I almost got a psychology degree I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion epistomology and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

In the traditional urban novel there is only survival or not. The suburban idea the conformist idea that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

There are fundamentalist psychopaths in every religion in the world. Every single one.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

Recounting of a life story a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully not merely what the evidence is but with psychoanalysts and psychologists and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

Actually I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

Individual psychotherapy - that is engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient modest and a perceptive listener rather than a talker and advice-giver.

Over the last half century the television interview has given us some of TV's most heart-stopping and memorable moments. On the surface it is a simple format - two people sitting across from one another having a conversation. But underneath it is often a power struggle - a battle for the psychological advantage.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye creating works of psychic and physical power.