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Freud was a very great man, but I never get the impression that anyone ever effectively stroked his penis.

... the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don't change corpses. Corpses aren't bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.

'If I weren't a consistent self, a glutton at the table, sloppy in dress, bland in speech and rigidly devoted to psychoanalysis, to success, to publication - and all of these things consistently - I'd never get anything done, and what would I be?'
I didn't answer.
'If I sometimes smoked one way,' he went on, 'sometimes another, sometimes not at all, varied the way I dressed, was nervous, serene, ambitious, lazy, lecherous, gluttonous, ascetic - where would my "self" be? What would I achieve? It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. It's insane.'
With a satisfied and relaxed grunt he placed his pipe down again and smiled pleasantly at me. For some reason I hated him.
'And accepting these self-defeating limitations is mental health?' I said.

... breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.
I also created problems.

I was surprised at the way I began to be interested in her spiel. I'd sat down filled with anticipatory resentment, had at first internally criticized Ms Kalb's dress, speaking voice and verbal style, but then gradually found my mind being engaged by what she was saying, perhaps because she so clearly didn't give a damn whether I approved or not. I had never given any serious thought to what my father had been about, except to reject it out of hand, but she was getting through. She acted as if she were providing a service that people could take or leave as they saw fit, and she couldn't care less.