We are accomplices struggling to become collaborators – at least in this picture. We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use.

We have to be attentive, in other words, to what we use fantasy to do; whether it becomes, as we say, an end in itself.

People become real to us by frustrating us; if they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy.

Freud calls ‘repression’ is a way of getting into something by getting out of it (the neurotic keeps arriving at the place he is trying to escape from; he can get to his destination only by trying to avoid it). Repression is what we do with the experiences that we cannot let ourselves have. We set them aside so as not to be troubled by them again.

he is a writer shrewd enough to know that betrayal only matters because something else matters more.

Suffering, the psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler once remarked in a rather too neat formulation, is a consequence of the distance between the ego and the ego-ideal, the distance between who I feel myself to be and who I want to be.

What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing – nothing comes of nothing – but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a

It may be a disillusionment, but it is a salutary one, that love can never be between equals because love makes people unequal. It returns them to, it reminds them of, an initiating inequality. Love is the medium in which people become unequal, and for the reasons actually spelled out by Baier;

avoiding things is a way of attending to them, of keeping them in mind.