1. I read a long interview in The Paris Review with psychotherapist and author Adam Phillips. I’d never heard of him before this interview–and, being The Paris Review, it’s pretty intellectually rarefied–but there were some really shining nuggets of truth in there:
Your mind by itself is full of unmediated anxieties and conflicts. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else—I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms—whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
and:
[Analysis] is not about redescribing somebody such that they become like a character in a novel. It’s really showing you how much your wish to know yourself is a consequence of an anxiety state—and how it might be to live as yourself not knowing much about what’s going on.
That second one can almost pass as a hippie thought!
2. Yes, I’m still playing with the Waterlogue app: