Deep Thoughts:
a forum for ideas expressed in a single sentence or less
Editors: George Atwood and David Klugman
A religious war occurs when adults fight over whose imagined friend is the best.
Daniel M. Ogilvie
Daniel M. Ogilvie
Dinner with Descartes
The food was tasteless
But I was certain that
I was eating it.
______________________________
Thanks for nothing Rene!
David Klugman
The food was tasteless
But I was certain that
I was eating it.
______________________________
Thanks for nothing Rene!
David Klugman
A loving heart no safety finds.
Robert Stolorow
Robert Stolorow
If in dismissing the human validity of metaphysics, as such, the philosopher or theorist fails to supplant this 'obsolete system’ with a full-blooded alternative, drawing upon an understanding of the soul’s irreducible power of creative imagination, one is left with nowhere to go but backward and downward - because the rejector of the metaphysical must inevitably fall into a fealty to some form of materialist monism: an essentially dead worldview, itself unconsciously metaphysical, envisioning a vast cosmos in which human beings are nothing but brothers and sisters in skin sacks standing on a dirt ball floating in a meaningless physical void.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
When catastrophe in early life is too great to be borne, either because there may actually be no organized personality or unit-self yet there, or because one is certain that upon consciously encountering such disaster whatever sense of selfhood has been attained would surely be shattered and destroyed, the only way out in psychotherapy is through a long intersubjective engagement in which the murdering trauma can have its bloody day and at last fully happen, on both sides of the couch, as it were - allowing the person to survive to the next day, a little less unformed, and not as much held captive by the terror of annihilation.
George Atwood and David Klugman
George Atwood and David Klugman
Phenomenology as birthed by the High Romantics, Goethe and Coleridge in particular, refuses to concede the metaphysical break between mind and nature, offering instead a view of the mind’s participation in reading the phenomena from within rather than reducing them from without - thereby overcoming the dualistic opposition between the material and the nonmaterial by pursuing the meanings of appearances as they reveal themselves in relation to the person, world history, and the evolution of consciousness.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
Bound by a causal-mechanistic view of the world (i.e., the wind blows the leaves, my hand opens the door) one is left with a starkly literalized universe of dumb, lifeless objects that merely function and that possess no voice; accordingly all meaningful dialogue with Nature and the Cosmos, become delegitimized and thus rendered impossible to find and to cultivate – but as Owen Barfield might say, “No less real for that reason.”
David Klugman & George Atwood
David Klugman & George Atwood
One likes to believe that one lives in an age that has transcended the authority of religious dogma, and that thereby one has transcended the need to defer to authority in any form with regard to one’s right to liberated, individualized thinking; and yet how many still unconsciously defer to the dogma of materialism, the essence of which mandates a surrender to fundamental beliefs no less restrictive, and certainly no less dogmatic than those of the preceding age.
David Klugman
David Klugman
"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music."
John Milton submitted by Deborah Anastos
In Aristotle’s system—after Plato’s death—the Ideas are dragged down from heaven into nature; then, in the Middle Ages, they move, as abstractions, out of nature into the classifying and “naming” mind of man, where they are soon firmly entrenched by the increasing subjectivism of Descartes, Berkeley and Kant.
Owen Barfield submitted by David Klugman
Owen Barfield submitted by David Klugman
"The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become - for questioning is the piety of thought.” —Martin Heidegger
Submitted by Robert Stolorow
Submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "… the whole conception of my mind sitting safely in my body and looking out through its senses on to a universe which is not mind, and with which my own mind has therefore no connection except through the senses, is an impossible one; the whole picture is an illusion, and I myself called the apparatus, on which this much-prized ‘solitude’ is based – a spectre.”
Owen Barfield (submitted by David Klugman)
Owen Barfield (submitted by David Klugman)
The tendentious habit of thought in our time (our common sense) is still wildly skewed by Cartesian premises, toward the division - and not merely the distinction - between mind and the phenomenal world it perceives, leaving us with no understanding of how the constitutive activity of our intuitive thinking renders possible our link to any world at all we can experience, stranded on a dark, barren stage made of matter only: life’s poor player reduced to signifying nothing.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
Deep Question: Could it be that the narrative impulse - the need to have and tell a story about one’s life - and the metaphysical impulse - the need for an eternal, changeless foundation for all that exists - are, ultimately, complementary formulations of the same thing, providing a sense of purpose, meaning, and wholeness: the former imagining a reassuring coherence and unity in the diverse elements of our otherwise unbearably chaotic personal lives; the latter creating an image of a cosmic ground that solidifies all that is transitory and threatens to melt into air?
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought
"To look hard at something, to look through it, is to transform it, convert it into something beyond itself, to give it grace."
Charles Wright, from Bye-and-Bye, Selected Late Poems (submitted by Patricia Price)
"To look hard at something, to look through it, is to transform it, convert it into something beyond itself, to give it grace."
Charles Wright, from Bye-and-Bye, Selected Late Poems (submitted by Patricia Price)
Classic Deep Thought
"There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept' of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (submitted by Robert Stolorow)
"There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept' of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (submitted by Robert Stolorow)
Rene Descartes, in a tone of godlike certainty, articulated the credo of materialism: “Grant me matter and motion and I will construct a universe” - and elicited a profound rejoinder from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one that advanced the philosophic paradigm from duality to polarity (by way of Imagination), affirming an indissociable, dynamic unity binding of mind and matter: “…grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend itself in this infinity, and I will cause the whole world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.”
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
A DEEP QUARTET
1. One of the tragic features of the manic state is that the explosive counter-drive against psychological erasure itself usurps the affective center of the Freedom Fighter, as an accelerating quest for validation and understanding undergoes a transformation into a spectacle perceived and defined by others as madness running wild - and once pathologized by others, this explosiveness takes on the very negating and destructive force of its original oppressors: To wit, Catch me if you can at my rate of speed, for to slow down to yours (or to anyone’s but my own) spells my surrender to annihilation.
2. When the creative eruptions of mania are consistently seen as dysfunction and disorder, when the protests and pleas inhering in this subjective state are viewed as symptoms of an illness, when there is no sheltering island of human understanding making possible a releasing of the need to be heard and understood from its drivenness, the only way of containing the runaway streaming of emotion and thought is to suppress it by means of medical violence.
3. If, early in life, there has been a smothering of one’s soul in accommodation to the social surround, an explosion may eventually take place, bursting the ancient boundaries of self-expression that have been set up - and if this explosion is met by uncomprehending and pathologizing objectification, it assumes the classic form of a manic episode: ever-accelerating speech in a desperate search for understanding, limitless euphorias within which the newfound freedom is celebrated and preserved, and radical disengagement from enslaving sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others.
4. At what point is so-called mania just what will happen to anyone who steps that far off a norm in any given norm-structured context, as the forces of conventionality gather power and seek a constraining dominion over the creator’s soul?
George Atwood and David Klugman
1. One of the tragic features of the manic state is that the explosive counter-drive against psychological erasure itself usurps the affective center of the Freedom Fighter, as an accelerating quest for validation and understanding undergoes a transformation into a spectacle perceived and defined by others as madness running wild - and once pathologized by others, this explosiveness takes on the very negating and destructive force of its original oppressors: To wit, Catch me if you can at my rate of speed, for to slow down to yours (or to anyone’s but my own) spells my surrender to annihilation.
2. When the creative eruptions of mania are consistently seen as dysfunction and disorder, when the protests and pleas inhering in this subjective state are viewed as symptoms of an illness, when there is no sheltering island of human understanding making possible a releasing of the need to be heard and understood from its drivenness, the only way of containing the runaway streaming of emotion and thought is to suppress it by means of medical violence.
3. If, early in life, there has been a smothering of one’s soul in accommodation to the social surround, an explosion may eventually take place, bursting the ancient boundaries of self-expression that have been set up - and if this explosion is met by uncomprehending and pathologizing objectification, it assumes the classic form of a manic episode: ever-accelerating speech in a desperate search for understanding, limitless euphorias within which the newfound freedom is celebrated and preserved, and radical disengagement from enslaving sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others.
4. At what point is so-called mania just what will happen to anyone who steps that far off a norm in any given norm-structured context, as the forces of conventionality gather power and seek a constraining dominion over the creator’s soul?
George Atwood and David Klugman
Psychoanalysis arose originally out of studies of human beings under ludicrous duress, unfolding uneasily, ambivalently, rebelliously, within a vision of the human condition promoted by the metaphors of Positivism (materialism, mechanism, dead cosmos, no meaning); so how can one hope for our field's future as a pathway for exploring and healing the soul until those old, dead metaphors have been discarded altogether, and we begin to forge new metaphors worthy of Whole Human Beings – thereby reminding ourselves that the Positivist Credo (all true observation is external to the observer) is without any foundation other than pure, irrational faith.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: “The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers…”
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers -
Submitted by Robert Stolorow
Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers -
Submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought:
"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell."
Carl Gaustav Jung submitted by Deborah Anastos
"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell."
Carl Gaustav Jung submitted by Deborah Anastos
Psychoanalysis was born historically of two mothers – one being the new scientific/materialist paradigm following the so-called Enlightenment, and the other a countervailing, restorative movement embracing subjectivity, drawing on German romanticism – and reflects a central division in Sigmund Freud’s personality: that between his need to objectify himself and others, subduing otherwise unbearable experiences of trauma; and an equally powerful desire to recover his own lost world of feeling and avert the dreaded fate of becoming emotionally inert and dead in an everlasting depersonalization.
George Atwood and David Klugman
George Atwood and David Klugman
The heart of language is to constitute a world, to disclose a world of which it is a constituting part.
Robert Stolorow and George Atwood
Robert Stolorow and George Atwood
The Manic Defense, Revisited
The so-called manic defense, described by Winnicott as a protection against psychic death, is both a protest and a plea: the former against not being seen, or better, of only being seen as a thing, to be made use of in an emotionally exploitive family context and/or in a pathologizing psychiatric diagnostic system; the latter a desperate cry for the human understanding that will imbue the suffering one with a fully dimensional subjective life, and shield against the onrushing, terrifying Blackness.
George Atwood and David Klugman
The so-called manic defense, described by Winnicott as a protection against psychic death, is both a protest and a plea: the former against not being seen, or better, of only being seen as a thing, to be made use of in an emotionally exploitive family context and/or in a pathologizing psychiatric diagnostic system; the latter a desperate cry for the human understanding that will imbue the suffering one with a fully dimensional subjective life, and shield against the onrushing, terrifying Blackness.
George Atwood and David Klugman
The great shift announced by many to be occurring in contemporary thought about psychotherapy - chiefly among and by its advocates with great fanfare and ostensibly approved and supported by workers in so-called neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis - involves a reported movement from focusing on cognition toward more affect-based and motivational approaches rooted in “implicit knowing” – which knowing, among other things, resurrects, reinforces and even celebrates ‘Freud’s fundamental assertion’ regarding the distinction between the consciously knowable and the unconsciously unknowable – thereby demonstrating, sadly, that this so-called ‘great shift’ is in fact next to nothing in its actual magnitude, as it not only fails to alter but covertly repeats and (most probably unconsciously, that is, ironically, implicitly) reinforces the already existing Empirical paradigm that continues to hold our minds captive.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
A rendering of Heideggerian "finite freedom:" We don’t have a say in the cards we are dealt, but we do have a say in how we play them.
Ben Stolorow and Robert Stolorow
Ben Stolorow and Robert Stolorow
There is a hidden totalitarianism within important streams of so-called postmodern thought, which appear to posit the non-existence of the subject, except as a purely fictional creature, pictured as somehow inhabiting a wholly imaginary universe: such a denial of the foundational, positive existence of the subject is a kind of unholy counterpart, on a level of breathtaking abstraction, to the systematic elimination of millions of subject-less objects in the last century.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
On the shadow side of our (pathological) accommodations lie the various rascal-like ways in which we seek to recruit others into some form of accommodating us – unaware of how by acting in this way we pass our traumas on to the next generation by solidifying and thereby enshrining the trauma of the unfulfilled need to be granted our birthright and released from an insoluble and deadly dilemma: that we were not Loved, or worse, repeatedly traumatized when we needed more than anything else to be seen, protected, raised and cared for.
Davld Klugman and George Atwood
Davld Klugman and George Atwood
When one’s personhood has been thrust into the dark realms of negation, with a slow slide toward the horrors of annihilation, the result is sometimes the emergence of a counter-drive, a kind of reaction formation against surrendering to ontological erasure – the resistance fighter, fatally allergic to all things counterfeit, no longer free to be ‘phony,’ thereby becomes locked within the prison house of his/her own uncompromising authenticity.
George Atwood and David Klugman
George Atwood and David Klugman
On Twinship
The need for twinship is not innate like the need for mirroring (to be seen) and idealization (to feel safe, protected) but is rather born of a traumatic need for affiliation in the wake of its devastating absence; the problem being that with twinship, even between the closest and most intimate of people, there is an inescapable “collapse of difference” that goes on, which keeps both parties enslaved by their original trauma, tragically destined to repeat it, as their beloved sameness follows its inevitable path toward rupture and dissolution - in other words, twinship does not allow the Other to be different enough, distinct enough, differentiated enough to gradually learn how to become his or her own point of agency and origination and of independent thought, feeling and imagination: paradoxically, I did not originate myself, while yet I am responsible to and for my own origination.
David Klugman and George Atwood
The need for twinship is not innate like the need for mirroring (to be seen) and idealization (to feel safe, protected) but is rather born of a traumatic need for affiliation in the wake of its devastating absence; the problem being that with twinship, even between the closest and most intimate of people, there is an inescapable “collapse of difference” that goes on, which keeps both parties enslaved by their original trauma, tragically destined to repeat it, as their beloved sameness follows its inevitable path toward rupture and dissolution - in other words, twinship does not allow the Other to be different enough, distinct enough, differentiated enough to gradually learn how to become his or her own point of agency and origination and of independent thought, feeling and imagination: paradoxically, I did not originate myself, while yet I am responsible to and for my own origination.
David Klugman and George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought
"The I is not an object but a willed act; and if it cannot believe in itself in what or whom can it believe?"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - submitted by David Klugman
"The I is not an object but a willed act; and if it cannot believe in itself in what or whom can it believe?"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - submitted by David Klugman
A unification bridging and superseding the Newtonian-Galilean worldview on the one side and the romantic worldview on the other, bringing together mind and matter, the human sciences and the natural sciences, is to be found in an inclusive phenomenology - one that recognizes the physical world as but a domain of experience (instead of the absolute and exclusive foundation of the Real) .
George Atwood
George Atwood
Delusions, far from being comprehensible solely as products of an isolated deranged mind, are always embedded in a constitutive context that includes an encounter with the disbelief of the other; moreover, a delusion forms, as such, as a response to the imperviousness and extraordinary conviction of the disbeliever.
Kyle Arnold and George Atwood
Kyle Arnold and George Atwood
For those who do not challenge it, Reality will always be prescribed, and proscribed.
David Klugman and George Atwood
David Klugman and George Atwood
Classic Deep Thoughts: "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid,
and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."
Bertrand Russell
and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."
Bertrand Russell
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
William Butler Yeats submitted by Rebecca Atwood and George Atwood
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
William Butler Yeats submitted by Rebecca Atwood and George Atwood
I'm afraid sometimes
you'll play lonely games too,
games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.
Dr. Seuss submitted by Deborah Anastos
you'll play lonely games too,
games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.
Dr. Seuss submitted by Deborah Anastos
Although contextualism in psychoanalysis, and elsewhere, is undoubtedly the solution to the false dichotomy handed down to us since Descartes, it is still incumbent upon us to ongoingly distinguish between affect and cognition, between Having and Wanting (as modes of being), without dividing them; for as the old poet sage reminds us:
“It is a dull and obtuse mind that distinguishes in order to divide;
yet it is still a worse that divides in order to distinguish.”
S.T. Coleridge – Aids to Reflection submitted by David Klugman
“It is a dull and obtuse mind that distinguishes in order to divide;
yet it is still a worse that divides in order to distinguish.”
S.T. Coleridge – Aids to Reflection submitted by David Klugman
Classic Oxymoron: Earthquake preparedness
Robert Stolorow
Robert Stolorow
"Among all beings, only the human being, called upon by the voice of Being, experiences the wonder of all wonders: that beings are."
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Classic Deep Thought: “When one is alone and it is night and so dark and still that one hears nothing and sees nothing but the thoughts which add and subtract the years, and the long row of disagreeable facts which remorselessly indicate how far the hand of the clock has moved forward, and the slow irresistible approach of the wall of darkness which will eventually engulf everything you love, possess, wish, strive, and hope for--then all our profundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable hiding place, and fear envelops the sleepless one like a smothering blanket.”
C. G. Jung - submitted by Robert Stolorow
C. G. Jung - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Cartoon by William J. Coburn and Katalin Coburn
"Trauma recovery," an oxymoron, is the constitution of a new world that coexists
alongside the absence of the one that has been shattered: the essential
fracturing at the heart of traumatic temporality.
Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief
that develops the powers of the mind."
Marcel Proust - submitted by Robert
Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "Melancholy men are of all others the most witty."
Aristotle - submitted by Stephanie Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks inside you."
Friedrich Nietzsche - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Blame shames, and shame takes the blame.
Robert Stolorow
"I think I just heard the two minute warning."
George Carlin, just before he died - submitted by Robert Stolorow
French Proverb: Le monde appelle fous ceux qui ne sont pas fous de la folie commune. Mad are labelled those who do not take part in the common madness.
submitted by Rebecca Atwood
Cohesive selves stick together, as long as their cohesion is not borrowed.
William Coburn & George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: "No human being is without religion....[T]hat means [we are each] deranged."
Martin Heidegger - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "[In a dream, a delusion, or a work of art] a situation taken up into a metaphor loses its transitory, painful and unstable quality, and becomes full of significance and inner validity, the moment it passes wholly into an image."
Rainer Maria Rilke - submitted by George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: “And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.”
Soren Kierkegaard - submitted by Robert Stolorow
"The name ...is in advance the name of a dead person."
Jacques Derrida - submitted by Robert Stolorow
"But science is merely a secondary bracketing of philosophical language,
from which it ultimately derives; it can never have the last word."
Emmanuel Levinas - submitted by Robert Stolorow
"Lamenting the groundlessness of our existence is why-ning."
George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: "A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart."
Goethe - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror."
Ranier Maria Rilke - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Grief is the hole you walk around during the day, but fall into at night.
Anonymous - submitted by Tony Schwartz
"Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy"
William Shakespeare - submitted by Michael Leyton
"We only become what we are by the radical and deep seated refusal of that which others have made of us."
Jean Paul Sartre
Classic Deep Thought: It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
D.W. Winnicott - submitted by Helen Davey
" Classic Deep Thought: The prince of darkness is a gentleman."
William Shakespeare - submitted by Stephanie Stolorow
"Classic Oxymoron: Neuropsychoanalysis"
Robert Stolorow
"In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit (i.e., we should be able to think what cannot be thought). "
Ludwig Wittgenstein submitted by Rebecca Rabin
"All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy"
Martin Heidegger submitted by Robert Stolorow
Narcissistic parents give the gift that keeps on taking.
Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "...go there where you cannot go, to the impossible, it is indeed the only way of coming, or going..."
Jacques Derrida submitted by Dorthy Levinson
Classic Oxymoron: Trauma Recovery
George Atwood and Robert Stolorow
“You’re brainwashed” brainwashes.
A patient - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: “You who are immaculate, you pure perceivers…Behind a God’s mask, you hide from yourselves.”
From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche – submitted by Robert Stolorow
The driven need to cut oneself, embodying a desire to render visible in the flesh injuries to the soul that have been denied, invalidated and erased, arises so that the bloody wounds stand as testimonies, in the manner of the mothers of the disappeared marching before the palace of the Argentinian generals in the 1970s, to a truth that otherwise vanishes without a trace.
George Atwood
A thought that strangely subverts itself, suggesting a certain madness in the thinker:”What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
From the Tractatus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein – submitted by George Atwood
The positivist credo, which is a self-cancelling proposition - All those statements not verifiable by external observation are to be consigned to the flames - - - “Ahhh, positivism: a doctrine that flies up its own asshole!”
George Atwood’s friend, Lawrence Schechter, who committed suicide in 1974
Classic Deep Thought: When you take poison, sooner or later you get poisoned – and all drugs are poison.
The great psychiatrist, Elvin Semrad, answering a question as to what he thought of psychiatric medications submitted by Rebecca Rabin
An unspoken counterpart to the idea of the selfobject in self psychology is that of the objectself, a self constituted exclusively by the needs and requirements of the object - inasmuch as the cohesion of the objectself is entirely a borrowed one, it can be said that an objectself disintegrates into authentic chaos upon encountering a selfobject.
George Atwood
For someone whose mind and body have been stolen, the only thing that exists is unreality and the only thing that is real does not exist.
Dorthy Levinson and George Atwood
In the use of the concept of projective identification, the clinician does to the patient precisely what this concept tells us that the patient is doing to the clinician.
George Atwood, Robert Stolorow, and Donna Orange
Those who create 'systems' in psychoanalysis, their most ardent followers, and those who revel in presenting, discussing, and being discussed at psychoanalytic conferences appear, almost without exception, to be in headlong flight from profound childhood depression.
David Klugman and George Atwood
An important difference one often sees between those therapists who never encounter multiple personality and who doubt its very existence except perhaps as something iatrogenically induced, and those therapists who observe and treat multiple personality fairly frequently and who regard it as absolutely genuine, is that the former tend to be persons who have compliantly identified with idealized authority figures in their lives (parents, teachers, analysts) and in the process have sequestered and silenced the pain of serious childhood trauma, whereas the latter are persons who have reacted to the injuries and disruptions of their early years by becoming the idealized parent their mothers and fathers were not, and by seeking to heal and comfort themselves vicariously through taking care of childhood pain in others.
George Atwood and Janet Droga
The quintessential irony of the analytic relationship resides in the analyst who insists that the patient have a right to his or her own life, a right to develop a personal sense of freedom and agency.
William Coburn
Classic Oxymorons:
(a) The fundamental RULE of FREE association - Robert Stolorow
(b) Assertiveness ......... Training! - George Atwood
In the same way one refrains from confronting the objective falsity in a delusion in order to respond to the core of subjective truth contained within it, one must avoid a focus on the potential or actual danger of a manic enactment in order to mirror and validate the sole surviving remnant of personal agency lying at its heart.
George Atwood and Dorthy Levinson
The traditional diagnostic process requires dividing the constituents of the intersubjective field into the patient and a separate observer, who does not consider himself or herself part of the diagnosis; this separation inevitably denies the patient the opportunity to have a twinship selfobject experience that is needed, generating reactions to this deprivation (feelings of estrangement, isolation, anxiety, depression, and the like) which the observer then identifies as emanating from a pathological condition located inside the patient's mind (or body).
Gil Spielberg & George Atwood
There are three known psychiatric conditions: (l) haldol deficiency; (2) valium deficiency; and (3) haldol/valium deficiency. (unnamed surgeon at 3:00 AM, residents' lounge, unnamed hospital,1986)
reported to DT by Craig Smart
haiku -
Purified affects
Make the truth unspeakable:
"Please don't be angry."
Constance Brunig
Against a theory of mental health that posits as its cornerstone a capacity to differentiate between self and other - and that an inability to do so represents a fixation at, regression to, or overvaluing of archaic psychic life characterized by fusion - one may suggest that the absence of a capacity for differentiation as such (be it in the form of pathological merger, conceptions of primal unity, or idealized transcendence experiences) is inevitably the result of trauma, by virtue of which the self has been usurped.
David Klugman
Analytic therapy eventually collapses into an arrogance-bound (and unfortunately stable) binary orbit, with the analyst's position of superior objectivity revolving around the patient's position that his or her problem is special, unique, and deserving of such attention, thereby replicating scenarios of early life (and analytic training) in which the analyst paid for parental approval and attention by a surrender of the mind.
Craig Smart and George Atwood
What we remain most unconscious of is not something that lives buried deep inside, but quite simply, the World.
Barry Magid
Reality is so continuous and pervasive, so solid, impenetrable, inscrutable, so real, that it is virtually impossible for the mind to grasp the simple fact that what we call REALITY is an illusion, a construct, a schema devised by the mind to explain the phenomenon and mystery of life.
Floyd Arnold
Food for Deep Thoughts
"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. Most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.".
Sigmund Freud (from a letter to Oscar Pfister)
"...an element of my psychology that analysis could not reach [was] the feeling that I would be all right if someone would split my head open (front to back) and take out something (tumour, abscess, sinus, suppuration) that exists and makes itself felt right in the centre behind the root of the nose."
Donald Winnicott (from a letter to a colleague)
Isolated minds are Descartesmentalized.
Robert Stolorow
In a life constituted entirely by lies, the only authentic action possible is suicide.
In a life constituted entirely by lies, the ultimate act of compliance is suicide.
George Atwood
One result of psychoanalysis is that problems do not disappear from, but rather into our lives.
Barry Magid
The theory that mutual recognition necessitates a destruction of omnipotence in order to make room for the otherness of the Other, may be at risk of universalizing what is only one route to a sense of the Other as an independent center of experience and initiative: traumatic impingement on early organizations of subjective life (retrospectively identified as omnipotence in need of being destroyed) and the response to the trauma of forming a lastingly reified image of oneself and one's experience being insulated from contact with the Other, mirroring the Cartesian binary that separates the intrapsychic from the intersubjective.
David Klugman and George Atwood
A contemporary debate in psychoanalysis is anchored at a personal level by widely contrasting attitudes toward what is possible in human life: Cartesian thinking, which posits the isolation of the mind and the duality of mind and body, arises from an unconscious attitude of resignation and even cynicism as to the possibility of healing a breach in relatedness; certain trends in post-Cartesian thought, positing interdependence and approaching mind-body relations phenomenologically, reflect an attitude of hope that sustaining relations to others can be restored and that personal fragmentation can thereby be brought together in an embracing unity.
George Atwood and David Klugman
If your parent ORDERS you to be independent, you should respond by saying: "If a Greek man comes up to you and says, 'all Greeks are liars, do you believe him?'"
Christopher Atwood (age 11)
As our ancient, arboreal ancestors learned to see color to better distinguish poisonous from nutritious fruit, they relied on pigments (colors) previously evolved by the flowering, fruiting plants to attract the pollinating affections of the flying insects - - in that very successful, primeval competition that finally defeated the hegemony of the ferns - - and so the sky turned blue as the wasps and bees danced.
Tom Atwood (from Why the Sky is Blue)
From having little to having nothing takes one's life away.
Ramon Riera
Schools of psychotherapy that view psychological dilemmas as ultimately composed of pathogenic "narratives" over which the patient should acknowledge his or her "authorship" or agency paradoxically encourage a disavowal and intellectualization of these dilemmas - for in viewing one's life only as an aesthetic object, a kind of novel to be "reauthored" or otherwise manipulated, one ceases to feel it as a lived reality.
Kyle Arnold
(a) Kleinian game: "I'm rubber, you are glue; everything you say bounces off of me, and sticks to you."
Julia Schwartz
Kleinian greeting: "You feel fine, how am I?"
Robert Stolorow
Solipsism is a fantasy of the traumatized.
David Klugman
Classic Deep Thoughts
[O]ne of the greatest difficulties encountered in bringing about favorable change is this almost inescapable illusion that there is a perduring, unique, simple existent self, [which is] in some strange fashion, the patient's, or the subject person's, private property.
Harry Stack Sullivan - 1950
An analyzable patient is a patient with whom the analyst can maintain the illusion of neutrality.
Merton Gill - 1982
DEEP LIMERICK ( Fall 2001)
Ode to a Besserwisser
By Robert D. Stolorow
There was a young analyst so fair,
With clear and distinct ideas most rare.
In objectivist zeal,
He knows the real Real,
Being wrapped in a cordon sanitaire.
Take a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo and listen to it without any backing -
it sounds like a terrible noise .... until one hears it with bass and drums, and it becomes the most beautiful music; so too, the anguish of our patients is a terrible noise that exasperates us... until, drawing on the resonance of our own souls, if we find the right backing and amplification, a deep, sad music appears.
Ramon Riera & George Atwood
One who never feels right enough, cannot say that he or she is actually right.
Ramon Riera
Psychoanalysis is hysterical; it cannot see its own blindness.
Jeffrey Rubin
The idea that one finds the otherness of the Other through destruction is often discussed as though some unchanging Other were out there to be found - call it the Real as opposed to the fantasied Other; and as such seems to harbor a sort of objectivism of Otherness that resembles all other objectivisms in that a Reality out there, presumed at first to be misrepresented in the mind, is thought, through the rigors of disenchantment, to become known in some final, independent way - which way of knowing is, because of a maturity morality disguised as developmental theory, regarded as more advanced, desirable, and praiseworthy than its forerunner.
David Klugman
The problem with running up against someone who knows what's what, is that it destroys our confidence in our own confusion.
George Atwood & Dorthy Levinson
The classical psychoanalytic model of the mind as being made up of Ego, Id, and Superego, when viewed as a symbol of a very particular human situation, may be understood as reflecting an enmeshment scenario, wherein the child, in fear of the loss of a needed connection, surrenders parts of his or her own experience to the judgments and values of authority, and a constellating occurs of a driven animality, a seething cauldron of sexuality and aggression, representing a compromised authenticity striking back against the hegemony of the Other (an interpretation, incidentally, that articulates closely with the suggestion that Freud's concept of the Id is a counterpart to Winnicott's idea of the True Self).
George Atwood & David Klugman
In the spirit of Winnicott's famous remark that there is no such thing as an infant, it can also be said that there is no such thing as a mother, no such thing as a patient, no such thing as an analyst, and even no such thing as a person.
George Atwood
The blues guitarist, from a precise tension in the strings of his
electric guitar, extracts with his fingertips a little explosion of
vibrations that would be lost in the air, nearly inaudible, but
fortunately, the amplifier faithfully picks them up and turns them into
the most beautiful music, that this way can reach our soul;
in the same way, when we were children, the tensions of our muscles and internal organs were lost in the nothingness, but fortunately, sometimes somebody faithfully picked them up and turned them into the affects by which today we are moved.
Ramon Riera
A void the vortex
'Who or what do you see when six year old Christopher sits
breathlessly alone, opposite mother in a tight corner of the
room, just waiting for you the analyst to find him, while everybody
else except angry mother calls him Chris?'
Fitz Douglas
The idea that one has identified the Satanic is itself the Satanic(?)
George Atwood & Christopher Atwood
I am (in the world), therefore I think.
Robert Stolorow
For one whose character is centrally organized by a split between an inner true self and an exterior false self, a radical relational theory would seem to suggest, insofar as it is only in the false self that concrete relationships with others are registered while the true self remains hidden and untouchable, that the so-called "true self" is in fact the product of inauthentic, solipsistic illusion while the apparent "false self" is the seat of a nascent authenticity embedded in its exquisitely sensitive attunement with the emotional needs of others- if so, perhaps instead of ridding the patient of an invidious false self, psychotherapy should attempt to help the patient discern the truth in that which had hitherto felt false, and the false in that which had hitherto felt true, thus deconstructing the schizoid fantasy maintaining the patient's divided self.
Kyle Arnold
Classic Deep Thoughts
I met someone who claimed that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that more people were not so as well.
Bertrand Russell (submitted by Floyd Arnold)
The first lesson that innocent childhood affords me is - that it is an instinct of my Nature to pass out of myself, and to exist in the form of others; the second is - not to suffer one form to pass into me and to become a usurping Self in the disguise of what the German Pathologists call a fixed idea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The world exists for the sake of the Self
Patanjali - - the first Self psychologist - 2,500-3000 years ago
(submitted by Elaine Pomfrey)
The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
alongside the absence of the one that has been shattered: the essential
fracturing at the heart of traumatic temporality.
Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief
that develops the powers of the mind."
Marcel Proust - submitted by Robert
Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "Melancholy men are of all others the most witty."
Aristotle - submitted by Stephanie Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks inside you."
Friedrich Nietzsche - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Blame shames, and shame takes the blame.
Robert Stolorow
"I think I just heard the two minute warning."
George Carlin, just before he died - submitted by Robert Stolorow
French Proverb: Le monde appelle fous ceux qui ne sont pas fous de la folie commune. Mad are labelled those who do not take part in the common madness.
submitted by Rebecca Atwood
Cohesive selves stick together, as long as their cohesion is not borrowed.
William Coburn & George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: "No human being is without religion....[T]hat means [we are each] deranged."
Martin Heidegger - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "[In a dream, a delusion, or a work of art] a situation taken up into a metaphor loses its transitory, painful and unstable quality, and becomes full of significance and inner validity, the moment it passes wholly into an image."
Rainer Maria Rilke - submitted by George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: “And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.”
Soren Kierkegaard - submitted by Robert Stolorow
"The name ...is in advance the name of a dead person."
Jacques Derrida - submitted by Robert Stolorow
"But science is merely a secondary bracketing of philosophical language,
from which it ultimately derives; it can never have the last word."
Emmanuel Levinas - submitted by Robert Stolorow
"Lamenting the groundlessness of our existence is why-ning."
George Atwood
Classic Deep Thought: "A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart."
Goethe - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror."
Ranier Maria Rilke - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Grief is the hole you walk around during the day, but fall into at night.
Anonymous - submitted by Tony Schwartz
"Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy"
William Shakespeare - submitted by Michael Leyton
"We only become what we are by the radical and deep seated refusal of that which others have made of us."
Jean Paul Sartre
Classic Deep Thought: It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.
D.W. Winnicott - submitted by Helen Davey
" Classic Deep Thought: The prince of darkness is a gentleman."
William Shakespeare - submitted by Stephanie Stolorow
"Classic Oxymoron: Neuropsychoanalysis"
Robert Stolorow
"In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit (i.e., we should be able to think what cannot be thought). "
Ludwig Wittgenstein submitted by Rebecca Rabin
"All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy"
Martin Heidegger submitted by Robert Stolorow
Narcissistic parents give the gift that keeps on taking.
Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: "...go there where you cannot go, to the impossible, it is indeed the only way of coming, or going..."
Jacques Derrida submitted by Dorthy Levinson
Classic Oxymoron: Trauma Recovery
George Atwood and Robert Stolorow
“You’re brainwashed” brainwashes.
A patient - submitted by Robert Stolorow
Classic Deep Thought: “You who are immaculate, you pure perceivers…Behind a God’s mask, you hide from yourselves.”
From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche – submitted by Robert Stolorow
The driven need to cut oneself, embodying a desire to render visible in the flesh injuries to the soul that have been denied, invalidated and erased, arises so that the bloody wounds stand as testimonies, in the manner of the mothers of the disappeared marching before the palace of the Argentinian generals in the 1970s, to a truth that otherwise vanishes without a trace.
George Atwood
A thought that strangely subverts itself, suggesting a certain madness in the thinker:”What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
From the Tractatus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein – submitted by George Atwood
The positivist credo, which is a self-cancelling proposition - All those statements not verifiable by external observation are to be consigned to the flames - - - “Ahhh, positivism: a doctrine that flies up its own asshole!”
George Atwood’s friend, Lawrence Schechter, who committed suicide in 1974
Classic Deep Thought: When you take poison, sooner or later you get poisoned – and all drugs are poison.
The great psychiatrist, Elvin Semrad, answering a question as to what he thought of psychiatric medications submitted by Rebecca Rabin
An unspoken counterpart to the idea of the selfobject in self psychology is that of the objectself, a self constituted exclusively by the needs and requirements of the object - inasmuch as the cohesion of the objectself is entirely a borrowed one, it can be said that an objectself disintegrates into authentic chaos upon encountering a selfobject.
George Atwood
For someone whose mind and body have been stolen, the only thing that exists is unreality and the only thing that is real does not exist.
Dorthy Levinson and George Atwood
In the use of the concept of projective identification, the clinician does to the patient precisely what this concept tells us that the patient is doing to the clinician.
George Atwood, Robert Stolorow, and Donna Orange
Those who create 'systems' in psychoanalysis, their most ardent followers, and those who revel in presenting, discussing, and being discussed at psychoanalytic conferences appear, almost without exception, to be in headlong flight from profound childhood depression.
David Klugman and George Atwood
An important difference one often sees between those therapists who never encounter multiple personality and who doubt its very existence except perhaps as something iatrogenically induced, and those therapists who observe and treat multiple personality fairly frequently and who regard it as absolutely genuine, is that the former tend to be persons who have compliantly identified with idealized authority figures in their lives (parents, teachers, analysts) and in the process have sequestered and silenced the pain of serious childhood trauma, whereas the latter are persons who have reacted to the injuries and disruptions of their early years by becoming the idealized parent their mothers and fathers were not, and by seeking to heal and comfort themselves vicariously through taking care of childhood pain in others.
George Atwood and Janet Droga
The quintessential irony of the analytic relationship resides in the analyst who insists that the patient have a right to his or her own life, a right to develop a personal sense of freedom and agency.
William Coburn
Classic Oxymorons:
(a) The fundamental RULE of FREE association - Robert Stolorow
(b) Assertiveness ......... Training! - George Atwood
In the same way one refrains from confronting the objective falsity in a delusion in order to respond to the core of subjective truth contained within it, one must avoid a focus on the potential or actual danger of a manic enactment in order to mirror and validate the sole surviving remnant of personal agency lying at its heart.
George Atwood and Dorthy Levinson
The traditional diagnostic process requires dividing the constituents of the intersubjective field into the patient and a separate observer, who does not consider himself or herself part of the diagnosis; this separation inevitably denies the patient the opportunity to have a twinship selfobject experience that is needed, generating reactions to this deprivation (feelings of estrangement, isolation, anxiety, depression, and the like) which the observer then identifies as emanating from a pathological condition located inside the patient's mind (or body).
Gil Spielberg & George Atwood
There are three known psychiatric conditions: (l) haldol deficiency; (2) valium deficiency; and (3) haldol/valium deficiency. (unnamed surgeon at 3:00 AM, residents' lounge, unnamed hospital,1986)
reported to DT by Craig Smart
haiku -
Purified affects
Make the truth unspeakable:
"Please don't be angry."
Constance Brunig
Against a theory of mental health that posits as its cornerstone a capacity to differentiate between self and other - and that an inability to do so represents a fixation at, regression to, or overvaluing of archaic psychic life characterized by fusion - one may suggest that the absence of a capacity for differentiation as such (be it in the form of pathological merger, conceptions of primal unity, or idealized transcendence experiences) is inevitably the result of trauma, by virtue of which the self has been usurped.
David Klugman
Analytic therapy eventually collapses into an arrogance-bound (and unfortunately stable) binary orbit, with the analyst's position of superior objectivity revolving around the patient's position that his or her problem is special, unique, and deserving of such attention, thereby replicating scenarios of early life (and analytic training) in which the analyst paid for parental approval and attention by a surrender of the mind.
Craig Smart and George Atwood
What we remain most unconscious of is not something that lives buried deep inside, but quite simply, the World.
Barry Magid
Reality is so continuous and pervasive, so solid, impenetrable, inscrutable, so real, that it is virtually impossible for the mind to grasp the simple fact that what we call REALITY is an illusion, a construct, a schema devised by the mind to explain the phenomenon and mystery of life.
Floyd Arnold
Food for Deep Thoughts
"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. Most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think.".
Sigmund Freud (from a letter to Oscar Pfister)
"...an element of my psychology that analysis could not reach [was] the feeling that I would be all right if someone would split my head open (front to back) and take out something (tumour, abscess, sinus, suppuration) that exists and makes itself felt right in the centre behind the root of the nose."
Donald Winnicott (from a letter to a colleague)
Isolated minds are Descartesmentalized.
Robert Stolorow
In a life constituted entirely by lies, the only authentic action possible is suicide.
In a life constituted entirely by lies, the ultimate act of compliance is suicide.
George Atwood
One result of psychoanalysis is that problems do not disappear from, but rather into our lives.
Barry Magid
The theory that mutual recognition necessitates a destruction of omnipotence in order to make room for the otherness of the Other, may be at risk of universalizing what is only one route to a sense of the Other as an independent center of experience and initiative: traumatic impingement on early organizations of subjective life (retrospectively identified as omnipotence in need of being destroyed) and the response to the trauma of forming a lastingly reified image of oneself and one's experience being insulated from contact with the Other, mirroring the Cartesian binary that separates the intrapsychic from the intersubjective.
David Klugman and George Atwood
A contemporary debate in psychoanalysis is anchored at a personal level by widely contrasting attitudes toward what is possible in human life: Cartesian thinking, which posits the isolation of the mind and the duality of mind and body, arises from an unconscious attitude of resignation and even cynicism as to the possibility of healing a breach in relatedness; certain trends in post-Cartesian thought, positing interdependence and approaching mind-body relations phenomenologically, reflect an attitude of hope that sustaining relations to others can be restored and that personal fragmentation can thereby be brought together in an embracing unity.
George Atwood and David Klugman
If your parent ORDERS you to be independent, you should respond by saying: "If a Greek man comes up to you and says, 'all Greeks are liars, do you believe him?'"
Christopher Atwood (age 11)
As our ancient, arboreal ancestors learned to see color to better distinguish poisonous from nutritious fruit, they relied on pigments (colors) previously evolved by the flowering, fruiting plants to attract the pollinating affections of the flying insects - - in that very successful, primeval competition that finally defeated the hegemony of the ferns - - and so the sky turned blue as the wasps and bees danced.
Tom Atwood (from Why the Sky is Blue)
From having little to having nothing takes one's life away.
Ramon Riera
Schools of psychotherapy that view psychological dilemmas as ultimately composed of pathogenic "narratives" over which the patient should acknowledge his or her "authorship" or agency paradoxically encourage a disavowal and intellectualization of these dilemmas - for in viewing one's life only as an aesthetic object, a kind of novel to be "reauthored" or otherwise manipulated, one ceases to feel it as a lived reality.
Kyle Arnold
(a) Kleinian game: "I'm rubber, you are glue; everything you say bounces off of me, and sticks to you."
Julia Schwartz
Kleinian greeting: "You feel fine, how am I?"
Robert Stolorow
Solipsism is a fantasy of the traumatized.
David Klugman
Classic Deep Thoughts
[O]ne of the greatest difficulties encountered in bringing about favorable change is this almost inescapable illusion that there is a perduring, unique, simple existent self, [which is] in some strange fashion, the patient's, or the subject person's, private property.
Harry Stack Sullivan - 1950
An analyzable patient is a patient with whom the analyst can maintain the illusion of neutrality.
Merton Gill - 1982
DEEP LIMERICK ( Fall 2001)
Ode to a Besserwisser
By Robert D. Stolorow
There was a young analyst so fair,
With clear and distinct ideas most rare.
In objectivist zeal,
He knows the real Real,
Being wrapped in a cordon sanitaire.
Take a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo and listen to it without any backing -
it sounds like a terrible noise .... until one hears it with bass and drums, and it becomes the most beautiful music; so too, the anguish of our patients is a terrible noise that exasperates us... until, drawing on the resonance of our own souls, if we find the right backing and amplification, a deep, sad music appears.
Ramon Riera & George Atwood
One who never feels right enough, cannot say that he or she is actually right.
Ramon Riera
Psychoanalysis is hysterical; it cannot see its own blindness.
Jeffrey Rubin
The idea that one finds the otherness of the Other through destruction is often discussed as though some unchanging Other were out there to be found - call it the Real as opposed to the fantasied Other; and as such seems to harbor a sort of objectivism of Otherness that resembles all other objectivisms in that a Reality out there, presumed at first to be misrepresented in the mind, is thought, through the rigors of disenchantment, to become known in some final, independent way - which way of knowing is, because of a maturity morality disguised as developmental theory, regarded as more advanced, desirable, and praiseworthy than its forerunner.
David Klugman
The problem with running up against someone who knows what's what, is that it destroys our confidence in our own confusion.
George Atwood & Dorthy Levinson
The classical psychoanalytic model of the mind as being made up of Ego, Id, and Superego, when viewed as a symbol of a very particular human situation, may be understood as reflecting an enmeshment scenario, wherein the child, in fear of the loss of a needed connection, surrenders parts of his or her own experience to the judgments and values of authority, and a constellating occurs of a driven animality, a seething cauldron of sexuality and aggression, representing a compromised authenticity striking back against the hegemony of the Other (an interpretation, incidentally, that articulates closely with the suggestion that Freud's concept of the Id is a counterpart to Winnicott's idea of the True Self).
George Atwood & David Klugman
In the spirit of Winnicott's famous remark that there is no such thing as an infant, it can also be said that there is no such thing as a mother, no such thing as a patient, no such thing as an analyst, and even no such thing as a person.
George Atwood
The blues guitarist, from a precise tension in the strings of his
electric guitar, extracts with his fingertips a little explosion of
vibrations that would be lost in the air, nearly inaudible, but
fortunately, the amplifier faithfully picks them up and turns them into
the most beautiful music, that this way can reach our soul;
in the same way, when we were children, the tensions of our muscles and internal organs were lost in the nothingness, but fortunately, sometimes somebody faithfully picked them up and turned them into the affects by which today we are moved.
Ramon Riera
A void the vortex
'Who or what do you see when six year old Christopher sits
breathlessly alone, opposite mother in a tight corner of the
room, just waiting for you the analyst to find him, while everybody
else except angry mother calls him Chris?'
Fitz Douglas
The idea that one has identified the Satanic is itself the Satanic(?)
George Atwood & Christopher Atwood
I am (in the world), therefore I think.
Robert Stolorow
For one whose character is centrally organized by a split between an inner true self and an exterior false self, a radical relational theory would seem to suggest, insofar as it is only in the false self that concrete relationships with others are registered while the true self remains hidden and untouchable, that the so-called "true self" is in fact the product of inauthentic, solipsistic illusion while the apparent "false self" is the seat of a nascent authenticity embedded in its exquisitely sensitive attunement with the emotional needs of others- if so, perhaps instead of ridding the patient of an invidious false self, psychotherapy should attempt to help the patient discern the truth in that which had hitherto felt false, and the false in that which had hitherto felt true, thus deconstructing the schizoid fantasy maintaining the patient's divided self.
Kyle Arnold
Classic Deep Thoughts
I met someone who claimed that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that more people were not so as well.
Bertrand Russell (submitted by Floyd Arnold)
The first lesson that innocent childhood affords me is - that it is an instinct of my Nature to pass out of myself, and to exist in the form of others; the second is - not to suffer one form to pass into me and to become a usurping Self in the disguise of what the German Pathologists call a fixed idea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The world exists for the sake of the Self
Patanjali - - the first Self psychologist - 2,500-3000 years ago
(submitted by Elaine Pomfrey)
The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
Friedrich Nietzsche