On Love

Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but she could provide an inside account. Her experience had prompted her to reinterpret a famous speech, in the Symposium, in which Socrates, whom she considers her role model, argues that the highest kind of love is not for people but for ideals. She was troubled by Socrates’ unerotic and detached view of love, and she proposed that he was actually describing how two lovers aspire to embody ideals together. True lovers, she explained, don’t really want to be loved for who they are; they want to be loved because neither of them is happy with who he or she is. “One of the things I said very early on to my beloved was this: ‘I could completely change now,’ ” she recounted. “Radical change, becoming a wholly other person, is not out of the question. There is suddenly room for massive aspiration.

On Loneliness

Agnes, who was diagnosed with autism in her thirties, felt that she and Arnold were trying to navigate the problem of loneliness—not the kind that occurred when each of them was in a room alone but the sort of loneliness that they felt in the presence of another person. Most couples struggle with a version of this problem, but it often feels like a private burden. For Agnes, it was philosophical work, a way of sorting out “what one human can be to another human.” It seemed to her that Arnold had come to her with a question: Is it possible to eliminate the loneliness that is intrinsic to any relationship, to be together in a way that makes full use of another person’s mind?

On Excess

"We might say, then, that excessive behaviour reveals a failure of authority; that only children with weak parents are excessive. From a psychoanalytic point of view we might even say - in support of the law-andorder lobby - that when young people are being excessive they are unconsciously - without realizing it - trying to find strong, containing parents. Unruly adolescents, for example, can be thought of as needing to find out just how reliable, just how robust and impressive, the authorities really are. And even though this is an often useful account - that children are only as powerful as their parents let them be, and that there is nothing the child is more frightened of than being too powerful - there is something in this view that we need to notice."

On Knowing Someone in a Relationship

"...certain forms of knowing strive to fix the fluidity and multiplicity of the other into a predictable pattern. This form of knowing kills romantic passion, and this is a kind of knowing that is very prevalent in long-term relationships. It has a strong appeal. It seems to be security enhancing. But it is coercive and illusory.

On the Vulnerability of Children

"But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things."

When Is a Gourmet Meal Not a Gourment Meal?

"A gourmet meal is a gourmet meal only if one is prepared to enjoy it in a relatively conflict-free manner, which means that one is not maintaining the conviction that one does not deserve it, is too greedy, is spending too much, is being exploited by the restaurant, etc. One may eat many such meals and still end up unfed."

On Trauma

"If we are to be an understanding relational home for a traumatized person, we must tolerate, even draw upon, our own existential vulnerabilities so that we can dwell unflinchingly with his or her unbearable and recurring emotional pain. When we dwell with others’ unendurable pain, their shattered emotional worlds are enabled to shine with a kind of sacredness that calls forth an understanding and caring engagement within which traumatized states can be gradually transformed into bearable painful feelings."

On Clinical Work, Psychoanalytic Technique, and Being Surprised

"One of us remembers being told by a supervisor years ago that with long experience one would no longer be surprised by patients, that the incapacity for further surprise was the mark of a mature clinician. What a loss! So many possibilities of experience for patient, analyst, and analytic couple are foreclosed by devaluing surprise and new experience. Making a routine procedure out of the analytic couch, for example, ignores the developmental importance of mutual gaze regulation and other forms of facial affective communication in forming possibilities of relatedness. We must, instead, retain a thoroughly exploratory attitude toward everything we do and create together in a psychoanalysis, and relentlessly seek the meanings, both individual and cocreated."

Mental Pain and Breakdown

"All people who are having breakdowns, whether it's psychotic breakdowns or non-psychotic breakdowns, have that look of utter bewilderment on their face. It's the first visual indication of a person being in really deep trouble."

Beauty and the Two Selves

In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s mother also teaches her daughter that society’s regard is everything. That “a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.” That she must manipulate and manage both her gifts and society’s esteem to get what she needs, to be safe. It makes sense that Lily is always looking in mirrors; she knows very well that the specular self is the social self, the one on which her life depends.
But there are two Lilys: the one ravenous for approval and security, who believes entirely in “the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled,” and another, more private one. When she disobeys society’s rules, the rules of her mother, in that grace period before the other inhabitants of the cage begin to punish her for her transgressions, she can feel it, “one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.”