The effort, the altitude, the agonising achievement, it can all strip back the boundaries of your personality, lay bare emotions, inhibitions, expose the hurt, bring out the joy, and, like the stunning vistas of the French Pyrenees, bring everything into stark relief.
Here is one of her insights: "All his thinking had a forceful impact upon his inner life, so that the fullness of the inward and contending experiences threatened to burst the circumscribed boundaries of his personality". This sentence hauntingly yet compassionately encompasses not only Nietzsche's inadequacy as a lover but also his final madness.
Mostly, students say, the freedom lets them explore the boundaries of their own personalities.
"That's a really interesting example for me to say, 'Well what are the boundaries?' and try to have some sort of personality around stuff and show that government can have some personality".
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965), especially chapter 7, section A on "The Forgetting of Dreams". Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality (New York: Harpercollins, 1992).
Deciding where the precise boundary lies between what is the normal range of personality and a disorder is always difficult".
Journal of Personality, 39-63.
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.
The importance of personality factors.
Genetics of Personality Consortium.
