Sublime

From the impinging mother to the indoctrinating analyst, this figure of the rigid, imposing, pre-emptive presence haunts Winnicott’s work as a negative ideal, the saboteur of personal development.

a protector in Person A criticizes Person B for displaying an attribute that is actually characteristic of another part of Person A—either an exile or another protector—who is being disowned.

Wasn’t that the point? A journalistic foray into unknown territory, reporter’s notebook blazing bright, à la George Plimpton, or more close to home, Colson Whitehead?* But the me who has now traveled this far can’t help but feel a little differently.

(‘a miserable mediocrity’).

of the New Journalism (which put a new emphasis on the voice and point of view of the reporter),

It is a comment on our press conventions that we are considered “well-informed” to precisely the extent that we know “the real story,” the story not in the newspaper.

Wallace’s cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.

her aura of near-pathological inauthenticity.

(it is a shibboleth of psychoanalytic treatment that the patient comes to psychoanalysis to change by remaining the same).