Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.
Interpretation
Flashbacks are vivid sensory experiences that often lack verbal articulation, creating a powerful present moment.
In this quote, Siri Hustvedt reflects on the nature of flashbacks, emphasizing that they are often experienced as intense visual, motor, and sensory memories rather than verbal recollections. This description highlights the often overwhelming and immediate essence of such memories, which can evoke strong emotions and transport individuals back to distressing moments without the mediation of language.
In practice
In a therapy session discussing trauma, this quote can illustrate the nature of painful memories.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.
The world is governed by opinion.
This little separate self must die. Then we shall find that we are in the Real, and that Real is God, and He is our own true nature, and He is always in us and with us. Let us live in Him and stand in Him. It is the only joyful state of existence. Life on the plane of the Spirit is the only life, and let us all try to attain to this realization.
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.
When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.
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