The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued - if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing - are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access

You write to find out what you believe.

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.