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Only when one feels an insight in one’s bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about “responsibility assumption,” but it’s all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it.
If a system is infinitely expanding, one cannot not be encircled by it.
The lonely I ecstatically dissolving into the we. How often I’ve heard that! It’s the common denominator of every form of bliss—romantic, sexual, political, religious, mystical. Everyone wants and welcomes this blissful merger.
Only Thelma could tell me. But which Thelma? The Thelma who deceived me? The Thelma who deceived herself? Or the Thelma who was deceived by herself?
the unbonded obsessional, like nascent oxygen, quickly melds with some mental image or idea. This moment, this brief interval between obsessions, was the crucial time
Every severely obsessional patient has a core of anger, and I was not unprepared for its emergence in Thelma. All in all, I considered her anger, despite its irrational components, an excellent development.
Cervantes asked, “Which will you have: wise madness or foolish sanity?”
I had stripped away defenses without building anything to replace them.
