>I'm not talking about psychosis but about garden-variety neurosis
>and noodling around with your noggin as hobby.
Hobby? How is trying to get out from under depression and/or bad choice of love objects a hobby?
Funny you should set the hysterically optimistic Emerson against the gloomy Mitteleuropaische Freud, the man who said that the goal of psa was to turn hysteria into ordinary unhappiness. I'd have thought SF might appeal to your own gloomy anti-Americanism.
Doug