e Clérambault's syndrome:

"The pathological extensions of love not only touch upon but overlap with normal experience, and it is not eacy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology."


Like a self in a dream I was both first and third persons. I acted, and saw myself act. I had my thoughts, and I saw them drift across a screen. As in a dream, my emotional responses were non-existent or inappropriate. Clarissa's tears were no more than a fact, but I was pleased by the way my feet were anchored to the ground and set well apart, and the way my arms were folded across my chest. I looked out across the fields and the thought scrolled across: that man is dead. I felt a warmth spreading through me, a kind of self-love, and my folded arms hugged me tight. The corollary seemed to be: and I am alive. It was a random matter, who was alive or dead at any given time. I happened to be alive. p.19

Smile

We come in this world with limitations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed. Many of our features, our foot shape, our eye colour, are fixed, and others, like our social and sexual behaviour, and our language learning, await the life we live to take their course. But the course in not infinitely variable. We have a nature. The word from the human biologists bears Darwin out; the way we were our emotions in our faces is pretty much the same in all cultures, and the infant smile is one social signal that is particularly easy to isolate and study. p.10

.....brain was such a delicate fine-filigreed thing that it could not even face a change in its emotional state without transforming the condition of a million other unfelt circuits.

We are highly adaptable creatures. The predictable becomes, by definition, background, leaving the attention uncluttered, the better to deal with the random or unexpected. p.141