199 Quotes About Psychotherapy

{B]eware of empty compliments - make your support as incisive as your feedback or interpretations.

The idea of using current distortions to re-create the past was part of an old, now abandoned, vision of the therapist as archaeologist, patiently scraping off the dust of decades to understand (and thus, in some mysterious manner, undo) the original trauma. It is a far better model to think of understanding the past in order to apprehend the present therapist-patient relationship.

I have always found quite useful Freud's formulation that the dream borrows building blocks from the day residue, but that for images to be important enough to become incorporated into it, they must be reinforced by older, meaningful, affect-laden concerns.

In therapy the individual learns to recognize and express his feelings as his own feelings, not as a fact about another person.

Dissociative Disorders have a high rate of responsiveness to therapy and that with proper treatment, their prognosis is quite good.

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...

However they coped, children are not wrong to have learned to do what they could.

One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that 'the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother'; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications.

Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy.