We frustrate ourselves by what we do to our frustration; we use our frustration to deceive ourselves. We are, at least for Freud and Bion, frustrated of frustration;

Melding, as much so-called Attachment Theory does, Darwin and Freud – the need to survive through dependent relationships made compatible with the need to be sensually gratified

In its state of repression it is an uncompleted action, a thus far missed opportunity. Though the ego, our more conscious self, is living as if it knows exactly what would happen were this impulse to be enacted. Faced with unacceptable desires, the ego is in a continual state of performance anxiety.

From this point of view we are, in Wittgenstein’s bewitching term, ‘bewitched’ by getting it; and that means bewitched by a picture of ourselves as conspirators or accomplices or know-alls.

As though some kinds of knowledge – call them wishful fantasies of satisfaction – were both the preconditions for satisfaction and a satisfaction in their own right; as though certain knowledge was the object of desire. And if this object of desire was a person, our picture of satisfaction would be of some kind of certainty in our relation to them,

If thinking is the way to modify it, then attacking one’s capacity to think would be an evasion; failures of imagination would be the unwillingness to bear with frustration.

We mustn’t let knowing do the work of acknowledging; otherwise we can end up disbelieving – that is, being unable to prove – the existence of other people and then of ourselves.

When Freud wanted to persuade us that perception was distorted by wish, he wanted to persuade us that we tend to see merely what we want in what is there, and that knowing (and not-knowing) is all to do with wanting rather than with truth.

he is a writer shrewd enough to know that betrayal only matters because something else matters more.