“While the counselor may sometimes take a pose of neutrality, psychotherapy becomes unintelligible without some normative understanding about what constitutes healthy functioning.”

From ‘Finding A Self To Love: An Evaluation of Therapeutic Self-Love’ by David M. Holley from ‘The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis’ by Paul C. Vitz

“The oddness [of self-love] is similar to what arises with other concepts that gain their primary meaning in contexts involving interpersonal relationships but are by extension applied to something that goes on within a single person …. For exameple, if you think of deceiving youself as a matter of telling yourself a lie, it will be puzzling how you can know the truth in order to tell the lie and yet believe the lie anyway. Self-deception is a real phenomenon, but we can be misled about its nature, if our thinking about it is tied too closely to the interpersonal model …. Oswald Hanfling underlines the oddness of the idea of self-love with the observation that if you were asked to name the people you love most, it would be absurd to name yourself.”

From ‘Finding A Self To Love: An Evaluation of Therapeutic Self-Love’ by David M. Holley from ‘The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis’ by Paul C. Vitz