Debbie Foster

His resistance to the truth about himself is expressed as curiosity about something else, a ruse familiar to psychoanalysts.

The idea of Rome as the Eternal City inspired one of Freud's most memorable metaphors. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagines a fantastical Rome ‘in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent'. In this truly eternal city, every building would exist in

The Enlightenment was a scene of intellectual conflict that drew upon utterly foreign cultures in the ancient world and in the New World to destabilize systems of oppression. It was not a unified program but a process of creative intellectual destruction.

Trapped in the past or future in the DMN, you’re likely to abandon projects you once started with enthusiasm, make careless mistakes, or, worse, fall into a state of misery and despair, for no good reason whatsoever.

ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don’t do, with what I say or don’t say; and whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it, whether they can see something in it that I can’t. It is as though ordinary life is a performance art in front of, initially, one’s

Work exploring the link between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is characterized by impulsivity and mind wandering, suggests that ADHD-prone individuals fail to accurately trade off the value of their thoughts with respect to the demands of the external task (Franklin et al. 2014).

If I am capable of change, I think…, it will begin there, in language. A risk: it may end there too. One cannot trick words with a pratfall; they will only turn away. I have to actually leap off an edge, not knowing whether they will rise up to meet me.

Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

… the more foreign a state is from normal behavior, the more it demonstrates special powers and supernatural contact. A shaman who chitchats with an audience in their everyday voice is likely to be considered a fraud. One who thrashes violently, speaks in a strange voice, and then doesn't remember anything afterward is more conceivably doing