What am I trying to accomplish here? I can express it as follows: a fresh way to view our interaction with numbers, with science, and with those psychological forces within us that strive for security and coherence in the world. The matters I explore are so closely bound up with our everyday lives that we simply take them for granted: numbers don't lie; two plus two must always equal four; mathematics comprise the way for empirical investigations to establish the true and reject the false; science offers us an objective, realistic picture of the world, as opposed to our subjective musings; there is a sphere of pure intellectual endeavour that takes us beyond the bodily realm of sensorial and often erroneous information. For millions of people everywhere such notions are axiomatic.

Psychoanalysis is particularly provocative and revealing when it probes the quotidian—dreams, slips of the tongue, humor, politics, religion, raising children—in other words, normative behaviors and beliefs that roll along unreflectively, unthinkingly even,