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As my old mate Sam T told me in his comment on my discussion last week of all the forms of dementia I could think of, the most troubling of them all had somehow slipped my mind.

And this lapse really started me wondering, indeed worrying. How could I have been so blinkered in my thinking as to focus on such syndromes as he-mentia, shementia, cementia, sedimentia, academentia and doughmentia to the exclusion of the most fundamental human mentia of them all, me-mentia?

The answer, I’m afraid, is that it was probably a case of so-called ‘Freudian forgetfulness’, or what Freud himself called repression, of the shame I feel at how self-centred and self-interested I see myself as still being despite my best efforts to minimise such symptoms of my own me-mentia.

Not that I haven’t made some progress toward sanity in this regard. For example, I fancy myself an exception to Logan Pearsall Smith’s devastating contention that "every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast."

And even if self-awareness of my literary limitations is ever insufficient to keep my ego in check in this regard, I can always remind myself that I’m a mere columnist, not an author, and in any case, I can always rely on readers like the aforementioned Sam T to bring me back to my senses.

That being said, however, it’s an inescapable fact of life that every one of us needs certain basic feelings of self-worth and self-care to enable us to successfully compete with our fellows for the food, drink, shelter and whatever else we need to survive and if possible thrive.

But unfortunately, as the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued in distinguishing us from other animals, physical "needs" can be satisfied, but the human mind endlessly invents "wants" that it proceeds to imagine are further needs and thus is capable of an infinity of insatiable greeds...

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