Sublime

the presence of an inner attorney—

‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’” I

Children, and adults as well, perform best when there is consistency and dependability. The brain craves them both.

psychoanalyst Erich Fromm

“Why must a man who cares neither for wealth nor intellect bear the responsibility of both, and each to the utmost?”

Early on, he had fallen victim to what psychologists call identity foreclosure—when we settle prematurely on a sense of self without enough due diligence, and close our minds to alternative selves.

your old brain segregates all people into six categories. Is this someone to: (1) nurture, (2) be nurtured by, (3) have sex with, (4) run away from, (5) submit to, or (6) attack.

Like Kat Cole, you learned to zoom in and not ask questions about what larger things you were abetting. And because the firm knew at some level what psychological sacrifice all this demanded, it had the decency to put on a speaker series for you, where museum chieftains and health care experts and this foundation president—people living closer to t

The psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg wrote, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them.