NEW YORK — What's the best way to really know someone? Is it to uncover their daily worries, hassles or fears? To discern what traits they most hide from others, and perhaps even from themselves?
More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud argued that our darkest features are the most revealing — and that the deeper we go into the thicket of human personality, the more dismal our inner landscape.
Hugely influential, Freud's pessimism permeated special education and child guidance, psychiatry and social work and — after World War II — dominated the emerging fields of both family counseling and addiction treatment. The focus was always on the negative; generally, "the more negative, the better" was the unspoken mantra of professed experts.