I must assume that knowing is better than not know, venturing better than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit. I take with deep seriousness Thomas Hardy's words, 'If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcend category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.

It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas—it's always the relationship.

People need people - for initial and continued survival, for socialization, for the pursuit of satisfaction. No one - not the dying, not the outcast, not the mighty - transcends the need for human contact.

Psychiatric cure is the "expanding of the self to such final effect that the patient as known to himself is much the same person as the patient behaving to others.

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.

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

There is no human deed or thought that lies fully outside the experience of other people.

I agree with Viktor Frankl that a sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves.