Alain de Botton: Introspection, defence mechanisms, and ghosts

Happy Place

Fearne Cotton

Society & Culture, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Relationships, Personal Journals

4.6 • 15.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Breaking patterns of intergenerational trauma could have a profound effect on the state of the modern world. Writer Alain de Botton believes love – or a lack thereof – is at the heart of our personal and societal issues.

In this chat with Fearne, Alain explains why so-called ‘attention seekers’ are precisely the people who need to be wrapped in love and attention. He also talks about why our defence mechanisms usually have real logic behind them, and why we should be curious about other peoples’ odd characteristics rather than getting frustrated by them.

Plus, he answers the simplest and most complex of questions: what actually is a healthy mind?

Alain’s book, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons From the School of Life is out now.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton.
0:04.8	This is the show that asks how we can be kinder to ourselves and others.
0:09.6	Today I'm chatting to Alan de Botan.
0:12.4	When there is a shortfall of love, you've got two options.
0:15.0	Number one, the sadistic option, which is to go off and make somebody else unhappy.
0:18.0	Someone is evacuated something negative into us.
0:20.0	We evacuate it into others in order to alleviate our things that's the origin of
0:24.0	bullying so it's a sort of transgenerational transfer of hurt and then the other
0:28.6	mechanism which is slightly better for the world but not much good for the
0:31.9	individual is the
0:32.6	masoch response which is someone's hurt me and I'm going to treat myself
0:37.9	like that hurtful person treated me you will become your inner torturer. If we could get rid of that we'd have a happy planet.
0:44.2	Alan is the best-selling author of 15 books. His writing is basically a philosophy for everyday life.
0:51.7	He's also the founder of the School of Life which is a
0:55.1	platform dedicated to bringing about health, growth and self-understanding in
1:00.9	various ways through psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy and art and my
1:06.7	God it's helped me a lot. His latest book is a therapeutic journey and it basically looks at the whole arc of mental health from
1:15.0	crisis to recuperation he's amazing at taking what feels absolutely huge complex
1:22.0	subjects and writing about them in a really clear and
1:26.1	really kind way and that's the way he talks about it in this chat too and we talked
1:31.5	about some big stuff intergenerational transfer of trauma the
1:35.4	logic behind defence mechanisms what a healthy mind actually is that one was
	...

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