American Psychiatrist Quotes

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

The highest love a person can have for you is to wish for you to evolve into the best person you can be.

David Viscott
David Viscott
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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names in research.

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

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

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.

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
"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."

The psychopath... is a rebel, a religious disobeyer of prevailing codes and standards. Moreover, clinical experience with such individuals makes it appear that the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program.

Understanding a person's hunger and responding to it is one of the most potent tools you'll ever discover for getting through to anyone you meet in business or your personal life.

Mark Goulston
Mark Goulston
It is impossible to win a contest with a helpless opponent since if you win you have won nothing.

Indeed, it is the perennial (and almost always unverbalized) premise of creativity, to show that the tangible, visible, and audible universe is infinitesimal in comparison to the one that awaits discovery through exploration of the external world and of the human psyche.

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.

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
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.

We tend to think of dangers and uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life, or irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world. I suggest the contrary: that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life. In fact, as we shall come to understand, they make life matter. They define what it means to be human.

Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable.

In my experience with EEG Biofeedback and ADD, many people are able to improve their reading skills and decrease their need for medication. Also, EEG biofeedback has helped to decrease impulsivity and aggressiveness. It is a powerful tool, in part, because the patient becomes part of the treatment process by taking more control over his own physiological processes.

Daniel Amen
Daniel Amen
I receive death threats on a daily basis. I'm a well-known writer in the Arab world. My writings expose me to millions of devout Muslims who have nothing positive to prove but the sheer cruelty of their teachings. Islam has deprived them of their intellectual ability to face criticism with an effective and acceptable way.

Wafa Sultan
Wafa Sultan