Against Excessively Introspective

From Peter Singer's How Are We To Live: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest and more:
 
People spend years in psychoanalysis, often quite fruitlessly, because psychoanalysts are schooled in Freudian dogma that teaches them to locate problems within the patient’s own unconscious states, and to try to resolve these problems by introspection. Thus patients are directed to look inwards when they should really be looking outwards… Obsession with the self has been the characteristic psychological error of the generations of the seventies and eighties. I do not not deny that problems of the self are vitally important; the error consists in seeking answers to those problems by focusing on the self.

But what would turning outwards mean in practice? Singer has an answer. He thinks we would be best off by dedicating our lives to pursuing a ‘transcendent cause’. This refers to committing yourself to some cause or project that is ‘larger than the self’. At this point he turns to support from the psychotherapist Victor Frankl, who ‘is exceptional in his insistence on the need to find meaning outside the self’. Frankl’s most renowned work, Man’s Search For Meaning, documents his time as a prisoner in Nazi death camps, where he saw that those who were most likely to survive were not those who were physically strongest or best at scavenging food, but those who felt they had something to live for in the future. Perhaps it was to be reunited with their son, or to finish writing a scientific textbook which they had started before the war. Frankl quotes Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how.’

Of course, there are many forms of transcendent cause. Supporting one’s Mafia family is a cause larger than the self, as is being a member of a religious cult. For Singer, the kinds of transcendent cause that really offer lasting fulfilment are ethical ones. Committing yourself to animal liberation, human rights, ecological activism or some other issue of social or planetary justice is going to be more sustaining than committing yourself to a football club or a corporation. Thinking back to his academic colleagues, he had this to say:

‘If these able, affluent New Yorkers had only got off their analyst’s couches, stopped thinking about their own problems, and gone out to do something about the real problems faced by less fortunate people in Bangladesh or Ethiopia – or even in Manhattan, a few subway stops north – they would have forgotten their own problems and maybe made the world a better place as well.’