Fredric Schiffer

"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."

"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."

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

"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.'"

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."