This I Believe

Defining the beliefs by which we live is never easy; for most of us, in a full and busy life, take our ethics for granted, never stopping to think how much of what we profess to believe we actually incorporate into our daily living. As I pause to glance back over my 23 years in medicine, I believe that the first clue to my fundamental ethics in living came when I turned away from Pathology, the study of dead tissue, and chose instead the field of Psychiatry, where I could work with living, troubled people. I made that choice because I was interested primarily in people and their problems of living, and I know the choice was right because immense satisfaction has come to me from my efforts over the past 20 years to help people who were emotionally and mentally troubled.

I believe it is my vocation to serve people and I have been fortunate in being married for 25 years to a woman with a similar vocation, so that both my home and my professional life have been invested with the same atmosphere of service to people, whether they were friends, patients, neighbors, or the children of neighbors. In trying to define the ethics behind this atmosphere of my life, I find that a few simple words summarize whatever wisdom I have achieved: self-understanding breeds understanding of others; therefore tolerance, compassion, true selflessness, and the ability to serve others.

I believe it is most important to know oneself—one’s deepest self, the unconscious part of oneself. This principle, of course, has been essential to my work as a psychiatrist, but its application to myself has been of the greatest benefit to me as a human being. For to be honest with oneself, to know one’s liabilities as well as one’s assets—one’s aggressive and hostile impulses as well one’s tender loving components—is to develop the wonderful quality of humility and the capacity to understand others. I have found that self-knowledge makes it possible to comprehend other people’s motives—their strivings, their defenses, their yearnings, and their sometimes-ignoble thoughts and behavior.

I believe that with full and complete self-understanding, in the sense of recognizing one’s own motives and varying impulses, it becomes virtually impossible to set oneself up as a judge or despot to condemn others who do not share one’s beliefs or who do not belong to one’s own social group or who do not have the same skin pigmentation or do not share one’s religious convictions.

I believe that Christ had such a deep intuitive understanding of himself that He could understand human motives and aspirations and could thus found an entirely new civilization. I believe that with such a sense of deep regard on the part of myself and my fellows, respect and consideration for others derived from true self-comprehension, a better world can be created with the hope of lasting peace.