“ Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
“ I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.
“ Literally, psychologist means ‘one who studies the soul’, we think of it as a scary word in our harsh-sounding, Germanic language, but it actually means something really beautiful. I also like that it is ambiguous as to whether it’s me studying my own soul, or yours, or you studying my soul, or me asking you to study your own. It’s like a big impossible object that goes around and around.
“The theme of art is the theme of life itself. This artificial distinction between artists and human beings is precisely what we are all suffering from. An artist is only someone unrolling and digging out and excavating the areas normally accessible to normal people everywhere, and exhibiting them as a sort of scarecrow to show people what can be done with themselves.”
In an article for The American Scholar, T. M. Luhrmann presents a new understanding for how to deal with disturbing voices:
“Voices arise when the person is confronted with overwhelming emotional trauma he cannot handle,” Marius Romme explained as he strode across the stage at the Maastricht conference. “We know this.” It is generally agreed that the concept of dissociation was coined by Pierre Janet, as the 19th century turned into the 20th, to describe a disruption in the normally integrated processes of identity, memory, and consciousness.
If it is true that distressing auditory hallucinations are the dissociative consequences of trauma, the implications are enormous. Dissociative disorder has a positive prognosis, one of the most positive in the realm of psychiatric disease, whereas schizophrenia is often thought to have the worst. Dissociative disorder is understood to be a reaction to events in the world; schizophrenia is usually imagined as a largely inherited vulnerability. Dissociation is best treated with therapy and interaction; schizophrenia is assumed to require medication, often heavy. The new way of thinking opens the possibility that people do not hear voices because they are crazy, but that their apparent craziness may be the result of the brain-numbing chaos that can result from hearing voices. It suggests that we can help by teaching people to cope with their voices, rather than viewing the voices as evidence of organic damnation.
“ Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.
“Roughly, for me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”
“Suleika Jaouad was a senior at Princeton when I was a sophomore. I didn’t know her — she was two years older, and intimidatingly beautiful. After graduation, she moved abroad. Then she was diagnosed with leukemia. Since the end of last year, Suleika has been writing a column for The New York Times’s “Well” blog. With frank insights and tremendous eloquence, Suleika tackles a series of tough topics, from managing pain during chemotherapy, to navigating relationships made complicated by cancer (for example, her brother becoming her bone-marrow donor). Her articles, as well the series of video clips which accompany them, offer an affecting glimpse of what it means to be a young person wrestling with cancer.” —Alyssa Loh
“ Perhaps that is the real challenge of psychiatric care: to hold up a picture of what language actually is. Where communication is broken, dysfunctional, turned back on itself, persons are trapped; care for persons is care for their language, listening to the worlds they inhabit (to their souls) so as to engage them with other worlds — neither reductively or collusively.
“ Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
Moral philosopher Peter Singer, who is 66 today, in Writings on an Ethical Life.
Also see David Brooks on the dangerous divide between reason and emotion, and this 1943 Disney animated propaganda on reconciling the two.
“ The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.
“ You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.
Tired
You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.
Come with me, then,
And we’ll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)
You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired. So am I.
But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.
Ah, come with me!
I’ll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I’ll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.
-E.E. Cummings
I Like
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If you were born after 1976, you’re getting screwed by the economy.
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“After ‘Friday Night Lights’ ended, my wife and I were adrift. I still talk to Coach Taylor and Tami in my head. I think she does, too.”
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“Let us be eager to leave what is familiar for what is true.”— Fran Chan (via naomijade)
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Meet Dr. Ezra Feinberg. Ezra is our clinical psychologist. We’ve come to re-think the standard $250, 50-minute weekly therapy...
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Constantly feeling out of sync with the rest of the world, and thus retreating to the world you create for yourself in your mind. If you think about...
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