Quotes by Psychiatrists - Page 7

You can be justified in attacking someone, physically or verbally, but the satisfaction it brings is limited; it often leaves you with a bad feeling in the long run and gets you more involved with someone you'd like to stay away from.
Michael I. Bennett
Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?
Thomas Szasz
Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of the most unequal relationships imaginable. It is no accident that incest occurs most often precisely in the relationship where the female is most powerless. The actual sexual encounter may be brutal or tender, painful or pleasurable; but it is always, inevitably, destructive to the child. The father, in effect, forces the daughter to pay with her body for affection and care which should be freely given. p4
Judith Lewis Herman
Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.
Neel Burton
In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.From this one may see that there is no reason to pity the old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that: Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past -the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized -and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
Viktor E. Frankl
If you observe a really happy man you will find ... that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of each day.
W. Beran Wolfe
The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other.
M. Scott Peck
Follow your heart. Just don't get lost.
Ilsa J Bick
I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
IRVIN D.YALOM
Choose to be a love-finder rather than a faultfinder.
Gerald Jampolsky
Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice. No matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable. We are as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we are obviously ill matched as with someone more suitable. Indeed, we may not even like or admire the object of our passion, yet, try as we might, we may not be able to fall in love with a person whom we deeply respect and with whom a deep relationship would be in all ways desirable. This is not to say that the experience of falling in love is immune to discipline. Psychiatrists, for instance, frequently fall in love with their patients, just as their patients fall in love with them, yet out of duty to the patient and their role they are usually able to abort the collapse of their ego boundaries and give up the patient as a romantic object. The struggle and suffering of the discipline involved may be enormous. But discipline and will can only control the experience; they cannot create it. We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.
M. Scott Peck
The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.
John Bowlby
...not all encounters with the world affect the mind equally. Studies have demonstrated that if the brain appraises an event as "meaningful," it will be more likely to be recalled in the future.
Daniel J. Siegel
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
C.G. Jung
But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shallow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really "final" truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.
C.G. Jung
Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, "suffering from tragedies that never occur"? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs.
Randolph M. Nesse
Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.
Viktor E. Frankl
Change comes about when you become what you are, not when you try to become what you are not.
Arnold R. Beisser
Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account.
Robert Coles
The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.
Neel Burton
When we forgive, the slave we free is ourselves.
Edward M. Hallowell
Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.
Karl Menninger
It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.
Anthony Storr
If you observe a really happy man you will find ... that he is happy in tiie course of living life twenty-four crowded hours each day.
W. Beran Wolfe
What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that the view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality.
M. Scott Peck
People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.
Judith Lewis Herman
In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind.
Neel Burton
Master the power of attitude and you'll live a powerful life.
Gerald G. Jampolsky
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic
Thomas Szaz
We look to the accumulation of sensory pleasures to give our lives meaning. We have the ability now to consume anything we want and this capacity far exceeds our actual needs. With so much at our fingertips, a kind of gluttony pervades our mind-sets.
Mark Epstein
Trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it makes us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.
Mark Epstein
Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am and psychotic means he's even worse than my brother-in-law.
Karl Menninger
For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.
Viktor E. Frankl
All of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their fullest extent. ... And every life must be chalked up at least a partial failure when it does not succeed in reaching its inherent destiny.
Smiley Blanton
... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.
Judith Lewis Herman
Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy. Got that, fellas? If you're unhappy at the amount of sexual opportunity in your life, don't blame the women. Instead, make sure they have equal access to power, wealth and status. Then watch what happens.
Cacilda Jethá
Or rather, he was sad because that morning he'd understood that he'd understood nothing, because while he still understood nothing he wasn't sad at all, but now that he'd understood that he'd understood nothing he felt sad, if you follow.
François Lelord
The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.
Anthony Storr
Dying, however, is lonely, the loneliest event of life. Dying not only separates you from others but also exposes you to a second, even more frightening form of loneliness: separation from the world itself.
IRVIN D.YALOM
Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine.
Randolph M. Nesse
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.Carl JungSwiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)
C.G. Jung
There are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with true masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.
Jeremy Holmes
I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness
Frantz Fanon
When I’d RSVPed for tonight, I hadn’t expected to be the youngest by three-plus decades. To be honest, I hadn’t expected anything. I didn’t have the mental capacity. The excitement over my first house party overwhelmed me and kept my thoughts abuzz for threeweeks.Jim and Valerie suggested Harry and Jackie invite me. Understandably, Harry and Jackie were skeptical about bringing a single male into their close-knit group, but Valerie vouched for me, which persuaded Jackie. I leapt at the invitation—any single male would have—but now, learning about the most recent medications to assist smooth menopausal transition, I was seriously rethinking my decision.
Daniel Stern
The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.
Judith Lewis Herman
The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance onOur SOULS.
C.G. Jung
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
C.G. Jung
The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.
Frantz Fanon
Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.
Bruce D. Perry
You don't ask for all that you get. You don't get all that you ask for. That doesn't mean you don't work the hardest for what you want the most.
Shefali Batra
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
Jacques Lacan
One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.
Frantz Fanon
After all, inside every woman, no matter how grown up she is, there is still a frightened little girl.
Sergei Lukyanenko
A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love. These assumptions are relatively stable and enduring: those built up in the early years of life are particularly persistent and unlikely to be modified by subsequent experience.
Jeremy Holmes
Forgiveness is not turning the other cheek. Forgiveness is not running away. Forgiveness does not mean that you condone what the person has done, nor does it mean that you invite them to do it again. It doesn't mean that you forget the offense, nor does it mean that by forgiving you tacitly invite bad things to happen again. It doesn't mean that you won't defend yourself.
Edward M. Hallowell
Everybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Anyone can drown. Sometimes you see it. Most often, youdon’t because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn’t look like drowning and somepeople scar so nicely. Take it from an expert.
Ilsa J Bick
Hope is the major weapon against the suicide impulse.
Dr. Karl Menninger
So it is with grief where, if all goes well, can come a strengthening of the inner world, of memory and definition.
Jeremy Holmes
The main reason why clinicians may not diagnose personality disorders is that they think that doing so supports therapeutic pessimism. Recent research has shown this is not true; most patients get better, either with time or with treatment, that the prognosis is actually better than in many patients with severe mood and anxiety disorders.
Joel Paris