Tell me, what do you think of yourself? How do you feel about living with you? You know, the precedents aren’t too encouraging. A man that we call Saint Peter cried out: "O, Lord, keep away from me, for I am a sinful man." A man whom we call Saint Paul had the words wrenched out of him: "O, wretched man that I am." And the great king, David, cried out in the Psalm: "I am a worm" - I am a worm! - "and no man." Or make it more contemporary. A teenage girl in my study stated her problem honestly: "People don’t like me." "What people?" I asked. She thought for a moment, and then replied: "Well, me, for one." And that’s our problem, isn’t it?

I was reading a columnist who made this pungent statement: "Not self-love, but self-loathing is the chief problem of the contemporary personality."

One …