Deep Reflection: The Other as Furnace | On Self-Love, Distance, and Recognition 📚 #WritingCulture
We return to the self, Jung said, to learn how to love. But perhaps we do so to escape what we cannot control in the other.
We are often told that the hardest task is to love ourselves, that self-acceptance must come before we can love others. Yet psychoanalysis reveals a more unsettling truth: we oscillate between two forms of avoidance, using each as refuge from the other. When self-examination becomes too painful, we flee to the drama of relationships. When others’ opacity threatens our carefully constructed identity, we retreat to the familiar territory of self-improvement. Both self-love and love of others involve encountering resistance and unknowability. The real defense is not choosing one over the other but using whichever feels safer in the moment to avoid the fundamental challenge: that love, whether inward or outward, demands we surrender the fantasy of control.
This morning, still anchored among the coral shallows of the Dahlak Archipelago at 15°40.82′ N, 39°57.99′ E, I watch another dhow appear on the horizon. The small vessel moves with rhythms not my own, carrying lives whose desires I cannot fathom. Here in solitude, I can convince myself I’ve achieved some profound self-knowledge. Yet when that other boat draws close, I might discover how much of my “self-love” was actually self-management, a way of avoiding the chaos that genuine encounter brings.
The unconscious is cunning in its defenses. We cultivate self-compassion when relationships feel too destabilizing, then seek connection when introspection reveals truths we’d rather not face. Neither path is inherently easier or harder; both require us to sit with what cannot be controlled or fully understood. The self, however familiar, contains its own opacity. Others, however knowable they seem, retain their essential mystery.
Perhaps the deeper insight is that love itself, regardless of its direction, is the furnace that transforms us. Whether we turn toward the self or the other, genuine love means abandoning the illusion that we can remain unchanged. The real work is recognizing when we’re using one form of love to avoid the discomfort of the other.
Reflection
As the dhow fades back into the horizon, I am reminded that perhaps self-love is not the crucible we imagine but the refuge that steadies us before the true encounter begins. The crucible is the other, whose difference tests the limits of our endurance. To remain with that opacity is to accept that we cannot master or contain the unknown. Without this risk, love collapses into a loop of self-regard, polished yet closed. The danger emerges not in caring for ourselves, but in refusing to be altered by another’s presence. What steadies us can also shield us from transformation, and sometimes the comfort of solitude becomes a harbor that never opens to the sea.
—#WritingCulture— by Ellis Zeitmann ThinkZeit
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