Quotes About Psychotherapy

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life.

The psychotherapist must not allow his vision to be coloured by the glasses of pathology; he must never allow himself to forget that the ailing mind is a human mind, and that, for all its ailments, it shares in the whole of the psychic life of man. The psychotherapist must even be able to admit that the ego is ill for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole, and has lost its connection with mankind as well as with the spirit.

for as soon as psychotherapy requires the self-perfecting of the doctor, it is freed from its clinical origins and ceases to be a mere method for treating the sick. It is now of service to the healthy as well

The natural course of life demands that the young person should sacrifice his childhood and his childish dependence on the physical parents, lest he remain caught body and soul in the bonds of unconscious incest. This regressive tendency has been consistently opposed from the most primitive times by the great psychotherapeutic systems which we know as the religions

The aim of psychotherapy is therefore to narrow down and eventually abolish the dissociation by integrating the tendencies of the unconscious into the conscious mind. Normally these promptings are realized unconsciously or, as we say, "instinctively," and though their spiritual content remains unnoticed, it nevertheless insinuates itself into the conscious spiritual life of the patient, mostly in disguised form, without his being aware of it.

Without the help of these "représentations collectives," which have psychotherapeutic value even for primitives, it is not possible to understand the archetypal associations of the products of the unconscious.

Not only Christianity with its symbols of salvation, but all religions, including the primitive with their magical rituals are forms of psychotherapy which treat and heal the suffering of the soul, and the suffering of the body caused by the soul.

Either a large man with very quick reflexes and a deadly sword hat indeed, invaded her home. Or she needed intense psychotherapy.

The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes, while his failures, on the other hand, are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth, but force him to change his views and methods.

One of the reasons I've never done intensive psychotherapy or any of that stuff is that if there's anything in me that needs fixing, I want to know that I can rely on my own intuition to fix it.

my experience as a psychotherapist working with people with troubled bodies shows that the kind of touch we receive when we are little and the impact of a mother's (or carer's) physical sense of herself are crucial to the development of our own body sense. Our bodies are a lot more than an executed blueprint given by our DNA.

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

As a psychotherapist I see that nothing does as much for an individual's self-esteem as becoming aware of and accepting disowned parts of the self. The, first steps of healing and growth are awareness and acceptance—consciousness and integration. They are the fountainhead of personal development.

It is generally recognized by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists that pathological anxiety is the central and basic problem with which they must deal in psychotherapy—the symptom underlying the patient's other symptoms

As a psychotherapist I see that nothing does as much for an individual's self-esteem as becoming aware of and accepting disowned parts of the self.

What, then, are psychotherapists and what do they sell to or impose on their clients? Insofar as they use force, psychotherapists are judges and jailers, inquisitors and torturers; insofar as they eschew it, they are secular priests and pseudomedical rhetoricians. Their services consist of coercions and constraints imposed on individuals on behalf of other persons or social groups, or they consist of contracts and conversations entered into by individuals on their own behalf.

My parents were from a generation where you tended to your own problems, one where psychotherapy was an indulgence. They both came from families where you kept your problems to yourself and got on with life. If Keller was starting to act a little out of the ordinary, wasn't everybody trying to quote-unquote find themselves in Southern California in the early seventies? Not to mention that psychiatry had a cuckoo's-nest edge of paranoia about it.

The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy—man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities.

They show that roughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not.

I'm not a 'suffer in silence' type; I'm a 'let's throw money at the problem' type - I've done reflexology, reiki, psychotherapy, counselling. I've never actually had analysis, but I'd like to try that sometime.

Psychotherapy works, and some types of therapy have been shown to be much more effective than antidepressants over the long run.

I was forced to realize how culturally laden, to the point of inadequacy, psychotherapy was for Danny. I now know how the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung felt in 1925 after spending time with an Indigenous man: Jung was made aware, he said, of his "imprisonment in the cultural consciousness of the white man." Freud, along with all the other European founding fathers of psychotherapy, knew nearly nothing of Indigenous culture, and neither did I. But as my father used to say,

In the course of psychotherapy with children, innumerable transactions between child and therapist result in an emotionally corrective, relational healing experience. What happens when therapists respond in the expected way?

One knows one's madness, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.