“God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human” by Dominic Johnson

Johnson posits that far from religion being a by-product or parasite of other evolutionary features, it actually was an adaptive trait that was selected for in our evolutionary progress. It was the advent of a fear of supernatural punishment that advanced humanity. Advanced societies developed “theory of mind”- the ability to put oneself in the shoes of the other. They also developed language- the ability to communicate and, thus, the ability to inform on or gossip about those not present as well as strangers. This allowed for an increase in group size and changed group dynamics. In a band of just 50 individuals, there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships. These two traits combined made it very costly to act selfishly consistently or deviant to societal norms. These traits are also unique to humans, absent even among our fellow primates. From this point forward in homo sapiens development, it evolutionary did not pay to act selfishly. Instead, one had to act against his own urges and suppress what often came most naturally. Self control became advantageous to the individual and humans who could adapt to this new feature of the landscape would tend to be more attractive to mates and to reproduce more. The ability to cooperate well with others became a dominant attribute. Formal religion, or belief in karma, or in a cosmic order, or in simple fate became mechanisms to act as if someone was watching you even when you thought you were alone and your actions were undetectable. Fear of supernatural punishment was adaptive to social cohesion and to repression of selfish behavior. Furthermore, at the group level, religion allows for in-group solidarity, puts the group above the individual, unites people of different ethnicities and languages, and, in general, makes quick friends among strangers. Societies with high levels of religiosity (all things being equal) grew bigger and were more technologically, culturally, and economically advanced.

“On Dreams” by Sigmund Freud

This is a short book concerning Freud’s method for interpreting dreams. Freud states that dreams and their contents are not known to our consciousness. In that way dreams share qualities of phobias and obsessions. However, dreams can be analyzed for their deeper meanings. Freud feels that dreams are “a sort of substitute for the thought processes, full of meaning and emotion.” However, the contents of each dream is much shorter than the thoughts for which they are a substitute. The manner in which the latent content of a dream is transformed into its manifest content Freud has coined as the process of “dream work”. Because this process disguises the latent information in dreams it makes the nature of dreams outwardly unintelligible and confused. 

The simplest dreams, children’s dreams, are often undisguised wish fulfillments. Sometimes this takes place in fulfilled reversals. When a disagreeable experience happens in real life, the dream will later represent the opposite scenario. Dreams also condense thoughts. Combinations of different persons are often combined into a single representative figure, designed to connect or compare the two separate individuals. “Just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream thoughts, so as a rule a single dream thought is represented by more than one dream element; the threads of association do not simply converge from the dream thoughts to the dream content, they cross and interweave with each other many times over the course of their journey.” The manifest dream content is invariably quite different from the latent thoughts. In fact, the dream content is always subservient to the role of the dream thought. “It is often an indistinct element which turns out to be the most direct derivative of the essential dream thought…. The more obscure and confused a dream appears to be, the greater share in its construction which may be attributed to the factor of displacement.” Freud believes that every dream, without exception, goes back to impressions of only a few days, most often the day immediately preceding the dream. Dreams are always of import and never concerned with trivialities, if we dig deep enough into their latent content. “It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or recognize the dream thoughts in the dream content, unless we understand the reason for their distortion." The dream thoughts are disguised as symbols by means of similes and metaphors, images representing poetic speech. “The manifest content of dreams consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the dream thoughts must accordingly be submitted in the first place to a treatment which will make them suitable for a representation of this kind…. Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the dream thoughts of contradiction, ridicule, and derision…. No dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones.” Finally, all dreams that are produced in a single night will derive from the same circle of thoughts when they are analyzed deeply enough.

The “dream work” is never creative. It develops no fantasies of its own. It makes no judgements and draws no conclusions. It merely transforms through condensation and displacement, using pictorial forms. When one digs deep enough into latent thoughts one invariably finds thoughts that are both alien and disagreeable to the conscious mind. “There is a causal connection between the obscurity of the dream content and the state of repression.” Freud posits that in a state of sleep censorship of the mind is relaxed. Dreams are often quickly forgotten upon waking because “when the state of sleep is over, the censorship quickly recovers full strength; and it can now wipe out all that was won from it during the period of weakness…. [However, sometimes] a fragment of the dream content which had seemed to be forgotten reemerges. This fragment which has been rescued from oblivion invariably affords us the best and most direct access to the meaning of the dream.” Dreams exist to help us sleep. In fact, dreams are guardians of sleep. “The dream provides a kind of psychical consummation for the wish that has been suppressed (or formed with the help of repressed material) by representing it as fulfilled; but it also satisfies the other agency by allowing sleep to continue.”

Freud also contends that most dreams are about sex. “Analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from the activity of waking life as “residues of the previous day” only find their way to representation in dreams through the assistance of repressed erotic wishes…. Infantile sexual wishes provide the most frequent and strongest motive forces for the construction of dreams…. The material of the sexual ideas must not be represented as such, but must be replaced in the content of the dream by hints, allusions, and similar forms of indirect representation.” For Freud, a banana is never just a banana. “There are some symbols which bear a single meaning almost universally: thus the Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) stand for the parents, rooms represent women and their entrances and exits the openings of the body. The majority of dream symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested in erotic interest.” Freud believes these symbols are not created by the “dream work”, but are taken from cultural artifacts such as myths, fairytales, and jokes. In the world of dreams, nothing is as it first seems.

“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (translated by Lucia Graves)

This is a mystery story designed to be devoured by lovers of books. Zafon’s novel has books wrapped within books, mysterious libraries, and book burnings. It is a strange tale where fact and fiction blur and the reader sometimes struggles to keep solid footing. The setting of post-World War II Spain, with Franco’s despotic rule hanging in the background, lends to the somber mood. There are flashbacks to the Civil War, which all the characters seem to want to forget. The plot has love, young and old, betrayal between childhood friends, and plenty of deaths all around. At the heart of this novel is the story of the power of books, reading, and fiction. Even Zafon’s title for his actual novel is the imaginary title of the most important novel in his book. This is a true page turner, which blends murder mystery and historical fiction with characters that you root and ache for as the plot unwinds page by page.

“From The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” by Pankaj Mishra

Mishra begins with Japan’s destruction of the Russian Navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. It was the first time a Western power had been defeated by an Asiatic power in a major battle since the Middle Ages. The news was applauded as far afield as India by Gandhi and America by W.E.B. DuBois as a blow against white colonial power. Mishra goes on to survey a wide breadth of the story of colonialism in Asia, its reversals, and its remnants. He tells the forgotten biography of Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghnai, a man who influenced the revolution in Iran, the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, modern salafists, other pan-Islamists and pan-Arab nationalists alike. He was the first scholar who saw Islam and the West as diametrically opposed, preceding Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” by decades. He called out Islamic rulers, from the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire to the Shah of Iran, for their retrograde ways. He also called out western powers for their hypocrisy in extolling liberty and freedom at home, while behaving as despots above the law abroad. He was convinced Islam needed its own Reformation (and that he was Islam’s answer to Luther). At times, he preached the need for tolerance, the need for Muslim/Hindu unity, and the virtues of science and modern learning. At the same time, he decried mimicry of the West, which would lead to false admiration of and dominance by colonial powers.

Mishra also shines a light on China through the lens of Liang Qichao. Liang was from the Confucian scholar tradition and at first only a modest reformer, who wanted to reinvigorate the Manchu Dynasty. By the end, however, he became a fervent anti-Manchu, while still sensing that the Chinese peasantry was not ready for western democracy. His democracy was not individualist, but aligned with a common good for all. In his years exiled in Japan he had become impressed with the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s efforts to modernize, selectively westernize, and build an identity as a collective nation-state. Foremost, he argued that the accumulation and centralization of capital was the only defense China had against the encroachments of the West.

In India, Rabindranath Tagore was similarly skeptical of wholesale westernization. He worried that uncritical mimicry would lead to the dehumanization of the soul. He extolled a return to Indian peasant ways and towards the spirituality of the ancient East. But he also dismissed the caste system and other mysticisms of Hinduism. He believed self-regeneration began in the simple village life. Tagore thought the ideas of the Western enlightenment, individualism, and the glory of the nation would lead to man devoid of his inner worth. He felt the West, itself, was becoming subsumed by its own materialism and cautioned countries like Japan and China with trying to catch up to western wealth and status on the West’s own terms. Visiting New York, he conceded, “the age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science, [but] you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortunate with this gift.”

Mishra ends by describing Turkey as an example that in many ways has succeeded in modernizing with its own blend of Islamic culture and westernization. Ataturk brutally suppressed Islamic tendencies for a time, eliminating the Caliphate, forbidding the headscarf, and replacing Arabic with the Turkish language, but a current of Islam was always bubbling below the surface, particularly in the heartland of Anatolia. Erdogan and the AKP have successfully harnessed this nascent sentiment. The West would do well to embrace Turkey as a full-fledged member of its community rather than to look on it as a second-class uncouth brother unfit for a seat at the grownup table, like the West treated Meiji Japan.

“Evolution of Desire- A Life of Rene Girard” by Cynthia L. Haven

This biography of Girard reviews his major body of work and gives background to the man behind the philosophy. The book is a good introduction to Girard’s main ideas and is also useful for those who have already read Girard, by delving behind the scenes. Starting with his birth in Avignon and ending with his death in Palo Alto, Haven details moments in Girard’s life and professional career that lend insight to the development of his theories on mimetic rivalry, the scapegoat, and sacrifice.

Haven recounts Girard’s view of Faulkner as a way of describing his general method of reading the texts of novels for greater truths. “Many people believe that Christianity is embodied by the South. I would say that the South is perhaps the least Christian part of the United States in terms of spirit, although it is the most Christian in terms of ritual…. [In the distant future,] if a Faulkner novel survived, telling the truth that is not in the archives, but rather the truth as it is in the Faulkner novel— nobody would believe it. They would all be wrong, obviously. They would lack the essential thing, the social scheme, the psychological scheme, in terms of everyday life, which determined the country at this time.” Girard’s reflection combines both his skill in deep contextual reading of fiction, which digs for truth beneath the text, with his year observing the South while teaching at Duke University in 1952.

Girard also dismantled the “Romantic lie” of an “authentic Self” who is free from the bounds of society at large, which was prevalent in so many novels of the nineteenth century. “Even the most passionate among us never feel they truly are the persons they want to be. To them, the most wonderful being, the only semi-god, always is someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those whom they simultaneously hate and admire.” No one can escape mimetic desire for it is in the best, as well as the worst, of human nature to imitate and copy models, who we are bound to aspire to and resent. The object of desire is often incidental and in time actually dissolves away as the model and the subject battle as doubles, escalating their rivalry tit for tat against each other. Girard cites Wagner’s Ring Cycle, “The gold is nothing, clearly, since it’s the ray of sunshine that alights on it and transfigures it. And yet the gold is everything, since it’s what everyone is fighting over; it’s the fact of fighting over it that gives it its value, and its terror.”

Girard also cites Dostoevsky in describing man’s futility in replacing religion with secular humanism on Earth. “Man possesses either a God or an idol…. The false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow’s world men will be gods for each other. This ambiguous message is always carried by the most blind of Dostoevsky’s characters. The wretched creatures rejoice in the thought of great fraternity. They do not perceive the irony of their own formula; they think they are heralding paradise but they are talking about hell, a hell into which they themselves are already sinking.” Girard decries “nihilistic individualism” of all stripes, feeling that “the romantic does not want to be alone, but to be seen alone.” He asks, “why do we, all of us, have to keep judging and being judged?” We are addicted to our obstacles, but hide it, even from ourselves. According to Girard, the novelist has a penchant for lying, even to his own Ego, “which in fact is made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated over a long period, sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.”

Girard’s conversion back to the tepid Catholicism of his youth was a seminal event in his life and career. For him, “conversion is a form of intelligence, of understanding.” It is not an event or a single moment in time, but a continual process. “Metaphysical desire brings into being a certain relationship to others and to oneself. True conversion engenders a new relationship to others and oneself.” He viewed religion as seminal to his understanding both of world history and the events of his day. “If I am right, we’re only extricating ourselves from a certain kind of religion so as to enter another, one that’s infinitely more demanding because it’s deprived of sacrificial crutches. Our celebrated humanism will turn out to have been nothing but a brief intermission between two forms of religion.” He goes on, “It is because we have wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force and in a retrograde, violent form…. it will perhaps have been our last mythology. We ‘believed’ in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.”

Girard saw a commonality in human behavior that he traced from archaic rituals through modern religions to our secular age. “Human society begins the moment symbolic institutions are created around the victim, that is to say when the victim becomes sacred.” That act is the founding murder of society and the great lie, when the mob convinces itself of its innocence and the scapegoat is turned into savior, by ending the escalating violence and reinstating unanimity and unity within the community. “Human beings fight not because they’re different, but because they’re the same, and in their accusations and reciprocal violence have made each other enemy twins.” He sees the downside to imitation as well as its glory. “When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion.”

Girard sees Christ’s teachings as the only path forward. “It is the absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns Jesus. There is no other cause for his death than the love of one’s neighbour lived to the very end, with an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes.” Christ alone has exited the cycle of violence. “It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through…. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated. Imitating Christ thus means thwarting all rivalry, taking distance from the divine by giving it the Father’s face.”

Girard sees the danger in majority rule unbound by tradition. “Intelligent democracies can last only if they are aware of the mob and take great precautions against it, but these precautions are not always effective.” Towards the end of his life, Girard became ever more cognizant that total war, escalating by degrees, could end all of humanity. He warned, “we accept to live under the protection of nuclear weapons. This has probably been the greatest sin of the West. Think of its implications. The confidence is in violence. You put your faith in that violence, that that violence will keep the peace.” When the apocalypse comes, it will be justified as a defensive response.

“The Edge of the World” by Michael Pye

Pye details the rise and fall of the three main powers of the medieval North Sea: the Frisians, the Vikings, and the Hanseatic League. It is no surprise that all three made their livings on the sea, as the lands in which they inhabited were so inhospitable for much of the year. Pye makes the case that the harsh conditions of the region led to an independent peoples who led modernizing innovations in seafaring, writing, architecture, governmental institutions, weaponry, gender roles, and the creation of money which were then adopted throughout the rest of Europe.

Pye posits that the North Sea’s development was every bit as essential to the development of Western civilization as its well studied compatriot the Mediterranean. Pye is at his most compelling when making the case for the economic development of the West and, particularly, of international trade. Pye posits that because the land abutting the North Sea was often so inhospitable and under threat, with the water often reclaiming the land along with homes and entire communities, that the people who chose to settle these backwaters were often left alone by the great powers of the day- the Roman Empire and its bastard heir “The Holy Roman Empire.” Within this milieu, inventions were allowed to develop and grow without a central authority- chief among them paper money, printed books and written ledgers for accounting, and seafaring science and technology. 

Chronologically, Pye details the rise and subsequent fall of the three great North Sea cultures the Frisians, the Vikings, and the Hanseatic League of free city-states. Pye, more importantly, details the remnants of those cultures that outlasted the societies themselves, most often through extended and prodigious trade. He does not gloss over the sometimes brutal and warlike nature of the people who inhabited the outskirts of the world, but convincingly refutes the myth that they were mere plunderers and not innovators too. He details law that evolved naturally so that trading strangers could resort to contracts and tort claims through information-disseminating institutions used to shun those who reneged on their word. It is no coincidence that the first stock market in Amsterdam grew from the joint-trading institutions of the Hanseatic League. Pye also makes a powerful case for the polycentric order that developed- where people had recourse to multiple competing and overlapping sources of institutional order from kinship bonds, religious affiliations, commercial relations, and community formations from small villages to larger cities that could unite or divide as the particular situation saw fit. Pye describes the village of Helgo, near modern day Stockholm, that predated even the Viking societies of 800 AD, where in was found buried a bronze ladle from Egypt and a gold Buddha covered with a fine embroidered cloak from Kashmir. These men might have lived on the edge of the world, but by no means were they your typical country bumpkins.

“The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov (translated by Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor)

Bulgakov’s novel is full of mysticism, fantasy, and religion. The plot is mostly set in pre-Great Patriotic War communist Moscow. There is much mystery and more than a little devilish magic. Ten ruble notes turn into worthless scraps of paper and back into money again. A large black cat walks on his hind legs and pours himself glasses of vodka, while playing chess. Pigs fly and buildings burst into flames. The Devil plays a proponent role in the story, as he befuddles a bevy of Muscovites and causes mischief and worse all around the city. And, somewhat even more enchanting, Bulgakov has written a novel within his novel, which depicts the details around the last days of Jesus, after his condemnation by Pontus Pilate. Bulgakov’s story skips around from character to character, but is linked by the mayhem caused by the Devil and his crew of wicked subordinates. The mysterious Master is introduced to the reader as an inmate in an insane asylum, who has abandoned his lover Margarita. There is dark humor throughout the book. The scene shifts to a mysterious underworld where a monkey band plays jazz, skeletons turn to men dressed in tuxedos, and polar bears mingle with naked ladies swimming in pools of brandy, before the story returns to biblical Judea and Moscow. As Margarita says, “it’s not everyday you meet up with an evil power!”

“The Open Society and Its Enemies- Volume 1 The Spell of Plato” by Karl Popper

Popper makes the case that Plato, especially in his later writings, as in “The Republic”, was diametrically opposed to the ideal of an open society. Plato felt all social change was decay. Political degeneration followed from moral degeneration. Plato’s perfect State, the form or idea of the State, was free from all change and corruption. “The original or primitive form of society, and at the same time, the one that resembles the Form or Idea of a state most closely, the ‘best state’, is a kingship of the wisest and most godlike men…. First after the perfect state comes ‘timarchy’ or ‘timocracy’, the rule of the noble who seek honour and fame; secondly, oligarchy, the rule of the rich families; ‘next in order, democracy is born’, the rule of liberty which means lawlessness; and last comes ‘tyranny…. the fourth and final sickness of the city’.” Furthermore, Plato viewed class conflict as both inevitable and the main cause of degeneration within the State. The origins of class conflict begin through divisions within the ruling class, “between virtue and money, or between the old-established ways of feudal simplicity and the new ways of wealth.” Plato’s ideal State had rigid class distinctions- between rulers and those being ruled; between masters and slaves; between law-giving guardians, developed and selected from amongst the warriors, and menial workers. There would be common ownership of property, including of women and children. Plato stated, “each should look upon all as if belonging to one family.” Furthermore, “the race of the guardians must be kept pure.” Among contemporary Greek city-states, Sparta exemplified Plato’s ideal.

For Plato, man was social by nature. This was because the human individual was imperfect by necessity. Human nature insured that the individual could not be self-sufficient. Even “rare and uncommon natures”, the best of the best, depend on society to reach towards perfection. “The state therefore must be placed higher than the individual since only the state can be self-sufficient (‘autark’), perfect, and able to make good the necessary imperfection of the individual.” For Plato, it followed that “the wise shall lead and rule, and that the ignorant shall follow.” He believed in the division of labor. “Is it better that a man should work in many crafts or that he should work in one only?…. Surely, more will be produced and better and more easily if each man works in one occupation only, according to his natural gifts.” These gifts were immutable and assigned to man at birth.

Plato’s ideal State was homogenous. It should remain small, lest size endanger unity. The whole State should be as one. In this sense, it was anthropomorphic. The State was the perfect individual and all its individual citizens were imperfect copies of it. Plato was reaching back in time for a lost tribalism, displaced by the humanism and democracy of the Athens of his day. Plato writes that the law “is designed to bring about the welfare of the state as a whole, fitting the citizens into one unit, by means of both persuasion and force.” Additionally, by “persuasion” Plato does not just mean the use of argument and debate, but also duplicitous means such as lies and propaganda.

Popper makes the case that Plato’s ideal State was a totalitarian reactionary one, in which all change is evil and stasis, alone, is divine. Popper also asserts that Plato’s conception of justice, in his later works, especially in “The Republic”, is defined as “that which is in the interest of the best state.” It is not the conception of individual justice, stressing equality before the law, that is common today and was even in Plato’s time. Plato states, “when each class in the city minds its own business, the money-earning class as well as the auxiliaries and the guardians, then this will be justice.” The State is just that is “healthy, strong, united- stable.” This was in contrast to equalitarians of his day, such as Democritus and Pericles. Pericles stated, “our laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes.” Plato claimed, “equal treatment of unequals must beget inequity.” For him, justice meant to keep one’s place in the rigid structure of society.  Plato wrote that in the ideal State, “you are created for the sake of the whole and not the whole for the sake of you…. Everything possible has been done to eradicate from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual. So far as it can be done, even those things which nature herself has made private and individual have somehow become the common property of all…. The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should ever be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative…. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it. In this way the life of all will be spent in total community.”

Plato felt that the common herd must be ruled and those best qualified to do the ruling were philosopher-kings. These philosophers must be educated and trained by the State not in free inquiry, but to follow its diktat. Plato stated, “it is the business of the rulers of the city, if it is anybody’s, to tell lies, deceiving both its enemies and its own citizens for the benefit of the city.” However, the philosopher must not be ambitious but merely “destined to rule, he the least eager for it.” Popper makes the case that the ideal State of Plato’s was a utopia. Popper writes, “the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship.” Plato’s utopia, as all utopias, rests on the assumptions that the ends of society are never changing and that there are rational means, also never changing, of getting to them. Popper proposes that Plato yearned to go back in time to the unified tribal communities of the early Greeks. However, the Athens of Plato’s day was in the process of making the transition from a tribal community to humanitarianism, where individualism had primacy. Society was losing its organic character. Groups and classes were not unified and fixed. Social bonds were fraying. In this kind of open society “personal relationships of a new kind can arise where they can be freely entered into, instead of being determined by the accidents of birth.” Sea communication and trade were major factors accelerating these new connections both within and between city-states. According to Popper, philosophy bloomed in this transitional period. “It is an attempt to replace the lost magical faith by a rational faith; it modifies the tradition of passing a theory or a myth by founding a new tradition- the tradition of challenging theories and myths and of critically discussing them.”

“One Way and Another” by Adam Phillips

Phillips is truly the master of the essay. Whether primarily about psychoanalysis, literature, or just the quirks of life, he combines pithy epigrams, keen observations, and beyond-the-surface commentary in a succinct and funny way. His essays allow him to ramble, to meander, and to explore a subject, while always circling back to the heart of the matter, in a thoroughly enlightening trip. In this collection of essays Phillips writes deeply about the craft of analysis and the process of psychoanalysis, while referencing the points of view of both the analyst and the analysand. He quotes Freud on the unconscious, “everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable.” He discusses the theory of the Self, “one’s history, of course, never begins with oneself.” On the subjectivity of memory, “memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience.” On childhood, “every child grows up in the climate of his parents’ mostly unconscious history.” On the Self as seen by the Other, “other people see us in ways that we cannot anticipate; we cannot know ourselves because we cannot be everyone else in relation to ourselves.” On self-betrayal, “people who believe too much in compromise believe too much in not getting what they want.” On the purpose of dreaming, “awake or asleep we do not want to be awakened to, or by, our wishes, the wishes that represent our unconscious forbidden desire. Dreams just help us to stay asleep when we are asleep.” On our ideals, “we are tyrannized by our picture of ourselves as we would prefer to be; we organize our lives around it.” On the nature of our preoccupations, “our preoccupations are the way our pasts go in search of a future.” On the role of accidents in interpreting life, “it may not be that all accidents are meaningful, but that meaning is made out of accidents.” On imagining one’s inhibitions, “if we can’t to some extent imagine it- whether consciously or unconsciously- we wouldn’t know not to do it, or how to go about avoiding doing it.” On what failing in life actually means, “to fail at one thing is to succeed at another.” Each essay muses on a different subject matter, but the book is held together by the process of exploring the Self as a continual project that may or may not be helped through analysis. He does not judge and hopes the reader does not judge either.