Psychoanalysis does something altogether breathtaking

Psychoanalysis is still feared and attacked, not because it raises the spectre of the sex lives of children or suggests that we want to sleep with our fathers and mothers, but because it invites us into a world with more variables that we can cope with, while giving us very powerful demonstrations of why we should believe this world to be a truer representation of what’s going on than the world we are able to handle. But beyond this, psychoanalysis does something altogether breathtaking. Out of the unworkability of its own project, and as though to upbraid us with the comfortable dishonesty of our ordinary human bonds, it fashions an image of pure trust: not trust based on the appetitive deal-making of friendship and love, but a groundless, purposeless, unjustifiable trust between two human beings holding a conversation on the edge of the abyss.

- Nicholas Spice