Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)
The fundamental importance of the distinction between self and not-self—the source of all other distinctions, it has rightly been said—might suggest that it serves as the first principle of mental life, the axiomatic premise without which mental life cannot even begin. In fact, however, it is a distinction that is accepted, in the infancy of life, only with the greatest reluctance, after fierce inner struggles to deny it; and it remains the source of our existential uneasiness, as well as the source of our intellectual mastery of the world around us.
(p. 163)
[it] presents itself, at first, as a painful separation from the surrounding environment, and this original experience of overwhelming loss becomes the basis of all subsequent experiences of alienation, of historical myths of a lost golden age, and of the myth of the primary fall from grace, which finds its way into so many religions. Religion, like art at its best, seeks precisely to restore the original sense of union with the world, but only after first acknowleding the fact of alienation, conceived as original sin, as hubris followed by divine retribution, as existential loneliness and separation, or in the arts (especially in music, which conveys these experiences at their deepest level), as the rhythm of tension and release followed by inner peace.
(p. 164)
