Psychiatry Quotes

• I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous - everyone hasn't met me yet.

  Rodney Dangerfield

  Funny, Hate, Humorous

  "Laugh Off: The Comedy Showdown Between Real Life and the Pros". Book by Bob Fenster, 2005.

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• I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.

  Gore Vidal

  Grandparent, Phrenology, Belief

  Gore Vidal, Donald Weise (1999). “Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking, Collected Sex Writings”

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• The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage -- in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.

  Sigmund Freud

  Passion, Mind, Battle

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1958). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: The case of Schreber, papers on technique and other works”

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• Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.

  Michel Foucault

  Essentials, Limits, Sovereign

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• Those modern analysts, they charge so much! In my day, for five marks Freud himself would treat you. For ten marks he would treat you and press your pants. For fifteen marks Freud would let you treat him - that included a choice of any two vegetables.

  Woody Allen

  Vegetables, Two, Choices

  Woody Allen (2007). “The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose”, Random House Incorporated

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• If you do not feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work - work the like of which I do not know.

  Harry Stack Sullivan

  Hard Work, Science, Headache

  Harry Stack Sullivan (1953). “The collected works”

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• I believe that this neglected, wounded, inner child of the past is the major source of human misery.

  John Bradshaw

  Children, Believe, Past

  John Bradshaw (2013). “Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child”, p.7, Bantam

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• The relation of eugenics to British psychiatry bears examination. The primary controlling body for psychiatry in England is the British National Association for Mental Health (NAMH), formed in 1944, and initially run by the mentally unstable Montagu Norman, previously of the Bank of England. The group originally met at Norman's London home, where he and Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht had met in the 1930s to arrange financing for Hitler.

  Jim Keith

  Running, Home, Eugenics

  Jim Keith (2003). “Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness”, p.16, Adventures Unlimited Press

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• The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

  R. D. Laing

  Patient, Traveler, Psychiatrist

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• Psychiatry is to medicine what astrology is to astronomy.

  Leonard Roy Frank

  Medicine, Astrology, Astronomy

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• If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility

  Brock Chisholm

  Family, Responsibility, Race

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• The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Issues, Mind, Obscurity

  Charles Horton Cooley (1922). “Human Nature and the Social Order”

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• Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.

  R. D. Laing

  Doctors, Medicine, Differences

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• I proved to you that psychiatry is an exact science!" "An exact science?!" "Yes, you owe me exactly one hundred and forty-three dollars!

  Charles M. Schulz

  Dollars, Three, Hundred

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• All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.

  Janet Malcolm

  Ashes, Analysis, Mouths

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• Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Self, Medicine, Understanding

  Irvin D. Yalom (2012). “The Spinoza Problem: A Novel”, p.167, Basic Books

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• The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.

  Thomas Szasz

  War, Self, Two

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1990). “The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary”, Open Court Publishing Company

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• Going to a psychiatrist has become one of the most dangerous things a person can do.

  Peter Breggin

  Dangerous, Psychiatrist, Persons

  FaceBook post by Peter R. Breggin, MD from Aug 27, 2012

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• Conventional psychiatry has emphasized the genetic roots of psychosis based on the claim that twin and other studies show that schizophrenia is 80% heritable, which means that 80% of the cause is genetic.

  Richard Bentall

  Mean, Psychosis, Roots

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

  Antonin Artaud

  Suicide, Time, Morning

  "Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society". Essay by Antonin Artaud, 1947.

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• It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud's later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs.

  Scott Stossel

  Father, Ideas, Drug

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• Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.

  Sigmund Freud

  Religion, Neurosis, Universal

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• Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.

  Thomas Szasz

  Hurt, Vanity, Self

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• Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.

  Oscar Levant

  Funny, Humorous, Flower

  "Fictional character: Jerry Sunborne". "Things We Lost in the Fire", www.imdb.com. 2007.

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• A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

  Joey Adams

  Love, Marriage, Clever

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