Sublime

Quant au risque de suicide, Breuer connaissait un test infaillible. Le patient se projette-t-il dans l’avenir ? Nietzsche avait passé l’épreuve ! Il n’était donc pas suicidaire : il parlait d’une mission longue de dix ans et de livres auxquels il devait encore donner forme dans son esprit.

The ability to hold paradox

As French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) showed in his brilliant 1961 study History of Madness (Histoire de la folie), modern reason created ‘madness’ (i.e., came up with this category) and in so doing, created itself – defining itself as sane, that is, by what it was not.

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.”

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.”

Case histories do demonstrate more what’s wrong with psychology than with its cases. The clinical stories show how usual psychology—and we are each affected by its style of thought—draws its conclusions by working backward from the ordinary to the extraordinary, taking the “extra” right out of it.