“Oh, a friend!” Psychotherapy and the Other in the Light of Montaigne’s Essays

Abstract

The irrepressible 16th century humanist and essayist, Michel de Montaigne, wrote a self-portrait with such unprecedented candour and conversational flair, that he all but jumps from the page and shakes your hand. At Mon­taigne’s invitation, I bring together psychotherapists and the Essays in a conversation that revives the notion of friendship, and evokes the pleasure of mutual revelation in the search for understanding. In the light of the Essays’ “gay and sociable wisdom”, I see essaying and therapy as discrete yet closely intertwined cultural tasks. Each is an openhearted work of being together, of making room for alterity rather than conquering it with theory. Only in a world made coherent through the practices of friendship and hospitality can we come to cultivate the otherness of painful separations, tolerate the strangeness of our ordinary foibles, and draw closer to life.