Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness

by Peter Michaelson

The human mind is hungry for truth and the human spirit is starving for consciousness. This book is a big mouthful of high-protein mental nutrition. People are ready now to acquire the knowledge that puts an end to misery and failure. Psychotherapist Peter Michaelson’s insightful book reveals and explains the human tendency to recycle and replay unresolved negative emotions that produce suffering and self-defeat. Most readers will immediately realize that this deep psychological knowledge is entirely new to them. We are, in a sense, addicted to our suffering. How is that possible? The notion seems preposterous. Unfortunately, it’s true—and this book shows exactly how most adults, in varying degrees, continue unwittingly and compulsively to experience and recycle unresolved emotions. Whatever form your unhappiness takes, the knowledge in Why We Suffer can save you from failure, self-defeat, and misery. Are you depressed? Do you feel confused, overwhelmed, disappointed, angry, and dispirited? Perhaps you’re failing at some of your endeavors and feel you can’t get your intelligence into high gear. Are you lacking in self-regulation? Some of us just feel like we’re stranded on the wrong planet. Why We Suffer makes it possible to see exactly how we produce this suffering. The book brings our psyche into sharp focus, revealing the precise psychological mechanisms at the heart of human dysfunction. This book also disputes the psychological establishment’s contention that emotional suffering is caused mainly by such factors as cultural clashes, human malice, genetic anomalies, and brain biochemistry. The knowledge in Why We Suffer empowers individuals to resolve their suffering by showing precisely how inner conflict operates in our psyche. The content is practical, specific, and scientific, and it popularizes the most powerful knowledge from psychology. The writing is polished and the ideas simplified, and the material, while intellectually stimulating, can be read and understood by a high-school student. The knowledge in this book is based mainly on the work of Edmund Bergler M.D. (1899-1962), a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who wrote 25 books and almost 300 articles published in professional journals. He is largely unknown because the deep knowledge he produced is covered up by our psychological defenses. Bergler’s writing, which is laden with clinical terminology, does put difficult demands on readers. In a sense, Michaelson, a former journalist and science writer, is his translator. He communicates Bergler’s ideas with a skill he has honed over many years of teaching these concepts and writing about them. (Revised and updated, December, 2014.)

Genres: Psychology, Self Help

341 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 13, 2011

Reviews

[Larry Wayte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend this insightful, honest, and eye-opening book for those who have the appetite for rigorous self-scrutiny. This is not a "self-help book" in the popular sense. Rather, it offers insights as to how many of us (myself included) are addicted to negativity, to the extent that we unconsciously seek out, create, and fantasize opportunities to indulge in various forms of self-gratifying suffering.

The book explores these unconscious mechanisms in great detail, providing a way out of their vicious cycle not through blaming others (part of the problem), but rather in honestly acknowledging these processes in our own behaviors. This is by no means an easy path, as we've spent literally our entire lives becoming attached to these destructive cycles of thought and behavior. Also interesting, though perhaps a bit over-politicized for some tastes, is the author's extension of these individual processes to entire societies and cultures.

If you have the introspective honesty and persistence to tackle your own demons, this book provides a compelling path for such exploration.

[Canoebeast · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book! As he says, this kind of psychological knowledge is not currently in fashion. It's depth psychology - we're talking Jung and Freud here, old school psychoanalytic theory. But don't think of Woody Allen's jokes about 15 years of therapy. This book cuts to the essence of this knowledge, as do the many free articles on the author's website.

This is important because this knowledge can be used to deal with all kinds of intense emotional issues you might be dealing with - trauma, stuckness, the whole shebang. He describes the primitive parts of our psyche and how they play out in our lives, relationships, and society at large. The book rambles here and there somewhat, but not in a bad way. It's just that Michaelson sees these ideas as relevant on multiple levels.

Frankly, I was interested in practical matters of dealing with my own issues. Getting a handle on the distinct players, elements, or forces within the subconscious helped me see that the conscious self can in a sense take charge of these. And Michaelson talks a bit about consciousness, the self, that level of existence and its value.

This is perhaps a little known book, given it's self-published. It's been much more helpful to me than any of the therapists I've seen. As he says, they tend to offer comfort or consolation, not solutions, but he claims to offer real solutions. I think his claim is valid. Just don't look for simple steps and concrete tools. It's very conceptual, and you work with those concepts in your consciousness to develop insights. This works for me.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding book. The world would be a much better place if this book were widely read. It is in my top 12.

[Madhav Kandukuri]

This is one of the more underappreciated, but profound books I read on the subject. The subject content feels fresh and I believe holds the potential to affect a real change in the reader.

[Peng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful if you're open to the ideas

For a long while I adopted the popular view to dismiss psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience, but my desire to get to the depth of reasons of why we have to tendency to participate in our own suffering led me to Michaelson's website and this book. His explanatory mechanism for our attachment to unresolved negative emotions echoes with my personal experience. Many of us hold a false belief that our "inner drill surgeon" is good for us in the long haul, which in a sense allowed us a free pass to indulge in self inflicted suffering. While light on empiricism, the ideas in this book are good fuel for thoughts, and I see a lot of parallel with other more widely acclaimed books such as Why Buddhism is True, and even Tuesdays with Morrie.

[Swainck · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me, one of the great strengths of this book is that it sheds new light--new to me, at least-- on why change is so hard and our resistance to it so strong. It addresses a massive blind spot in today's mainstream perspective, as psychoanalysis does, but this particular understanding of the nature of the problem I have found especially relevant to my personal shade of neurosis. Today, we are familiar with symptoms, we understand new elements of our brains work, we have a number of interpretations as to why we do what we do (or don't do what would be better for us). Yet it can feel a bit surface-level, and it can miss the mark where self-defeat is concerned.

I feel like I gained a lot of insight from this book. This is depth psychology, a bitter pill to swallow, it felt uncomfortable at times, but I found the takeaways ultimately empowering and filled with hope. It definitely is an antidote to the crushing pessimism one can sometimes feel.

The author presents ideas developed by a now obscure psychoanalyst called Bergler, with the two psychic entities of "the inner critic" and our "inner passivity," the superego (a sadist and a bully not to be confused with our true conscience, he argues), and the ego, basically a weakling or a puppet king, the insecure, fragile part of us, ruled by inner passivity and weakly defending himself from the inner bully (hello, defense mechanisms).

There is also the key concept of the "fatal flaw," a secret collusion, through subconscious emotional attachment, in feeling defeated, self-critical, and condemned by the harsh and ruthless inner critic. It is an original perspective on something dark and mysterious some have called original sin, or our inner demons. This new insight contributes to my understanding of it along with René Girard's concept of mimetic desire, and the concept of skandalon from the New Testament. This is fascinating territory. And just plain scary. But this book helps us see more clearly the pitfall the great spiritual traditions warn us against, particularly where the defense mechanisms work (and they can be quite subtle and dynamically rearrange themselves, with the effect of obfuscating some uncomfortable truths).

The book is a call to practice courageous inner work to start living a life more aligned with our "true self" instead, a more secure, braver and more generous part of us that is more attracted to goodness and more able to resist the "fatal flaw." I also thought it did a really good job at showing the complexity of the dynamic, largely subconscious arrangements inside the psyche.

This was a fascinating read with a lot of takeaways. It's a daunting task to look under the hood of your own psyche and try to shed some light on the nasty parts in order to try and grow as a person, but it's well worth the effort, and the perspective offered in this book is a precious guide along the way, encouraging the reader to face their issues with courage and to develop more integrity, awareness and goodness.