Psychotherapy

1:Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy. ~ M Scott Peck,

2:Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind. ~ Dion Fortune,

3:Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds. ~ Thomas Keating,

4:All psychotherapy is ultimately something of an art. There is always an irrational element in psychotherapy. The doctor's artistic intuition and sensitivity is of considerable importance. The patient, too, brings an irrational element into the relationship: his individuality. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

5:We are reminded again of that remark of Goethe's which we have already quoted, and which we called the finest maxim for any kind of psychotherapy: "If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

6:There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

7:The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. ~ Carl Rogers,

8:This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

9:Few of us can escape being neurotic or character disordered to at least some degree (which is why essentially everyone can benefit from psychotherapy if he or she is seriously willing to participate in the process). The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. ~ M Scott Peck,

10:Any limiting categorization is not only erroneous but offensive, and stands in opposition to the basic human foundations of the therapeutic relationship. In my opinion, the less we think (during the process of psychotherapy) in terms of diagnostic labels, the better. (Albert Camus once described hell as a place where one's identity was eternally fixed and displayed on personal signs: Adulterous Humanist, Christian Landowner, Jittery Philosopher, Charming Janus, and so on.8 To Camus, hell is where one has no way of explaining oneself, where one is fixed, classified-once and for all time.) ~ Irvin D Yalom,

11:The soul theoretically is the purview of religion. But in today's society, relatively few people look to religion to truly heal their despair - and for understandable reason. In most ways organized religion has abdicated its role of spiritual comforter, if not through its own malfeasance, the at least through dissociation from the soulfulness at the core of its mission.

Modern psychotherapy has taken up some the slack, and yet it too fails deliver when it doesn the soult necessary to heal our emotional pain. The psychotherapeutic profession has now turned to the pharmaceutical industry to compensate for its frequent lack of effectiveness, yet the pharmaceutical industry lacks the ability to do more about our sadness than to numb it. ~ Marianne Williamson,

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

2:Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy. ~ viktor-frankl, @wisdomtrove

3:Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion. ~ nathaniel-branden, @wisdomtrove

4:The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. ~ carl-rogers, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Love is nature's psychotherapy. ~ Eric Berne,

2:Psychotherapy is the prostitution of friendship. ~ Hans Eysenck,

3:The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. ~ Rollo May,

4:The more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate. ~ Hans Eysenck,

5:Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy. ~ M Scott Peck,

6:Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy. ~ M Scott Peck,

7:In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy. ~ Brian W Aldiss,

8:Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~ Michael Torke,

9:There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy. ~ Thomas Szasz,

10:The ultimate goal of Jungian psychotherapy is to make the symbolic process conscious ~ Edward F Edinger,

11:If ever there was an avian candidate for psychotherapy, the male blue heron is our nominee. ~ Carl Sagan,

12:I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now. ~ Jim Harrison,

13:Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. ~ Paul Kalanithi,

14:Effective psychotherapy works because the therapist continues to grow as a person and as a healer. ~ Jed Diamond,

15:The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. (36) ~ Jonathan Kellerman,

16:Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool. ~ H L Mencken,

17:Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

18:Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

19:Psychotherapy seeks for an improvement in neurotic balance. Letting go, however, eliminates it all together. ~ David R Hawkins,

20:In psychotherapy it is the myth of knowing this why as precondition for change which defeats its own purpose. ~ Paul Watzlawick,

21:'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing. ~ Thomas Szasz,

22:Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that. ~ A S Byatt,

23:[T]he harvest of psychotherapy is not cure - surely, in our field, that is an illusion - but instead change or growth. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

24:Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind. ~ Dion Fortune,

25:Probably saying a 30-second prayer at a key moment has done more good than any psychotherapy or drugs I've prescribed. ~ Harold George Koenig,

26:Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind. ~ Dion Fortune,

27:'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it. ~ Thomas Szasz,

28:Psychotherapy works, and some types of therapy have been shown to be much more effective than antidepressants over the long run. ~ Irving Kirsch,

29:Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion. ~ Nathaniel Branden,

30:Either a large man with very quick reflexes and a deadly sword hat indeed, invaded her home. Or she needed intense psychotherapy. ~ Gena Showalter,

31:The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories. ~ Thomas Szasz,

32:three types of effective treatment for depression: antidepressant medications, individual and group psychotherapy, and bibliotherapy. ~ David D Burns,

33:I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

34:The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are that belated objectives of nearly all Psychotherapy ~ Brock Chisholm,

35:There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate. ~ Hans Eysenck,

36:Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy. ~ Terence McKenna,

37:You were lost in the darkness of the world until you asked for light. And then God sent His Son to give it to you. Psychotherapy-3. III. 8:9-13. ~ Robert Holden,

38:Psychotherapy -- A long, drawn out process consisting of subtle probings of the human mind, whereby women are blamed for all of Freud's shortcomings. ~ Marc Cooper,

39:some psychiatrists believe that exercise (aerobic or anaerobic) can be as effective in healing depression as psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs.14 ~ Helen Fisher,

40:When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process. ~ Lawrence Block,

41:Norman Doidge alludes to in his breakthrough book The Brain That Changes Itself when he writes: “Psychotherapy is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors. ~ Mark Wolynn,

42:Every psychotherapist not only has his own method—he himself is that method...The great healing factor in psychotherapy is the doctor’s personality” (1945, p. 88). ~ Anonymous,

43:No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

44:One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy. ~ Glen Duncan,

45:Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

46:A man undergoing intensive psychotherapy discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic. ~ Anonymous,

47:Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world. ~ Mark Epstein,

48:J.L. Moreno was a pioneer of twentieth-century theater and psychotherapy. A remarkable work, Impromptu Man should be required reading for therapists and dramatists alike. ~ Jeffrey K Zeig,

49:Depression comes back over time in about 90 percent of people on antidepressants. Studies show that relapses are far less common when people are treated with psychotherapy. ~ Irving Kirsch,

50:The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help (the client) acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering. ~ Carl Jung,

51:Catholic education and law schools provide me with a lot of miserable people as psychotherapy clients. I should be grateful. These people are looking for rescue from their education. ~ Brad Blanton,

52:Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. ~ Chris Voss,

53:Breathing properly, meditating, and focusing on the impermanence of all things are healing activities. In fact, some of our most successful psychotherapy incorporates aspects of Buddhism. ~ Mary Pipher,

54:no cure is possible; the most one can hope for is an improvement in social adjustment. But then, what is left for the analyst to do? ~ VonFranz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, Shambahla Publications, 1990,

55:Psychotherapy is a practice that many different professional disciplines engage. Psychiatrists are also medical doctors and increasingly offer medication and do less and less actual therapy. ~ Jed Diamond,

56:It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This ~ M Scott Peck,

57:I've never been to rehab, I've never been to psychotherapy or the doctor or anything like that. I went to a church and I was prayed for, and I've always had a great relationship with God. ~ Smokey Robinson,

58:would say, reification has become the original sin of psychotherapy. But a human being is no thing. This no-thingness, rather than nothingness, is the lesson to learn from existentialism. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

59:I'm trapped inside of me and I don't go out at all. I go to bed at eight o'clock at night. I never go out during the week. I'm in psychotherapy four days a week, pretty heavy commitment to it. ~ Howard Stern,

60:I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

61:For me, the term "psychotherapy" is limiting. It implies that we work with mind and emotions, but excludes the body and pays scant attention to the spirit, soul, and broader environmental issues. ~ Jed Diamond,

62:One of the reasons I've never done intensive psychotherapy or any of that stuff is that if there's anything in me that needs fixing, I want to know that I can rely on my own intuition to fix it. ~ Kate Winslet,

63:Philip Rieff, who argued that the decline of a shared moral horizon defined by religion had left a huge void that was being filled by psychologists preaching a new religion of psychotherapy. ~ Francis Fukuyama,

64:The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy—man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. ~ Carl R Rogers,

65:Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society. ~ James Hillman,

66:I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs. ~ Albert Ellis,

67:Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man. First ~ Viktor E Frankl,

68:The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy. ~ Philip K Dick,

69:Psychotherapy and medication both produce similar changes in brain functioning.18 There is a biochemical process in depression, but the individual has been made susceptible to depression through life experiences. ~ Richard O Connor,

70:Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires. ~ Edward St Aubyn,

71:They show that roughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not. ~ Hans Eysenck,

72:"[Jungian analyst Joan] Chodorow suggests that the root of creative arts psychotherapies (art, dance, #music, drama, poetry and sandplay) can all be traced to Jung's early contribution." ~ Joel Kroeker, Jungian Music Psychotherapy, Ch. 5,

73:I found myself very lost after 'The Partridge Family,' and I lost my dad and I lost my manager, and I lived in a bubble, and it took me 15 years to get through that and a lot of psychotherapy, and I'm laughing about it now! ~ David Cassidy,

74:Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds. ~ Thomas Keating,

75:Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds. ~ Thomas Keating,

76:[Fritz] Perls felt that most psychotherapy, and particularly psychoanalysis, was too intellectual, ignoring the physical sensations of the individual. One of his sayings was that we must "lose our heads to come to our senses". ~ Deldon McNeely,

77:It is generally recognized by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists that pathological anxiety is the central and basic problem with which they must deal in psychotherapy—the symptom underlying the patient’s other symptoms ~ Nathaniel Branden,

78:Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior. ~ Milton H Erickson,

79:I've been through many years of psychotherapy, psycho-drama, I've taken risks in my life. I've had trials and tribulations just like every body else. You have to really think about who you are. You can't just go through life and sail threw. ~ Joy Behar,

80:Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn’t have to do anything but stay alive and have fun. ~ Tayari Jones,

81:Unfortunately there are many kinds of psychotherapy and many psychotherapists involved with trying to prove themselves and their own theories rather than working with what is. In fact they find it very frightening to work with what is. ~ Ch gyam Trungpa,

82:I'd been trained in the art of psychotherapy, the excavation of the past as a means of untangling the present and rendering it livable. It's detective work, of sorts, crouching stealthily in the blind alleys of the unconscious. (179) ~ Jonathan Kellerman,

83:Felix believed that the answer to every problem involved penguins; but it wasn't fair to birds, and I was getting tired of teleporting them back home. Somewhere in Antarctica, a whole flock of Magellanic penguins were undergoing psychotherapy. ~ Rick Riordan,

84:Developing one’s inferior function is, in a way, also a social obligation. Until one has done this and dealt with one’s inferior function, one will tend toward one-sided and asocial behavior because that is the original form. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Psychotherapy,

85:Ambivalating is one of the healing processes of psychotherapy. When clients are encouraged to thoroughly explore their conflicting feelings about job or relationship issues, they eventually connect with a deep intuitive sense about what is best for them. ~ Pete Walker,

86:The world doesn't usually affect us directly. It's what we do with it. It's the filters that we put on it. That's the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth. ~ Jonathan Haidt,

87:When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet. ~ Karl Marlantes,

88:I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs. In that sense, psychotherapy belongs in the schools. ~ Albert Ellis,

89:While collective events could release the demons of the unconscious, the only resolution to collective conflicts was through the inner revolution of the individual. Psychotherapy offered itself as a vehicle through which this could occur. ~ Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self,

90:In psychotherapy; Jung sought to enable his patients to recover a sense of meaning in life through facilitating and supervising their own self-experimentation and symbol creation. At the same time, he attempted to elaborate a general scientific psychology. ~ Sonu Shamdasani,

91:In his book, Anatomy of the Psyche, Edinger states:The problem of finding the prima materia corresponds to the problem of finding what to work on in psychotherapy." Quoting Aristotle, he says the "1rst matter is the name of that entirely indeterminate power of change." ~ T Cavalli,

92:in 1972, the revelation that a vice-presidential candidate—George McGovern’s running mate, Thomas Eagleton—had undergone psychotherapy was reason enough to have him removed from the ticket. The notion of working through a trauma therapeutically was still unfamiliar, ~ Caroline Myss,

93:I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

94:I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it's because love & psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness & seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery... I hate to be love’s executioner. ~ Dr. Irvin Yalom,

95:All psychotherapy is ultimately something of an art. There is always an irrational element in psychotherapy. The doctor's artistic intuition and sensitivity is of considerable importance. The patient, too, brings an irrational element into the relationship: his individuality. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

96:Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It ~ Tom Butler Bowdon,

97:All psychotherapy is ultimately something of an art. There is always an irrational element in psychotherapy. The doctor's artistic intuition and sensitivity is of considerable importance. The patient, too, brings an irrational element into the relationship: his individuality. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

98:In recent years, “psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless,” as one psychoanalyst has put it. If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and the mind in the practice of psychotherapy. At least that’s the promise. ~ Michael Pollan,

99:You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you – look at the burnish of you. ~ Martin Amis,

100:Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

101:This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known. ~ Allen Ginsberg,

102:He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realised that right here, on this disco floor, there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy – and all for naught. In a few years they’d all be old walruses, and in a few more, dead. ~ Edmund White,

103:I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area. ~ William S Burroughs,

104:Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

105:Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them. ~ Peter Breggin,

106:We are reminded again of that remark of Goethe’s which we have already quoted, and which we called the finest maxim for any kind of psychotherapy: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

107:Most pointedly, nature-based people manifest the very qualities that contemporary psychotherapy, the recovery movement, and spiritual practices continually aim for: a visible sense of inner peace, unselfconscious humility, an urge to communal cooperation, and heartfelt appreciation for the world around them. ~ Chellis Glendinning,

108:We are reminded again of that remark of Goethe's which we have already quoted, and which we called the finest maxim for any kind of psychotherapy: "If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

109:The continuing struggle was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: 'I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.' (138) ~ Sheldon B Kopp,

110:More recently, these electrodes have targeted a new area of the brain (called Brodmann’s area number 25) that is often overactive in depressed patients who do not respond to psychotherapy or drugs. Deep brain stimulation has given almost miraculous relief after decades of torment and agony for these long-suffering patients. ~ Michio Kaku,

111:If she learned anything in school she learned this, courtesy of Albert Ellis, father of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm shift in psychotherapy. Other people are not here to fulfil our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will general feelings of anger and resentment. ~ A S A Harrison,

112:A statement once made by Edith Weisskopf-Joelson: "Although traditional psychotherapy has insisted that therapeutic practices have to be based on findings on etiology, it is possible that certain factors might cause neuroses during early childhood and that entirely different factors might relieve neuroses during adulthood. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

113:Want to discover the truth about deception in therapy? Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson have collected a formable collection of old pros whose compelling prose sheds light on an important, but previously unexplored, subtext that permeates psychotherapy. Don't fool yourself: The roadmap to avoid being duped is contained within. ~ Jeffrey K Zeig,

114:No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

115:The dead end was considered a plus because we could play in the road without getting run over. Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn’t have to do anything but stay alive and have fun. ~ Tayari Jones,

116:There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

117:There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

118:Friendship between therapist and patients is a necessary condition in the process of therapy - necessary, but not, however, sufficient. Psychotherapy is not a substitute for life but a dress rehearsal for life, In other words, though psychotherapy requires a close relationship, the relationship is not an end - it is a means to an end. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

119:I have said that the attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness. Not surprisingly, most psychotherapy patients (and probably most non-patients, since neurosis is the norm rather than the exception) have a problem, whether they are young or old, in facing the reality of death squarely and clearly. What ~ M Scott Peck,

120:It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing. Psychotherapy ~ Chris Voss,

121:My personality has become one that tends to focus and move forward, yes. But I was not like that when I was 16 or 23, I think. I was much more uncertain, unconfident and inwards looking. Then via certain techniques I learned from psychotherapy, magick and just life in general I become more focused, confident and happy within myself. ~ Sean Michael Wilson,

122:simultaneously we need to get continual feedback about how our clinical evaluation and interventions are going and be open to letting go of considered specifics, of moving back from the peaks of activation and plateaus of probability into the plane of possibility. Such feedback is a key element of effective psychotherapy of all sorts (see ~ Daniel J Siegel,

123:Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver. ~ Thomas Szasz,

124:I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy—I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

125:What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy. ~ Brock Chisholm,

126:There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

127:Most experts agree that treatment with medication and psychotherapy combined is best, but very little research is being conducted on combined treatment because in the U.S. drug companies fund research, and they’re not interested in supporting that conclusion. So psychotherapy for depression became the exception, and a scrip from your GP became the norm. ~ Richard O Connor,

128:Psychedelics are extraordinary tools, when used with psychotherapy, because in one day you can let go of so much, and have insight into so much. Sometimes more than in a year of traditional psychotherapy. I think they should be used in psychotherapy. But I don't know who should be entrusted with the toolbox - priests or psychiatrists? That is the difficulty. ~ Laura Huxley,

129:For many years I wrote nothing but "I will not sleep with Steve Almond" over and over again, page after page à la Jack Torrance in The Shining. Finally, hundreds of psychotherapy sessions and an intense shaman-guided DMT sweat lodge experience led to a breakthrough, and I was able to write about other people I would not sleep with, and also about people I would. ~ Alissa Nutting,

130:The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. ~ Carl Rogers,

131:The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self. ~ Carl Rogers,

132:Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by "talking to neurons," and that an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a "microsurgeon of the mind" who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks. ~ Norman Doidge,

133:Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by ‘talking to neurons,’ and that an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a 'microsurgeon of the mind’ who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks. ~ Norman Doidge,

134:It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

135:One strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy. ~ James Hillman,

136:Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems. ~ Jordan Peterson,

137:Depression is a serious problem, but drugs are not the answer. In the long run, psychotherapy is both cheaper and more effective, even for very serious levels of depression. Physical exercise and self-help books based on CBT can also be useful, either alone or in combination with therapy. Reducing social and economic inequality would also reduce the incidence of depression. ~ Irving Kirsch,

138:Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems. ~ Jordan B Peterson,

139:there is a danger inherent in the teaching...that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

140:Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. ~ James Hillman,

141:You see, we don't know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there. "I don't know what I'm building but I'm going to enjoy building it and when I get through building it I'll know what it is." In doing psychotherapy you impress this upon patients. You don't know what a baby is going to become. Therefore, you take good care of it until it becomes what it will. ~ Milton H Erickson,

142:It is the psychic depression of decadence which has come to this place and time. It is what happens to people who ignore their artists and deny their children. It is a terminal case of involutional melancholia which comes from within and cannot be cured by T.V. or psychotherapy or anything but a creative life, which is hard to come by in a country where it doesn't pay to do anything for yourself. ~ Jennifer Stone,

143:Indeed, the entire process of neurotic living is directed toward resisting a richer, more fulfilled way of life due to the fear of ultimate loss or separation. Throughout life there is a constant struggle between the drive toward actualizing one’s potential and the tendency to be self-denying and self-destructive. A “successful” psychotherapy would be a catalyst for a lifetime process of growing. ~ Robert W Firestone,

144:Shame is probably our most hidden and misunderstood emotion. It’s also the one most likely to motivate men to stay away from the help they need—and need to admit they need—which can range from psychotherapy to addiction programs. Performance anxiety is driven by shame; so is the drive to overachieve; so is the pressure to man up. Shame is behind the scenes much more often than you might think. ~ Robert Augustus Masters,

145:If she learned anything in school she learned this, courtesy of Albert Ellis, father of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm shift in psychotherapy. Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive. ~ A S A Harrison,

146:It was a five-hundred-page novel called Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. I took it home and read it in a day. It wasn’t high culture. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. However, it did make the throwaway assumption that the mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naïve understanding of the world. ~ Paul Kalanithi,

147:Cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, psychotherapy—none of it really worked in the way that the pills did. Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be. ~ Ruth Ware,

148:Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life. ~ Kenny Smith,

149:n our time, when such threatening forces of deavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy ~ Emma Jung,

150:Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another. ~ Rollo May,

151:Some encouraging studies suggest that the answer may be yes. Dr. Isaac Marks, from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, has shown that many individuals can overcome anxiety disorders using CBT techniques without face-to-face psychotherapy or medications. I’m hopeful that this book will prove just as effective for people with anxiety as Feeling Good has been for people struggling with depression. However, no ~ David D Burns,

152:It can work the other way as well. I have worked with many depressed patients who were still stuck after I had tried numerous psychotherapeutic interventions. When I prescribed an antidepressant medication, many of these patients started to turn the corner, and the psychotherapy began to work better. It seemed as if the medication really did help them change their negative thinking patterns as they recovered from the depression. ~ David D Burns,

153:The re-interpretation and eventually (sic) eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith... are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy. The fact is, that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely. ~ Brock Chisholm,

154:Psychotherapy/educational cults, which have enjoyed great popularity, purport to give the participant “insight” and “enlightenment.” Commercial cults play on people’s desires to make money. They typically promise riches but actually enslave people, and compel them to turn money over to the group. None of these destructive cults deliver what they promise and glittering dreams eventually turn out to be paths to psychological enslavement. ~ Steven Hassan,

155:Imagine if diabetologists had perceived the ravenous hunger that accompanies uncontrolled diabetes as a behavioral disorder, to be treated by years of psychotherapy or behavioral modification rather than injections of insulin. These researchers simply never confronted the possibility that the nutrient composition of the diet might have a fundamental effect on eating behavior and energy expenditure, and thus on the long-term regulation of weight. ~ Gary Taubes,

156:Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory. ~ Patricia Hampl,

157:It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud's later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs. ~ Scott Stossel,

158:When another person perceives our genuine curiosity, openness, and acceptance, there is a sense of professional caring, what we might be so bold as to call a “healing form of love.” It’s tricky, naturally, to risk confusing the romantic sense of “love” within the context of psychotherapy and this healing stance. But the feeling of compassionate concern, of genuine interest and engagement, of the mutual influence that each person has on the other (mutual, ~ Daniel J Siegel,

159:Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology . ~ Rollo May,

160:I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. ~ James Hillman,

161:The existential psychotherapy approach posits that the inner conflict bedeviling us issues not only from our struggle with suppressed instinctual strivings or internalized significant adults or shards of forgotten traumatic memories, but also from our confrontation with the "givens" of existence.
And what are these "givens" of existence? [...] Four ultimate concerns, to my view, are highly salient to psychotherapy: death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

162:When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering. ~ Philippa Perry,

163:there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s “nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

164:I think we're coming into a time where it has to do with how you stand in relationship to your own world within and in relationship to those around you in the world without. And I believe these are the things that we need to put into our schools, education, into our psychotherapy and into our culture more, finding a way to not be so harsh and judgmental, so objectifying and dehumanizing, constantly focused within and trying to get these difficult thoughts and feelings to go away. ~ Steven C Hayes,

165:This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

166:This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

167:Buddhism and Western psychotherapy have much in common. They each recognize that the key to overcoming suffering is the conscious acknowledgment of the ego’s nefarious ways. Without such consciousness, we remain pushed around by impulses and held in check by unrecognized defenses. But when we are able to see the extent of our own fears and desires, there is something in us, recognized by both Buddha and Freud, which is able to break free. Taking responsibility for what is going on inside of us gives hope. ~ Mark Epstein,

168:Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress. I’ve had court-mandated psychotherapy clients. They did not want my help. They were forced to seek it. It did not work. It was a travesty. ~ Jordan Peterson,

169:He was not losing his family; he was not losing Harry. Their relationship was just beginning—a new chapter, a new day in his life. He would not be Pater, who had died estranged from his sons. He would do whatever it took to be a good father—not a perfect father, but the best he could be. He would be there for his son today, tomorrow, and every day after that. And he’d read that psychotherapy held much promise for people motivated to change. Damn right, he was motivated to change. He was going to hire professional help—the best. ~ Barbara Claypole White,

170:Maybe I should at least wait, to help you, until it’s clear that you want to be helped. Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress. I’ve had court-mandated psychotherapy clients. They did not want my help. They were forced to seek it. It did not work. It was a travesty. ~ Jordan B Peterson,

171:Few of us can escape being neurotic or character disordered to at least some degree (which is why essentially everyone can benefit from psychotherapy if he or she is seriously willing to participate in the process). The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. ~ M Scott Peck,

172:Few of us can escape being neurotic or character disordered to at least some degree (which is why essentially everyone can benefit from psychotherapy if he or she is seriously willing to participate in the process). The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. ~ M Scott Peck,

173:But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief. But, always, it is where I have believed—or have learned to believe—that I might ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

174:But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

175:Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings. Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words in psychotherapy, and let us be satisfied if we may be auditors of the words which are exchanged between the analyst and his patient. ~ Sigmund Freud,

176:Psychotherapy can help some people, especially people who are neurotic, who are always making problems for themselves. We are like a rider on an elephant. We can steer the elephant, and if he's not busy, he'll go where we want, but if he has other desires, he'll go where he wants. They need to get a better relationship between the rider and the elephant. In part, you get it just from watching yourself stumble around in life, make mistakes, then read a little psychology and stop blaming yourself. Realize that I am flawed. I am complicated. I am divided, and I'm doing the best I can. ~ Jonathan Haidt,

177:One of the major reasons why it’s hard for us to get over dysfunctional paradigms is our habit of selective attention. We’re more likely to register experiences that support our beliefs, and forget about—or just not see—those that run counter to what we want to believe. The basic principle of interpersonal psychotherapy, a highly respected method, is this: The reason it’s so difficult to change problem behavior is that the behavior is based on beliefs and attitudes that are continually validated by other people and by selective inattention to results that contradict those beliefs. ~ Richard O Connor,

178:Any limiting categorization is not only erroneous but offensive, and stands in opposition to the basic human foundations of the therapeutic relationship. In my opinion, the less we think (during the process of psychotherapy) in terms of diagnostic labels, the better. (Albert Camus once described hell as a place where one’s identity was eternally fixed and displayed on personal signs: Adulterous Humanist, Christian Landowner, Jittery Philosopher, Charming Janus, and so on.8 To Camus, hell is where one has no way of explaining oneself, where one is fixed, classified—once and for all time.) ~ Irvin D Yalom,

179:Any limiting categorization is not only erroneous but offensive, and stands in opposition to the basic human foundations of the therapeutic relationship. In my opinion, the less we think (during the process of psychotherapy) in terms of diagnostic labels, the better. (Albert Camus once described hell as a place where one's identity was eternally fixed and displayed on personal signs: Adulterous Humanist, Christian Landowner, Jittery Philosopher, Charming Janus, and so on.8 To Camus, hell is where one has no way of explaining oneself, where one is fixed, classified-once and for all time.) ~ Irvin D Yalom,

180:But in practice, every psychological confession has religious significance, and every religious confession, whether ritual and sacramental or free, its psychological effects. It is perhaps in this fact that we perceive most clearly the unity of the human being, and how impossible it is to dissociate the physical, psychological and religious aspects of his life. Every doctor, even without specializing in psychotherapy, in so far as he has understanding of what is human and likes contact with human beings, may suddenly find himself promoted to a confessor's priesthood without having sought it. ~ Paul Tournier,

181:Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term “striving for superiority,” is focused. ~ Anonymous,

182:First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s “nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

183:Kandel argues that when psychotherapy changes people, 'it presumably does so through learning, by producing changes in gene expression that alter the strength of synaptic connections, and structural changes that alter the anatomical pattern of interconnections between nerve cells of the brain.' Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by 'talking to neurons,' and that an effective psychotherpist or psychoanalyst is a 'microsurgeon of the mind' who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks. ~ Norman Doidge,

184:First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s “nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.
To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

185:The lesson for psychotherapy is that the therapist may well have as great an impact through her presence as she does through her problem-solving skills. Especially when the root of the patient’s emotional predicament lies in the basic fault, in experiences that were preverbal or unremembered and that left traces in the form of absence or emptiness, the therapist’s ability to fill the present moment with relaxed attentiveness is crucial. It is not just that such patients tend to be extraordinarily sensitive to any falseness in relating, but that they need this kind of attention in order to let themselves feel the gap within themselves. It is much too threatening otherwise. ~ Mark Epstein,

186:Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis. ~ Anonymous,

187:The precept of unconditional parental love is a fundamental part of society’s morality and the core of family life. It leads to considerable guilt feelings in parents. These feelings of guilt further contaminate the picture for those individuals who have difficulty in, or are incapable of, loving their offspring. The alternative to facing this painful lack in oneself is to act as though one is loving whether or not one happens to be. Most parents who have come for psychotherapy over the years have found it difficult to admit to not loving their children. The author has spent considerable time and effort to convince obviously unloving parents that they do not love their children and that this fact is innocent. ~ Robert W Firestone,

188:Hedonism is not heroism for most men. The pagans in the ancient world did not realize that and so lost out to the “despicable” creed of Judeo-Christianity. Modern men equally do not realize it, and so they sell their souls to consumer capitalism or consumer communism or replace their souls—as Rank said—with psychology. Psychotherapy is such a growing vogue today because people want to know why they are unhappy in hedonism and look for the faults within themselves. Unrepression has become the only religion after Freud—as Philip Rieff so well argued in a recent book; evidently he did not realize that his argument was an updating and expansion of exactly what Rank had maintained about the historical role of psychology. ~ Ernest Becker,

189:The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achieved when the egocentric model of dualistic thinking is no longer dominant, we are not united with it, nor am I united with you, but we all just are. The movement from object to subject, as described in both Eastern meditation and modern psychotherapy, is training for this union, but its perception usually comes as a surprise, even when this shift is well under way. It is a kind of grace. The emphasis on sexual relations in the tantric teachings make it clear that the ecstatic surprise of orgasm is the best approximation of this grace. ~ Mark Epstein,

190:The goal of the research on my ward was to determine whether psychotherapy or medication was the best way to treat young people who had suffered a first mental breakdown diagnosed as schizophrenia. The talking cure, an offshoot of Freudian psychoanalysis, was still the primary treatment for mental illness at MMHC. However, in the early 1950s a group of French scientists had discovered a new compound, chlorpromazine (sold under the brand name Thorazine), that could “tranquilize” patients and make them less agitated and delusional. That inspired hope that drugs could be developed to treat serious mental problems such as depression, panic, anxiety, and mania, as well as to manage some of the most disturbing symptoms of schizophrenia. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

191:The soul theoretically is the purview of religion. But in today’s society, relatively few people look to religion to truly heal their despair – and for understandable reason. In most ways organized religion has abdicated its role of spiritual comforter, if not through its own malfeasance, the at least through dissociation from the soulfulness at the core of its mission.

Modern psychotherapy has taken up some the slack, and yet it too fails deliver when it doesn the soult necessary to heal our emotional pain. The psychotherapeutic profession has now turned to the pharmaceutical industry to compensate for its frequent lack of effectiveness, yet the pharmaceutical industry lacks the ability to do more about our sadness than to numb it. ~ Marianne Williamson,

192:The soul theoretically is the purview of religion. But in today's society, relatively few people look to religion to truly heal their despair - and for understandable reason. In most ways organized religion has abdicated its role of spiritual comforter, if not through its own malfeasance, the at least through dissociation from the soulfulness at the core of its mission.

Modern psychotherapy has taken up some the slack, and yet it too fails deliver when it doesn the soult necessary to heal our emotional pain. The psychotherapeutic profession has now turned to the pharmaceutical industry to compensate for its frequent lack of effectiveness, yet the pharmaceutical industry lacks the ability to do more about our sadness than to numb it. ~ Marianne Williamson,

193:There were nights when I left the sessions physically and emotionally drained after hearing the anguish pour out like blood from a gaping wound. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different – psychotherapy is one of the most taxing endeavors known to mankind; I’ve done all sorts of work, from picking carrots in the scorching sun to sitting on national committees in paneled board rooms, and there’s nothing that compares to confronting human misery hour after hour and bearing the responsibility for easing that misery using only one’s mind and mouth. At its best it’s tremendously uplifting as you watch the patient open up, breathe, let go of the pain. At its worst is like surfing in a cesspool struggling for balance while being slapped with wave after putrid wave. ~ Jonathan Kellerman,

194:The personal and the private are most often emphasized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life. Conventional therapy, necessary and valuable at times to resolve personal crises and suffering, presents a very incomplete sense of self. As a guide to the range of human possibility it is grimly reductive. It will help you deal with your private shames and pains, but it won't generally have much to say about your society and your purpose on earth. [...] Such a confinement of desire and possibility to the private serves the status quo as well: it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

195:This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another... ~ Jon Ronson,

196:Sigmund Freud founded virtually all of psychotherapy on introspection, so one would expect him to be able to explain his own feelings, no matter how primitive. In one area, however, he baffled himself: He could not explain group loyalty. He wrote that he was “irresistibly” bonded to Jews and Jewishness, by “many obscure and emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as by a clear consciousness of inner identity, a deep realization of sharing the same psychic structure.”
Freud was writing about powerful feelings of kinship to an entire people. These are the feelings of nationalists and fanatics—and of ordinary people—and do not lend themselves to precise analysis. By refusing to take seriously that which they cannot analyze, social scientists misunderstand how real societies work. ~ Jared Taylor,

197:Client-therapist disagreement about the goals and tasks of therapy may impair the therapeutic alliance.† This issue is not restricted to group therapy. Client-therapist discrepancies on therapeutic factors also occur in individual psychotherapy. A large study of psychoanalytically oriented therapy found that clients attributed their successful therapy to relationship factors, whereas their therapists gave precedence to technical skills and techniques.84 In general, analytic therapists value the coming to consciousness of unconscious factors and the subsequent linkage between childhood experiences and present symptoms far more than do their clients, who deny the importance or even the existence of these elements in therapy; instead they emphasize the personal elements of the relationship and the encounter with a new, accepting type of authority figure. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

198:It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. “You must be Dr. van der Kolk,” she said. “My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?” I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting “Jane” and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

199:In cases like these, people must learn first to look at what they are repeating (the rage, the attempts to destroy the separateness that disappoints, the sullen yearnings for attention) and then to feel the inner emptiness that is behind the demands for reparation. It is this emptiness, with which those who are scarred by the basic fault are so identified, that must be held in the attentional space of bare attention. It is often fought against with all of the fury of a rejected lover, but by helping people work their way back through defensive feelings of outrage to the direct experience of that terrifying hollowness, the fear that so permeates their perception of themselves can be slowly divested. This is a goal that psychotherapy has long cherished, but it is one that is made more approachable through the contributions of meditative awareness. * * * ~ Mark Epstein,

200:My great-grandmother raised nine children to adulthood in a world without supermarkets, refrigerators, or washing machines. She did not have much time to search for “unconditional love” or “commitment,” because she was too busy practicing it herself. Most of her life was taken up with the unceasing procurement and preparation of food for her husband and children. Yet she got along fine without romance novels, child custody gamesmanship, or psychotherapy; she was, I am told, always cheerful and contented. This is something beyond the imagination of barren, resentful feminists. It is the satisfaction which results from knowing that one is carrying out a worthwhile task to the best of one’s abilities, a satisfaction nothing else in life can give. We are here today because this is the way women used to behave; we cannot continue long under the present system of rotating polyandry. ~ F Roger Devlin,

201:This hall of epistemological mirrors was just one of the many challenges facing the researchers who wanted to bring LSD into the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychedelic therapy could look more like shamanism or faith healing than medicine. Another challenge was the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results of their experiments at the same time it fueled the skepticism of colleagues who remained psychedelic virgins. Yet a third challenge was how to fit psychedelics into the existing structures of science and psychiatry, if indeed that was possible. How do you do a controlled experiment with a psychedelic? How do you effectively blind your patients and clinicians or control for the powerful expectancy effect? When “set” and “setting” play such a big role in the patient’s experience, how can you hope to isolate a single variable or design a therapeutic application? ~ Michael Pollan,

202:Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual
framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective.
This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help. ~ Judith Lewis Herman,

203:I answered that as a neurologist and a psychiatrist, of course, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is not at all free from conditions. But I added that along with being a professor in two fields (neurology and psychiatry) I am a survivor of four camps (that is, concentration camps), and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is, and always remains, capable of resisting and braving even the worst conditions. To detach oneself from even the worst conditions is a uniquely human capability. [...] By virtue of this capacity man is capable of detaching himself not only from a situation but also from himself. He is capable of choosing his attitude toward himself. By doing so he really takes a stand toward his own somatic and psychic conditions and determinants. Understandably this is a crucial issue for psychotherapy and psychiatry, education and religion. For, seen in this light, a person is free to shape his own character, and man is responsible for what he may have made out of himself. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

204:For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier for them to talk about what has been done to them—to tell a story of victimization and revenge—than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience. Our scans had revealed how their dread persisted and could be triggered by multiple aspects of daily experience. They had not integrated their experience into the ongoing stream of their life. They continued to be “there” and did not know how to be “here”—fully alive in the present. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk,

205:Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession. Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead, as these stories bear witness, therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction. The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy. This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter. ~ Irvin D Yalom,

206:Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression. Love forsakes us from time to time, and we forsake love. In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance. ~ Andrew Solomon,

207:During one of our sessions I had the feeling that the therapist was trying to lead me to some major insight that might help save the day for me. When I asked if that was the case, she acknowledged it, but when I asked if she would be willing simply to tell me in some many words what the insight was, she demurred. That was not the sway psychotherapy worked, she said. It was something I would have to come to on my own if it was to have any real value for me, she said, or something like that. But then as the end of the hour drew near, she relented and put into words what it was she had been trying to lead me to see. There was nothing in the world just then that I was more fascinated to hear - for all I knew my recovery itself might depend on it - but even later that same day I couldn't have told you what she said nor could I possibly tell you now. I was simply not ready to hear it yet. The words I could hear all right, but in terms of their meaning I was as deaf as my mother before me, and possibly, like her, because I chose to be deaf. Possibly I was not ready to be well yet either. ~ Frederick Buechner,

208:Commercial industrialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge. This is the promise of psychology, and for the most part the psychotherapists are obliged to live it and embody it. But it was Rank who saw how false this claim is. "Psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception," he said, because it does not give what men want, which is immortality. Nothing could be plainer. When the patient emerges from his protective cocoon he gives up the reflexive immortality ideology that he has lived under-both in its personal-parental form (living in the protective powers of the parents or their surrogates) and in its cultural causa-sui form (living by the opinions of others and in the symbolic role-dramatization of the society). What new immortality ideology can the self-knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this? Obviously, none from psychology-unless, said Rank, psychology itself become the new belief system. ~ Ernest Becker,

209:I well remember the first great hemp shop that was opened in San Francisco around 1976. It was essentially a long wooden bar with stools for the customers. On the bar itself were a few large crocks containing the basic and cheaper forms of the weed—Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, Indian Ganja, and Domestic Green. But against the wall behind the bar stood a long cabinet furnished with hundreds of small drawers that a local guitar maker had decorated with intricate ivory inlays in the Italian style. Each drawer carried a label indicating the precise field and year of the product, so that one could purchase all the different varieties from Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, India, and Vietnam, as well as the carefully tended plants of devout cannabinologists here at home. Business was conducted with leisure and courtesy, and the salesmen offered small samples for testing at the bar, along with sensitive and expert discussion of their special effects. I might add that the stronger psychedelics, such as LSD, were coming to be used only rarely—for psychotherapy, for retreats in religious institutions, and in our special hospitals for the dying. ~ Alan W Watts,

210:...even though [my psychiatrist] understood mor than anyone how much I felt I was losing--in energy, vivacity, and originality--by taking medication, he never was seduced into losing sight of the overall perspective of how costly, damaging, and life threatening my illness was. He was at ease with ambiguity, had a comfort with complexity, and was able to be decisive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. He treated me with respect, a decisive professionalism, wit, and an unshakable belief in my ability to get well, compete, and make a difference.

Although I went to him to be treated for an illness, he taught me, by example, for my own patients, the total beholdenness of brain to mind and mind to brain. My temperament, moods, and illness clearly, and deeply, affected the relationships I had with others in the fabric of my work. But my moods were themselves powerfully shaped by the same relationships and work. The challenge was learning to understand the complexity of this mutual beholdenness and in learning to distinguish the roles of lithium, will, and insight in getting well and leading a meaningful life. It was the task and gift of psychotherapy. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

211:When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach....During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony.....

But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

212:There’s no reason, on paper at least, why I need these pills to get through life. I had a great childhood, loving parents, the whole package. I wasn’t beaten, abused, or expected to get nothing but As. I had nothing but love and support, but that wasn’t enough somehow. My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are. Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The depression I fell into after university wasn’t about exams and self-worth, it was something stranger, more chemical, something that no talking cure was going to fix. Cognitive behavioral therapy, counseling, psychotherapy—none of it really worked in the way that the pills did. Lissie says she finds the notion of chemically rebalancing your mood scary, she says it’s the idea of taking something that could alter how she really is. But I don’t see it that way; for me it’s like wearing makeup—not a disguise, but a way of making myself more how I really am, less raw. The best me I can be. ~ Ruth Ware,

213:Mithoefer completed an FDA- and DEA-approved trial of MDMA for the treatment of severe PTSD, with stunning results. In 2011, with the support of MAPS, he and his team created a double-blind design in which twelve severely traumatized patients were given MDMA and psychotherapy, and eight patients were given an active placebo and psychotherapy. The researchers used the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) as a means of measuring symptom reduction after intervention. In the placebo group, only two out of the eight subjects had a significantly lowered CAPS score post-intervention, whereas in the MDMA group, ten out of the twelve subjects had significantly lowered CAPS scores and were able to maintain those scores at a two-month follow-up. Furthermore, in the MDMA group, ten of the twelve patients were so improved that they no longer met the DSM criteria for PTSD. The second phase of the study allowed seven subjects who had previously taken the placebo (six of whom had failed to respond to the placebo and one of whom had relapsed after the placebo) to now try MDMA. They found a clinical response rate of 100 percent, and the three people who had previously said they weren’t able to perform their jobs on account of their PTSD were now able to work once again. ~ Lauren Slater,

214:Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened."

Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles."

Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things. ~ Peter Ames Carlin,

215:depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases. Except in those maladies strictly designated as malignant or degenerative, we expect some kind of treatment and eventual amelioration, by pills or physical therapy or diet or surgery, with a logical progression from the initial relief of symptoms to final cure. Frighteningly, the layman-sufferer from major depression, taking a peek into some of the many books currently on the market, will find much in the way of theory and symptomatology and very little that legitimately suggests the possibility of quick rescue. Those that do claim an easy way out are glib and most likely fraudulent. There are decent popular works which intelligently point the way toward treatment and cure, demonstrating how certain therapies—psychotherapy or pharmacology, or a combination of these—can indeed restore people to health in all but the most persistent and devastating cases; but the wisest books among them underscore the hard truth that serious depressions do not disappear overnight. All of this emphasizes an essential though difficult reality which I think needs stating at the outset of my own chronicle: the disease of depression remains a great mystery. It has yielded its secrets ~ William Styron,

216:Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis. Let me explain why I have employed the term “logotherapy” as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes “meaning.” Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term “striving for superiority,” is focused. ~ Anonymous,

217:the effects the denial of our true and strong emotions have on our bodies. Such denial is demanded of us not least by morality and religion. On the basis of what I know about psychotherapy, both from personal experience and from accounts I have been given by very many people, I have come to the conclusion that individuals abused in childhood can attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment* only by recourse to a massive repression and detachment of their true emotions. They cannot love and honor their parents because unconsciously they still fear them. However much they may want to, they cannot build up a relaxed and trusting relationship. Instead, what usually materializes is a pathological attachment, a mixture of fear and dutiful obedience that hardly deserves the name of love in the genuine sense of the word. I call this a sham, a façade. In addition, people abused in childhood frequently hope all their lives that someday they will experience the love they have been denied. These expectations reinforce their attachment to their parents, an attachment that religious creeds refer to as love and praise as a virtue. Unfortunately, the same thing happens in most therapies, as most people are still dominated by traditional morality. There is a price to be paid for this morality, a price paid by the body. Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel will ultimately fall ill—unless, that is, they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves. This ~ Alice Miller,

218:One of the most frightening aspects of this alleged technology is the possibility of mind control by “remote control,” that is, through such technology as microwaves and radio waves. There are many stories about this, coming primarily from survivors, although we do know from a variety of reliable websites and mainstream news that such technology is being developed, or at least the technological groundwork laid. Once again, however, we do not know whether this was in place when today's survivors were programmed. It is difficult at this point to determine how much of this is genuine, and how much comes from false beliefs deliberately induced to make survivors feel powerless, much like the “one huge and invincible cult” of whose existence survivors convinced therapists twenty years ago. I know that one of my mind control survivor clients was convinced of technological monitoring during a psychotic period several years ago, but as he healed he discarded such beliefs, along with many other bizarre ones in favor of recognizing that he had been abused by real human beings whose identity he knew.
If some of this remote control it is genuine, we may need to develop technological means to combat it.
However, we should not be intimidated. Even if “voices” are induced in the head by remote control rather than through alters doing jobs, survivors can learn to disobey such voices just as they do those of alters. Competent and compassionate therapy for the dissociation can help survivors to heal. Meanwhile, there are numerous survivors whose mind control is of the kind that can be treated through psychotherapy.
p205-206 ~ Alison Miller,

219:A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29 The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers.30 And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood. 31 Babies who show a lot more activity on the right side of the forehead become toddlers who are more anxious about novel situations; as teenagers, they are more likely to be fearful about dating and social activities; and, finally, as adults, they are more likely to need psychotherapy to loosen up. ~ Jonathan Haidt,

220:One of the best descriptions of the actual psychological experiences that come with deep meditation is the Visuddhimagga (Path of purification), a fourth-century meditation manual composed on the island of Sri Lanka by an Indian Buddhist named Buddhaghosa. In the Visuddhimagga he laid out the early Buddhist vision of what can be achieved psychologically through the cultivation of certain critical factors of mind that are developed through meditation practice. As a cross section of the meditative mind, this manual is unparalleled. Through the relentless development of both concentration (the ability to rest the mind in a single object of awareness) and mindfulness (the ability to shift attention to a succession of objects of awareness), the meditator eventually enters into states that are variously described as ones of either terror or delight. These are states that do not often unfold in psychotherapy: they may be glimpsed or remembered, but they do not come forward inexorably, as they do in meditation practice. Their emergence is predicated on the development of certain ego functions beyond the normal operating range of everyday life. Listen, for example, to the classic descriptions of some of these states. The experiences of delight, for instance, are characterized by varying degrees of rapture or happiness, of which there are said to be five grades: Minor happiness is only able to raise the hairs on the body. Momentary happiness is like flashes of lightning at different moments. Showering happiness breaks over the body again and again like waves on the seashore. Uplifting happiness can be powerful enough to levitate the body and make it spring up in the air. . . . But when pervading (rapturous) happiness arises, the whole body is completely pervaded, like a filled bladder, like a rock cavern invaded by a huge inundation.1 ~ Mark Epstein,

221:When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias.
But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison,

222:Also by Alan Watts The Spirit of Zen (1936) The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937) The Meaning of Happiness (1940) The Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius (1944) (translation) Behold the Spirit (1948) Easter: Its Story and Meaning (1950) The Supreme Identity (1950) The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) Myth and Ritual in Christianity (1953) The Way of Zen (1957) Nature, Man, and Woman (1958) “This Is It” and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (1960) Psychotherapy East and West (1961) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (1963) Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship (1964) The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966) Nonsense (1967) Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality (1970) Erotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak (1971) The Art of Contemplation (1972) In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 (1972) Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal (1973) Posthumous Publications Tao: The Watercourse Way (unfinished at the time of his death in 1973, published in 1975) The Essence of Alan Watts (1974) Essential Alan Watts (1976) Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life (1978) Om: Creative Meditations (1979) Play to Live (1982) Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self (1983) Out of the Trap (1985) Diamond Web (1986) The Early Writings of Alan Watts (1987) The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings (1990) Talking Zen (1994) Become Who You Are (1995) Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion (1995) The Philosophies of Asia (1995) The Tao of Philosophy (1995) Myth and Religion (1996) Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking (1997) Zen and the Beat Way (1997) Culture of Counterculture (1998) Eastern Wisdom: What Is Zen?, What Is Tao?, An Introduction to Meditation (2000) Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks: 1960–1969 (2006) ~ Alan W Watts,

223:Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning. As for psychotherapy, however, it will never be able to cope with this state of affairs on a mass scale if it does not keep itself free from the impact and influence of the contemporary trends of a nihilistic philosophy; otherwise it represents a symptom of the mass neurosis rather than its possible cure. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man.

First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's "nothingbutness," the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.

To be sure, a human being is a finite thing and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. As I once put it: "As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps-concentration camps, that is-and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable. ~ Viktor E Frankl,

224:When problems of transference are involved, as they usually are, psychotherapy is, among other things, a process of map-revising. Patients come to therapy because their maps are clearly not working. But how they may cling to them and fight the process every step of the way! Frequently their need to cling to their maps and fight against losing them is so great that therapy becomes impossible, as it did in the case of the computer technician. Initially he requested a Saturday appointment. After three sessions he stopped coming because he took a job doing lawn-maintenance work on Saturdays and Sundays. I offered him a Thursday-evening appointment. He came for two sessions and then stopped because he was doing overtime work at the plant. I then rearranged my schedule so I could see him on Monday evenings, when, he had said, overtime work was unlikely. After two more sessions, however, he stopped coming because Monday-night overtime work seemed to have picked up. I confronted him with the impossibility of doing therapy under these circumstances. He admitted that he was not required to accept overtime work. He stated, however, that he needed the money and that the work was more important to him than therapy. He stipulated that he could see me only on those Monday evenings when there was no overtime work to be done and that he would call me at four o’clock every Monday afternoon to tell me if he could keep his appointment that evening. I told him that these conditions were not acceptable to me, that I was unwilling to set aside my plans every Monday evening on the chance that he might be able to come to his sessions. He felt that I was being unreasonably rigid, that I had no concern for his needs, that I was interested only in my own time and clearly cared nothing for him, and that therefore I could not be trusted. It was on this basis that our attempt to work together was terminated, with me as another landmark on his old map. The problem of transference is not simply a ~ M Scott Peck,

225:The psychiatrist R. D. Laing, at one of the first conferences on Buddhism and psychotherapy that I attended, declared that we are all afraid of three things: other people, our own minds, and death. His statement was all the more powerful because it came shortly before his own death. If bare attention is to be of any real use, it must be applied in exactly these spheres. Physical illness usually provides us with such an opportunity. When my father-in-law, an observant Jew with little overt interest in Eastern philosophy, was facing radical surgery not so long ago, he sought my counsel because he knew of some work I was engaged in about stress reduction. He wanted to know how he could manage his thoughts while going into the surgery, and what he could do while lying awake at night? I taught him bare attention to a simple Jewish prayer; he was gradually able to expand the mental state that developed around the prayer to encompass his thoughts, anxieties, and fears. Even in the intensive care unit after surgery, when he could not tell day from night, move, swallow, or talk, he was able to use bare attention to rest in the moment, dissolving his fears in the meditative space of his own mind. Several years later, after attending Yom Kippur services, he showed me a particular passage in the prayer book that reminded him of what he had learned through his ordeal. A more Buddhist verse he could not have uncovered: A man’s origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust, at risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream. The fearlessness of bare attention is necessary in the psychological venue as well, where the practice of psychotherapy has revealed just how ingenious and intransigent the ego’s defenses can be. Even when they are in therapy, people are afraid of discovering things about themselves that they do not wish to know. ~ Mark Epstein,

226:Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion.

The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day.

Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247
Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997 ~ Judith Lewis Herman,

227:We must become what we wish to teach.

As an aside to parents, teachers, psychotherapists, and managers who may be reading this book to gain insight on how to support the self-esteem of others, I want to say that the place to begin is still with oneself. If one does not understand how the dynamics of self-esteem work internally—if one does not know by direct experience what lowers or raises one’s own self-esteem—one will not have that intimate understanding of the subject necessary to make an optimal contribution to others. Also, the unresolved issues within oneself set the limits of one’s effectiveness in helping others. It may be tempting, but it is self-deceiving to believe that what one says can communicate more powerfully than what one manifests in one’s person. We must become what we wish to teach.

There is a story I like to tell psychotherapy students. In India, when a family encounters a problem, they are not likely to consult a psychotherapist (hardly any are available); they consult the local guru. In one village there was a wise man who had helped this family more than once. One day the father and mother came to him, bringing their nine-year-old son, and the father said, “Master, our son is a wonderful boy and we love him very much. But he has a terrible problem, a weakness for sweets that is ruining his teeth and health. We have reasoned with him, argued with him, pleaded with him, chastised him—nothing works. He goes on consuming ungodly quantities of sweets. Can you help us?” To the father’s surprise, the guru answered, “Go away and come back in two weeks.” One does not argue with a guru, so the family obeyed. Two weeks later they faced him again, and the guru said, “Good. Now we can proceed.” The father asked, “Won’t you tell us, please, why you sent us away for two weeks. You have never done that before.” And the guru answered, “I needed the two weeks because I, too, have had a lifelong weakness for sweets. Until I had confronted and resolved that issue within myself, I was not ready to deal with your son.”

Not all psychotherapists like this story. ~ Nathaniel Branden,

228:Why is this? How can experience be so valuable in some professions but almost worthless in others? To see why, suppose that you are playing golf. You are out on the driving range, hitting balls toward a target. You are concentrating, and every time you fire the ball wide you adjust your technique in order to get it closer to where you want it to go. This is how practice happens in sport. It is a process of trial and error. But now suppose that instead of practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball has landed? With each shot, it could have gone long, short, left, or right. Every shot has been swallowed by the night. You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy. This metaphor solves the apparent mystery of expertise. Think about being a chess player. When you make a poor move, you are instantly punished by your opponent. Think of being a clinical nurse. When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic. But these data are highly unreliable. After all, patients might be inclined to exaggerate how well they are to please the therapist, a well-known issue in psychotherapy. But there is a deeper problem. Psychotherapists rarely track their clients after therapy has finished. This means that they do not get any feedback on the lasting impact of their interventions. They have no idea if their methods are working or failing—if the client’s long-term mental functioning is actually improving. And that is why the clinical judgments of many practitioners don’t improve over time. They are effectively playing golf in the dark.11 ~ Matthew Syed,

229:In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different. ~ Anonymous,

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