A simple example: a patient criticizes me for being incompetent, offering no help, etc. I feel I have worked hard to try and understand and help this patient and feel a tinge of annoyance, or building frustration. All of a sudden without much thought I am running through in my head all the ways I have helped the patient and why the patient is wrong. Oops. I catch myself. The patient feels me as bad and I have just tried to avoid the transference. I notice this and say aloud, with meaning and feeling, 'I've really let you down. What should I have done differently?' Here it is likely the patient transferred onto me an early experience with a caretaker. But whereas the caretaker - as parents often do - was most likely unable or unwilling to accept criticism and ask for feedback, probably doing the opposite by attacking the child or becoming overly defensive, I give the patient a new experience that allows new thoughts and feelings to come to light. Patient: 'wow, no one has ever said that to me before...'

[Joker] violates the taboo which guards the moral incoherence of all American stories about supervillains: the correlate of the villain’s motiveless malignancy is the fundamental innocence of society, its right to continue as it is. Only an evil originating outside of that society can possibly explain the desire to harm it. But this fantasy of innocence is bound to collide with the gothic underpinnings of Batman’s moral universe: Gotham is a city of endemic corruption and decay, and its villains are endogenous, home-grown, expressions of a universal sickness.