Quotes About Pathology

incapacity to commit oneself to any value system beyond one supplying self-serving needs usually indicates severe narcissistic pathology. The

Subtle but significant superego pathology may easily go undetected throughout psychoanalytic training and only emerge later in trivialization, cynical relativism, messianic deterioration, and rigidly dogmatic and paranoid stances regarding psychoanalysis.

Taken to extremes, scapegoating feeds the political pathology called fascism, a movement ideology centered on a "radical and authoritarian nationalism" that actively suppresses "openness and opposition" to the movement and the nation-state it hopes to commandeer.15 When this diseased brand of nationalism rushes in to fill our inner emptiness, its mildest manifestation is the belief that nation's critics are unpatriotic, even traitorous. At

But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding out lives in check until we honor its truth.

Today, our society is caught in the grip of superficial values—glamour, glitter, materialism, a pathological emphasis on youth, a neglect of the elderly, the handicapped. Families are being broken up under the impact of a frenzied desire for success. Violence is glorified and paraded in front of children every day on the media.

The word respect comes from the Latin word respectus, which means the action of looking back. McWilliams (1999) emphasizes that the formulations encourage us to think about our patients as complex wholes, not just their weaknesses, but their strengths, not just their pathology but their health, not just their misperceptions but their surprising, unaccountable sanity under the worst of conditions.