Sublime

So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

We are always involved, or should be, in the giving of and asking for good reasons to change.

through his use of an albeit idiosyncratic ordinary language, Winnicott made the theory of psychoanalysis more accessible to people it was originally intended to help.

It was often Winnicott’s inclination to dispel a contradiction, here between Klein and Anna Freud, with a paradox. To find a third position that would combine, and so modify, two apparently incompatible options.

‘a most valuable compromise’ between the other two kinds, a compromise between language and silence.

Whatever else a culture is, it is a repertoire of desirable forms of change.

Melding, as much so-called Attachment Theory does, Darwin and Freud – the need to survive through dependent relationships made compatible with the need to be sensually gratified

Converting others being the only antidote to one’s own doubt.

Freud, in other words – like Musil and Mann, but in a different kind of language – is describing a loss of confidence in our knowledge of the good, of the good as something we can both recognize, and aspire to live by, whatever our versions of the good happen to be (after psychoanalysis, distinctions between good and evil become less tenable, less