The Thoughts Loom

  Part II of Notes from Underground is where I started understanding the Underground Man much more closely. Not because I agree with him, or because I see myself in his actions, but because I could recognise something in the way his mind works. At one point I was also in an underground of my own. Every thought I had, every statement I heard, I could reason in both ways. If someone said something was right, I could understand why it was right. If someone said it was wrong, I could understand that too. Then I would start questioning the question itself. What is the reference? Why should this value be considered a value? Who decided it? What if the opposite is also true? And then the questioning can continue forever. I think this is part of what Dostoevsky is showing through the Underground Man. He doesn't seem to have a stable reference from which he judges himself. He is always comparing himself with someone else. Am I above this person or below him? Did he respect me? Did I humili...

  Looking Behind Behaviour I was thinking about psychoanalysis recently, and initially I understood it as looking behind an action from the lens of an individual's history and experiences, especially those experiences that are somehow pushed into the subconscious but still influence what a person does. For example, whenever an exam approaches, someone becomes ill. You ask what they feel, and the answer is that they want to score well. Then you ask, what exactly do you feel in those days? Maybe the answer takes some time, but eventually it becomes, "I am not good enough and I have to win approval." Then you start asking where that feeling comes from, and perhaps there was childhood comparison, perhaps there was no basic sense of security, perhaps the person learned that being good enough was necessary for approval. If you keep going backwards like this, you are not only looking at what the person did. You are trying to understand why that particular thing means what it mea...