The term ‘Friend’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several intersecting axes, none reducible to the other. The most ancient stratum is philosophical: Plato’s Lysis stages the aporetic inquiry into what friendship (philia) is, oscillating between need-based and good-based accounts without resolution, while Aristotle — mediated through Ricoeur, Konstan, and the Stoics — develops the tripartite taxonomy of utility, pleasure, and virtue friendships, with the last constituting genuine mutuality. The Stoic strand, recovered by Graver, insists that the friend is as intimate to the self as a limb, yet the wise person remains self-sufficient even after such loss. Nietzsche shatters the consoling image: the friend is ‘your own face in a rough and imperfect mirror,’ a site for self-overcoming rather than sentimental comfort, demanding silence, conjecture, and the hard pity of a master psychologist. Ricoeur synthesizes these threads through the figure of the ‘other self’ (heteros autos), arguing that mutuality imposes ethical requirements that egoism cannot domesticate. Von Franz and Freud introduce the shadow-friend, the dead or lost companion who returns in dreams as a psychic messenger. Across the corpus, friendship emerges as the primary relational form in which the self encounters genuine otherness — neither mirror nor stranger — and must negotiate reciprocity, care, utility, and self-knowledge simultaneously.
your friend’s face is something else beside. It is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror… Your friend should be a master in conjecture and in keeping silence.
Nietzsche reframes friendship as a site of self-confrontation and demanding psychological discernment, rejecting sentimental mutuality in favour of the friend as a harsh, revealing mirror of the self.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis
Two notions appear to be struggling or balancing in the mind of Socrates: First, the sense that friendship arises out of human needs and wants; Secondly, that the higher form or ideal of friendship exists only for the sake of the good.
Plato’s Lysis identifies the constitutive aporia of friendship theory: whether it is grounded in lack and desire or in the good itself, a tension that anchors subsequent philosophical debate.
, Lysis, -390thesis
The friend, inasmuch as he is that other self, has the role of providing what one is incapable of procuring by oneself… ‘Friends,’ we are surprised to read, ‘are thought the greatest of external’
Ricoeur, reading Aristotle, establishes that the friend as ‘other self’ (heteros autos) is indispensable to the happy life precisely because the self cannot be self-sufficient in isolation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
The greatest good of friendship is not daily intercourse… but on the great occasions of life, when the advice of a friend is needed, then the word spoken in season about conduct, about health, about marriage, about business.
Plato locates friendship’s supreme value not in constant presence but in the disinterested counsel available at life’s decisive moments, distinguishing true friendship from mere sociability.
, Lysis, -390thesis
each loves the other as being the man he is… This ‘as being’ averts any subsequent egoistic leanings: it is constitutive of mutuality. The latter, in turn, cannot be conceived of in absence of the relation to the good.
Ricoeur argues that genuine mutuality in friendship is constituted by loving the other as what he actually is, a structure that logically requires grounding in the good and forecloses egoism.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
The relation of the wise person to friends is not a cool or distant relation, as to a piece of baggage that can easily be laid aside; rather, it is as intimate as one’s attachment to one’s own body.
Graver shows that Stoic self-sufficiency does not produce emotional detachment from friends; the friend is constitutively intimate with the self in the manner of a bodily member.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis
a friend is intrinsically valuable, ‘choiceworthy for his own sake’… in wise friendship each person ‘values his friend’s reason equally with his own.’
The Stoics, according to Graver, hold that the friend is not merely instrumentally valuable but is intrinsically choiceworthy, with some Stoics going so far as to equate the friend’s reason with one’s own.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis
Epicurus’ emphasis on the absolute necessity of friendship for happiness… Like justice, friendship is a means to absence of pain, or tranquillity, by the protection and confidence it provides.
Long and Sedley demonstrate that for Epicurus friendship is not merely pleasant but absolutely necessary to happiness, its utility residing in the security and freedom from fear it generates.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
classical Greek lacked an ordinary noun corresponding to the English ‘friendship’… which uniquely designates mutual affection as opposed to the individual sentiment.
Konstan’s philological argument reveals that the very concept of friendship as a reciprocal bond distinct from individual sentiment required Aristotle to press philia into double duty, exposing a conceptual gap in the Greek lexicon.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
the body which is in health requires neither medical nor any other aid… the sick loves him, because he is sick… sickness is an evil, and the art of medicine a good and useful thing.
Plato uses the physician analogy to argue that friendship arises from lack — the neither-good-nor-evil being courts the good because of some deficiency — anticipating Aristotelian accounts of friendship grounded in need.
, Lysis, -390supporting
the good are like one another, and friends to one another; and the bad… are never at unity with one another or with themselves; for they are passionate and restless.
Plato revises the ‘like to like’ maxim by restricting genuine friendship to the good, since only the good are sufficiently self-unified to sustain stable bonds with others.
, Lysis, -390supporting
you cannot endure to be alone with yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to mislead your neighbour into love… you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.
Nietzsche argues that flight to the neighbour is a failure of self-love, and that genuine friendship requires first creating the capacity for it within oneself rather than projecting need outward.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883supporting
I had a patient who drank and was in a dangerous situation inwardly and outwardly. He dreamt again and again of a dead school friend… the type of schizophrenia which you could describe as moral insanity.
Von Franz presents the dead friend appearing in repeated dreams as a shadow-figure embodying the patient’s own dissociated nihilism, demonstrating how the psyche personifies its most dangerous split-off contents in the image of a known person.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
the original sense of philos was ‘his’; this developed to ‘friend,’ and this evolution of sense is supported by the analogy of Lat. suus… to make somebody his friend.
Benveniste traces the etymological debate over philos to reveal that ‘friend’ may derive from the possessive ‘one’s own,’ locating the concept of friendship at the boundary between property, kinship, and affective bond.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
The first stage of meeting one’s spiritual friend is like going to a supermarket… The second stage of your relationship is like going to court, as though you were a criminal.
Trungpa maps the progressive stages of the spiritual friend relationship as a movement from idealization and projection to uncomfortable self-exposure, recasting friendship as a vehicle for dismantling ego-armor.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973supporting
I have a passion for friends; and I would rather have a good friend than the best cock or quail in the world… I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius.
Socrates’ declaration of his overriding desire for friendship establishes the existential priority of the friend over all material and competitive goods in the Platonic inquiry.
, Lysis, -390supporting
if you are friends, you must have natures which are congenial to one another… no one who loves or desires another would ever have loved or desired or affected him, if he had not been in some way congenial to him.
Plato proposes congeniality of nature as a deeper criterion of friendship than simple likeness, attempting to resolve the aporia by grounding attraction in soul-affinity rather than mere resemblance.
, Lysis, -390supporting
I often introduce the concept with the Two Friends Metaphor.
Harris deploys a ‘Two Friends’ metaphor as a clinical entry point for teaching self-compassion, using the imaginative framework of friendship to bypass clients’ resistance to therapeutic language.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009aside
you could experience the happiness of seeing your friend, the anticipation that she’s about to appear, the fear that she won’t arrive, or worry that you might no longer have anything in common.
Barrett uses the anticipation of a friend’s arrival as a phenomenological illustration of the brain’s predictive processing, with ‘friend’ functioning here as a concrete anchoring scenario rather than a theoretical object.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside