Articles on Self-Knowledge, Relationships and Calm - The School of Life

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Self-Knowledge

What is Art Therapy?

Art Therapy can help us to assemble a range of ever clearer portraits of our elusive true selves.

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Leisure

Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Oddly, history can be powerfully consoling, not because it tells us that our times are great, but because it shows us how normal large societal troubles really are.

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Relationships

True Love Begins with Self-Love

One of the central requirements of a good relationship is a degree of affection for our own natures.

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Relationships

Why You Can’t Read Your Partner’s Mind

In relationships, whatever our professed scepticism, we very frequently proceed as if mind reading were not only possible but a standard requirement and possibility in love.

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Relationships

The Importance of Being Single

There is no better guarantee of a successful relationship than knowing that we could — and can — manage perfectly well on our own.

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  • Sociability
  • Friendship

Why Misfits Make Great Friends

Once we have given up on the poisonous goal of respectability, we will at last be ready for friendship.
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  • Relationships
  • Sex

What Freud’s Oedipus Complex Can Teach Us

We might think of the Oedipus Complex as offering us a guiding narrative about how we come, through the varied experiences of childhood, to have our own distinctive approach to sexuality.
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  • Leisure
  • Art/Architecture

How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity

There is every reason to be appalled by our race. But to retain a vestige of hope, we should look at our docksides and warehouses, our flyovers and radar stations.
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Relationships

Kierkegaard on Love

Kierkegaard insisted that through concentrating on Romantic love, we develop a narrow and impoverished sense of what love can actually be.

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What is Art Therapy?

Self-Knowledge

What is Art Therapy?

One of the more surprising aspects of being human is that we often can’t tell other people or, more strangely,…
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Kierkegaard on Love

Leisure

Kierkegaard on Love

One of the most provocative analyses of love ever produced is to be found in the writings of the Danish…
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A Portrait of Tenderness

Relationships

A Portrait of Tenderness

There’s a story going on, a very lovely one, but we can’t know the details for certain. In this respect,…
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