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.

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

I mean that I think I find the psychology of people more interesting than politics. I think the psychology of politics is more interesting than straight politics.

I think politics come out of psychology.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else poetry in terms of psychology.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement and Freud and Jung and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.