Adam Blatner

There are innumerable stories. It’s a more complex form of individuality. This unique person meets that one, the dynamic takes some twists and turns. It all unfolds within a circle of other individuals with their own quirks, and a setting, club, organization, with its own norms. All this happens in a larger culture and time in history that adds its own circumstances.

Truly, we live as stories, not as abstract categories. People most naturally think as stories—it’s traditional schooling that has distorted our more organic mental life so that we think in terms of separate categories, abstractions, interacting with others in a dry mathematical way. Truth is that in every interaction there are many textures that remain unknown, such as how A feels about B. That in turn is affected by many variables—see my papers on my website on “tele” or the foundations of rapport.

How we feel about a person dictates unconsciously how we interpret that person’s behavior—cute, tiresome, darling, overbearing, whatever.