Analytical Essay Quotes

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any "great ideal" which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.

My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don't honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that's what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don't see feel/think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations.

The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.

The man with the persona is blind to the existence of inner realities, just as the other [man without a persona] is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground.

The unconscious has still another side to it: it includes not only repressed contents, but all psychic material that lies below the threshold of consciousness.

read through your tutorial essay draft. Sixty pages describing an off-white canvas. Indecipherable.” She shook her head. “It’s as if you never learned the most basic analytical habits, so you never had to unlearn them.

The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance. This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowledge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure. It is simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature. Though it may be allied to some of the elements in the appreciation of verse, it does not need any poets, other than the nameless artists who composed the language. It can be strongly felt in the simple contemplation of a vocabulary, or even in a string of names.

There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the biblical prophets: revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished to go. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I suppose, what they call a poet.

[...] nouă tuturor ne merge ca fratelui Medardus din Elixirele diavolului a lui E.T.A. Hoffman: există undeva un frate neliniștitor, groaznic, adică o replică a noastră în persoană, legată de noi prin sânge, care conține și adună cu răutate tot ceea ce noi am vrea din toată inima să dispară sub masă.

Ne înşelăm dacă credem că inconştientul este ceva inofensiv … Desigur, el nu este primejdios în orice condiţii; dar de îndată ce apare o nevroză, acesta e un semn că în inconştient există o acumulare de energie, adică un fel de încărcătură care poate exploda … Săpăm cumva ca să dăm de o fântână arteziană şi riscăm să ne izbim de un vulcan.

We must not attempt to tell nature what to do if we want to observe her operations undisturbed.

Of the dream it can indeed be said that “the stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the the head of the corner.

The endless dilemma of culture and nature is always a question of too much or too little, never of either-or.

A voi să înţelegi sau să explici prea mult e la fel de inutil şi de nociv ca a nu înţelege.

Dacă însă oamenii vor fi educați în așa fel încât să-și vadă cu claritate latura întunecată a naturii lor, e de sperat că vor învăța să-și înțeleagă mai bine semenii și să-i iubească. O reducere a ipocriziei și o sporire a autocunoașterii nu pot avea decât consecințe benefice în ce privește grija față de aproapele; căci prea ușor suntem înclinați să transferăm asupra semenilor noștri injustiția și violența pe care le facem propriei noastre naturi.

The tone is at once tender and analytical, impassioned and nuanced, sweeping and deeply personal. Baldwin showed us that letter-essays, as a form, are perfectly situated to blend incisive political thought with intimate reflections, to fold them into a single embrace. And

O funcționare incorectă a psihicului poate dăuna în mare măsură corpului, după cum, invers, o suferință fizică poate să atragă participarea la suferință a sufletului; căci sufletul și corpul nu sunt ceva separat, ci sunt mai degrabă una și aceeași viață. Astfel, rareori există o boală a corpului care să nu fie complicată psihic, chiar dacă nu este determinată psihic.

Studying for the GRE®? Essay-Girls provides students with sample essay responses for the Analytical Writing section of the exam.   Presented herein are 15 sample essays to aid in study for GRE®. As the essay prompts are property of ETS, they can be found on the ETS website yet are not presented herein. However, each sample essay’s thesis statement is in bold.   Now, get studying!

Psihologia individului corespunde însă psihologiei națiunilor. Ceea ce fac națiunile face și individul și, atâta timp cât face individul, face și națiunea. Doar schimbarea atitudinii individului este începutul schimbării psihologiei națiunii. Marile probleme ale omenirii nu au fost niciodată rezolvate prin legi generale, ci întotdeauna doar prin reînnoirea atitudinii individului.

The incompatibility here [between some anthropologies] rests with basic attitudes toward cultural others, which in turn rests on fundamentally different understandings of history. The one sees the Other as different and *separate,* a product of its own history and carrying its own hitoricity...The second sees the Other as different but *connected,* a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of "our" history and "their" history is impossible. In this view, there are no cultures-outside-of-history to be reconstructed, no culture without history, no culture or society "with its own structure and history" to which world-historical forces arrive.

Marxism cannot, even on the grounds of political expediency or party solidarity, be reduced to a rigid formalism like mathematics. Nor can it be treated as a standard technique such as work on an automatic lathe. The material, when it is present in human society, has endless variations; the observer is himself part of the observed population, with which he interacts strongly and reciprocally. This means that the successful application of the theory needs the development of analytical power, the ability to pick out the essential factors in a given situation. This cannot be learned from books alone. The one way to learn it is by constant contact with the major sections of the people. For an intellectual, this means at least a few months spent in manual labour, to earn his livelihood as a member of the working class; not as a superior being, nor as a reformist, nor as a sentimental "progressive" visitor to the slums. The experience gained from living with worker and peasant, as one of them, has then to be consistently refreshed and regularly evaluated in the light of one's reading. For those who are prepared to do this, these essays might provide some encouragement, and food for thought.

We do not sufficiently distinguish between individualism and individuation. Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity rather than to collective consideration and obligations. But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfillment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to a better social performance than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed. The idiosyncrasy of an individual is not to be understood as any strangeness in his substance or in his components, but rather as a unique combination, or gradual differentiation, of functions and faculties which in themselves are universal. Every human face has a nose, two eyes, etc., but these universal factors are variable, and it is this variability which makes individual peculiarities possible. Individuation, therefore, can only mean a process of psychological development that fulfils the individual qualities given; in other words, it is a process by which a man becomes the definite, unique being he in fact is. In so doing he does not become “selfish” in the ordinary sense of the word, but is merely fulfilling the peculiarity of his nature, and this, as we have said, is vastly different from egotism or individualism.

Dacă urmărim cu atenție istoria unei nevroze, dăm regulat peste un moment critic când s-a ivit o problemă care a fost evitată. Această evitare este o reacție atât de firească și de generală precum sunt lenea, comoditatea, lașitatea, anxietatea, neștiința și ignoranța care îi stau la bază. În fața a ceea ce e neplăcut, dificil și primejdios, șovăim de cele mai multe ori și pe cât posibil nu ne îndreptăm într-acolo. Consider că aceste motive sunt suficiente.

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.

Visagalėje kasdienybėje, deja, retai pasitaiko kas nors nepaprasta, kas kartu būtų ir sveika. Mažai vietos lieka akivaizdžiam didvyriškumui - bet ne todėl, kad niekas iš mūsų nereikalautų heroizmo! Priešingai, bjauriausia ir nemaloniausia yra tai, kad banali kasdienybė kelia banalius reikalavimus mūsų kantrybei, atsidavimui, ištvermei, pasiaukojimui ir t. t.; reikalavimus, kuriuos reikia įvykdyti nuolankiai, be jokių herojiškų, įkvepiančių gestų, tačiau kuriems taip pat reikia didvyriškumo, nors ir nematomo aplinkinių akims. Jis neturi išorinio blizgesio, nesulaukia pagyrimų ir nuolatos slepiasi po kasdienybės rūbu.

Identificările cu un rol social sunt în genere o sursă bogată de nevroze. Omul nu se poate debarasa de sine în favoarea unei personalităţi artificiale, fără să fie pedepsit. Chiar şi încercarea făcută în acest scop declanşează în toate cazurile obişnuite reacţii inconştiente, capricii, afecte, angoase, reprezentări obsesive, slăbiciuni, vicii, etc. "Bărbatul puternic" din punct de vedere social este adesea un copil faţă de propriile sale stări afective, disciplina lui publică (pe care o cere în mod special de la alţii) e în sfera privată jalnic nimicită. Bucuria muncii profesionale ia acasă un chip melancolic; morala lui publică "fără pată" arată curios în spatele măştii...

Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other - even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of 'sociality', the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body - and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become sociodramatic, semiodramatic, melodramatic.

In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.

The English philosopher and geometer, Keith Critchlow, brings his own light to the same point: “The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them . . .”18

It is at the heart of my research: black women are rational and human. Working from that assumption, I work my way analytically through political theory, economics, history, sociology, and culture. It rarely fails me. I thought about this rarity recently. Donald Trump's election had been one thing. There was clearly as aspect of race and gender at play. Women, some of them black, weighed in on what it meant that 53 percent of the white women who voted did so for Trump. But, as Trump's eclectic, manic style of governance set in, public discussion turned to ideas about Russia and fascism and economic anxiety. I understand all of these issues as ones to which black women contribute meaningful analysis.

These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment.

done to show that this is not so (which is not to say that there are no points of difference between Thomistic and Aristotelian metaphysics). The dominant form of neo-Platonism in medieval Christian thought was Augustinianism. It is little wonder that the Platonic tradition should have seemed agreeable to the early Church Fathers, for it is not difficult to map Christian beliefs and practices into central elements of neo-Platonism. Most fundamentally, just as the Christian distinguishes between the physical cosmos and the eternal kingdom of God, so Plato and his followers distinguish between the material world and the timeless and unchanging realm of immaterial forms. Similarly, Christians commonly distinguish between body and soul and look forward to life after death in which the blessed will enjoy forever the sight of God; while Platonists contrast the mortal frame and the immortal mind that will ascend to eternal vision of the forms. Supreme among these forms is that of the One whose principal aspects are those of truth, beauty and goodness; a trinity-in-unity ready-made to assist Christians struggling with the idea that God is three persons in one divinity. The lesser Platonic forms, including those corresponding to natures experienced in the empirical world, became the ideas out of which God created the world. Even Christian mysticism found its rational warrant in the idea that the most noble experiences consist in inexpressible encounters with transcendental realities. Aristotle came into his own as a philosopher through his rejection of the fundamental tenets of Platonism and through his provision of a more naturalistic and less dualistic worldview. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the enthusiasm for Aristotelianism shown by Aquinas and by his teachers Peter of Ireland and Albert the Great was viewed with suspicion by the Augustinian masters of the thirteenth century. Even so, it is a serious mistake, still perpetrated today, to represent Aristotle as if he were some sort of scientific materialist. In one of the classics of analytical philosophy, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, Peter Strawson explains his subtitle by distinguishing between two types of philosophy, writing that ‘descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, [while] revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure’.7 He goes on to point out that few if any actual metaphysicians have been wholly of one or other sort, but that broadly speaking Leibniz and Berkeley are revisionary while Aristotle and Kant are descriptive. In these terms Aquinas’s thought and thomist metaphysics are fundamentally ‘descriptive’, notwithstanding that they are at odds with the materialism and scientism which some contemporary philosophers proclaim as enlightened common sense. The words of G.K. Chesterton quoted at the outset of this chapter

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.

This is not to say that the race question is any nearer resolution in Brazil than anywhere else - simply that racist ideology faces a more difficult task in Brazil on account of the racial confusion and the range of race mixtures that exist there. Discrimination confronts a web of racial lines as unpredictable as the lines of the human palm. This invalidation of racism by virtue of the scattering of its object is far more subtle and effective than ideological struggle, whose ambiguity invariably revives the very problem it seeks to resolve. Racism will never end so long as it is combated frontally in terms of rational rebuttal. It can be defeated only through an ironic give-and-take founded precisely on racial differences: not at all through the legitimation of differences by legal means, but through an ultimately violent interaction grounded in seduction and voracity. One thinks of the Bishop of Pernambuco; one thinks of the words 'How good he was, my little Frenchman!' He is very good-looking, so he is sanctified - and eaten. He is granted something greater than the right to exist: the prestige of dying. If racism is a violent abreaction in response to the Other's seductive power (rather than to the Other's difference), it can surely be defused only by an increase in seductiveness itself. So many other cultures enjoy a more original situation than ours. For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary analytical means but no situation to analyse. We live theoretically well beyond our own events: hence our deep melancholy. For others destiny still flickers: they live it, but it remains for them, in life as in death, something forever indecipherable. As for us, we have abolished 'elsewhere' . Cultures stranger than ours live in prostration (before the heavens, before destiny); we live in consternation (at the absence of destiny). Nothing can come from anywhere except from us. This is, in a way, the most absolute misfortune.

Analyze’, ‘compare’, ‘contrast’, ‘relate’, and ‘examine’. These are kinds of instructions for an analytical assignment.

Retention is the most critical metric in understanding a product, but most of the time, the data is not pretty. When you look at the engagement data for the entire industry, the data has told the same story over and over—users don’t stick to their apps. One study50 published on tech blog TechCrunch told the story in its headline: “Nearly 1 in 4 people abandon mobile apps after only one use.” The authors looked at data from 37,000 users to show that a large percentage of users would quit an app after just a single try. Unfortunately, I’ve found similar results. In collaboration with Ankit Jain, a former product manager at Google Play, I published an essay titled “Losing 80% of mobile users is normal,” which illustrated the rapid decay that happens right after a new user signs up to a product. Of the users who install an app, 70 percent of them aren’t active the next day, and by the first three months, 96 percent of users are no longer active. The shape of the retention curve matters a lot—ideally, the curve levels out over time, indicating that some users consistently come back. But this is not true for the average app—its curve consistently falls over time, eventually whittling itself to zero. The brutal conclusion is that the usual result for most apps is failure—but there are, of course, exceptions. This is why out of the 5+ million apps on iOS and Android, just a few hundred have large audiences, and only a few dozen dominate all of people’s time and attention. Data from analytics company comScore, revealed that people spend 80 percent with just three apps51—and I’m sure you can guess which ones.

Our life is indeed the same”: Carl Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1972).

Shakespeare famously claimed that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” and this theatrical quality of life is nowhere more evident than in the social world. For the social world is not, and never will be, a world in which we reveal our true selves. Our total character is the product of our genes, our environment, and the interaction of the two, but who we are in public is only a slice of this totality. From very early in life, we learn to magnify the traits of our character most likely to produce social acceptance, while diminishing and hiding those traits which garner rejection or ridicule. This process leads to the creation of our social mask, or what can be called our persona, and as Carl Jung explains, the persona: “…is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, represents an office, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a product of compromise, in making which others often have a greater share than he.” Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology

A further reason for becoming more self-aware, is because the unconscious is not only home to elements of our character which conflict with our self-image and elicit shame, such as our character faults and weaknesses, but it also contains much of what is best about us. This is especially true in the modern day, where we tend to rely too much on our social role, or what Jung called the persona, in the building up of our character. In so doing we make “. . .a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend to be.” Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Sometimes the mere act of sacrifice will be enough to cure what ails us. Free from the chains of our past we can look at the world with a new set of eyes and move forward with a new sense of purpose and energy: “. . .a painful sacrifice can be risked with a mighty effort of the will” wrote Jung. “If successful . . . the sacrifice bears blessed fruit, and the [sacrificer] leaps at one bound into the state of being practically cured.” Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

But on the other hand, there is always a risk that the chaos will overwhelm us and rather than leading to a new and better life order, the descent into chaos will lead to a psychological breakdown. Some psychologists suggest that the psychological rebirth only differs from a psychological breakdown by the end result. The stages that lead to a breakdown, in other words, often mirror those that produce the rebirth. Or as Jung explains, the loss of balance that the sacrifice can produce: “. . .is similar in principle to a psychotic disturbance; that is, it differs from the initial stage of mental illness only by the fact that it leads in the end to greater health, while the latter leads to yet greater destruction.” Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

How is this life-promoting power cultivated? Through the process of self-realization which according to Jung “represents the strongest [and] most ineluctable urge in every being” and which “is a law of nature and thus of invincible power.” (Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) To self-realize is to actualize our potentials, to cultivate our skills, to adapt to the outer world, and to bring harmony to our inner world. “Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbours under the hypocritical cloak of . . .the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power. Individual self-reflection, return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and social destiny – here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present hour.” Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

The aesthetics of language is the ineluctable medium of thought that wends through the leas of prose and poetry, literature and philosophy. People who think are always analytical. Essays, literature, and poetry are analytical and philosophical. All philosophy is literary prose; all philosophy contains the poetry of thought.

Denial of the fundamental role of class relations and struggles in the production of oppression and inequality defines intersectionality’s macro-level assumptions about the relationship among its key elements. Regardless of the politicised vocabulary, i.e. references in the intersectionality literature to imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, class, and so on, intersectionality – like the RGC perspective that preceded it – is an abstract analytical framework which, like sociology, approaches the study of social phenomena ahistorically, i.e. in abstraction from their capitalist conditions of possibility

In an essay on ‘The Concept of Cure’ I suggested that there were two main factors in the analytical process which promoted recovery from neurotic distress. The first factor is that the patient adopts some scheme or system of thought which appears to make sense out of his distress. The second is that he makes a relationship of a fruitful kind with another person.1 Both factors enter into all our lives, but some natures are more inclined toward finding the meaning of life chiefly in interpersonal relationships; others toward finding it in interests, beliefs, or patterns of thought. However important personal relationships may be for the creatively gifted person, it is often the case that his particular field of endeavour is still more important. The meaning of his life is constituted less by his personal relationships than it is by his work.

In The Truants, William Barrett’s splendid memoir of the Partisan Review crowd, Barrett recalls Delmore Schwartz remarking, “ ‘Analytic exuberance’—Philip Rahv’s euphemism for putting a knife in your back.

My theoretical approach here, I want to insist, will be decidedly experimental, more of an attempt—in the classic sense of “essay”—than an analytic framework. In cobbling my network of concepts together, I am driven by my dissatisfaction with the idealism of religious and mystical thinking, on the one hand, and the stinginess of the usual reductionism on the other.

Although not a few people think that a psychology can be written ex cathedra, nowadays most of us are convinced that an objective psychology must be founded above all on observation and experience.