“We live in a lawless society with a facade of law enforcement.”
“You know that when the local utility company is trying to assassinate you, that your research into their frauds and corruption is progressing in the right direction.”
“Psychoanalysis is a conspiracy against the tourism industry: it makes travelling to faraway places in order to better understand human beings unnecessary.”
“Maybe it’s better to be with someone you don’t love too much. Someone you love just enough, but not so much that it could destroy you.”
“When a police officer is pointing a gun at you, pulling your pants up is a proven way of getting you legally killed.”
“The police have turned into a health and safety issue for the general public.”
“There is no transparency in the police.”
“Good people are rarely suspicious: they cannot imagine others doing things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct oe, and let matters rest there. Then too, the normal are inclined to visualize the [psychopath] as one who s as monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, whihch is about as far from the truth as one could well get...These monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal mannerthan their actually normal brothers and sisters; they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself--just as the wax rosebud or the plsatic peachseemd more perfect to the eye, more what the mind thought a rosebud or a peach should be, than the imperfect original from which it had been modelled.”
“I no longer exist, while those who exist never did something to exist. I no longer exist because I was killed inside.”
“In fact, the whole place was filled with little conflicts like this: beautiful next to disgusting, free next to confined, compassion next to torture, death next to life.”
“Research is an endless loop of failures interspersed with occasional profound discoveries.”
“Discovery originates out of unusual observations that curiosity demands to understand.”
“Be unpredictable.”
“…It seems impossible to overestimate their capacity for irrationality. Somewhere in this world, with every blink of the eye, a fool is born.”
“The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and untruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.”
“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?”
“As a younger man, I burned with enthusiasm for my work: I was to be a warrior, the champion of reviled or exiled passions. I would assail the forces marshaled to enslave these passions, the tyrannies imposed in the name of factitious moralities, the sadistic compulsions disguised as highest law. I would be, in my silent, expensive way, the apostle of a thrilling freedom. When did it abandon me, that faith? How often have I heard it repeated, nearly verbatim, that commonplace of every educated, sophisticated patient: I don’t believe in judgment, in divine judgment; I don’t believe that someone is sitting up in the sky frowning down at me. In the past I would have thought: Yes, you do— and that is your problem. In the fullness of time I would assist them in shaking free of this secret conviction. Now, though, my calling has deserted me. The premise wasn’t wrong: most patients suffer more than they know from obscure inner persecutions. What I did not realize, however, was how deeply I myself believed in such a judgment, how along with my patients I embraced with inalienable fidelity that very conviction. This conviction did not presume a personified judge— bearded, severe, enthroned. It presumed instead a law, inhuman, abstract, and implacable, the law to which we owed our lives, the law to which we owed our reckoning. Failure, worth, crisis, potential, fulfillment. Every patient returns to these words again and again. They are the words from which my profession is made, and each of these words presumes a judgment, a mark attained or missed. No one enters my office who does not believe in his very marrow that judgment, some judgment, is absolute and fixed. The person I am meant to be: that mythical creature, that being whom each patient longs and dreads to become, is itself a judgment, a standard one does not devise but to which one must account. What or who set the standard? What or who measured the body for its soul? What or who meant them to be the people they were meant to be? I am certain: belief in judgment is not what my patients reject or grow out of. The belief in judgment is what they cling to. Beneath their affections and afflictions, judgment is their one true love.”