'Psychotherapy can often entail confronting a lifetime of accumulated shit. Psychotherapy patients sometimes experience the daunting task of delving into their past and dealing with their emotional demons in much the same way Hercules must have felt as he faced his disgusting, demeaning and ego-deflating fifth labor. For some, even taking the decision to seek psychotherapy is perceived as a failure or defeat. Such a seemingly impossible, tedious, menial task is tough on the ego and can be a severe blow to one's narcissism. But it can take just such a turn in life to teach us some healthy humility and diminish our neurotic narcissistic grandiosity. Carl Jung once commented that "the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego." I prefer to think of this infuriating and humiliating "defeat for the ego" as a traumatic yet potentially transformational process. We are insulted, humbled and, at first feel defeated by such untoward events, which can take the form of outer travails or hardships, involuntary psychiatric symptoms, and/or inner crises painfully demonstrating that we are not in complete command of ourselves but rather subject to the superior or relatively autonomous powers of the unconscious and of life itself. Naturally, the ego furiously resists such displacement and dethronement, seeking to maintain its illusion of control and mastery over reality. This resistance on the part of the ego to surrendering to the Self is so strong, persistent and pervasive – and we are so overidentified with it – that sometimes a seemingly insurmountable crisis or trauma is required to forcefully topple it from its narcissistic ivory tower. Life inevitably provides precisely that which is called for.'

The Gulag Archipelago: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand? -- If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

"The global insurrection against the corporate occuptation." -- Excellent thoughts about the need for artists in times of crisis. (The purpose of art is to tell the truth.)