Debbie Foster

There are times when a voice from the beyond—that of an oracle, a prophet, a psychotherapist—is the only force capable of breaking the circle of doubt.

We have a set of stories about what geniuses are, and how they work, and how singular their achievements are—stories that are often entirely untrue.

Meaning is the value of information, in other words, and it is what we as humans constantly create and recreate as part of our social and cultural experience.50 Rather than hovering over and above us, animating us, or exerting its own transpersonal causal (or, in Jung’s paradoxical formulation, “acausal”) force, meaning is constantly fashioned and

Identities are interchangeable with metadata, and metadata is interchangeable with our everyday language.

Some of the earliest practices of reading were not of letters, words, or books, but of stars, entrails, and birds, and these practices had a significant impact on the way literature was read and understood in the ancient world.

Borges reminds us that Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.

Freud was a modern alchemist who reformulated medieval demons as complexes and Darwinian imperatives. He translated all things devilish - lust, violence, cruelty - into terms that were compatible with twentieth-century thinking.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein found Freud's dream theory logically inconsistent. How can a wish be fulfilled in a dream if the dreamer isn't aware of having had that wish in the first place? And how can a symbol function as a symbol if the dreamer doesn't know what it is supposed to be symbolising? The simple answer to these questions is that

maybe it wasn’t true that her family was chaotic and his family was proper, the biggest difference seemed to be the story, Hector’s family always had a story, a perfectly neat, organized story, with a beginning, middle and end, with a main character and an obstacle and an enemy, with a complicated Before and a happy After, and in their presence,