9 Quotes by Peter D. Kramer

Support has no direction. Our plan is to hold the patient - to strengthen the container - until the patient develops his own container-strengths or until the contents settle down. We do not know just how or when all this ought to happen. Worse we do not have a particularly cogent rationale for limiting our own actions...

Suicide is what the death certificate says when one dies of depression.

What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?

Part of the impetus for my writing is the pain I’ve seen my friends experience both in their marriage and in their dreams.

When a psychiatrist writes a bestseller, he is then urged to write a book of advice. But I think our culture’s awash in advice. The problem is we don’t know whether it applies to us or whether we’re an exception.

The success of Prozac says that today’s high-tech capitalism values a very different temperament. Confidence, flexibility, quickness, and energy – the positive aspects of hyperthymia – are at a premium.

I do not like to see men walk away from women in late middle age.

When people come into the office and say they’ve tried to make their marriage work, and I hear what the effort was, it seems to me that there’s some lack of understanding of what effort is.

Support has no direction. Our plan is to hold the patient – to strengthen the container – until the patient develops his own container-strengths or until the contents settle down. We do not know just how or when all this ought to happen. Worse we do not have a particularly cogent rationale for limiting our own actions...