What stands out to me is not that this essay permits a methodological critique. It’s that this is where all of the posts I’ve encountered place its center of gravity. As I read it, the essay is less an exposé about scientific misconduct and more portrait of a life shaped by subjugation, inhibition, and longing and of a man who survived by transforming emotional pain into meaning. To interpret it largely as a scandal about made up details is to miss what the essay can help us see.

The moral core of the essay is humanization. Can care be lifesaving but incomplete? Can an analytic relationship sustain someone without liberating them? Can meaning-making that distorts nonetheless still be a way to persist? Its climax is not the exposure of poor epistemic hygiene but a moment of mutual recognition in two old men who finally use each other’s first names.

Collapsing this essay into a culture-war critique creates clarity but loses depth. In this frame, ambiguity is error and tragedy is ethical misconduct. What should not be so neatly judged is shifted into categories that are cleaner and more easily evaluated. I think that in this move we miss the essay’s invitation, which is to consider the uncomfortable truth that human lives are often held together by compromises that just barely succeed at keeping despair at bay.