Book excerpts (35 entries)
Beyond the Sad Passions – Miguel Benasayag
Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: “I suffer, therefore I am.” Read the full page
The Society of Deviants – Piero Cipriano
The schizoid is rigid in his decisions […] Read the full page
Zachary Wheeler – Treatment of schizoid personality: an analytic psychotherapy handbook
There is even a debate as to the legitimacy of schizoid personality as a diagnosis (Slavik, Sperry, & Carlson, 1992). Fairbairn was amongst the first to note that schizoid states are present to some degree in all people, and span a continuum from normal to severe and debilitating (Fairbairn, 1940). Recent authors assert the normalcy of temperamental introversion (Cain, 2012), the biases of object relations theory toward the primacy of relationship (Modell, 1993; Storr, 1988), the creative and regenerative functions of reclusive behaviors (Storr, 1988), and the gains and pleasures of seclusion (Rufus, 2003) as counterarguments to pathologizing schizoid-like behavior. Continue reading
Let’s Talk About Music – Stefano Bollani
Ever since I was a child, I struggled with the idea that at some point you had to choose a specific path, in music as in life. Read the full page
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
You Can’t Go Back: The Story of Ernesto Lomasti – Luca Beltrame
A single mistake and… a mother’s tears, a father’s silent grief, and for everyone else life would go on just the same. Read the full page
The Instinct of the Wolf – The Law of Lone Wolf – Massimo Lugli
I grabbed a newspaper from a trash bin and read it from top to bottom to pass the time. Politics, sports, entertainment. I couldn’t understand why people cared so much about all that bullshit. Read the full page
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery
Lastly, teenagers think they’re adults when in fact they’re imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life. It’s pathetic. Read the full page
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – John Gray
The examined life may not be worth living. Read the full page
God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment – Scott Adams
The subconscious is an odds-calculating machine. Read the full page
The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age – Alain Ehrenberg
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
Lying On the Couch – Irvin D. Yalom
But Marshal had not been swayed by these new developments. At sixty-three, he had been a psychiatrist long enough to have lived through several such positivistic swings. Read the full page
Disorders of the Self – New Therapeutic Horizons: the Masterson Approach – James F. Masterson and Ralph Klein
It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself. Read the full page
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
Angels of the Universe – Einar Már Guðmundsson
No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all. Read the full page
The Policy of the Superego: Foundations of Structural and Dialectical Psychopathology – Luigi Anepeta
In the context of obsessive experiences, depression intervenes […] driven by a push for change that leads the subject to feel the need to address their unfulfilled needs. However, these needs have taken on an anarchic and transgressive drive and are intensely guilt-ridden. Continue reading
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. Read the full page
Wild Justice – Wilbur Smith
Parker had trained himself to be totally celibate, channelling all his sexual energies into pursuits of the mind […] Read the full page
If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. Read the full page
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
That Day on the Moon – Oriana Fallaci
The world that technology imposes on us is not a world of individuals striving for beauty; it is a world of automatons aligned in the pursuit of success: and the most extraordinary of human adventures, the Moon, is based on a collective arithmetic operation. Read the full page
Flowers for Algernon (novel) – Daniel Keyes
Why am I always looking at life through a window? Read the full page
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
”… Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying
here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita. Read the full page
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. Read the full page
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Read the full page
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
All grown-ups were once children—although few of them remember it. Read the full page
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Read the full page
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud
Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. Read the full page
Short Stories for a Year – The Wheelbarrow – Luigi Pirandello
When there’s someone around, I never look at her, but I feel that she’s looking at me, she’s looking at me without taking her eyes off me for a moment. I’d like to make her understand in private that it’s nothing, that she should relax, that I couldn’t allow myself to perform this brief act in front of others, that for her it’s of no importance, but for me it’s everything. I perform it every day at the right moment in utmost secrecy and with frightful joy because, trembling, I experience the delight of a divine, conscious madness that for an instant frees me and allows me to get even with everything. Read the full page
In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) – Marcel Proust
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Read the full page
Theory of Harmony – Arnold Schoenberg
Life and death are both equally present in the embryo. What lies between is time. Nothing intrinsic, that is; merely a dimension, which is, however, necessarily consummated. Let the pupil learn by this example to recognize what is eternal: change, and what is temporal: being (das Bestehen). Read the full page
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas à Kempis
Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page