In what Freud called ‘primary process thinking,’ the wish is conceived of as gratified, it comes in gratifying form; in ‘secondary process thinking,’ reality is taken into account.

What Žižek calls ‘the attitude of overinterpretation’ is a self-cure for the fear of what I am calling ‘not getting it’. Overinterpretation is getting it with a vengeance. It betrays an anxiety, so to speak, of not being close enough to, not being of the same mind as, the one supposed to know.

(frustration is optimistic in the sense that it believes that what is wanted is available, so we might talk about frustration as a form of faith).

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.

The ego in the Freudian story – ourselves as we prefer to be seen – is like a picture with a frame around it, and the function of the frame is to keep the picture intact.

‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead’;

Our doubts tend to be about whether we can get the satisfactions that we seek, not about the nature of these satisfactions.

I remember a child telling me in a session – a child who believed, as many children do, that being an adult is the solution to being a child – that the reason he wanted to be bigger was because he wouldn’t have to want to be bigger.

That if growing up might be a quest for one’s illegitimacy, this is because one’s legitimacy resides in what one thinks one knows about oneself. This, I think, is what Freud quickly discovered and then tried to undiscover. It is not an increase in self-knowledge that Freud describes, but its limits. He