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A model of human behaviour in which everyone steadily pursued their self-interest
in an objective and enlightened manner would, I fear, be so imprecise as to be useless.
The truth is that, in public as in private life, we continually come up against
instances of people acting against their own best interests. Let us explore some
examples. My daughter phoned recently to say that she had had to revise her holiday
plans after finding that she had locked herself out of her flat, her spare keys
being with her boyfriend several hundred miles away, and herself having been forced
to stay with a friend.
Reason goes no further than to explain such an event in terms of distraction, loss
of concentration, fatigue, overwork etc. A synchronous approach, however, at once
asks two questions: why did the tiredness etc manifest in this way, rather than
one of a hundred others? And: what is the symbolic significance of such a situation?
Notice the two assumptions which underpin this response. First, the belief that
nothing is random – i.e., that a significant (as against trivial) event such as
locking oneself out of one’s house means something; the act has a message for its
perpetrator. Second, that to grasp that meaning, one has to understand the symbolism
of the elements involved: the key, the home. Nor can one simply read the symbolic
meaning of dream elements from a dictionary of symbols. To do so would be to attempt
to intrude the rationalist’s method, whereas it is the intuitive’s which is needed.
On the contrary – we must treat each situation as unique. What we need is a good
intuition about what is involved, not a good dictionary. |
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