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.

And yet, since dignity - understood as recognition - is something that must be conferred, two other assumptions about the human condition must be made: first, homo sapiens are inclined in some respect to regard one another as equals; and second, they cannot live optimally without having some form of relationship with each other. Indeed, both these ideals - that we are an egalitarian and social species - have become so commonplace in many parts of the world as to sound like hackneyed New Age notions.

This will not surprise cognitive psychologists, of course, who have known for years that knowledge does not translate into action. Psychotherapists, too, regard it as fairly unremarkable that the self can be so damaged as to be incapable of acting in its own interests.

And just as therapist and patient must negotiate their hopes in dialectical conversation with one another, we, too, have to nurture between us the most fragile of cargoes, with the retaliation that what each of us does in our lives on a moment-to-moment basis will ripple through the ages. There has to be a revolt and a sincere engagement with it - failing which there can be no shared hopes, only selfish ones.

And yet this enduring struggle to re-cognise one another should not be seen as doomed to hopeless failure: this is because our earnest striving for mutuality is not a promised land but a process evolving all the time. The task before us is a daunting one - first creating and then immersing ourselves in a stream of openings for psychotic recognition, all the while appreciating that each of us is a moving target, different each time at the moment of being found.