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Psychiatrist Quotes

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Psychiatrist Quotes

“The first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology's failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”

“You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.”

“The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them 'till last.”

“It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.”

“as we acquire new aches and new pains, our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, periodontists, gynecologists and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion. We want a second opinion that says, don't worry, you are going to live forever.”

“Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It meant, 'One can plainly see you are sensitive, intense, and interesting, and therefore neurotic.' Only the dullest of clods trudged around without a neurosis.”

“Within the world of TV land, into which American life has been reduced as well as reproduced, the phenomenon of the talk show has emerged as a genre located somewhere on the spectrum between coffee klatch and town meeting, or perhaps between the psychiatrist's couch and the crowd scene at a bad accident.”

“To help other people, you've got to be able to help yourself. You go to a psychiatrist, and they're on this Prozac, Effexor, and antidepressants, you may have picked the wrong person. If you go to somebody who's broke who's selling you financial services, that might not be a good thing. You go to somebody who's fat to help you lose weight... And a lot of people ironically do these types of things.”

“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.”

“When the psychiatrist approves of a person's actions, he judges that person to have acted with "free choice"; when he disapproves,he judges him to have acted without "free choice." It is small wonder that people find "free choice" a confusing idea: "free choice" appears to refer to what the person being judged (often called the "patient") does, whereas it is actually what the person making the judgment (often a psychiatrist or other mental health worker) thinks.”

“..why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality almost nobody believes in?...ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker?”

“The need of an insecure psychiatrist to draw security from a virtuous adjustment to the conventionalities of his time and from a quest for approval from "the good and the great" may turn out to be another agent interfering with his ability to listen in a therapeutically valid fashion. This type of dependence gives rise to the danger that the psychiatrist may consider the changeable man-made standards of the society in which he lives to be eternal values to which he and his patients must conform.”