Truth Theme Analysis

Consider the following situation: A client in my practice recounts a long, meandering, emotion-laden account of a difficult period in his or her life. We summarize, back and forth […] It is now a different memory, in many ways—with luck, a better memory […] We have extracted the moral of the story […] That’s the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded” […] but so that you are prepared for the future.

To have this kind of conversation, it is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions […] You must meditate, too, instead of strategizing towards victory. If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness.

Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything […] Communication would require admission of terrible emotions […] But in the background […] the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. […] Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything.

If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganized and chaotic. […] Ignored reality transforms itself (reverts back) int the great Goddess of Chaos, the great reptilian Monster of the Unknown—the great predatory beast against which mankind has struggled since the dawn of time. […] Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering.

If the consequences of placing skatestoppers on plant-boxes and sculpture bases […] is unhappy adolescent males and brutalist aesthetic disregard of beauty then, perhaps, that was the aim. When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine […] I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.

It is almost impossible to over-estimate the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power. […] There is sufficient truth to Derrida’s claims to account, in part, for their insidious nature […] [T]he fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.