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Quote by Jon Ronson

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The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

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Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson

Jon Ronson is a British journalist and writer known for his in-depth exploration of marginal cultures and psychology. His work often focuses on social phenomena, personal stories, and human behavior, delving into the complexities and universality behind them. more

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“Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud’s and Jung’s. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to.”

“[об американцах] — Я понимаю, они — туристы, не отличающиеся очень уж развитым воображением. Вспоминаю, как училась там в школе. Ребята там казались мне гораздо более открытыми, по крайней мере в том, что касалось личных пристрастий. Всегда рассказывали, что чувствуют. — Да дело вовсе не в том, что они об этом не рассказывают. — А в том, что недостаточно чувствуют? — Да и не в этом тоже. Недостаточно знают. Не позволяют себе много знать. Как с этим Грамши, о котором ты говорила. — Он помолчал и добавил: — Всё всегда делают по правилам. Джейн помолчала немного. — Питер писал о чём-то вроде этого в одном из писем. Как вначале тебе нравится их прямота… а потом начинаешь тосковать по извивам. — Я испытал то же самое. Прозрачность — прекрасная вещь. Пока не начинаешь понимать, что она основана не столько на внутренней честности, сколько на отсутствии воображения. И эта их так называемая откровенность по поводу секса. Они просто не понимают, что утратили.”

“The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature. The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature. Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb.”