In the end, all of our quests for ultimate understanding necessarily relegate us to metaphor. And over the years I’ve been exposed to many different explanatory metaphors.

We are organisms co-existing with our environment, making no sense without it, needing to be aware of what we are actually doing, rather than what we think we are doing — let alone what we think about what we are thinking we are doing.

In this second of the series on sense of self and how it differs across cultures, I am going to look at the interconnected or relational self, and how awareness of how interdependent we are might lead to fear of others.

Our conceptualizations of the situations we find ourselves in can not only place us at a disadvantage, but can literally do us harm.

I have never in my life felt so relieved and so inspired by the results of an election as I am by the selection of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. Today, the world is a better place.

When you’re talking about a neurotic individual, it’s reasonable to think of their personality as a sort of “mask” or facade that hides their true self. But when it comes to the disordered character, what you see is what you get.

Several intriguing comments and questions have been posted in reply to my earlier articles on character disturbance. In this post, I’d like to address some of these and the issues which readers have raised.