Honoring Thy Self: The Unsung Virtues of Selfishness

Self-Help Honoring Thy Self: The Unsung Virtues of Selfishness Is our society becoming more or less selfish? Updated September 7, 2026 Reviewed by Davia Sills Key points - Selfishness is often demonized in our society. - Sometimes the solution to the problems people bring to therapy is being more selfish, not less. Is selfishness ever a virtue? We live in a culture that worships selflessness and despises selfishness. Most of us are taught from a very early age that it is bad or sinful to be selfish. Selfishness is denounced by parents, teachers, friends, etc., and children are frequently punished by scolding, shaming, berating, humiliating, criticizing, and, in some cases, even beating them. Religion, culture, and modern psychology have contributed to this exceedingly negative attitude toward the expression of selfishness, whether in children, adolescents, or adults. Societally, we seem to believe that selfishness is an evil tendency or trait that must be forcibly exorcised as soon as possible in the service of what we euphemistically call socialization—the massive suppression and denial of our most basic, vital, and essential self. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents (1929), recognized that human beings are naturally and inherently selfish, which can be antithetical to creating community and collective culture, and, therefore, such selfish tendencies, he said, must be suppressed, denied, or repressed. Yet, despite thousands of years of suppression, pathological or neurotic selfishness, or what we today call narcissism, is even more ubiquitous, pervasive, and problematical than ever. Why? Could we paradoxically be engendering more neurotic or psychotic selfishness in our culture by suppressing and denigrating our innate, normal, or healthy selfishness? Might our entire approach to the problem of selfishness be grossly misguided and ultimately self-defeating? Clearly, when we are speaking of selfishness as excessive egoism, self-centeredness, greediness, narcissism, cruelty, violence, and being inconsiderate of and insensitive to the needs, dignity, and feelings of others, this is certainly something negative, destructive, evil, and undesirable, though, to some extent, tragically unavoidable in human society. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1978) theorized that, paradoxically, neurotic or pathological narcissism stems from childhood suppression or negation of our necessary natural or “healthy narcissism.” This is a kind of axiomatic psychological truth: that which we chronically suppress, repress, or deny in ourselves eventually expresses itself in even more negative and destructive ways. Another good example of this is the primitive emotion of anger, which, when chronically repressed, can cause various psychological and somatic symptomatology, including headaches, depression, resentment, embitterment, hostility, rage attacks, aggression, and destructive and violent behavior toward ourselves or others (see Diamond, 1996, 2025). For Freud (1923), the primordial passions of what he termed the id are defined as any powerful feeling, impulse, or emotion, such as sexuality, aggression, love or hate, Eros or Thanatos, and are metaphorically described as “a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.” Existential psychoanalyst Rollo May (1969) referred to such primal, natural human emotions, instincts, and proclivities as anger, rage, sex, anxiety, selfishness, and craving power and control collectively as the daimonic, “the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself.” (See Diamond, 1996, 2025.) When the daimonic is chronically or habitually denied or repressed, it tends to be expressed or manifest negatively and destructively. Why? As Jung indicated in his concept of the shadow, just because we suppress or deny our rage, sexual desires, or selfishness, rendering them unconscious, it does not make such feelings or tendencies magically disappear; on the contrary, it only amplifies and makes them stronger, more powerful, difficult to manage, and potentially more dangerous and destructive. This is equally true of so-called selfishness. When denied or suppressed over time, it is reduced to its lowest, most primitive, evil, ugly, dangerous, antisocial, inhumane, and negative form: greed, lust, inflation, grandiosity, authoritarianism, domination, sadism, omnipotence, psychopathy, etc. It can take complete possession of us, body and soul, and compel us to behave badly. This is an expression of the negative, evil, destructive side of selfishness and of the id, daimonic, or shadow in general. But when we can acknowledge, accept, embrace, and assert rather than routinely deny or repress our intrinsic selfishness, it can manifest more constructively, prosocially, and even creatively as we become more authentically true to ourselves. But there is yet another kind of selfishness, one that centers not solely on the ego but on the needs of what Jung called the self and the individual’s congenital tendency to, as Jungian analyst John Beebe (1996) in his blurb for my book so pithily puts it, outwardly express “this strongly self-assertive energy, so glibly dismissed as narcissism... [Diamond] discloses the daimonic as the self’s essential capacity to claim and defend its own right to being itself.” Indeed, one of the most difficult tasks for some psychotherapy patients is learning to be selfish in the right way. To consciously acknowledge and assert their most fundamental wants and needs, their deepest dreams and desires, their most passionate emotions. It contradicts everything they were ever taught and engenders strong guilt feelings. For them, being selfish is one of the hardest things to do, but it is absolutely essential if they are serious about improving the quality of their lives. Jung's analytical psychology differentiates between what he called the self and the ego, the part of our personality with which we tend to most closely identify and experience as its center. Jung (1961) places the ego and the persona in a subordinate, secondary, and subservient position in relation to the self, which he defines as “the central archetype. . . . the totality of the personality. . . . The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind.” When we think about selfishness, this typically has more to do with being oriented toward the wants and needs of the ego rather than of the self. But when we deny or refuse to acknowledge and, when appropriate, obey the desires of the self, which can sometimes be antithetical to or contradict those of the ego, there can be even more tragic consequences. In the Old Testament, Jonah heard an inner voice, presumably from God, telling him to go to Nineveh, but chose to go instead to the town of Tarshish. From a psychological perspective, was this his ego or the self speaking? I would venture to say the latter, and that his rebellious decision to do what he wanted instead came from his ego. Each of us has some mysterious inner voice (not a psychotic hallucination), daimon, soul, or self urging us toward our destiny that we choose either to listen to, respect, and obey, or ignore, deny, and run from. But, as with Jonah being swallowed by the whale, there is always a heavy price to pay for ignoring or fleeing from one’s self. For refusing or failing to find the requisite courage to selfishly accept and pursue this calling despite what others, society, or sometimes one’s own ego or persona, say. In this sense, selfishness requires acknowledging, rather than suppressing, not only the primitive, animalistic, instinctual desires of the ego but also carefully and courageously listening to, discerning, and pursuing the deeper desires of the self. This is healthy or spiritual selfishness. Becoming more, not less, self-ish: i.e., conscious of and attuned to the deepest and most meaningful needs of the innermost self. References Diamond, S.A. (1996). Anger, madness, and the daimonic: The psychological genesis of violence, evil, and creativity. SUNY Press. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. May, R. (1969). Love and will. Norton. Kohut, H. (1972). Thoughts on narcissism and narcissistic rage. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 27, 360–400. Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, dreams, reflections. Pantheon Books. Diamond, S. A. (2026). The psychology and psychotherapy of evil: Encountering the daimonic. In L. Hoffman, L. X. Vallejos, D. Hocoy, P. Tummala-Narra, & E. M. DeRobertis (Eds.), APA handbook of humanistic and existential psychology: History, research, philosophy, and theory (pp. 365–404). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000431-016