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.
The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Donβt let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.
Once I got into space, I was feeling very comfortable in the universe. I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck of stardust, any comet, any planet.
I don't think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.