199 Quotes About Psychotherapy

Societal pressures work to pull you up to the line of psychological adequacy, and psychotherapy can be used when society falls short. But these aims are far too low. Falling within the current normal range of psychological health is nothing to aspire to. We are interested in far exceeding this line - in psychological greatness.

Where there are problems, it is implied that there are solutions; sometimes the solution is to endure the problem, and one problem passes and another appears. But there are some insoluble predicaments which we must transcend.

Delusion is so fragile; it rarely survive questions.

In essence, we gain self-respect through discipline and closeness to others through love. Discipline must always have within it the element of love. "I care enough about you to force you to act in a better way, in a way you will learn through experience to know, and I already know, is the right way." Similarly, love must always have an element of discipline. "I love you because you are a worthwhile person, because I respect you and feel you respect me as well as yourself.

[P]atients, no matter what their psychiatric complaint, suffer from a universal defect: they are unable to fulfill their needs in a realistic way and have taken some less realistic way in their unsuccessful attempts to do so.

Therapy is a special kind of teaching or training which attempts to accomplish in a relatively short, intense period what should have established during normal growing up.

The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.