This past Sunday 5 May, TheGuardian featured an article entitled “Interpretation of seams? Sigmund Freud’s couch needs £5,000 restoration”. It recounts how the Freud Museum in London has launched an appeal for funds to restore ‘possibly the most famous piece of furniture in the world’:

It is possibly the most famous piece of furniture in the world, but the couch in Sigmund Freud‘s consulting room is now sagging under the weight of more than a century of dreams, terrors, traumas and phobias, and is overdue for a facelift.

The Freud Museum in London has launched an appeal on what would have been his 157th birthday for funds to restore the couch on which his patients lay while they bared their souls to him.

Many of Freud’s most famous patients, whose psychological traumas helped him to formulate his theories of psychoanalysis, lay on the couch. They included the “Wolf Man”, a…

Rorty wrote in favor of historicist thinkers, showed sympathy towards questions asking for “What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth-century democratic society?”, and remarked the importance of the so-called historicist turn, which, according to him, “has helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. xiii). But Rorty did not talked about an homogeneous group of historicist writers, but of groups of them, and went over to distinguish the exemplars group form the fellow citizens group (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. xiv). Some writers searched for private perfection or “aestheticism”, as Rorty called it. Some others engaged in an effort which Rorty qualified as “social”, namely “the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. xiv). He denominated the former “writers on autonomy”, the later “writers on justice” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. xiv)…

“For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength” (Phil. 4:13).

Making changes and facing challenges can often brings thoughts of fear. Can I really do this? What if I fail? What will others think?

Changes and challenges. Sometimes when I face a change or challenge–like when I confront someone, change jobs, or re-evaluate priorities and commitments–I feel paralyzed with fear. Then, I spend more of my energy dreading the inevitable than actually “doing it.”

Deadlines. In college, fear often overwhelmed me at the beginning of a new semester or when I faced a deadline or test. I would think, How can I possibly do all this in just a few weeks or days? How can I remember all those details?

Success. But I found success as I took each assignment or test one at a time. And then, when the next test, assignment, or semester rolled around, and fear attempted to paralyze me again…