An Observer best psychology book of the year.
“The book deconstructs with especial vim our modern prejudices in favour of self-expression, unconditional self-love and trusting one’s feelings; even tenacity, the two agree, is not always well-directed. “Negativity gets a bad press these days,” Baggini writes cheeringly, “but we desperately need the right kind of it.” [A] very elegant, high-class self-help book”
Based on their Financial Times Weekend column, philosopher Julian Baggini and his psychotherapist partner Antonia Macaro offer intriguing answers to life’s questions. Can infidelity be good for you? What does it mean to stay true to yourself? Must we fulfil our potential?
Self-help with a distinctly cerebral edge, the shrink and the sage – aka Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro – have been dispensing advice through their FT column since October 2010. Combining practical advice on personal dilemmas with meditations on the meaning of concepts like free will, spirituality and independence, this book – their first together – expands on these columns and adds much more.
Through questions of existential unease, metaphysical trauma and – for instance – how much we should care about our appearance, intellectual agony uncle and aunt team Baggini and Macaro begin to piece together the answer that we’d all like to hear: what is the good life, and how can we live it?
To coincide with the publication of The Shrink and The Sage, Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro, authors of the book and the FT Weekend Magazine column of the same name, talk to philosopher John Sellars about the relationship between ancient Stoic philosophy and modern psychotherapy.