“Just as we often evoke psychoanalytic language without realizing it (“Don’t be so defensive!”), so too has the mind-as-machine concept entered daily speech in an insidious way. “I need to process this,” we say, though for the late twentieth-century cognitive-behaviorist, “processing” carried a very specific meaning. The idea was that people, like a computer, think and act according to rules and logic; that we are fundamentally rational beings. Emotional difficulties were therefore the result of faulty thinking that must be corrected, or conditioned behaviors that must be reconditioned. From this vantage there was little room for the psychotic core, for contradiction or ambivalence: the new metaphor conferred an implicit assumption that, as with machines, a healthy human is an optimized human. We should want to be well, to be productive, to be happy.”