I went to physical therapy, occupational therapy, voice, every kind of therapy except mental therapy - obviously!
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.
This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
I must confess that, at that time, I had absolutely no knowledge of the slowness of the relaxation processes in the ground state, processes which take place in collisions with the wall or with the molecules of a foreign gas.
Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses. Anyone can become a drug addict if you let yourself do it and, once you become a drug addict, you'll do whatever you have to to get the drugs. Absolutely, anybody can do it.
The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements.
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.
I always had a dissociative disorder. But I healed from it over the course of 14 years of big-time therapy. But, you know, I mean, everybody's kind of loony now. So I was kind of a pioneer in the mental illness thing, too.
By relaxation, I don't mean falling asleep in front of the TV set or unwinding with friends. The kind I'm talking about is a quieting of mental activity and withdrawal of body and mind from external stimulation.
LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.
Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.
In meditation, it is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to become devoid of all mental thoughts, so what we want to do is fill the mind with those thoughts that induce positive feelings of peace, relaxation or happiness.
I've tried to create a comedy that doesn't look like any other comedy. Maybe traditionally in TV there has been a kind of formula that says, 'Oh, comedy has to look this way; it has to look super bright.' But the way we shoot 'Insecure' is motivated by the mental state of each of our characters.