Debbie Foster

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.

In 2015, the psychologist Bruce Wampold showed that, while some treatments might be better than others, these differences are small compared to the effects of contextual factors, like patient expectations, the relationship with the healer, and a shared understanding of the reason for suffering. Much of healing, whether by Colombian shamans or Johns

this is precisely how “prophecy” works—it is always self-fulfilling.

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

Some monks visualized not only their thoughts but also themselves thinking those thoughts, as a way to reframe their prayers and keep them from meandering.

Neuroses are jailbreaks—not out of a prison but into one. Today neurosis takes the place of the monasteries, Freud wrote, which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.

White space in fiction or narrative nonfiction can act like cuts in film: a way to shift from location A to location B, or from scene to scene.

How we imagine children to be turns out to reflect how we imagine the world ought to be, which is what makes the death of an innocent child (or, for some, that of an unborn fetus) so hard to bear: a possible world, a better world, seems to have died with it.

If the United States' Cold War propaganda efforts have receded so far into the past as to be meaningless to us today, then it remains remarkable that we still believe basically everything they said.