Quotes from Anthony Storr

The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.

When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion

It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.

Since I was not able wholly to subscribe to any one set of beliefs advanced by any 'guru' I had to fall back on my own, however derivative.

I owed Lewis one thing, at least. Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday morning conferences, no other public appearance, whether on radio, TV or the lecture platform, could hold any terrors for you.

It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.

The professional must learn to be moved and touched emotionally, yet at the same time stand back objectively: I've seen a lot of damage done by tea and sympathy.

I owed Lewis one thing, at least. Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday morning conferences, no other public appearance, whether on radio, TV or the lecture platform, could hold any terrors for you.

I once had a conversation with the director of a monastery. "Everyone who comes to us," he said, "does so for the wrong reasons." The same is generally true of people who become psychotherapists. It is sometimes possible to persuade people to be come psychotherapists who have not chosen the profession for their own personal reasons; but, for the most part, we have to put up with what we get; namely, ourselves.

In Meyer's view, delaying closure is one way in which composers contradict the listener's expectations and increase his degree of arousal. If

What is universal is the human propensity to create order out of chaos.

To appreciate art, the observer must adopt a special attitude of mind; the same attitude required by Plato, of detachment from personal concerns, so that the work of art can be appreciated in contemplative fashion uncontaminated by personal needs or preoccupations.

She knew and, I think, understood the joy that my mind derived, at these first hearings, from this task of modelling a still shapeless nebula.40

He despised music and considered it solely as an intrusion! For that matter the whole Freud family was very unmusical.

People occasionally report that music has increased depression; but, unless someone is so depressed as to be unresponsive to any external stimulus, music is more likely to raise his spirits or at least relieve the sterility of being unable to care about anything or anybody which is so characteristic of depression. It is better to feel that life is tragic than to be indifferent to it.

The oddest consequence of Freud's theory is its implication that, if total sexual fulfilment were possible by means of complete adaptation to reality, the arts, including music, would become otiose. I have discussed the unsatisfactory nature of this conclusion elsewhere.

Art was important to the pessimistic Schopenhauer because the aesthetic mode of knowing, the pure contemplation of beauty, the tranquil appreciation of the Ideas, enabled the individual to escape, for the time being, from the never-ending misery of unsatisfied desire into a Nirvana of spiritual peace.

Psychoanalysis is based on Freud's theories of infantile development: it includes the idea that no one, however mature, entirely outgrows his or her infantile past.

However, it is not a direct evocation of those emotions within himself which moves the listener but rather the way in which a great composer transforms universal emotions into art.

Reading his account leaves one with the impression that being taken out of oneself, forgetting oneself as an individual, as he puts it, invariably leads to a contemplative state from which all passion is absent. In fact, he describes the aesthetic attitude as an objective frame of mind, as if stepping into another world, 'where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists'.20

Words alone are never enough to convey meaning: prosody is an essential feature of adult verbal exchanges. Consider the exclamation 'Really!' It can imply surprise, disbelief, disapproval, enthusiasm, disdain, and perhaps many other meanings, each of which must be conveyed by intonation rather than by the word itself.

There may still be people who think of Carl Gustav Jung only as a distinguished psychiatrist who enlarged our understanding of the mind and who also made important contributions to psychotherapy. He did both, but his variety of analysis is not simply concerned with the relief of neurotic symptoms; it promises a secular form of salvation. Jung was a spiritual teacher as well as a physician.