"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best"
About this Quote
Psychology, in Valery's hands, isn’t a comforting user manual for the self; it’s a solvent. The line pivots on a delicious provocation: the things we "know best" are precisely the things we’ve stopped seeing. Habits of mind harden into certainty, and certainty becomes a kind of blindness. By framing psychology’s purpose as giving us "a completely different idea", Valery rejects the popular fantasy of psychology as reassurance or diagnosis. Its real job is estrangement: making the familiar suddenly strange enough to examine.
The subtext is poetically suspicious of introspection. Valery, a poet obsessed with consciousness and the machinery of thought, understood that the inner life is not a transparent window but a staged production with unreliable narration. The phrase "completely different" is intentionally excessive. It implies that ordinary self-knowledge is not merely incomplete; it’s structurally distorted. Psychology doesn’t add facts to what you already know; it rewires the frame through which you interpret those facts.
Context matters. Writing in the wake of late-19th and early-20th century upheavals in how the mind was understood - from early experimental psychology to Freud’s unsettling claims about motive and desire - Valery is catching the cultural tremor: the modern realization that the self is not sovereign. The wit is that psychology’s success isn’t measured by clarity but by productive discomfort. If it works, you don’t feel affirmed; you feel interrupted.
The subtext is poetically suspicious of introspection. Valery, a poet obsessed with consciousness and the machinery of thought, understood that the inner life is not a transparent window but a staged production with unreliable narration. The phrase "completely different" is intentionally excessive. It implies that ordinary self-knowledge is not merely incomplete; it’s structurally distorted. Psychology doesn’t add facts to what you already know; it rewires the frame through which you interpret those facts.
Context matters. Writing in the wake of late-19th and early-20th century upheavals in how the mind was understood - from early experimental psychology to Freud’s unsettling claims about motive and desire - Valery is catching the cultural tremor: the modern realization that the self is not sovereign. The wit is that psychology’s success isn’t measured by clarity but by productive discomfort. If it works, you don’t feel affirmed; you feel interrupted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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