Ok, not that this comes out of a personal situation that I'm currently experiencing or anything, but has anyone had a friend who, for whatever reason, seems to think that someone died and made him/her your psychoanalyst?
I mean: a friend or rather acquaintance who thinks they know so much about you that their every piece of advice is worth a careful and "sincere" giving and taking between the two of you? (without even so much as the half-facetious playfulness that usually lends advice between friends its tolerability?) Someone who considers it his/her business to help others around them "fix" their lives? I take issue with that! No, let me be more reasonable: I take issue with people who actively seek to probe into the nature of my problems and offer solutions when I do not seek to do the same for them in return! It seems to me that a friend cannot help another friend with a problem unless the help is mutual in some way or another--even if the mutual "help" is only a learning-process by which the advice-giver comes to realize the half-truths and half-falsities of his or her advice. Personal problems always have a way of resolving themselves so that the "one in need" is revealed as "one full of surprises." But when the surprises come, who can say they knew the one to begin with? A person can never be a true psychoanalyst to another person (unless for officially arranged purposes between a consenting patient and "doctor").
Can you really presume to know someone else better than they know themselves? Can you know what's best for them better than they do for themselves? Ultimately, I do not believe so. I believe you can offer advice, but that advice is always subject to the ignorance of the one giving it (and so must be recognized as such: i.e. fallible). Practically, it may end up "helping" the other. But this "help" does not constitute actual knowledge of the other. It does not constitute a real moral "imperative" whose judgment is verified or deemed "true" simply on account of the fact that some kind of pain or suffering is avoided. The "truth" of the advice is only known after the fact because its "truth" hinges on the action of the one to which it is directed (his action in relation to it). This is because there is quite simply and clearly no imperative to act according to advice given, and it only becomes a true imperative after one has accepted it as such. Then again, the person who becomes what he is (and how can this be possible!?) through this process is somehow different though the same, and his newly constituted reality refuses the "truth" of a knowledge which assumed his old self as a starting point. The "true" advice thus is never true at any point: it is only postulated as true at first, and then becomes inapplicable afterward. There is thus no "knowledge of the other" at any point because there is no truth of what is expressed at any point. There seems only to be "reasonable" or "affable" actions and reactions. There aren't even real "reasons" to this "reasonableness" because, in the final analysis, everything is instincts guiding instincts.
How do you know when someone's advice is worth considering? Sometimes friends are in it out of their own carelessness or unresolved personal issues.