Sublime

How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?

has supposed that she suffered from a brief “psychotic episode” indicative of “schizophrenia.” Bruno Bettelheim, whose trenchant comments on Carotenuto’s book have since been added as a foreword to it, alternates between “either a schizophrenic disturbance or severe hysteria with schizoid features.”

Criminal lawyers, not surprisingly, are increasingly drawing on brain images supposedly showing a biological defect that “made” their clients commit murder.

incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular. It is not.

Folly The wise know that all human beings, themselves included, are never far from folly. They have irrational desires and incompatible aims, they are unaware of a lot of what they feel, they are prone to mood swings, they are visited by powerful fantasies and delusions – and are always buffeted by the curious demands of their sexuality.

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.

Rushworth Kidder, the founder of the Institute for Global Ethics and author of Moral Courage and How Good People Make Tough Choices,

“A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (I guess she would know.)