“Character and plot. Chicken and egg. Which comes first? Aristotle’s solution was simple and radical. He said: Plot is character. Forget psychology, forget the insides of men’s heads. Judge them by their actions.” - Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands

Staring out the window of a train carriage after a busy weekend is often the best time for ‘worthwhile’ thoughts, and new ideas. It’s also the time when I’m prone to introspection. The results of the latter never seems to all that constructive, even when it isn’t negative introspection per sé. Maybe that’s why I prefer reading a book, or watching a movie; it keeps my mind from from turning inwards, from introspection.

This particular evening, I’m watching Shadowlands, a story about a very painful episode in the life of one of my favorite writers, C.S. Lewis. The above quote jumped out at me, because it reminded me of some of Lewis’ other writing, in particular his thoughts on the act of introspection:

“In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.
[...]
The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look ”inside ourselves“ and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it.” - C.S. Lewis, Suprised by Joy

Lewis had a strong distaste for introspection. He even disliked the concept of talking with others about oneself in the ‘third person’ (’conversational introspection’). His stories generally reflect this; characters are painted by their actions, not their thought processes.

And yet, many great books are great precisely because they put us in the heads of the main character; we get an inside view into the minds of the protagonist. Wherein lies the difference between destructive introspection as described by Lewis’, and the ‘projected introspection’ many writers appear to engage in?

Leanne Payne, a great writer and also a big fan of Lewis, compares ‘introspection’ to the act of dissecting. It’s a powerful metaphor. In a way, introspection is much like performing surgery, where you cut through layers of tissue, fat, and bone, to expose what lies underneath. If the subject is alive, this is surgery. If he is dead, we call it dissection.

In the case of introspection, however, the difference is less clear. What might start as an act of self-administered surgery, an effort to heal, could very well culminate in a complete dissection, and a dead, gutted body as a result.

Surgery of this kind is perhaps best left to experts (psychologists), or should be limited to the ‘projected’ kind; characters in a book, or a movie. If my own experiences are anything to go by, both introspection in its original meaning, and ‘conversational introspection’, are very dangerous, best kept to a minimum, or avoided entirely.

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