Dissociation Quotes

• Some people give theirselves a certain number of white weeks once in a year, when they do not drink a single drop of alcohol. It is really wise. I myself have a few weeks per year, let us call them white or black, when I am not interested in the world around. When I come back from this isolation of the news, I realize that I have missed nothing significant. We live in the rain of disinformation and rumors, where the truth is a very small number. In those weeks of dissociation I seek for knowledge that lies within me.

  Henning Mankell

  Wise, Lying, Rain

  FaceBook post by Henning Mankell from Mar 09, 2012

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

  Judith Lewis Herman

  Events, Denial, Conflict

  "Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror". Book by Judith Lewis Herman, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 11, 1992.

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• Trauma dissociates us from the parts of our body that are wounded, so we have to leave our whole body. It's a journey you take your whole life, that coming back in, re-landing in your body, in your self, on the Earth. I think one of the reasons it's been so easy, in a way, for us to violate both women and the Earth is this profound dissociation that exists in everyone.

  Eve Ensler

  Journey, Thinking, Self

  Interview with Chantal Pierrat, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

  Carl Jung

  Men, Meaningless Life, Meaningless

  "Face to Face", TV Series (1959– ). "Professor Jung", www.imdb.com. 1959.

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• Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

  Henri Bergson

  Life, Philosophical, Doe

  Henri Bergson (2002). “Henri Bergson: Key Writings”, p.197, A&C Black

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• The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

  Judith Lewis Herman

  Atrocities, Ordinary, Consciousness

  Judith Lewis Herman (1997). “Trauma and Recovery”, p.1, Basic Books

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• For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'.

  Joseph Campbell

  Order, Brain, Quests

  Joseph Campbell (1991). “The Masks of God: Creative Mythology”, Penguin Group USA

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• There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God.

  Nikolai Berdyaev

  Hatred, Sin, Crime

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• Intense asana practice - too much, too soon - can have detrimental effects. It can also promote a dissociation from the personal sensitivity and self awareness that I am trying to encourage. I don't want to contribute to furthering physical or psychological trauma.

  James Fox

  Self, Practice, Trying

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• Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.

  Alexander Lowen

  Life, Long, Mixtures

  Alexander Lowen (1978). “The Language of the Body”

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• I think there will be a reaction - a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn't stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

  Carl Jung

  Men, Thinking, Forever

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• In truth a clear-headed physicalist shouldn't be thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-fibres firing, then there really isn't any possibility of having 'one' without the 'other'. Once you properly appreciates physicalism, this dissociation should cease to appear possible - C-fibres with pains should strike you as no more possible than squares without rectangles.

  David Papineau

  Pain, Thinking, Squares

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think that more so, my wonderful skill of dissociation came in very handy. I care very much what other people think. I'm a total pleaser. I want everyone to like me all the time. I feel like people who don't feel that way on some level are lying, but particularly female memoirists. We want to be seen and we want to be forgiven. So that occurred to me very early on.

  Melissa Febos

  Lying, Thinking, Skills

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.

  Ezra Pound

  Order, Ideas, Rose

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• If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.

  Martin Amis

  Sex, Real, Want

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• Every computer divides itself into its hardware and its software, the machine host to its algorithm, the human being to his mind. It is hardly surprising that men and women have done what computers now do long before computers could do anything at all. The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence.

  David Berlinski

  Men, Organization, Long

  David Berlinski (2000). “The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World”, Houghton Mifflin

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• I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Men, Vision

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