Top 444 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Psychiatrists - Page 3

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them.

Many people persist in the wrong job, trying year after year to get good at what they're bad at or at what they dislike. Like marrying the wrong person, working in the wrong job is a prescription for a life of toil-and-groan.

You brain does its best when it is doing a task it can do well. That's basic brain science.

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

Many patients cannot hear until they feel heard.

We have medicalized a lot of things that I think are not really medical conditions.

Ironically, some of our most stubborn habits and disorders are products of our plasticity.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

Most so-called women's work is not recognized as real activity. One reason for this attitude may be that such work is usually associated with helping others' development, rather than with self-enhancement or self-employment.

You condition a vulnerable boy at puberty to become aroused by brutality. It's the violence, not the nudity. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if every teenage boy had a subscription to Playboy. They'd be looking at attractive naked female bodies while they masturbated, not eviscerated female bodies.

Western intellectual Islamologists have totally failed in their duties as intellectuals. They have betrayed their calling by abandoning their critical faculties when it comes to Islam.

Creativity is not simply originality and unlimited freedom. There is much more to it than that. Creativity also imposes restrictions. While it uses methods other than those of ordinary thinking, it must not be in disagreement with ordinary thinking-or rather, it must be something that, sooner or later, ordinary thinking will understand, accept, and appreciate. Otherwise the result would be bizarre, not creative.

I like to have success experiences rather than failure experiences. So I'm more likely to compete in things I'm good at, and more likely to spend time on the things I expect to succeed at.

To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love.

I am not in favor of a traditional free market.

The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut.

Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

The miracle drugs (neuroleptics) cause the worst plague of brain damage in medical history.

Love is an act of imagination. For some of us, it will be the greatest creative triumph of our lives.

Supplements are very important, especially a multiple vitamin. The American Medical Association now says we should take one. And fish oil because it has omega 3 fatty acids and they have been found to lower depression, dementia, ADD, and people who kill themselves. So fish oil supplements; I have been taking them for years, I actually scanned my brain before and after and it's better.

Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs.

Dr. Shapiro is a pioneer in the field of helping people overcome trauma and negative past experiences.

One of the problems with studies that examine the effects of violent imagery is that they typically use mentally healthy psychology students. If you want to do a meaningful study, show movies like Body Double and Copycat to a group of sexual psychopaths the day before you release them.

When people can do something simple to avoid conflict--say, hit a button or unlock a latch--they'll generally do it.

Conflict begins at the moment of birth.

People do not come into therapy to change their past but their future.

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

The N.I.M.H. spent multi-millions of dollars on [Ritalin studies], and they're going to do the same thing now with little kids. And despite the millions spent, the N.I.M.H. study wasn't even conducted according to accepted scientific procedures and is basically worthless.

We always translate the other person's language into our own language.

Consider surgeons and their work. It's unthinkable to put your hands in the warm blood of another human's gut. Even with rubber gloves on. Who'd want to do that? But surgeons get over it.

In part I'm just mystified. Here's a woman, Hillary [Clinton], who wrote a book about it takes a "village" to raise children. It wasn't about a book about "it takes a pill." There's a "double think" that the modern person often has. Anything that's called "science" is accepted as an absolute and sweeps reason away.

We have this idea that everyone should be totally independent, totally whole, totally together spiritually, totally fulfilled. That is a myth. In reality, our lack of fulfillment is the most precious gift we have. It is the source of our passion, our creativity, our search for God. All the best of life comes out of our human yearning, our not being satisfied.

I would prefer a thousand mistakes in extravagance of love to any paralysis in wariness of fear.

If you take the teachings of Jesus, whether you consider yourself saved or you don't, those teachings are pristine. They're wonderful guides for life. And there's nothing in them that says hurt other people.

Humanity is regarded as unfinished, incomplete, imperfect. We have the possibility of completing ourselves, perfecting ourselves, and all that is necessary for this lies in us.

You can pretend anything and master it.

Stories open up new paths, sometimes send us back to old ones, and close off still others. Telling and listening to stories we too imaginatively walk down those paths - paths of longing, paths of hope, paths of desperation.

Over the years it [the National Committee for Mental Hygiene] has championed for the promotion of 'mental health' despite the fact that nobody knows what it is or how to do it.

The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious.

Life is lived in the present and directed toward a future.

There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.

The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain.

Savant syndrome is not a disorder in the same way as autism is a disorder or dementia is a disorder. Savant syndrome are some conditions that are superimposed and grafted on to some underlying disability. So savant syndrome is not a disease or disorder in and of itself. It is a collection of characteristics, or symptoms, or behaviors that have grafted on to the underlying disability.

As other perceptions arise...the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.

We need to meditate on what is peaceful. Once we have 'filled up' in this way, we once again have an abundance of love to send out into the world.

People who feel the need to push and control tend to keep their feelings bottled up. As a result, they get shut down or remote, and their feelings come out in twisted, unhealthy ways. They become irritable, passive-aggressive, or volatile, for example. Surrendered people make great lovers. They can be spontaneous and playful. They love to feel and express all of their emotions. They look vibrant, healthy, and energetic.

You can't effect the cards that you are dealt, but you can determine how you play them.

It is like the man who became short-sighted and refused to wear glasses, saying there was nothing wrong with him, but that the trouble was that the recent papers were so badly printed.

Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment.

[Our children] have been taken away from us by the psychiatric mental-health system. They've been taken away by the educational system, by the government, and by many different forces.

It's going to get even worse if Hillary [Clinton] follows her plan that I describe in Reclaiming Our Children. But even now in many, many schools the nurses are giving out more drugs than were given out in children's mental hospitals when I was in training. You can go into a school today and find that ten or twenty percent of the boys are on drugs given by the school nurse. I just recently visited a school where over half of the children were being given drugs.

Don't ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change.

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization.

The destructive impact of psychiatry upon our civilization has been given far too little attention, and the role of psychiatry in Nazi Germany almost no attention. It is entirely possible that without psychiatry the holocaust could never have taken place.

Life presents us with repeated opportunities to face what we fear, what we need to become conscious of, or what we need to master.

For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that “unless you love yourself, no one else will love you.”…The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation

Trust your intuition. It is the best friend you will ever have.

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A jealous husband is an ugly thing.

People react predictably, especially when they don't have time to think.