psychiatrists-from-the-united-states

"Man is a symbol-forming organism. He has constant need of a meaningful inner formulation of self and world in which his own actions, and even his impulses, have some kind of "fit" with the "outside" as he perceives it."

"The mind in ...[her] right hemisphere acted much like her father in its condemnation of herself. Because it is on the inside, the troubled mind can attack with a ferocity rare in the external world. This is why many of my depressed patients say to me,'If you've never been depressed, you have no idea how terrible it is.'"

"By stimulating one brain hemisphere at a time, I can talk with the two personalities within one person, and this greatly facilitates the aims of Dual-Brain Psychology."

"Dual-brain therapy entails a reaching out to the mind of the troubled hemisphere, attempting through patience, persistence, and a loving, mature, and informed attitude to teach it that it no longer has to fear abuse or protect itself with the archaic defenses that have become the source of new pain and problems."

"The troubled mind is "crazy" only if we expect to encounter the mind of a mature adult."

"That afternoon I asked my first patient...to hold one hand over his right eye and the other over all but the outside half of his left eye. I was completely surprised when he became a bit agitated and said, 'Oh, my God!'. [Schiffer:] 'What's that?' I had no idea what he meant. [The patient said:] 'I have all my anxiety back.' Some months earlier, ...[he] had entered treatment for profound anxiety stemming from childhood mistreatment. By this time, his symptoms had been substantially relieved. 'Try the other side [right side of the right eye],' I retorted.'That's better!' he immediately responded, to the relief of both of us. I asked him to go back and forth, and he repeatedly felt his symptoms when he looked to the left side of his left eye, and he had the complete relief of his symptoms when he looked out of the right half of his right eye. We were both amazed."

"Freud emphasized an internal, mentally primitive structure, whereas I saw an immature, conscious person."

"Depression, like anxiety, is the natural biological consequence of experience. Anxiety comes from a sense of threat. Depression comes from a sense of defeat."

"I see psychiatric diagnoses as descriptions of psychological states that all ultimately come out of the person's experience of traumas and their responses to them.... [Regarding psychiatric patients] I feel that dual-brain psychology treats the person through an understanding of his or her psychology. And that, in my experience, always relates to his or her covert traumas, traumas that (for reasons not yet understood) usually relate to one cerebral hemisphere, either the left brain or the right brain."

"I don't believe that a psychotic disorder is entirely different from an anxiety disorder, a depressive disorder, or a posttraumatic stress disorder. In all cases, psychological problems stem from traumas that lead first to a sense of anxiety and then to defeat."

"Imagine you and I are in a room with a third person. When I direct my conversation to you and you engage in the conversation with me, we may lose sight of the fact that for a few moments, we are ignoring the third person. But this third person still exists and observes and thinks even when he is not actively engaged in in the conversation. This is my vision of how they two minds generally work. When one side is stimulated, the other still exists and functions.... The two hemispheres [of the brain] relate to each other as two people do. Both listen, talk, and consider. Both have feelings and attitudes towards the other."

"Our basic job is to protect the hope of others,” she says. “We have to be hopeful they will get better or they won’t be."

"The saying ‘if you can see it, you can believe it’ is true"

"We now understand more clearly that these are not just “bad kids.” Most enter the system for reasons other than the delinquent act with which they are charged."

"And I hope to be tangible evidence for young girls and young boys and girls from communities of color that you can aspire to be a physician. Not only that, you can aspire to be a leader in organized medicine."

"Leadership can happen in ways large and small. I believe leadership happens more often in small ways in our own personal spheres of influence and in some ways that some people may never see."

"We are no longer at a place where we can tolerate the disparities that plague communities of color, women, and the LGBTQ community. But we are not yet at a place where health equity is achieved in those communities,"

"We need to get to a place where we can say, “It’s ok when you’re not ok.""

"We’ve got to be aware, we’ve got to educate ourselves, and we’ve got to let go of the stigma and the shame that adults feel about mental health that we then impose on our young adults so that they begin to feel bad about any challenge to their psychological well-being."

"We’re going to focus on the children we believe can be diverted from the system, either through a referral from law enforcement at the point of contact in the community, a referral from a school resource officer, a self-referral from a family member or a community organization that works with children who recognize some of the signs of at-risk behavior in that child,"

"We face big challenges in health care today, and the decisions we make now will move us forward in a future we help create."

"One issue where Christian theology and the New Age movement tend to part company radically concerns the issue of evil. Christian doctrine holds that evil is real. Eastern religions do not consider it to be real. They consider it to be illusion or false knowledge, what they call maya. I do not claim there is nothing to this view. There is no doubt in my mind that by thinking of evil we can create it. If we read the demonic into everything with which we disagree – as many Stage Two religious folk are prone to do – then we will cause fragmentation and hostility rather than healing. Through the New Age movement, however, the simplistic idea has spread that if we could just change our thinking, we would realise there’s no such thing as evil in the world. It would all just go away, vanish. But the reality is that there really are people out there who like to maim, to torture, and to crush other people. There are people who want war because they profit from war. And you can get into serious trouble if you believe that there aren’t. Because sooner or later you will be accosted with real evil, and dealing with it will not be as easy as some New Age books imply."

"At one point I allowed myself to become involved in a project called the Peace Train. It started as a fine idea but soon began to acquire all the trappings of a cult. People were surrendering their critical judgment to the leaders and suppressing their differences for the sake of an emotional high. When I recognized what was happening, I pulled out. I had no desire to become a guru, nor to see community used as a means of control. The Peace Train itself turned out to be terribly boring. What passed for excitement was mostly posturing. I found myself dreading the meetings and relieved when it finally came to an end."

"The one New Age book that has attracted the most attention, and the one that I am most often asked about, is A Course in Miracles. It is a very good book, filled with a lot of first-rate psychiatric wisdom. But A Course in Miracles also denies the reality of evil, saying that evil is unreal, a kind of figment of our imagination. This is not all that far from the truth, because evil does have a great deal to do with unreality. In fact, in my book People of the Lie, I defined Satan as ‘a real spirit of unreality’. So evil does have a great deal to do with unreality — that is, with lies and untruth. But that doesn’t mean that it in itself doesn’t exist. While A Course in Miracles purports to be Christian, it distorts Christian doctrine. It is not all the truth; rather, it is a half-truth, and in failing to deal with the problem of evil, it leaves out a major part of the picture. It runs with only one side of the ‘paradox’ of evil."

"I know no more accurate epithet for Satan than the Father of Lies."

"The reality of the matter is that the naming of evil is still in a primitive stage."

"The problem of evil is perhaps the most fundamental of all human problems. True community is always in a state of almost constant terror at the problem of human evil."

"In any case, in Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril."

"You may remember that The Road Less Travelled opened with the sentence "Life is difficult." And to that great truth, I will now add another translation: Life is complex."

"It occurred to him (Carl Jung) that it was perhaps no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as ‘spirits’, and that perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder or, better yet, a spiritual condition."

"... As (Malachi) Martin points out, it is terribly important to understand that Satan is a spirit. I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible in the way that matter is tangible. It no more has horns, hooves, and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something bascially nameless... It is spirit."

"Satan has no power except in a human body."

"Compartmentalization is not the root of all evil; it is, however, the principal psychological mechanism of evil. Deprive an evil man of his capacity to compartmentalize, and he will be like a general without an army. Or better yet, he will undergo a conversion to goodness — a conversion to integrity."

"The only power that Satan has is through human belief in its lies."

"The only real route to peace is through self-purification. We must purge ourselves of our own pride, our need to control, and our unwillingness to suffer for the sake of others. Peacemaking begins inside each of us."

"There are also, I believe, good addictions of a sort, and I have been blessed (or cursed) by one of them: an addiction to consciousness."

"Who in the hell is Satan? I don't know."

"The spirit of evil is one of unreality, but it itself is real. To think otherwise is to be misled."

"I have come to suspect that many cases of schizophrenia may in fact be the result of evil being passed from parents to children ... it is possible that some children, faced with the choice of either becoming evil themselves or utterly losing their minds, choose the latter. Evil is contagious. The children of the evil are often damaged for life."

"Laymen tend to associate sadism and masochism with purely sexual activity, thinking of them as the sexual enjoyment derived from inflicting or receiving physical pain. Actually, true sexual sadomasochism is a relatively uncommon form of psychopathology. Much, much more common, and ultimately more serious, is the phenomenon of social sadomasochism, in which people unconsciously desire to hurt and be hurt by each other through their nonsexual interpersonal relations."

"By masochism I do not mean that they (masochists) get their sexual jollies out of physical pain, but simply that in some strange way they are chronically self-destructive. Masochists are people who perpetually attempt to destroy themselves. They are always, in one way or another, trying to kill themselves. In the long run they almost always succeed. Our task in therapy is to help them empty themselves of their masochism so that life may fill them instead. The problem of masochism is intimately tied up with the problem of responsibility. Masochists are people who, because they hate themselves, believe that they are worthless and deserve only punishment. They are self-destructive because they lack the capacity to assume responsibility for their own lives. Instead of taking care of themselves, they neglect themselves, abuse themselves, and in the end destroy themselves. The genuinely disciplined person, on the other hand, is one who takes responsibility for his or her own life and well-being. Discipline is self-caring. Masochism is not. Discipline is love translated into action; masochism is love turned against the self."

"Most people who seek psychotherapy are suffering from a sense of personal inadequacy. Yet there are always a few whose problem is just the opposite: they suffer because they cannot accept their greatness. Perhaps ten percent of my patients have had to come to terms not with their inferiority but with their superiority. To accept one's legitimate talents without guilt or fear is as much a responsibility as to accept one's faults."

"It would, I believe, be quite appropriate to classify evil people as constituting a specific variant of the narcisstic personality disorder."

"There are a number of different theological models of evil ... This book will concern itself solely with the subject of human evil, and its primary focus will be on 'bad people'."

"The time is right, I believe, for psychiatry to recognize a distinct new type of personality disorder to encompass those I have named evil. In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, this one would specifically be distinguished by: (a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behaviour, which may often be quite subtle. (b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury. (c) pronounced concern with a public image and self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives. d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophreniclike disturbance of thinking at times of stress."

"This is a dangerous book."

"While Eastern religions have a far more developed understanding of spiritual growth, they have paid comparatively little attention to the phenomenon of human evil."

"Lying is both a cause and a manifestation of evil."

"Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent."

"Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?"