20th-century Psychiatrist Quotes

Through systematic oppression, the black American has been effectively castrated by white America.

Alvin Francis Poussaint

The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious.

Fredric Wertham

The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.

Sustenance for the infant and child is more than alimentary nourishment. The child needs love, security, narcissistic supplies -- however one may describe it.

Alexander Lowen

The less harshly we judge ourselves, the more accepting we become of others.

Harold H. Bloomfield

The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.

Robert Jay Lifton

Creative action plays with the unknown. But as the child fears the dark... the adult child will be fearful too, faced with the dark world of the unknown mind, with vast concepts looking enormous just beyond the front yard.

Arthur J. Deikman

Sleep is an essential part of life-but more important, sleep is a gift.

When we play, we sense no limitations. In fact, when we are playing, we are usually unaware of ourselves. Self-observation goes out the window. We forget all those past lessons of life, forget our potential foolishness, forget ourselves. We immerse ourselves in the act of play. And we become free.

Most people, in committing a suicidal act, are just as muddled as when they do anything important under emotional stress. Carefully planned acts of suicide are as rare as carefully planned acts of homicide.

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.

Randolph M. Nesse

The healthier people are, the more they are willing to admit to their limitations and so the more open they are to the possibility of improvement.

People who have three daughters try once more
And then it's fifty-fifty they'll have four.
Those with a son or sons will let things be.
Hence all these surplus women. Q.E.D.

Justin Richardson

Man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological milieu that does not respond empathetically to him, than he can survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen.

To empathize means to share, to experience the feelings of another person.

What happens in a changing field of medicine, where we have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

There is very much in the world that is bad. But usually the attempt to defeat evil engenders more evil. I advise you to do good; that is the only way to win the victory.

Sergei Lukyanenko

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.

Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Combat leaves a lasting impression on men's minds, changing them as radically as any crucial experience through which they live.

Roy R. Grinker, Sr.

We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.

Some authors have conceptualized depression as a "depletion syndrome" because of the prominence of fatigability; they postulate that the patient exhausts his available energy during the period prior to the onset of the depression and that the depressed state represents a kind of hibernation, during which the patient gradually builds up a new story of energy.

Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, yes when we should say no.

William Glasser

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.