Gabor Maté: the most interesting voice on the human mind since Sigmund Freud
It’s 10 o’clock in the morning, and Gabor Maté is anxious. “I gave a talk last night at Troxy to two thousand people,” he says nervously. “I beat myself up afterward. I didn’t give them enough.”
Maté is in town to talk about his new book, The Myth Of Normal, a 562-page behemoth on how to heal in a toxic culture. The idea is to transition from a society that penalises illness to one that tackles our trauma. Maté has agreed to meet me to record an episode for my podcast; but really, it’s just a pretext for me to meet one of the most interesting voices on the human mind since Sigmund Freud.
Dr Gabor Maté was born in Budapest in 1944: a child of the Holocaust, his grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. At age one, his mother put him in the care of a stranger for five weeks to save his life. “It made me feel like I wasn’t worthy,” he says. Understanding that emotion – and its long term effects – has been his life’s work.
Maté has, by his own admission, always been desperate to prove himself. “On an unconscious level,” he says, “I work to justify my very being.” He became a workaholic doctor hooked on buying CDs: a rather benign
