The School of Life: On Self-Hatred

The latest dispatch from the School of Life (A Replacement for Religion), an international educational organization, superficially tackles a topic that’s bread and butter for many a therapist. Self-hatred, the authors write, is “the bitter fruit of an ingrained sense of what we should be like” and can “wreak havoc across a range of psychological situations,” though many are oblivious to the fact that they suffer from it. To help readers self-diagnose, the authors provide a quiz-style audit that inventories one’s level of agreement with a series of sweeping statements (“If people knew who I really was, they would be horrified”). Self-hatred can assume various forms, they explain—imposter syndrome, people-pleasing, and perfectionism among them—and provide descriptions for each (of imposter syndrome: “No one is ever as competent as they feel they should be; what varies is how tolerant people can be of their own incompetence”). For the authors, self-hatred is only a result of bad parenting, because a child would tend to wonder “what may be wrong with itself to explain the parental disapproval.” Other possibilities that might hamper development, such as socioeconomic disadvantage, go unmentioned. The conclusion, which recommends trading self-love for self-acceptance lands as realistic, but doesn’t compensate for the entry’s cursory nature and oversimplified considerations of a complex topic. Readers can skip this one. (Apr.)