Mortal Secrets

Anxiety, depression, addiction and exhaustion are the new normal.

We must reclaim as much of ourselves as we can. We must discover a personal morality shaped by experience rather than 'tribal' prohibitions. We must wrestle our minds free of prehistory so that we can make better, rational choices.

…none of us really believe in our own demise. Some things are so vast or overwhelming that we effectively pretend they aren't there until reality forcefully obtrudes and our defences crumble.

God (as Nietzsche famously declared) is dead. But in the unconscious, God is eternal.

By exposing himself to the overwhelming majesty of Nature, the Romantic enters an altered state of consciousness that facilitates connection with the deeper truth behind appearances.

The id does not care about facts or evidence. The id's favourite literature is 'fake news'.

Creating a useful, accurate picture of something complex and abstract is very difficult. And there is nothing more complex and abstract than the human mind.

Freud's novel framework suggests that the neuroses are not illnesses in the accepted sense, but a consequence of incomplete development, reawakened infantile desires and unmastered childhood conflicts.

Many aspects of Kabbalah presage psychoanalytic thinking. For example, dream interpretation, close attention to language, conceptualising sexual desire as an energy, and recognition of symbols. Moreover, Kabbalistic knowledge is usually communicated orally. This resembles ‘training analysis' - the psychoanalytic convention of being psychoanalysed i