TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: I love these. They're reading glasses.

THERAPIST: Where did you get them from?

CLIENT: A little place called CVS.

THERAPIST: Is that right? They do fine then?

CLIENT: Yeah. Well, the lowest they go is one, so these are little stronger than what I need. [00:01:04] I'm recovering from a cold and I was feeling fine for a few days; and then yesterday I walked to the gym and worked out and I was fine. I walked came back and I was sitting on the couch. I had just sat down and turned on the game and halfway into it I just started sneezing. Anyway the cold has come back. I'm just e-mailing this guy who wants his daughter to be tutored in pre-calculus because our realtor, put me on the list. So we're going to meet on Friday to see if they want to set something up. It's nice I mean it could be. [00:02:15]

THERAPIST: Getting into the math teaching aspect?

CLIENT: Yeah. But the weird thing is, it's pre-calculus so, clearly, it should be easy, easy. But there are some things in pre-calculus that never get dealt with. It's pre-calculus, but I'm not sure why. In calculus you need to know trigonometry really well. You need to know algebra really well, but there are aspects of pre-calculus that, especially if it's a re-learning, I guess, to teach it.

THERAPIST: Yeah, that's not the best way to be teaching it. [00:03:09]

CLIENT: Yeah, absolutely. I find that this last problem set, I guess enough people kept saying they were having struggles with it that he's delaying it so it's not due today, it's due on Thursday; but I'm done. I was done on Friday. After gym yesterday this one problem that I hadn't really figured out, I went to the gym and then after working out I sat at the table at the entry to the gym and wrote out the next three pages for the proof and it was like boom done. It was like being on the bike and lifting weights somehow cleared my mind enough to see how to perceive it. [00:04:03] But on Saturday after our study session, and usually we're pretty even in our levels, but for the first time I felt like I really understood the material and they were absolutely struggling. That sort of felt good to me because I could honestly, genuinely teach the material and be helpful to them and it was nice to feel like, for some reason probably just because of all the hard work for some reason this seems clear to me, this material. Everything is proofs now, that's the thing. It's proof-based mathematics so, like in calculus, you write out lots and lots of work and sort of get partial credit in case you don't get the answer right; whereas in a proof-based class I don't know what level of math, if you're in a proof-based class but they don't want to see the scratch work. They don't want to see any of that. [00:05:05] They just want to see the logical progression from the claim and the use of definitions and then using methods of proof, which are many, either contra-positive or contradiction or direct or whatever, and just boom going down, getting it and being as economical as possible in your language. So no spare words. I struggle with that because I'm very conversational and I want to be free to explain the process of thinking, so even though I was good, high score on the homework, his note is, (laughs) "I'm looking forward to you being more concise." That's his please be more concise. It's a struggle to be concise.

THERAPIST: What are the benefits of being concise? [00:06:01]

CLIENT: The benefit of concision is that you assume that your reader of the proof is as knowledgeable as you are in mathematics. As a teacher that's a totally false assumption, right? And I feel like everything I do is teaching to myself so that I can be teaching to somebody else, possibly, but I need to think, "What were my thoughts going into this?" The idea is if your audience is someone who is at least as clever as you are in mathematics, you can leave a ton out because they will fill in all the gaps. They don't need to see why you did something else correctly; they will be able to, apparently, do the ten steps of algebra that are missing. They'll see that it makes sense. [00:06:54] So something that would actually take in algebra form truly several pages, you should be able to write in possibly ten lines, which leaves me a little cold because you see it and it's sort of like, "Oh." You have to capture it and you have to do a lot of effort. And somehow I want to be able to look back on the work that I've done and think, "Oh, yeah. That's how I did it." I need proof that somehow the revelation of how you figured it out is just left to the reader to assume you're really right. You just sort of figured it out and you don't need to show how you discovered it, you just show it as true. [00:07:51]

THERAPIST: Do people end up doing the steps of algebra? I mean if there is algebra to do that you end up not showing in your work, does everybody end up having to do that anyway and they just end up with a much more...?

CLIENT: Yeah. For instance, if you have something like X + 1 over X 1, the whole thing cubed, and you want to take the inverse of that, well you have to expand the whole thing and you have to substitute N and you do all of this stuff and it ends up being a lot of algebra, right? I, for one, need to see how you expand the NA of the cube root and how do you deal with it? You switch the X and the Y to make the inverse and then you substitute N in the original equation, da-da-da. I need to see it. But it's sufficient to just write "if X = X + 1 over X + 1 or X1 is 1 cubed," and then just write the answer. It's sort of assumed that people can do it in their head, which, of course, I can. I can do it in my head. I like doing all the stuff that, in terms of doing the proof, there is something pleasant about it, once you understand it and it's nice to sort of have the thought, to be able to think very logically, but I feel like I need to get the context. [00:09:59] The goal of what we're doing, which I find intriguing, is going back to a place where we're going to build math from scratch; so saying F of X = 3Y cubed, a function which we all that's just how we do it. We deal with functions in mathematics, right? That's too specific. We're just going to say, "Well, we're going to take some real number and match that to a real number, and that's sufficient." We're going to generally say "the domain, co-domain, there's an image over here," and generally talk in that way, which I like very much because you can come up with a rule if you wish. [00:11:02] But we're just going to talk ballpark where to go. That's been kind of what we're doing, so it's all about sets and composition of functions. Finally this will be amusing you remember when I was talking about real analysis how in that first day of class and that blonde, pony-tailed, gum-chewing girl, and then all of a sudden the teacher, a half-hour into the class was talking about injunction and bijection and surjection, blah, blah, blah. And then she pipes in saying, "Oh, no. That can't be surjective." And me saying, "I have no idea what that is." Well now I'm a pro. (both chuckle) Now I can do all of that now. [00:12:05]

THERAPIST: How is it?

CLIENT: Well, I don't know. I feel like the first five weeks of this class have been the first hour of that real analysis course. It's interesting. It's interesting to think it's just the nature of it more than anything you can go from being completely confused and frustrated and not even knowing why the words are the way that they are. There are also called on-two and one-to-one functions. And then feeling like I'm sort of making this progress, but I feel like everything we're doing is sort of chapter zero. [00:13:01] It's like all of this is the preliminary stuff for advanced mathematics. If you want to do abstract algebra, if you want to do real analysis all of those courses need this as assumption, and yet, how one learns this stuff, I'm not sure because people don't do proofs anymore. I mean in geometry they do proofs, which were really fun, but in calculus you don't do proofs you just figure out the relationships and do it. You do [...] (inaudible at 00:13:36), you do integrals and double integrals and triple integrals and you just sort of do it; and it's fun -not when you're learning how to do it, but when you get confident with it it's kind of cool. So if you have all these proofs and all of a sudden you're proving all kinds of interesting little numerical, number-theory kinds of things. [00:13:59] It's a feeling like, "Huh. All right. Wow. This is a launching pad to do interesting stuff. It's sort of a launching pad to go and revisit other math from a totally different perspective."

So with the prospect of tutoring pre-calculus, looking at all this material is sort of looking at it through the lens of how my own tutors, perhaps, looked at it, just looking at it as just sort of an instance of a larger truth just like sometimes you have a tutor who, for instance, who is in the math help room. I'll be struggling with some concept and he goes, "Well, just take that..." general sense of sets, for instance, or images of things an image is a technical term for mapping a function. [00:15:03] Not seeing that and being bogged down with details, now I feel like I'm gaining this ability to sort of look down and sort of see how lots of men feel like they sort of fit into these rather useful, general categories to have some deep meaning. So I'm thinking about tutoring. I'm thinking about how to tech trigonometry and somehow feeling like, "Well, that's their sine and cosine. Look, you don't have to get it like that." And I'm not sure whether that's helpful or not. If you're a sophomore or a junior in high school sometimes you just want to know the mechanisms. [00:16:04] You just want to know "what do I do?" That's sort of what a lot of them want know is just how do you do it? Just show me an example. (pause)

THERAPIST: What's that for you?

CLIENT: Well sometimes I'm very aware of the fact that I'm sort of in this little space, perhaps, just in this little bubble of math, which (pause) sometimes I feel slightly self conscious about it. [00:17:08] I feel like, "Well, why exactly am I preoccupied with this when there's not an obvious need for it?" (pause)

THERAPIST: It's kind of like being in a bubble.

CLIENT: Yeah. It's certainly I mean intellectually it's a focus. [00:18:11] I mean this takes a lot of effort. It's not just a pastime of sorts. You can't sort of think, "Well, I can just not do it for a few days." I have to do it because if I don't, I'll fall behind. It takes effort to keep up and then, on rare occasions, be ahead of the class.

THERAPIST: It almost sounds like it's an immersion into an intellectual, really intellectual activity, a very cerebral kind of place.

CLIENT: Yeah, without the headache though, right? I mean sometimes there is that, but for right now, just being aware of the fact that I come in here and evolve the many things that could and possibly should be and have thought about in terms of things in life. [00:19:10] I choose to, because I am usually, thinking about this because I think about it all the time. (pause) It's a different way of just in terms of the content of what we're doing in math you have the equal sign and, somehow in life, we have the equal sign. [00:20:01] Somehow that's a very useful idea this equals that. There is a lot to that and now, just thinking equals is just sort of instance of something bigger going on. It's really just a relation. It's just a relation from this to that and if it happens to have symmetry and reflexivity and transitivity, we could call it equal if we want, except for these other properties, right? These other properties. I'm thinking, "Huh. Isn't that interesting?" It has all those three things and I'm thinking about the thing with numbers. "Huh. Is it reflexive? Huh." All of a sudden the things that as a kid sort of bugged me, all of a sudden they're being explained in a very deep way. [00:21:04] And it's like, "Oh, yeah. It's not like people to just set equals, which left me in the cold. There's a lot behind equals and it's nuanced." If something is not equal but kind of equal, that's interesting kind of equal. Sometimes equal. I'm not talking about an actual function where it's either equal or it's not, but it's sort of relationships. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In the math world, that is kind of neat. I like the flexibility of that, so that's sort of the headspace I'm in right now. (pause) [00:22:17]

When you usually do mathematics, you just sort of assume that numbers work. You use the real numbers, which includes rationals, irrationals everything. And now you get to a point where you sort of say, "Well, we can have a rule from this to that, but we can't use real numbers here because it wouldn't work. We can use the natural numbers, we can use the integers." And so in your finding you're somehow saying, "Well, this is interesting, but we have to define where we're starting and where we're ending," which I think is really intriguing. [00:23:14]

Somehow this notion of, "Well, the rule works, but only under these circumstances," and being able to somehow say, "I have the freedom to somehow say ‘I'm going to define how we start and I'm going to define where we can end.'" And it seems much less absolute. It seems much more subtle that somehow and I haven't been writing lately, because I was writing about this, right? But now I feel like I'm so focused on learning the math that I'm not actually writing about the act of learning math. [00:23:56] But something is going on with that very notion of saying that some infinities are greater than others, some sets of numbers are greater than others, so you have to sort of pick where you're going to start and you're going to end. How big of a world can you start with? That's very interesting. That's very interesting. You know in life, how do you want to define where your first step is going to start from either in thought or in feeling or in some activity or in some conception of the world religiously or if one wants to think about psychological theory, right? Defining terms. Saying that this works, but let's just be very clear about for whom it works, as opposed to trying to make general statements about, "Well, this is a universal truth," instead of saying, "Well, you can have something that's really true and useful, but for a subset." [00:25:05] Somehow that is very helpful for me to think about. (pause) So I've been spending a lot of time just drawing these relationships out; making pictures, which I find immensely helpful. (pause) Which you don't need in a proof, right? The proof does not need pictures, but I feel like I can draw a picture and it's like there it is. That's it. That's the answer. (pause) [00:26:19]

THERAPIST: What's that?

CLIENT: This proof I came up with for this problem I'm really rather proud of myself because it feels like wow, really. I got it. (pause) I can't begin to I could draw it out and it would make sense to you. Verbally if I say it out it would be incoherent, but it generally has to do with the notion of if two things are true and three things are true and four things are true for a certain mathematical pattern and sets, what type of functions they are, they can be true for any arbitrarily large number of sets, as long as the biggest set is at least one bigger than the next set and the last set has at least one element. [00:27:19] And having to sort of prove that, it feels like this sort of pigeonhole idea like you take all of these numbers and they can just follow through an infinite number of sets and they can match up or they can actually funnel and go to a single point. And sort of proving that you can just have an even number of functions, as long as the functions are of a certain type, and they just whew-w-w-w, which is this big thing in calculus, right? [00:28:00] The composition of functions is a function inside of a function inside of a function. You do a derivative. You do a derivative of something inside of something inside of something inside. [00:28:12] Ad you sit down and think, "Hmm. I guess it works because the book says it works." But now, being able to draw pictures and having formal definitions of things and saying, "Oh, globally we can see the impact of how it works," and coming up with it is kind of neat. Granted, it was on our homework so it couldn't be that hard, but feeling like I got it. Anyways, there is a certain beauty to thinking about this stuff very clearly. [00:29:01]

So Saturday, I always bring colored chalk just drawing some pictures and teaching it and taking things that were very confusing to Sarah and Carrie and then being totally bogged down with the language of it and just drawing a picture, and all of a sudden it was like oh, that's it. And feeling to have that ability to work really hard trying to read that stuff and it not being easy and then getting it and turning it into a picture an having that picture communicate the idea so someone else could get it... I might have told you this story, but a few weeks ago I showed up to teach a class but they also wanted the first day's component. I didn't think that they did so I didn't bring my computer, therefore I couldn't have a PowerPoint presentation. [00:30:07] It's an hour long, so then I thought this might actually be much better. They had a dry-erase board and enough colored pens. I do have the knack to be able to draw really well, which is helpful teaching biology, being able to draw things on the board really clearly and accurately. Just doing the entire thing by drawing bleeding arms and hearts and neurons and all of a sudden realizing the class was the best ever because I was slowing down and I had to be drawing, which is fun. [00:30:59] It took place in the real time, as opposed to looking at something which has its own time the PowerPoint and sort of speeding through because there is so much information. Distilling it down and saying, "Okay, here is all of the information I know, but I'm going to focus and take a few things out because I actually have to draw this stuff as opposed to showing a slide." You feel like you're really connected to the people you're teaching because you're creating something and also, I think, this it probably doesn't need to be said but this whole notion of mirror neurons. In the act of learning they're watching a person do something that they themselves can do, which is draw a picture, so they're watching and they're thinking about drawing it, as opposed to simply looking at a picture and not knowing where it came from. [00:32:07] So somehow I feel like writing the stuff on the board, whether they draw it or not, is very helpful because it seems much more real because a real person is generating it, as opposed to something that was from stock images being shot up onto a screen using technology that they really don't understand because how does an LCD projector work? How does PowerPoint work? Who programmed it? I mean, now it's just sort of like I understand pens, I understand whiteboards, I understand you can draw.

THERAPIST: I imagine you might have been working in some way to learn the material, because you had to kind of grapple with things how are you going to put this into imagery? How are you going to distill all this stuff down? In terms of mirror neurons, there's not just the student learning trying to think about it, but the instructor, too. [00:33:23] I was just thinking about that compared to what we were talking about last week some sense, I think, about the relationship there that you're experiencing with struggling to understand or working to learn, as opposed to this kind of sense of your father knowing a to of stuff, as if it were divinely placed or something. It's just in him or in people in people that get math. They just can look at it and don't have to struggle with it. They don't have to grapple with stuff, it's revealed. It's not worked at. It's almost, not quite a priority knowledge or something, but something close. They're not having to grapple with it. [00:34:20] In some way, talking about the ease, I think, of what it feels like to really have to work at stuff to have to get it, that it's enjoyable or something. That's what I'm extrapolating from what you're saying. There's a certain satisfaction and fulfillment.

CLIENT: Yeah. And then, too, the process of getting a problem set and looking at it and not even being able to read part of it, because math has its own symbols. You keep learning new symbols. At some point you just sort of accept that fact; and still it's very upsetting when you feel like, "Okay, before I can even answer anything, I have to learn how to read this." [00:35:27] And that can be infuriating, right? The feeling like I can't even work the problem. And then, once one can be more philosophical about it and sort of settle oneself down, you feel like, "Okay. How do I do the first problem? Let me learn that language." And then, now, six days later, I look at the entire problem set and it's like, "Oh, okay," which is amazing to me. It's absolutely amazing.

THERAPIST: It's very interesting because it's as if one of the starting points you launch from is the recognition that you don't know it, that it's not intelligible initially; and you get frustrated. It's almost like that actually is the spark that makes the learning happen, like that's what you need, as opposed to... I think that maybe the fantasy is that I should already know this. [00:36:41] I should be able to look at it. And it's a fantasy I think everybody has, but it's almost like you have to go through that process of being aware that you don't know it to start to know it. (chuckles) And getting kind of frustrated moves that in some way.

CLIENT: And there's a sense of having thought people who are really good get all the concepts, it's just now they have to learn the language. It's like, "Oh, yeah. Okay, fine. I've thought about that before. I get it. That makes sense." Whereas for me there's a feeling like, not only do I not know the words, but then the concepts themselves are very difficult to hold onto unless you practice them a lot and really, in my case, draw, draw, draw, draw. [00:37:44] And now I feel good with it and I also realize I guess I have wondered about this, but I never really fully got it or really thought about it thoroughly because there was no need to think about it thoroughly because I didn't have the words to think about it thoroughly. Then it's sort of like one of those things (chuckles) like you're in complete darkness, and yet there's light on the other side and you sort of chip away and now you have a single, little dot of light. And since you have that, it's almost this multiplicative thing where you can see a little light and you can chp-chp-chp-chp and, all of a sudden, whoosh it becomes clear very quickly. But you struggle around and grope in the dark for quite a bit before you get that first little light. [00:38:47]

THERAPIST: It reminds me of the feeling you described before I don't know exactly how you put it but the image was of in life feeling that sometimes you feel as if you're in a dark room fumbling for the light switch. How did you put it? You might have put it a bit differently than that.

CLIENT: Yeah, I don't remember the feeling which gave rise to that. There's what I wrote, there's that dream of walking into that great, dark theater and all of a sudden seeing all of these people watching. I wasn't alone but I was welcome, even though I felt like I was interrupting something that they should be at audience and they were meant to be watching. I didn't know either I didn't know who the people were that were watching and I didn't know what it was they were watching. [00:39:49] And yet, I was welcome to be part of the audience and I was made to feel like what we were watching is something that we're part of; that, in fact, it was obvious who was up on stage. (long pause)

THERAPIST: What was it...?

CLIENT: I guess I'm thinking about what I wrote and it feels a bit (pause) like I've pushed that down a bit or it feels a little distant to me because it's been awhile since I've written. I feel like I've (pause) well, you know reading Euclid and thinking about how the Greeks thought about mathematics and thinking about how other cultures thought about mathematics and thinking about how people learned math and my experience of thinking about science and mathematics. And that whole cultural attachment to rigorous thinking and the biases that developed from that. [00:42:07] I mean (pause) it's not new that this nature this sort of determinism and inductionism, which is so prevalent and is sort of in code in basic biology books in high school. It leaves little wiggle room. And then thinking about the nature of all of how quantum the nature of probability and indeterminacy and feeling like people kind of went astray thinking about what's true at some basic level and math is true throughout the entire universe because it's a leap. [00:43:10] It's a leap to think that just because it works mathematically, that it must be true of physics because it often does, but it doesn't have to. So now I think that whatever is personal in writing, now I'm so (pause)... I feel like I'm sort of behind the scenes in some way. Math all of a sudden is getting genuinely interesting because it is not so set in stone, as it always has been in my mind. [00:44:06]

Now it feels like people really do create these ideas and the words that are used have to be thought about. So, for instance, when I heard those words in real analysis, surjective, bijective, injective, and I thought, "Oh, my God. What does that mean?" And then in this class, we start having to deal with it and I was anticipating this, so before the teacher even got to this I thought, "I have to get a jump on this." I'm like how can I get this straight? You are reading chapters and, if you don't know those three main words and have an instant image of what that means, you can't learn anything about them. You have to know what those three words are and the concepts. [00:45:02] So I'm researching and researching and researching and I realized the guy, the mathematician who came up with these three words is French, so surjective is French and a synonym for surjective is "an onto" function; so "sur" is on. I'm thinking oh, so I can hang my hat on that. And then reading what he wrote and people were thinking about these three ideas, awesome mathematicians, and he wrote this paper and he said, "Can we all agree that ‘surjective' means this and ‘injective' means that and ‘bijective' means this?" And it was roundly applauded as, yes, let's just all agree that these terms make sense. It was 1952. [00:45:58] It was like oh. So people were struggling with we had these ideas, but this person used that word and they just codified this. I'm feeling like it's so helpful to know that the idea that preceded these words, and yet somehow these words now are sort of these coins, as if they always existed. It's helpful to know that they were French, and yet now we simply say they're Latinized English words; but, no, they were French. They are French. And so then in my mind I can see all kinds of stuff, so I go and I find this French math professor who is talking about set theory. I'm watching this entire lecture in French, right? And, of course, I don't know French, but that's the thing they say about mathematics. [00:47:02] I know enough French to hear the words here and there. But I'm watching it right now up on the board and I'm realizing that it doesn't matter what language it is, I totally understand what's going on because he's speaking in French, and yet he's writing the exact same thing outright in English because it's all symbols and everyone agrees on the symbols. So he'll say G of X is the G of X (with a French accent), I'm still getting it. (chuckles) It was weird. How strange. I feel like something has transcended because now I'm just sort of watching this and because there's a limited vocabulary, it's like I feel like I actually understand the French after watching for like a half-hour and being like, "Oh, yeah. I guess I speak math-French." At least I hear math-French because the entire universe is (laughing) G of X, F to X (with a French accent). [00:48:08]

So I don't know what that meant to you other than so learning those two words. Now I can actually make progress reading about all the subtleties of the interactions and the fact that I did that three days before the lecture allowed me to be a week ahead of the other students so I could actually teach them on Saturday because I knew the words. I knew the language. (pause) [00:49:09] It feels, using that as some sort of tool, like I often refer to reading books such as these a long time ago and feeling entirely overwhelmed. Had I been able to calm myself down and do what I did in terms of learning surjective, bijective, injective, and say, "Okay. There are lots of ideas." We're now mid-argument in terms of thinking about what certain terms mean, so not only are theories being developed, but there's, I'm sure along with it although I wasn't perhaps seeing it at the time people trying to propose their own language. [00:50:21] And if I knew that and if I was clear that this person has these few words, this set of 20 words, and this is what they're wanting them to mean. Some people agree with these and others don't and be very clear about what are the underlying ideas? What's everyone trying to talk about? And yet when you're 19, 20, 21, it's all "they're the experts." People are championed for things and they go have their own sort of subtleties. A lot is resting on the success of certain ideas. It has felt like, in reading those things any philosophy, whether it's philosophy or psychoanalysis or any sort of social theory there is the sense of there being something very (pause) discovering something which is yet to be fully contemplated deep, deep, deep inside the nature of us, and that only a few people with special abilities and facilities can somehow elucidate these things. [00:51:58] And yet we all experience and feel whatever this is. Unlike mathematics, perhaps, where you don't understand the language of it and it's only if you're thinking about math that you would even contemplate a need to even think about this. But in terms of philosophy and psycho-analogy and social theory, for the most part if you're a human being, the birthright is to experience at some level what's going on. There is that sense that we're all experiencing this, I think, and yet the authors I feel somehow have a special insight into how things work, whether it's comped in the nature of truth and God or Freud in the nature of inner dynamics and struggles. [00:52:59] And feeling like, "My goodness." First in math I can somehow say that I can always sit back and contemplate and say, "Well." I can't just say that it's ‘just' math, but I'd also say that this really is the limit of a certain type of logical thinking and it has all kinds of consequences if you don't understand it. Personally I think, "Why didn't I understand this?" This, there's a sense that if I don't know how to read it and I don't know what the contentiousness is and why these theses are so strong and they are sort of provisionally stated. I mean they're stated with a certain sense of "this is the way things are," and you have to somehow fight is it true? Is it not? [00:54:09] And, meanwhile, it's taking place in your own heart, in your own mind. It's not math, which is somehow on a piece of paper and you either get it or you don't and you can struggle trying to figure out what's the logical thing. It sort of sits in a part of your brain. These issues are issues that everyone wrestles with and they're much more personal than trying to deal with certain subtleties of mathematics. [00:54:36]

THERAPIST: So if you don't get it, if you don't understand it, what's the...?

CLIENT: Well the feeling is that you're less than or that you're not (pause) educated enough or natively smart enough to fully appreciate the life that you have and you might never be able to fully appreciate the life you have; therefore (pause) there is that feeling of (pause) reading poetry and having many different languages on the first page. [00:55:57] You're feeling like, "I don't know these languages and some words are in Spanish," and you can't even read poetry. So there is that. (pause) So there is that feeling so Proust examines this instance, this recollection of the Madeleine, and there's that sense of striving for something personal. It's like that is how I probably approach things, as opposed to having, I think, the machismo of a Freud who, at some point, gained or maybe always had the confidence to write very powerfully and extraordinarily; and yet it's hard to resist it. [00:57:20] Proust you can walk away from. You can say, "Oh, yeah. I've had that feeling. I get it." Freud, there's an argument that's being made, and so there's that feeling that he seems to have cornered the market on the inner world and, if you don't agree with it, you've got to have some pretty good reasons. And that's a little alienating. If you don't agree with Kant, you'd better have some good reasons for not. That's true for anything so you can go on to the next class. And you read Marx. It's like huh. [00:58:05] All right, well. Sounds pretty good in a lot of ways. The only way we know it's not a good idea is because it went too far somewhere, but he didn't know that. That wasn't his intention. He wasn't planning on Russia perverting the ideas and going nuts with it. That was not his intention at all. So if you just look at it as a set of thoughts on its own, it makes a lot of sense. You just create people who have these arguments to be made, and math is simpler because the arguments are limited and once the argument has been made, it's just added to the list of mathematical truths. [00:58:58] There's no debate anymore. It's just adding to knowledge. I'm not sure how much knowledge is added to with thoughts of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis and social theory, in the sense that the disputes get subtler. It presumes you have thought and are well versed in the history of the argument; but still an argument and it's not been decided. You still have camps of people, whereas in math you don't have camps. I mean you can, depending on what realm of math you might say, "I don't use those methods. I don't disagree with them, but I find these methods more useful." But we don't all agree. Mathematicians aren't fighting. They're competing with each other, but they're not fighting over truths of things that have already been shown to be true. [01:00:10] So somehow it feels that there's something very refreshing about math and science proper, as opposed to the very murky sort of world of arguments and lewd states and historicism that takes place in reading...

THERAPIST: Reading Freud.

CLIENT: Well, he was a man of his age and he wasn't alone in thinking that men of a certain class were like that and women were of a certain type. Then you have to somehow think okay, move that foreign bureau of yours to the United States. I think he was still right about a lot of things so I have no axe to grind at all, but how do you explain that to people who reflexively say, "Oh, you've got it all wrong about women." [01:01:19] I don't know if they do or not. I mean looking at life through that lens I say they've kind of got it. But then you're sort of engaged, all of a sudden there's this thing that's contentious. People don't get angry about math. (pause) These books give us all kinds of words and metaphors and useful ways of thinking about things that have been thought for a very long time; and the debate goes on and on and on, so it's a matter of how well-read and how self-examined one is and how trained, in your case, one is to really recognize and know when to shift from one way of thinking to another and how to integrate thoughts and have your own notions of what's useful and what's not. [01:02:34] I think you have a language that you've studied, and yet what you're commenting on is the experience of what you feel. So you see things differently because of what you've read and thought and considered, like any professional. But for the person who has been, perhaps, sort of a jack-of-all-trades, it's exposes different ways of thinking. [01:03:35] And so now I'm finding it useful, right? I'm finding it useful to think so clearly and it's beyond culture. I can watch math in French and it's like huh. If it were being taught in Swahili... and so it's not dealing with the psychology of the man and the effort of or the man in France in 2012 and where he came from or where she came from and what's going on deep down. There is this common thing that is also universal, which I find amazing. There is this notion of subjectivities and [...] (inaudible at 01:04:40), right? But in math there's a sense that there is this common thing [...] (inaudible at 01:04:50), and that also is deeply human and people are interested in it, which I find intriguing. [01:05:06]

THERAPIST: Listen, I won't be here next Monday. I'll let you know if something opens up. I suspect it will.

CLIENT: Okay. Perfect.

THERAPIST: If not, I'll see you in two weeks then.

CLIENT: Very good.

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