Quotes from Anne Harrington

Heroic origin stories and polemical counterstories may give us momentary emotional satisfaction by inviting us to despise cartoonish renderings of our perceived rivals and enemies. The price we all pay, though, is tunnel vision, mutual recrimination, and stalemate. For the sake not just of the science but of all the suffering people whom the science should be serving, it is time for us all to learn and to tell better, more honest stories.

For Spiegel himself, all these developments meant something different: that he was suddenly forced to keep company with alternative practitioners whose approaches he had spent years reviling.

psychosomatic medicine would work alongside homeopathy and herbalism in the larger effort to create a more natural and earthbound approach to healing.

it is not enough to cure the sick; you have to cure them with methods accepted by the community."18

there just could not be that many incestuous fathers and uncles walking the streets of Vienna.

He agreed to look into their claims, but on the condition that all the studies were done in the evening, and that the students came to the laboratory through a back door so that none of his colleagues would see them.

Miracles could become experiences that people, armed with right understanding, could summon themselves, for themselves.

the family doctor was summoned, and pronounced me stricken with fever.

Thus in his 2009 Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia, the historian and clinical psychologist Richard Noll lamented "the tragic years of psychoanalysis" before declaring that "it took major advances in medical technology, specifically the computer revolution and the rise of new techniques in neuroimaging, genetics research, and psychopharmacology to swing the pendulum back to Kraepelin's search for the biological causes of the psychotic disorders.

These symptoms could be alleviated best, he learned, by encouraging soldiers to confront the frightening memories and make some kind of peace with them.

And in fact, Flechsig had repeatedly insisted that modern brain science had shown that the 'soul' was nothing more than a system of 'nerves.

but were actually heroes: people who, having lost their moorings in the inauthentic world we call normal life, were now on a perilous journey to discover what the world might be like without the masks of false consciousness that the rest of us habitually wear.

Even after they were told they had received the placebo version of the surgery, they continued to walk better, declared they slept more soundly, reported they were able to mow the lawn again, and more.

She reacted to this with hostility and openly maintained a prayer vigil outside the intensive care unit, praying that her son would die because of the shame he had caused her.