. This Strange Loop allows us to become aware of our self, to plan for the future, reflect and ruminate about the past, think about our selves as separate from others, imagine the thoughts of others, project our experiences into the minds of others, and judge our own actions. Self-awareness provides us the unique ability to control ourselves intentionally by imagining ourselves in the future and talk to ourselves about options for our future. Self-awareness allows us to imagine the world from a variety of perspectives. Not only can we contemplate what we perceive now, but we can reflect on the past and imagine a variety of futures. We can also imagine what others are thinking now, or were thinking in the past, or will be thinking in the future. Self-awareness allows us to travel through time and read minds. But our awareness is less accurate than it may seem. Self-awareness, introspection, and self-consciousness open us up to the emotions of pride, envy, jealousy, guilt, shame, and hope. Our ability to imagine the world from another's perspective allows us to feel empathy, compassion, pity, envy, and jealousy as it improves our emotional competency. This excellent book explores the potentials and pitfalls of our self-awareness.

Having written a book about self in Finnish 12 years ago, I find this book in many ways unique. It has a clear structure and the ideas presented are always interesting. The author can bind many threads together. Roy Baumeister has written much about "How self became a problem", but this book complements nicely Baumeister's writings. I find his emphasis on rationality and reality too strong, but he has provided many good points for his position. The Western self really is a curse in many ways. In the end of his book the author relents somewhat and admits that the ideas of positive psychology may be valuable. Especially I valued the parts discsussing about self and religion. I made a lot of notes and will be using his ideas on my lectures.

I found this book very easy to read and interesting. A wide variety of references were mentioned from the social psychology field, and although some of the research described seemed a little trite, overall it was well worth reading. I was particularly taken with the notion of self-control depletion,which I had never heard of before.It was the early 1970s that I did my undergraduate psychology degree, and it was good to learn of some of the more recent ideas in the field of social psychology. And isn't it amazing how this buddhist stuff manages to permeate so many things nowadays. It's like the 60s and 70s revisited! be here now