Quotes by Psychiatrists - Page 10

Humor acts to relieve fear.
Dr. William F. Fry
If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly." from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death
C.G. Jung
I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)
IRVIN D.YALOM
Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth--that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud.
Thomas Szasz
The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.
William Glasser
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
C.G. Jung
[A]ll mental disorders are in some sense passionate convictions about the situation of the self in the world.
Alan A. Stone
The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, a priori, abnormal.
Karl Menninger
The self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz
All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. ”—Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in a 1919 address to the Society for Psychical Research in England
C.G. Jung
Dissociative Disorders have a high rate of responsiveness to therapy and that with proper treatment, their prognosis is quite good.
Marlene Steinberg
I don’t care how intelligent or attractive someone is, if he zaps your energy, he isn’t for you. True chemistry is more than intellectual compatibility. Beyond surfaces, you must be intuitively at ease.
Judith Orloff
Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
M. Scott Peck
Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative".
Viktor E. Frankl
To reach back and help, and expect neither reward nor even thanks.To reach back and help, because that is what spiritual beings do.
Brian L. Weiss
You must have something in order to give it up.
M. Scott Peck
Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
Viktor E. Frankl
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game
R.D. Laing
The most chronic and complex of the dissociative disorders, multiple personality disorder, was renamed multiple personality disorder, was renamed 'dissociative identity disorder' in 1994 in DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association). The rationale for the name change, was among other things, to clarify that there are not literally separate personalities in a person with dissociative identity disorder; 'personalities' was a historical term for the fragmented identity states that characterize the condition.
Colin A. Ross
Let go of your hate. It's not too late.
Walter E. Jacobson
Who said to kill does not require gentleness?
Nawal El-Saadawi
He wondered why he wasn't as in love with her as he was with...Hector had only shared enjoyment with (her)...he shared everything, enjoyment and sorrow...but for some time now they'd shared too much frustration, boredom and fatigue.
François Lelord
The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive.
Jeremy Holmes
A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.
Neel Burton
Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.
Neel Burton
He who spends too long regretting his ruined crop will be neglect to plant next year's harvest.
François Lelord
[M]ental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental wellbeing.
Viktor E. Frankl
We are still living in a wonderful new world where man thinks himself astonishingly new and "modern." This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents.
C.G. Jung
The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
It is this intangible thing love in many forms which enters into every therapeutic relationship. . . . And it is an element which binds and heals which comforts and restores which works what we have to call - for now - miracles.
Karl Menninger
A life of Wisdom must be a life of contemplation and action
M. Scott Peck
Psychedelics show you what’s in and on your mind, those subconscious thoughts and feelings that are are hidden, covered up, forgotten, out of sight, maybe even completely unexpected, but nevertheless imminently present. Depending upon set and setting, the same drug, at the same dose, can cause vastly different responses in the same person. One day, very little happens; another day, you soar, full of ecstatic and insightful discoveries; the next, you struggle through a terrifying nightmare. The generic nature of psychedelic, a term wide open to interpretation, suits these effects.
Rick Strassman
Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference,ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being.
C.G. Jung
Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.
Viktor E. Frankl
In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive. And wehave no right to do that—we never have had, not since the creation of the world.
Sergei Lukyanenko
To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them—making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate.
Allen Frances
As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies.
Ilsa J Bick
The sweetest flower that blows I give you as we part. For you it is a rose For me it is my heart.
Frederick Peterson
Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.
Viktor E. Frankl
All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.
James Gilligan
So don't look over your shoulder or let fear and anxiety rule you. Go for broke. Let passion blaze your trail. Look ahead and pursue the dream that fits who you are as a person and a manager. Learn what you can, but don't get bogged down--in today's world, there's so much to know that learning can actually take the place of action and hold you back. Learn enough, then trust your gut and act. Be bold--or crazy--enough not to hold back. Take advantage of the freedom to be your own person. When the game is over, regardless of the score, you'll revel in what you've done.
Edward M. Hallowell
In spite of our proud domination of nature, we are still her victims, for we have not even learned to control our nature.
C.G. Jung
Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of the passion for envy, traits that few people value and fewer still cultivate and acquire. Not until there is more of Smith and less of Hobbes in the human heart, will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim
Thomas Szasz
Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer.
Thomas Szasz
It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all.
George E. Vaillant
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor E. Frankl
Don't aim at success-the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
Victor E. Frankl
Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.
IRVIN D.YALOM
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.
C.G. Jung
Perfection' is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe.... If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.
David D. Burns
The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
C.G. Jung
What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.
R.D. Laing
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.
Thomas Szasz
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to it creates us makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger
Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
M. Scott Peck
Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him-mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom- which cannot be taken away- that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
Viktor E. Frankl
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.
C.G. Jung
Perfection never exists in reality but only in our dreams.
Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs