Psychiatrist Quotes

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.

Beatrice M. Hinkle

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

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.

Jean Shinoda Bolen

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Arthur Kleinman

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

Harold G. Koenig

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.

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.

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

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.