the principal content of developmental psychology: what happened to you earlier is the cause of what happened to you later. That’s the basic theory: our history is our causality. “That is why I am as I am.” The myths we believe and are in the middle of, we call them “fact,” “reality,” “science.”
a baby comes into the world with a few innate mechanisms, but not a destiny. Instead of reading your life today as the result of fuck-ups as a child, you read your childhood as a miniature example of your life, as a cameo of your life — recognise that you don’t really know your whole life until you’re about eighty — and then you’re too old to get it in focus
developmental psychology, the idea that everything I am now was caused in my childhood... as Ivan Illich would say, it’s a way of maintaining the psychotherapy trade, which is a large business needing new raw material such as abuse, trauma, childhood molestation. And if you’re a believer—which we are, unconsciously — in the myth of development rather than a believer in acorns and nubs, structure, or essence, then what happened back then must be overwhelmingly important
I’m molting, and I’m at the beginning of something, and when I’m at the beginning of something I am a fool. Adolescence, a midlife crisis, sixty
We paint our national history rosy and white and our personal history - gray. We’re so willing to admit that we’re trapped in our personal history, but we never hear that said of our national history. ... Perhaps the way to begin the revolution is to stand up for your depression.
the consulting room could become a cell of revolution if therapy located our troubles more in the present and directed our attention to the world instead of only inside