A Mirror That Speaks Of Selves
In Other People’s Tongues
Psychology presents itself as a map of the mind, but it is, first and always, a social document.
Each of its theories — however humane or empirically polished — begins by deciding what a normal human looks like: how one should think, feel, and behave to remain a tolerable citizen.
From there, every deviation becomes pathology, and every therapy a path back toward the mean.
The Art of Adjustment
Cognitive behavioural therapy is only the most recent and elegant form of this adjustment. It teaches people to think and act “differently” — not differently from themselves, but differently from what society deems maladaptive.
Practical, efficient, and often genuinely relieving, it nonetheless speaks the language of compliance.
It helps one adapt to conditions that might, in another light, be recognised as symptoms of a collective disorder rather than a personal one.
Coping as a Measure of Health
Therapy is offered only to those who cannot “cope,” as though coping itself were the measure of health. The unspoken assumption is that the world is fixed and the self must bend.
That bending — made graceful by the rhetoric of insight — becomes a choreography of social control.
To be “well” is to resume function, to reintegrate into the same mechanisms that may have caused one’s disquiet.
The Universal Inadequacy
Even those who appear well-adjusted sense the drag of insufficiency.
Most imagine they should be more centred, more composed, closer to the ideal version of themselves — an image drawn by culture, media, and professional authority.
The therapist’s couch becomes an altar to this shared insecurity, where people seek not liberation but permission to continue.
What the Mirror Cannot See
Psychology can describe me, sometimes with disarming precision, yet it never knows me. Its insight is comparative: it measures deviation, not depth.
What it cannot capture is the felt, moment-to-moment weather of being — the private turbulence before language arranges it into diagnosis.
True self-understanding begins where psychology ends: in the quiet observation of how its models pass through us, how they shape our self-stories, and how we might, with patience, let those stories loosen.
To see psychology as a tool rather than a truth is to reclaim a small but vital sovereignty — the right to be more than what others can explain.
