Orthodox Psychotherapy Quotes

My own odyssey of therapy, over my forty-five-year career, is as follows: a 750-hour, five-time-a-week orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis in my psychiatric residency (with a training analyst in the conservative Baltimore Washington School), a year’s analysis with Charles Rycroft (an analyst in the “middle school” of the British Psychoanalytic Institute), two years with Pat Baumgartner (a gestalt therapist), three years of psychotherapy with Rollo May (an interpersonally and existentially oriented analyst of the William Alanson White Institute), and numerous briefer stints with therapists from a variety of disciplines, including behavioral therapy, bioenergetics, Rolfing, marital-couples work, an ongoing ten-year (at this writing) leaderless support group of male therapists, and, in the 1960s, encounter groups of a whole rainbow of flavors, including a nude marathon group.

Još je Dostojevski s pravom rekao da je đavolov trijumf kada postigne da čovek prestane da veruje u njega!

Jer šta se krije iza fanatične maske nesrećnog čoveka? Strah i osećanje velike slabosti, nesigurnost i potreba za natkompenzacijom osećanja inferiornosti (psihijatrijskim rečnikom, među fanaticima mnogo je neurotičara, psihopata i psihotičara) i, što je najgore, nevera u veru ili ideju koju ovakav čovek fanatično zastupa; u fanatika , najzad, jača bude vera u demonsku, nego u Božiju moć.

Na jedna pitanja odgovor nećemo nikad dobiti i treba ih ostaviti autentičnim mističarima; na druga nećemo dobiti odgovor jer su površna, leteća, previše znatiželjna i raznovrsna. O njima najbolje govori Sveti Nikodim Agiorit (1748-1809) kad kaže: „Čuvati um od nekorisnog znanja i prazne radoznalosti. Interesovanje za mnogo stvari je često plod gordosti; to su zamke zlog duha koji pokušava da nas saplete radoznalošću...Raspredajući o visokim stvarima, zaboravljaju da čuvaju čistotu srca; gordost uma je gora od gordosti volje.” Ima, srećom, i trećih pitanja na koja jedino i dobijamo odgovor, a to su ona koja nas godinama istinski muče.

Lobotomy and shock treatment are methods which by their very nature are more suited to handle vicious circulating memories and malignant worries than the deeper-seated permanent memories, though it is not impossible that they may have some effect here too. As we have said, in long-established cases of mental disorder, the permanent memory is as badly deranged as the circulating memory. We do not seem to possess any purely pharmaceutical or surgical weapon for intervening differentially in the permanent memory. This is where psychoanalysis and other similar psychotherapeutic measures come in. Whether psychoanalysis is taken in the orthodox Freudian sense or in the modified senses of Jung and of Adler, or whether our psychotherapy is not strictly psychoanalytic at all, our treatment is clearly based on the concept that the stored information of the mind lies on many levels of accessibility and is much richer and more varied than that which is accessible by direct unaided introspection; that it is vitally conditioned by affective experiences which we cannot always uncover by such introspection, either because they never were made explicit in our adult language, or because they have been buried by a definite mechanism, affective though generally involuntary; and that the content of these stored experiences, as well as their affective tone, conditions much of our later activity in ways which may well be pathological. The technique of the psychoanalyst consists in a series of means to discover and interpret these hidden memories, to make the patient accept them for what they are and by their acceptance modify, if not their content, at least the affective tone they carry, and thus make them less harmful. All this is perfectly consistent with the point of view of this book. It perhaps explains, too, why there are circumstances where a joint use of shock treatment and psychotherapy is indicated, combining a physical or pharmacological therapy for the phenomena of reverberation in the nervous system, and a psychological therapy for the long-time memories which, without interference, might reestablish from within the vicious circle broken up by the shock treatment.