With fear as our life’s companion, the best thing to do is what you would do with any companion: turn and look at them, ask them loads of questions, get curious, get intimate with them, and, in so doing, let them reveal you.

The first thing you may learn is that lots of your fears are focused on other people, and in particular what those other people think of you. This is not a problem. This is as it should be. When someone tells you that you should ignore what other people think of you, that others’ opinions of you are none of your business, please push back. You are designed to be concerned about what other people think of you. It’s part of what makes you human. The only people who are not concerned about what other people think of them are sociopaths.

So yes, it is wise and good to care about what other people think of you. As we talked about in chapter 12, their reactions to you are an important sign of how your loves are playing out in the world. You need to pay attention to their reactions—at least, if you’re interested in turning your loves into contribution.

… The second thing you’ll discover is that fear itself is not the thing to be afraid of. It’s not fear that causes the problems in your life. It’s what fear degrades into when you shun it.

It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.

In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

We, therefore, become afraid to hear the other person’s thoughts because to consider them would be, we feel, to betray our deepest selves. So we make sure that no idea can develop in either of us that does not fit our certainty of who we are and who they are. We stop them. We interrupt.

As Adam Phillips describes it, “In Winnicott’s view, the mind is that part of the self invented to cover for, to manage, any felt unreliability in the caregiving environment. It is, as it were, a necessary fiction, born of expedience, and therefore potentially tainted by (unconscious) resentment. Whenever the world is not good enough one has a mind instead.