American Psychiatrist Quotes

Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.

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.

Judith Lewis Herman

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

Edward F. Edinger

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

William Glasser

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

Darold Treffert

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.

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

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

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

Although humans and baboons may fight among themselves, dominate others, and keep harems, only humans have the ability to give pious excuses for what they do.

Arnold M. Ludwig

However patriarchal the world, at home the child knows that his mother is the source of all power. The hand that rocks the cradlerules his world.... The son never forgets that he owes his life to his mother, not just the creation of it but the maintenance of it, and that he owes her a debt he cannot conceivably repay, but which she may call in at any time.

Social laughter is momentary, soon burns itself out and passes away like the fire and smokes of straw, but genius shakes the very skies with its lasting, inextinguishable laughter.

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.

Edward Hallowell (psychiatrist)

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

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

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?

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.

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

Milton H. Erickson

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

Harry Stack Sullivan