Why is it so hard to truly get to know a person? Just when you think you understand a friend, a lover, a spouse, you are surprised by behavior, words or attitudes you had completely overlooked. A man with a good reputation does something evil and people can’t believe it. Or an evil person does an act of kindness and again people cannot believe it.

We humans are truly complex beings. We are full of contradictions. We say what we don’t mean, and don’t mean what we say. We confuse our friends and loved ones with our behavior. When asked to explain ourselves, we cannot because we have difficulty understanding ourselves. We do what we don’t want to do, and don’t do what we want to do.

I was reminded of the many mysteries that lie within each and every one of us when I read a piece by Theodore Reik, a psychoanalyst and one of my favorite authors. Instead of trying to paraphrase him, I prefer to let you read what he wrote. There is a lot of depth here. It’s a bit heavy, but very insightful.

“The frontiers of the personality reach farther than we think. Moreover, what we hate and what we love, what propels us and what hinders us, all constitute a part of us. ‘ The soul is a wide country’, says Schmitzler. It has room for so much: opposite tendencies can coexist in us, feelings contradicting each other live together, and what is true and what is false can be confused.

“A man said to his mistress who had been trying to convince him that she had spent the last few days with her girl friend, ‘Please stop lying; I already believe you’. Did he believe or disbelieve? So much lives in us: wishes and their denials, faith and mistrust, appetites and distastes. They change places so frequently that what is fair becomes foul and what is foul, fair.

“Psychoanalysis has demonstrated that the ego has built up an ego-ideal, a picture of oneself, an image of oneself as one wishes to be. Analysts have neglected taking the opportunity to find the counter-picture: the ego horror, a picture of oneself at which we shudder, the picture of an ego-possibility that frightens us and that we reject. Ego–ideal and ego–horror are sharply contrasted with each other.

“The frontiers of the personality reach farther in both directions: into what is commonly called good and what is commonly called evil. “There are mysterious repetitions in the choice of similar objects of love, puzzling resemblances in failure and success, friendships broken up under the same circumstances, affairs that take the same development along with seemingly quite unexpected interludes that show the reverse side.

“There are self deceptions about one’s own personality and role, interrupted by sudden insights. There are necessary ‘life-lies’ that go hand in hand with a clear understanding of the truth; tendernesses that are only the cover for cruel actions; and cruel actions that hide affectionate feelings.

“Dr. Jekyll is shocked because he is really Mr. Hyde, but Mr. Hyde is also astonished when he discovers that he is Dr. Jekyll. We are still living with the preconceived idea of the unity of the human soul, and man appears to us to be made of a single material, like a statue. We say a person is good or evil. In reality, he is good and evil, better and worse than he thinks.”

So true. So much wisdom expressed in so few words.