Moral rules, as we have seen, simply do not apply in the realm of feelings, if only because feelings cannot be switched on and off at will.

There can be few people who are not familiar with the state of depression. As with anxiety, it is probably when we can’t see the reasons for it that it turns from a painful and unpleasant experience into a malign and threatening form of misery.

Though the contrast between how we feel inside and how we wish to appear to others is universal and causes most of us many an uneasy moment, the extent to which we suffer in this way depends probably on the degree to which we were allowed as children to develop private lives without the threat of adult censure.

But in the end the first step has to be taken in fear and trembling, with no guarantee that there will be a positive outcome.

Whether or not we are able to realise our desires, put our plans into effect, do what we know to be right, will depend on our access to powers and resources which we need to acquire, or to have acquired, from the world around us.

It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the way someone experiences their problems and what the causes of those problems are.

It is about as sensible to seek the reasons for distress inside the ‘self’ as it would be to see feeling cold as a matter of personal responsibility.

We all of us feel that we have things inside us that would make us unlovable if only people knew.

From the brutal racism of the least privileged, through the proverbial mean resentment of the petit bourgeois to the paranoid secrecy of the very powerful, we are all haunted by the possibility of slipping from our perch.

A great deal of distress could be avoided, then, if we could learn to withdraw ‘morality’ from the private world of our feelings and to concentrate instead on the rights and wrongs of our conduct.