SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart.?"

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)  Macbeth

"The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them."

P.D. Ouspensky

"I suspect that our faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents’ belief in phrenology seems to us now."

Gore Vidal

Reflections on a sinking ship

"I imagine a far finer and more comprehensive task for (psychoanalysis) than alliance with an ethical fraternity. I think we must give it time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were-a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion."

C.G. Jung (in a letter to Freud)

"Freud and his followers frequently suggested that all religion was a mass delusion, a communal neurosis, or even a shared psychosis.....Of course, Freud's circle consisted of well-educated, highly secular persons who prided themselves on their scientific attitudes. But we suggest that the main reason for this hostility to conventional religion was the fact that Psychoanalysis itself was a client cult, struggling to establish itself at the very border of religion. Surely, it offered a package of compensators, some of which were very general, totally outside the prevailing Christian culture. In attacking conventional religions, Psychoanalysis explicitly sought to replace them. For many of Freud's followers, indeed, for an embarrassingly prominent set of his most famous disciples, Psychoanalysis did develop into a religious cult."

Stark & William Sims Bainbridge

The Future of Religion

"....Freudian psychoanalysis and all breakaway forms developed by his dissenting disciples (Jung, Adler, Reich, Burrow, Horney, and others) has become more like a schismatic religion than anything else. Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis are divided and mutually hostile as Ultra-Orthodox and Reconstructionist Jews, Catholic and Protestant Christians, or Sunni and Shi'ite Moslems. You don't need to be a medical doctor to be a psychoanalyst; you do need to cleave -at all costs-to a particular doctrine."

Lou Marinoff, Ph.D.

Plato Not Prozac: Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems

"My difficulties were surely personal, but I could not help suspecting that psychoanalysis was a form of alienation that was being used as a substitute not only for Marxism but for social activism of any kind. New York, that riverbed through which so many subterranean cultures are always flowing, was swollen with rivulets of dispossessed liberals and leftists in chaotic flight from the bombarded old castle of self-denial, with its infinite confidence in social progress and its authentification-through-political-correctness of their positions at the leading edge of history. As always, the American self, a puritanical item, needed a scheme of morals to administer, and once Marx's was declared beyond the pale, Freud's offered a similar smugness of the saved. Only this time the challenge handed the lost ones like was not to join a picket line or a Spanish brigade but to confess to having been a selfish bastard who had never known how to love."

Arthur Miller

"In practice, psychoanalysis has by now become all too often nor more than psychic blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analysts' nonresponsive reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution, a "tranquilizing' of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out-less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative."

-Norman Mailer

"We do not like to look at the shadow side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like....Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing."

-Carl G. Jung

"As for psychoanalysis, it’s neither more nor less than blackmail."

Ezra Pound

"Psychoanalysis is that spiritual disease of which it considers itself to be the cure."

Karl Kraus

"The relation between psychiatrists and other kinds of lunatics is more or less the relation of convex folly to a concave one."

Karl Kraus

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind."

-William James (1842-1910)

"Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts."

Vladimir Nabakov

""It is customary in these days of psychoanalysis to assume that, when any young person is out of harmony with his environment, the cause must lie in some psychological disorder. This is to my mind a complete mistake."

Bertrand Russell

   "The task of psychotherapy is to help the person achieve, through a special relationship with a therapist, good communication with himself. Once this is achieved, he can communicate more freely and more effectively with others. We may say then that psychotherapy is good communication, within and between men. We may also turn that statement around it will still be true. Good communication, free communication, within or between men is always therapeutic."

Carl Ransom Rogers

"Work and love-these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis."

Theodore Reik

"courage in war has been recognized from time immemorial as an important virtue, and a great part of the training of boys and young men have been devoted to producing a type of character capable of fearlessness in battle. But moral courage and intellectual courage have been much less studied; they also, however, have their technique. Admit to yourself every day at least one painful truth; you find this quite as useful as the Boy Scout’s daily kind action. Teach yourself to feel that life would still be worth living even if you were not, as of course you are, immeasurably superior to all your friends in virtue and intelligence. Exercise of this sort prolonged through several years will at last enable you to admit facts without flinching, and will, in so doing, free you from the empire of fear over a very large field."

Bertrand Russell

"Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If  anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, pre-suppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology."

-D.H. Lawrence

"One can safely predict that techniques for controlling and modifying personality will grow more efficient by the year 2000 . Thousands of experts at conditioning are now trying out their behavior-changing technology on tens of thousands of people-in classrooms, prisons, mental hospitals, day-care centers, factories, nursing homes….."

Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Summer 1967)

Presumably, research will continue to increase the effectiveness of psychological techniques for controlling human behavior. But we think that psychological technique, alone will be sufficient to adjust human beings to the kind of society that technology is creating."

Unabomber’s Manifesto

"As I studied the practical impact of psychotherapy. I reached a startling conclusion. Exactly one-third of the psychiatrist’s patients were getting better, one-third of them were getting worse, and one-third of them were staying the same. You can probably find better results now from "Kenny Kingston’s psychic Hotline." And everybody knows it."

Timothy Leary

"The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

"Wherever an inferiority complex exists, there is a good reason for it. There is always something inferior there, although not just where we persuade ourselves that it is."

-Carl Jung

"the confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings….for in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion….the existence of experimental methods makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problems and methods pass one another by."

Ludwig Wittgentstein

Philosophical Investigations

"Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.:-"

-Thomas Szasz

The Manufacture of Madness

"On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway."

H.L. Mencken

"The fact is psychology has much to answer for. Pre-frontal lobotomies, shock therapy, the Neuro-Linguistic Institute in its various forms, Esalen, est. techniques for manipulating people in a wide variety of areas, such as developing methods for selling inferior products to foolish consumers."

killing the spirit

"A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter."

-Susan Sontag

"Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness."

-Henry Miller

The Cosmological Eye "An Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere" 

   "The eagerness to brand certain behaviors as signs of dysfunctional neuroses rather than signs of personality traits or even of philosophical outlooks-and then to alter those behaviors by redesigning brain chemistry with psychoactive drugs-has become so common that it now invites editorializing and even parody. A commentary on a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman subtitled "Get That Man Some Prozac" quoted two psychiatrists diagnosing the tragic hero, Willy Loman, as manic-depressive with hallucinatory aspects. Margaret Talbot, writing for The New York Times Magazine, took a jaundiced look at what she called "the latest trait to become a pathology": shyness syndrome. Shyness, renamed social anxiety disorder or social phobia, can now be "treated" by Paxil, an antidepressant.

   Even Winnie-the-Pooh and his quirky fellow inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood have not escaped the medicalization of personality. A group of pediatricians wrote a parody of a scientific paper, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, diagnosing Pooh, Piglet, and the rest of Christopher Robin's crowd with DSM-IV standards. Their conclusions: Pooh has attention deficit disorder (OCD) as well, and is a candidate for methylphenidate (brand name, Ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant often prescribed for ADHD). Piglet's generalized anxiety disorder would respond to paroxetine (the generic name for Paxil, which counters not only depression but anxiety, panic attacks, and social phobias as well), and the chronically, though mildly, depressed Eeyore would probably benefit from fluoxetine (known, the world over as Prozac). Tigger, with his hyperactivity and impulsivity, needs a stimulant medication. perhaps combined with clondine (prescribed for high blood pressure and Tourette's syndrome). To judge from the letters to the editor received by and later published in the journal, many readers did not get the joke."

Michelle Stacey

The Fasting Girl

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Book: "Of Two Minds: The growing disorder in American Psychiatry" by T.M. Luhrimann

Book: "The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung

Book: "In the Freud Archives" by Janet Malcolm

Book: "Compassion and Self-hate: An Alternative to Despair" by Theodore Isaac Rubin M.D.

Book: "A Dose of Sanity: Mind, Medicine and Misdiagnosis" by Sydney Walker III

Book: "The Psychological Society: The impact-and the failure-of psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and the psychological revolution" by Martin L. Gross

Book: "A Life of One's Own" by Joanna Field

Book: The Powers of Psychiatry" by Jonas Robitscher J.D. M.D.

Book: "Talk Is Not Enough: How Psychotherapy Really Works" by Willard Gaylin

Book: "Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds" by David Lindorff

Book: "To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann" by Gail A. Hornstein

Book: "Think Like A Shrink: 100 Principles for Seeing Deeply into Yourself and Others" by Emanuel H. Rosen

Book: "Your Mental Health: A Layman's Guide to the Psychiatrist's Bible" by A. Frances & M.B. First

Book: "A History of Modern Psychology" by Duane P. & Sydney E. Schultz

Book: "The Essential Jung" by Anthony Storr

Book: "Introducing Jung" by M. Hyde & M. McGuinness

Book: A Life of Jung" by Ronald Hayman

Book: "Radical EcoPsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life" by Andy Fisher

Book: "The Erik Erikson Reader" by ed. Robert Coles

Book: "Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter" by Serge LeClaire

Book: "Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist" by Robert S. Corrington

Book: "Out of Her Mind: Women Writing on Madness" ed. Rebecca Shannonhouse

Book: "The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud" by Peter L. Rudnytsky

Book: "Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist" by Robert S. Corrington

Book: "Understanding Human Nature" by Alfred Adler

Book: "What Life Should Mean to You" by Alfred Adler