intercorporeally—

holy intensity?

laugh not simply because something is humorous but because it is honest.

Changing evidence is more effective than changing our long-standing ideas about others and ourselves, if the objective is to maintain the status quo.

It can be destabilizing to change long-standing ideas about ourselves, others, and the world, which is why, even as evidence contradicting a belief should lead us to adjust the belief to accommodate reality, many people will bend the evidence before them to keep their thinking intact—the fundamental maneuver marking perverse thinking.

like the map that comes to stand in for the territory, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes it: a simulation that takes the place of the real.

We are our choices, Sartre says; “an individual chooses and makes himself.” Our choices determine our identity.

“Indeed, a work of art,” writes composer Arnold Schoenberg, “can produce no greater effect than when it transmits the emotions which raged in the creator to the listener, in such a way that they also rage and storm in him.”

The “development of an ability to think,” in Bion’s words, occurs as a way of coping with the thoughts that crystallize from frustrated feelings: in philosopher Emil Cioran’s terms, “Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.” With the breast—or its metonym—in the mouth, however, there’s no need for thinking. You are free to feel.