Socrates is in prison awaiting execution, and he is doing something he had never done before: writing poetry. When his friends ask him why, he explains that he has always had a recurring dream, a voice that told him to “cultivate and make music” (Phaedo 60e). Socrates had always assumed that by “music” the dream […]
psychoanalysis
Money and the Whore of Babylon
I first came across this idea in Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money. In it Lietaer — one of the architects of the euro — describes how, in ancient Mesopotamia, the temple distributed clay tokens that entitled the bearer to a certain amount of barley. Some writers — beginning with Herodotus — have linked these […]
Christianity and the Maternal Fantasy
My mother had now come to me. Moved by her faith, she had followed me across sea and land, trusting entirely in You through every danger. When we were at sea, she was the one who comforted the sailors—even though it’s usually the sailors who comfort anxious passengers—because You had shown her in a vision […]
Beyond Nothing: ‘Meta’ and the Illusion of Depth
The prefix meta- is often used to signal a higher level of discourse—a way of stepping beyond an ordinary subject to talk about it from an external vantage point. But how real is this elevation? Often, meta- creates an illusion of depth rather than adding actual substance. Meta-words are just words Consider the sentence: “A […]
The ‘real’ father
Daughter: “What if you’re not my real dad? Like, what if someone else is my actual dad?” Dad: “Why do you say that? What made you think of this?” Daughter: “I don’t know… I just think I’d feel sad if you weren’t my real dad. I’d begin to like the other guy, even if I […]
Children and divorce: The litmus test
What should divorced or separated couples do with their children? This is a notoriously difficult problem. When a couple separates, one or both individuals may want to break free from the relationship, but they cannot entirely do so because they have a child in common—or can they? Consider the following example from a real case […]