“There are only
ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too
familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the super-ego is
reiterative. It is the stuck record of the past (‘something there badly not
wrong’, Beckett’s line from Worstward Ho, is exactly what it must not say) and
it insists on diminishing us. It is, in short, unimaginative; both about
morality, and about ourselves. Were we to meet this figure socially, this
accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we
would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and
cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was
living in the aftermath, in the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be
right.”
― Adam Phillips,
Against Self-Criticism
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