Getting them wrong

Recently I watched the film "American Pastoral" during a flight. So engaged in the film that I decided to read the novel by Philip Roth from which the film was adapted. I feel he had a deep insight into human psyche and often dwelt into the bewilderment beneath every placid surface.

One example is his description about how when we interact with people we often get them totally wrong no matter how objective we try to be.

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance.....take them on with an open mind, and yet you never fail to get them wrong......You get them wrong before you meet them, while you are anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you are with them;and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again..."

Don't we relate to this? So very often we place people in silos based on our own set of ill-perceived criteria. We never consider the uniqueness and complexity behind each character and once an impression is formed we forget that the character evolves and changes with time and circumstances.

As a counsellor it seems imperative to understand a client well, his ego, alto ego, imprints, his shadow, his strength and weakness,  his inner self etc etc, yet for me (partly due to my incompetence) I continue to struggle to go behind the client. Thus I know what Roth was alluding to and when Trump says he can size a person up within 1 minute I am really amazed.

Roth continued with " Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that- well, lucky you"

Don't we however need to exercise some judgement when dealing with people to safeguard our own interest? I think what Roth really meant is to accept the fact that we can never understand a person as well as we think we do, given all the unreal expectations, bias, arrogance and hope within us. Hence we should just "go along for the ride" which I take it to be accepting that sometimes we can be right and sometimes wrong and so be it as long as we do not hold onto our judgement too strongly, ie. neither be too enthralled nor abhorred.