Inheritance

I thought of John Keats’s negative capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In this direction lay freedom, and, paradoxically, self-knowledge. By my being willing not to know thoroughly who I am and where I come from, the rigid structures surrounding my identity might begin to give way, leaving behind a sense of openness and possibility

Another trenchant line from the psychoanalyst Bollas: “We learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language.” He’s speaking of infancy, of course, and the underpinnings of our psyches

A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”