20th-century Psychiatrist Quotes

Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery.

Competence in heterosexuality, or at least the appearance or pretense of such competence, is as much a public affair as a privateone. Thus, going steady is a high school diploma in heterosexuality; engagement a BA; marriage an MA; and children a Ph.D.

If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments.

When we give up our goals and concentrate diligently on the practices of our lives, we increase self-mastery and move toward the invisible universe, toward Spirit, to receive the wonders and miracles the universe has to offer us.

To "know thyself" must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.

Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even, by a vote of the members of APA, not to mention the courts.

When encountering emotional vampires, see what you can learn. It's your choice. You can simply feel tortured, resentful, impotent. Or, as I try to do, ask yourself, How can this interaction help me grow?

A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.

Adolescents who are absorbing negative messages about who they are and what is expected of them may sink to that level instead of realizing their true potential. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.

Daniel J. Siegel

In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.

Salvador Minuchin

The ceremonial and religious uses of psychedelics are much older than their recreational uses and abuses. For most of their history, they have been mysterious, dangerous substances and must be treated respectfully.

The hospital that feeds you refined sugar, white bread, canned soup, bouillon cubes, and frozen vegetables should be closed by the health department as a menace to the public health.

It is difficult to give children a sense of security unless you have it yourself. If you have it, they catch it from you.

William C. Menninger

The supply of interpretations, like that of advice, greatly exceeds the need for them.

Harry Stack Sullivan

I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...

Milton H. Erickson

It can be helpful simply to make a written or mental list of the things you do each day. Then give yourself a mental credit for each of them, however small. This will help you focus on what you have done instead of what you haven't gotten around to do. It may sound simplistic, but it works.

Jealousy, which serves the struggle for survival, can deteriorate into the envy which draws defeat even from victory.

Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

The recent years of the Grant Study have shown that our lives when we are old are the sum of all of our loves.

George Eman Vaillant

Children are incurable romantics. Brimful of romance and tragedy, we whirl through childhood hopelessly in love with our parents.

I know that there is a reason for everything. Perhaps at the moment that an event occurs we have neither the insight or the foresight to comprehend the reason, but with time and patience it will come to light.