Dr. Paul Conti

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you for asking.

It's one of the main points of the book.

In addition to saying, hey, we can understand our mental health and build good mental health like we do our physical health.

And here's a route to it.

Right.

I'm making this point that we have been misguided in how we conceive of ourselves, that a field of mental health has traditionally and across time seen us as having just assertion and pleasure drives in us.

So that was considered as gospel.

There are two drives in people.

Assertion, we want to assert ourselves because we want to be able to do something and change the world around us.

And why is that?

Because we want pleasure, right?

And that pleasure could be things that we associate with pleasurable things, food, sex, et cetera.

But it can also be the pleasure of safety, right?

Of knowing there's a roof over my head.

So we're just asserting ourselves so we can massage and manipulate the world around us so we can find our way to pleasure.

To conceive of humans this way,

is so patently and obviously false.

We would not be here as a species if that is all that was going on in us.