But it emphasises also the limit of empathy, explaining why both the wounds of our past and their enactments in the present will continue to haunt us. The affective tone that must colour our strivings, therefore, is neither untrammelled optimism nor hopeless despair: it involves, instead, a tempered liminal space in which we, as citizens, commit ourselves to an unfolding process of searching for moments of meeting where recognition of our shared humanity becomes possible.

This individualisation of trauma is typical of medical model thinking, but its unfortunate consequence is that our society is disinclined to regard the victims of structural violence as being the victims of trauma. Accordingly, the empathy we ordinarily show survivors of (individual) traumas is withheld from those who are victims of social trauma. It is no wonder, then, that we think nothing of confining offenders with the most traumatic social histories to the most traumatising places on earth.

Who we are is a product of where we have been. Psychotherapists usually understand this in respect of a given patient’s personal history - the absent father, the critical mother, the jealous sibling, the abusive cousin - but equally, there can be no denying the importance of one’s social history either. The areas we live in, the schools we attend, the quantity and quality of our caregiving, the various affirmations and discriminations that come our way - each of these experiences is layered in complex ways by social, economic and political forces far beyond the control of any single person.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

In some way, this is what I want to convey to April. We all wish we could just eliminate the dysfunctional parts of us. In pushing against what we do not like in ourselves, we get more knotted up. The shame, discomfort, embarrassment, and pain just reinforce the hold the whole thing has over us, and, in the process, we over-identify with an aspect of ourselves that does not need to define us so completely. Seeing this overidentification clearly is what I think of as insight.