preoccupation with self

In “Shadow Nation,” the essay that lends the book its title, Cyrus M. Copeland muses that shadows are “that part of our personality we reject out of fear, or ignorance or shame,” but he also suggests that Iran and America share many of the same traits, namely ethnocentrism, “overriding egoism” and a “preoccupation with self.”

“Some questions,” he began a 1985 essay in Moment, a magazine he edited and had founded a decade earlier with Elie Wiesel: “Why do we, less than 3 percent of America’s population, far, far less than 1 percent of the world’s, seem implicated in so much that happens about us? Or is it that, out of our preoccupation with self, we only imagine that implication? “And why is it that some of us are so absorbed with self, and others of us so indifferent?” he went on.

This helps him and above all her to eliminate that super-conscious preoccupation with self which has become the bane of existence in modern times.

Selfishness is the root of suicide, usually pathological in its utter preoccupation with self as the most important thing in the universe, but often only the result of a fostering of self-interest and a failure to train the mind to think of other people, which is of the very essence of religion.

Hysterical manifestations are indeed common at all the noted shrines, and wherever the excitement of exorcism is at hand to feed the morbid preoccupation with self of the hysterical.