He is asserting that wholeness only comes through relationship with another. Only in such fashion can the third appear. If we have only a conversation with ourselves, as a hermit might, we can easily get caught in the looping tape of our own madness, or our own stagnant, self-confirming neurosis.

Today most therapists are behaviorists, seeking to modify non-productive behaviors and replace them with more effective strategies. The second largest group practices some form of cognitive therapy, which identifies various “bad ideas” we have acquired that reflexively make self-defeating choices for us and seeks to replace them with more effective

The tragic sense of life, then, is not morbid but rather heroic, for it is a summons to consciousness, change, and humility before the awesome powers of nature and our own divided psyche. Who ignores this summons will suffer the wrath of the gods, the splitting of the soul we call neurosis.

What does the ego know, and what does it not know? And doesn’t what it does not know play a large role in the conduct of daily life? Again, what is unconscious owns us, and brings the weight of history into our present.

“the wounded vision,” the inherent biasing of our choices as a result of our own psychological history.

As our brother Job learned, our presumptive contracts are delusory efforts by the ego to be in control. We learn that life is much riskier, more powerful, more mysterious than we had ever thought possible. While we are rendered more uncomfortable by this discovery, it is a humbling that deepens spiritual possibility. The world is more magical, less

This search, this fantasy, is the chief fuel for our culture—the fantasy of romantic love, the fantasy that there is this other who will make our life work for us, heal us, protect us, nurture us, and spare us the world’s trauma.

A complex is cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.

what Freud called “the repetition compulsion,” the magnetic summons of an old wound in our lives that has so much energy, such a familiar script, and such a predictable outcome attached to it that we feel obliged to relive it or pass it on to our children.