Self-Analysis

To analyze oneself occasionally is comparatively easy and sometimes productive of immediate results. Essentially it is what every sincere person does when he tries to account for real motivations behind the way he feels or acts. Without knowing much, if anything, about psychoanalysis, a man who has fallen in love with a particularly attractive or wealthy girl could raise with himself the question whether vanity or money plays a part in his feeling. A man who has ignored his better judgment and given in to his wife or his colleagues in an argument could question in his own mind whether he yielded because he was convinced of the comparative insignificance of the subject at stake or because he was afraid of an ensuing fight. I suppose people have always examined themselves in this way. And many people do so who otherwise tend to reject psychoanalysis entirely.

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