I found a lot to like in Lee Siegel’s recent thoughts on the trouble and strife of John and Elizabeth Edwards. (I posted about their crisis last year.) As a therapist, I sat up in my chair when I read this:

“A friend of mine once said that the only two people who know what’s going on between a man and a woman are the man and the woman themselves. He was half right. The man and the woman—or man and man, woman and woman; it’s all the same—are the last to know. The idea that we can precisely fathom people’s emotions and motives is absurd. We can barely comprehend our own.”

I’m nodding my head up and down right now. Siegel is right about this. As a therapist, I’m paid to know a lot about relationships, learn a lot about my own clients, and use that knowledge to help them work through their most difficult relationship problems. And I know that to do my job well, I have to have a high degree of self-awareness and self-confrontation. And yet, there’s always something going on that will escape my awareness, and that of my clients. No human being can be fully understood or known by another human being (or themselves, for that matter). I expect that even if I live to be ninety years old, I’ll still not have taken the full measure of my own character, let alone those of others.

But if that’s the case, why do people make judgments about the Edwardses? Or—here’s a more difficult question for me—why do people go to therapy? My answer: as right as Siegel is about the need for humility in these matters, there’s a lot we can know about ourselves and each other. I will die not knowing everything there is to know about myself, but that doesn’t mean I plan to live an incurious life. The fact that we will never know everything about the universe didn’t stop us from launching the Hubble telescope.

So I’ll draw a lesson on humility from Lee Siegel’s reflections, but I won’t be paralyzed by that humility. I’ll keep wrestling with myself and engaging with other people in the adventure of self-discovery because I have faith that our exploration of the human universe will take us far. We’ll never reach the end, but our effort is part of what makes us human in the first place.

Meanwhile, I wish both John and Elizabeth Edwards well. As with all couples who are going through a hellish time, I hope they can find their way to a peaceful resolution of their crisis, and learn a lot about themselves along the way.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 9:55 am and is filed under About my practice, Couples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.