Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now we have marriages and relationships by instinct.
We get drawn to people.
But those instincts are so much more complicated than we like to think because we're not merely pulled by a desire to be happy.
We're pulled by a desire to rework many of the challenges of our past.
I mean, Freud put it at its best.
His view was that we're looking to...
recreate painful situations that we experienced at the hands of our parents, but give them a better ending.
So for example, someone might be, let's imagine a woman who finds herself very often getting together with angry, intemperate, slightly out of control men.
You say, okay, why is this happening?
Might discover that the past of this person includes a father who was very much like this.
And we might say, goodness, this sounds awful.
This is ever going to end.
The hopeful
psychotherapeutic answer is yes, because what the person's doing is not looking to suffer forever.
What they're looking is to understand the pattern and solve it, ideally with somebody that they can go on a journey with, which is why if you had an angry father,
And you come across a completely calm person.
That might not be that interesting.
You come across somebody who feels the temptation of anger, but wants to work it through with you in your company, and that together you might heal from this problem.
That can be deeply satisfying for people.
So if we want to be optimistic about the patterns people are involved with, I don't think people are invested in suffering forever.
Showing 921–940 of 1,037 · page 47 of 52
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