The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life [Hardcover]

Mark R. Leary (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 2004

Despite its obvious advantages, our ability to be self-reflective comes at a high price. Few people realize how profoundly their lives are affected by self-reflection or how frequently inner chatter interferes with their success, pollutes their relationships with others, and undermines their happiness. By allowing people to ruminate about the past or imagine what might happen in the future, self-reflection conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions. A great deal of unhappiness, in the form of addictions, overeating, and domestic violence, is due to people's inability to exert control over their thoughts and behavior. Is it possible to direct our self-reflection in a way that will minimize the disadvantages and maximize the advantages? Is there a way to affect the egotistical self through self-reflection? In this volume, Mark Leary explores the personal and social problems that are created by the capacity for self-reflection, and by drawing upon psychology and other behavioral sciences, offers insights into how these problems can be minimized.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Get ready to drop your ego and step into the real world. If you ever wanted to know why everybody else always seems one step removed from reality - Beware - Leary's well researched deadly accurate book, proves once and for all that the common denominator in all your failed relationships is you! Read The Curse of the Self and unlock the door to the bizarre inner workings of the human mind." --Lisa Earle McLeod Syndicated columnist, Lifetime Radio commentator and author of Forget Perfect (Penguin/Putnam)

"represents an impressive level of scholarship, presented in a pleasant and accessible way, with anecdotes and touches of humor. Leary is clearly an expert on the topic-I doubt you would find anyone better qualified to write this book." -Roy Baumeister, Professor, Department of Psychology, Florida State University

"Many years ago Whitney Houston sang that the greatest love of all was love for the self. She wouldn't feel that way if she read Mark Leary's refreshing and provocative analysis of how our 'selves' cause many of our greatest disasters and disappointments. Ironically, this book generates considerable introspection, even as it provides inspiration for learning not to let our selves get in the way of healthful and meaningful living." -Todd F. Heatherton, Champion International Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

"The Curse of the Self is a thinking person's self-help book, not in the trivial, superficial sense in which the term 'self-help book' is usually used, but in the sense of being both intellectually stimulating and offering useful, practical advice and insights." -Lee Jussim, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University

About the Author

Mark R. Leary is Professor of Psychology at Duke University. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and former president of the International Society for Self and Identity. He was named by the Institute for Scientific Information as among the 25 most productive scholars in psychology (1986-1990).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (July 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195172426
• ISBN-13: 978-0195172423
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,118,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thinking about our own thoughts, July 6, 2007

By 

Simply Curious (Middletown, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (Paperback)

Humans have the remarkable and perhaps unique ability to think about our own thoughts. This Strange Loop allows us to become aware of our self, to plan for the future, reflect and ruminate about the past, think about our selves as separate from others, imagine the thoughts of others, project our experiences into the minds of others, and judge our own actions. Self-awareness provides us the unique ability to control ourselves intentionally by imagining ourselves in the future and talk to ourselves about options for our future.

Self-awareness allows us to imagine the world from a variety of perspectives. Not only can we contemplate what we perceive now, but we can reflect on the past and imagine a variety of futures. We can also imagine what others are thinking now, or were thinking in the past, or will be thinking in the future. Self-awareness allows us to travel through time and read minds. But our awareness is less accurate than it may seem.

Self-awareness, introspection, and self-consciousness open us up to the emotions of pride, envy, jealousy, guilt, shame, and hope. Our ability to imagine the world from another's perspective allows us to feel empathy, compassion, pity, envy, and jealousy as it improves our emotional competency.

This excellent book explores the potentials and pitfalls of our self-awareness.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is our self really a curse?, May 11, 2005

By 

Markku Ojanen (Lempäälä Finland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (Hardcover)

Having written a book about self in Finnish 12 years ago, I find this book in many ways unique. It has a clear structure and the ideas presented are always interesting. The author can bind many threads together. Roy Baumeister has written much about "How self became a problem", but this book complements nicely Baumeister's writings. I find his emphasis on rationality and reality too strong, but he has provided many good points for his position. The Western self really is a curse in many ways. In the end of his book the author relents somewhat and admits that the ideas of positive psychology may be valuable. Especially I valued the parts discsussing about self and religion. I made a lot of notes and will be using his ideas on my lectures.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Curse of the self, March 29, 2005

By 

aging ex hippie (new zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Curse of the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (Hardcover)

I found this book very easy to read and interesting. A wide variety of references were mentioned from the social psychology field, and although some of the research described seemed a little trite, overall it was well worth reading.

I was particularly taken with the notion of self-control depletion,which I had never heard of before.It was the early 1970s that I did my undergraduate psychology degree, and it was good to learn of some of the more recent ideas in the field of social psychology.

And isn't it amazing how this buddhist stuff manages to permeate so many things nowadays. It's like the 60s and 70s revisited! be here now