Debbie Foster

The frontal cortices appear to be instrumental in assembling the vast mental panoramas that the process of consciousness literally illuminates and identifies as ours.

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.

… we must never forget the lesson of Oedipus with which we began: that the urges to confront or to flee the truth are present in all of us. The harder the truth, the greater the temptation to escape it.

… ‘genius' functions as a mythology rather than an objective category. A genius needs a story as well as achievements.

It is known that the likelihood of long-term therapeutic gains increases with the likelihood of the subject having a mystical experience, prima facie evidence favoring a critical role for subjectivity. It is precisely the high emotional impact of the memories of the vivid and highly unusual psychedelic experience that serves as the primary source

I wanted to step outside repetition, or to find a way to perceive it differently, closer to Gertrude Stein's questioning: "Is there repetition or is there insistence." For Stein, nothing can be repeated exactly by a living person; the emphasis will differ, transforming repetition to insistence. She learned this, she says, by observing the

this can be viewed as a defining feature of Freud's modernity: his total engagement with compound meanings and contradictions; his continuous excavation of mental life, all the way down to its primal substances. We do not think logically like characters in a novel. The mind is messy and loose chains of association unravel in unexpected directions.

it's dangerous to imagine human beings as less than human, especially when their oppression arises from already being perceived as less than human in the first place. A flat character is more than an aesthetic mistake: it's a political error too, even if placed in the service of good politics.

If you’re skeptical of any prescriptive advice to begin with, if “less certainty, more inquiry” is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow. And if that’s not self-awareness and self-discipline, I don’t know what is.