A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

In a lengthy dialogue, two men, possibly a psychologist and a patient, discuss adultery, sin, desire, and life.

A patient attends regular sessions with his psychiatrist but stubbornly refuses to tell the doctor his true thoughts.

Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

A man tells his life story leading up to his suicide, attempting to explain the seemingly-inescapable mental paradoxes he found himself facing in his quest to be an authentic person, which reinforced, time after time, his belief that he was a fraud.

A writer grapples with the suicide of her longtime friend and mentor.

Everything all at once in word form.

A man who unknowingly talks to himself wonders why a woman who is satisfied with her marriage is having an affair with him.

While caring for his wife in the hospital, Dickstein contemplates the legacy of his late father, the probability of his wife's future widowhood, and other familial queries brought to the surface in his wife's Freudian summer course.