No matter how many times we’ve seen it before, the frenzy for launching a military attack on another country is — to the extent we’re not numb — profoundly upsetting. Tanked up with talking points in ...

The “repetition compulsion” is a basic concept in psychotherapy. The compulsion to repeat is particularly interesting because what is repeated is not pleasurable. On the contrary, it is usually a ...

Carol Saller’s recent post on repetition inspires me to say just a little more about the subject. Let me take the sentence I just wrote, and you just read, as a path to talking about the basic issue ...

I think about Jackson Pollock and Adolf Wölfli a lot. Pollock: Depressive, tortured and famous for flinging thousands of tendrils of paint onto a surface, the polarizing Abstract Expressionist who ...

I learned a lot in Cub Scouts. I started a fire with sticks one time, and for that demonstration, witnessed by my scoutmaster, William Van Ameringen, I received a tiny arrowhead badge. My mother sewed ...

Why do we keep going back to the parents that mistreated us? It often takes years and many attempts before we finally free ourselves from our abusive, undermining, and bullying parents. We can’t stop ...

From articles by Anne Applebaum published in The Atlantic since 2021. Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, which is “dedicated to strengthening ...