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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Psychiatry is to medicine what astrology is to astronomy.

  Leonard Roy Frank

  Medicine, Astrology, Astronomy

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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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• 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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• In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away. all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Taken, Men, Execution

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• Psychiatric services - that is, the attempt to help a person overcome his emotional difficulties in living - are priceless if successful or worthless if they fail.

  Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

  Successful, Emotional, Overcoming

  Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1960). “Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy”, p.67, University of Chicago Press

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• I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.

  Bob Dylan

  Thinking, Helping, Nonsense

  Bob Dylan “The fiddler now upspoke: a collection of Bob Dylan's interviews, press conferences and the like from throughout the masters career”

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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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• Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society." A "utopia" could be found - providing "a sense of stability and certainty, whether realistic or not.

  Nathan S. Kline

  Emotional, Use, Substance

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• The fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry exist specifically to help the emotionally unstable become more stable and lead happier, healthier lives. Unlike in the eras of Vincent Van Gogh and Abraham Lincoln, there is now professional help available for those who suffer from emotional illness. Treatment may require therapy or even medication, but hope is now available every single day in practically every city in the civilized world.

  David J. Lieberman

  Emotional, Cities, Psychology

  David J. Lieberman (2010). “Find Out Who's Normal and Who's Not: The Proven System to Quickly Assess Anyone's Emotional Stability”, p.161, David Lieberman

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• We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

  Thomas Szasz

  Birth, Social, States

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.278, Routledge

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• To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

  William James

  Philosophical, Understanding, Abnormal

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• Psychiatry's a young science. Yesterday's madman may be tomorrow's genius. Beethoven and Van Gogh were both a bit loopy. In my view, most madmen are remarkable. They're explorers, travelers beyond the rim of consciousness. Not surprising if they pick up a few bugs and get sick. That's all it is, madness. Mad just means sick. If you get fluid on the lungs it's pleurisy. If it's fluid on the brain, it's insanity.

  Clare Boylan

  Depression, Mean, Yesterday

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• As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps - concentration camps, that is - and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Men, Two, Survivor

  Viktor E. Frankl (2011). “The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism”, p.51, Simon and Schuster

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• I had been introduced to psychotherapy, in which the doctors let you talk, talk, talk, until you find the source of your problem or find another doctor.

  Gene Tierney

  Doctors, Problem, Source

  Gene Tierney, Mickey Herskowitz (1979). “Self-portrait”, Peter Wyden

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