Fear of (self) suffering, of seeing oneself suffer, and of causing oneself suffering: When the ego oversteps the mark

Fear of the other, of nature, of fate, of oneself, of suffering (oneself), and of making oneself or someone else suffer all result in fear of abandonment and (implicitly) the fear of death. Today’s Western society seems to want to smooth over or even avoid any form of hardship. We must be freed from suffering at all costs if we are to enjoy life without fear or constraint in our fictitious Eden, from which the suffering, the old, the sick, and the disadvantaged are to be excluded. In this article, we thought it would be interesting to question this fear of suffering by affixing it to, or even opposing it with, the active-passive, altruistic-egoist, and pronominal decentering of oneself. Efforts must be made to “suffer oneself,” in the sense of “tolerate oneself,” before the suffering of the other can be dealt with. This is why introspection should be accomplished prior to any psychotherapeutic intention and even to any act of care provision. Indeed, if they have not embarked on a long, arduous, and serious process of introspection, practitioners run the major and immensely harmful risk of projecting their own anxiety onto their patients’ suffering, which only serves to increase the collective share of suffering.