50 Quotes by David Smail
- Author David Smail
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Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception,
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- Author David Smail
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Many children, however, are in some or many important respects unable to fulfill the expectations of their parents, and carry round with them, so to speak, raw, painful areas of disconfirmation which leave them exposed to sudden attacks of self-doubt and uncertainty, sudden ebbings of self-confidence which may well be experienced as 'symptoms' of anxiety or depression.
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- Author David Smail
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The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them).
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The truth, of course, is that human existence is uncertain and vulnerable, complex and delicate, and human relationships shot through with pain threat as well as joy and comfort.
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For shy people the Other is everywhere, and it never occurs to them that they could be the Other for others, that anyone could care what they thought about things.
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Our feelings, then, insist on recognition even though, in our accounts, we can dissemble endlessly. Although we can fake our experience through the way we describe it, and even if we can blind ourselves to its significance, we cannot fake the experience itself.
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- Author David Smail
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For there would be no point in painful struggle, in heroic battle against injustice, in the painstaking achievements of culture and learning, in courageous stance against cruelty or adversity, in loving self-sacrifice for others, if in fact the experience gained by just one tortured and despairing individual could simply be 'adjusted' or 'modified' by the appropriate expert.
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It is also true, however, that many patients experience psychotropic medication as in itself a further source of confusion and discomfort, since it may alter their perception of the world in an idiosyncratic way, so that their experience seems to bear no relation to the meaning of actual events of their world.
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The 'experts' will not change the world-- they will simply make a satisfactory living helping people to adjust to it; the world will only change when ordinary people realize what is making them unhappy, and do something about it.
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