Debbie Foster

The unsafe person is in a state of situationally induced paranoia; they are put in a position of terrible alertness', as Sedgwick observes in her essay on paranoia. … The threatened individual can only ensure their safety by feeling unsafe, by maintaining a constant state of anticipatory vigilance. This is the emotional logic of the threatened self

Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

The idea of Rome as the Eternal City inspired one of Freud's most memorable metaphors. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud imagines a fantastical Rome ‘in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent'. In this truly eternal city, every building would exist in

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

Before you are body, or nervous system or brain or mind, your most immediate experience of yourself is as a medium through which, in which, a world is manifested with you at its centre.

There is no real forgetting. Everything leaves a mark, whether you remember it, whether you can bring it to mind or not. There is no subtraction in mind.

Neuroticism is a personality trait, a particular way of approaching and responding to the world. Those of us who are more neurotic approach the world with caution; we look for and expect danger and difficulty. We are always on guard. When we do meet danger and difficulty, we tend to react more strongly to it; we experience more distress, more frust

that catapulted monks past their minds’ usual horizons, by offering glimpses of the divine logic that structured all of creation. Metacognition did not have to mean closing the mind up to itself. It could actually widen monks’ perspective beyond themselves, beyond their minds and memories and books and bodies and communities and world, to encompass

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t