With this insight we arrive at the high-philosophical moment in this discussion. The outside-of-language that we use as the corrective or norm for our discursive practices is itself a discursive practice, albeit of a “special” kind.

Related: Object-language and metalanguage. I explain your “you” by showing how it is generated, how it arises as the end product of a mass of prior conditions.

In fact, this is really what I care about: The interplay between the (physical) metaphors constituting the placebo system and the whole way of therapeutic life that springs from this.

Has anyone applied the greater insight of the Later Wittgenstein to the story of selfhood that emerges from one tiny but important (because official and credentialed) corner of our culture? People are not helped in therapy unless they are also invented theoretically through the therapy’s metaphors. The model is the thing. Making the self amenable to manipulation is what drives its modeling. Our metaphors are picked by how they support our imaginary self-determination. The self is made in order to be remake-able. We do not spend time theorizing a self

also what makes that self. In part, at least. Some things are finally there—like sense data, including the seven basic emotions.

Or are they? In Buddhism, even the fundamental givens are conditional constructions.