American Psychiatrist Quotes

Eric Kandel
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Rollo May
Kay Redfield Jamison
Karl Menninger
William Glasser
Wafa Sultan

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.

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.

"Abductees," Eva said, "are souls that have, for their individual purposes and reasons, chosen the probability of physical form." But through their experiences they are "regaining their memory of source... The process of abduction is one form of such, of regaining memory." The abduction "experience itself," Eva said, "is a mechanism to remove" the "structures that impede the reconnection with source," and to purify the physical vehicle in such a way to serve to regain better memory and to bring knowledge to others."

Being chosen doesn't come out of a state of fullness, it comes out of a state of emptiness.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

Insights from myth, dreams, and intuitions, from glimpses of an invisible reality, and from perennial human wisdom provide us with hints and guesses about the meaning of life and what we are here for. Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action are the means through which we grow and find meaning.

Fundamentally the male artist approximates more to the psychology of woman, who, biologically speaking, is a purely creative being and whose personality has been as mysterious and unfathomable to the man as the artist has been to the average person.

Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.

His comment about a book whose author claimed was channeled from the spirit of William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher: "If the vapid writings... did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities. (Survival of death with such an appalling decay of personality makes it, at least to me, a rather unattractive prospect.)"

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

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

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

The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this 'loss of face'—no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death.

James Gilligan
James Gilligan
Having purpose and vision during retirement is one of the most important determinants of mental, social, spiritual, and physical well-being in later life.

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.

Eric Kandel
Eric Kandel
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.

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

Rollo May
Rollo May