Psychiatrist Quotes

“Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.”

“Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.”

“The symbols of the self arise from the depths of the body.”

“When goals go, meaning goes. When meaning goes, purpose goes. When purpose goes, life goes dead on our hands.”

“In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.”

“New ideas are not only the enemies of old ones; they also appear often in an extremely unacceptable form.”

“Conflicts create the fire of affects and emotions; and like every fire it has two aspects: that of burning and that of giving light.”

“The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual”

“A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.”

“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”

“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”

“The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.”

“The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.”

“Hitler's unconscious seems to be female.”

“In the second half of life the necessity is imposed of recognizing no longer the validity of our former ideals but of their contraries. Of perceiving the error in what was previously our conviction, of sensing the untruth in what was our truth, and of weighing the degree of opposition, and even of hostility, in what we took to be love.”

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

“To be normal is the ultimate aim of the unsuccessful.”

“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokenness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results.”

“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.”

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

“Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.”

“People cannot stand too much Reality.”

“I would rather be whole than good.”

“Psychological type is nothing static - it changes in the course of life.”