Quotes About Psychotherapy

#1. 'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

Thomas Szasz

#2. The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy - man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities.

Carl R. Rogers

#3. Psychotherapy
A long, drawn out process consisting of subtle probings of the human mind, whereby women are blamed for all of Freud's shortcomings.

Marc Cooper

#4. Effective psychotherapy works because the therapist continues to grow as a person and as a healer.

Jed Diamond

#5. Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.

Thomas Keating

#6. There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

Thomas Szasz

#7. J.L. Moreno was a pioneer of twentieth-century theater and psychotherapy. A remarkable work, Impromptu Man should be required reading for therapists and dramatists alike.

Jeffrey K. Zeig

#8. I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#9. Psychotherapy seeks for an improvement in neurotic balance. Letting go, however, eliminates it all together.

David R. Hawkins

#10. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

Karl Marlantes

#11. Reports that online cognitive behavioral treatment can be as effective as in-person psychotherapy suggest that technology will expand access, extend the impact of a therapist, and expedite treatment for people who might not find 'seeing' a therapist acceptable.

Thomas R. Insel

#12. Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?

Michael Torke

#13. A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A METAPHOR-the metaphor metaphor.

Steven Pinker

#14. The other contested term is recovered memory therapy. As far as I can tell, no one practicsing psychotherapy today endorses this term as a descriptive of what they do... there are no self-described recovered memory therapists...

Richard J. McNally

#15. The four-letter word for psychotherapy is Talk.

Eric Hodgins

#16. Your genes may be causing your blues! We now know depression runs in families and chemical changes in the brain coincide with clinical depression. Medications, psychotherapy, and other treatments can adjust these changes and chase depression away.

Joni E. Johnston

#17. The stereotype of psychotherapy portrayed in popular books and movies is lying on the couch and saying whatever comes into your mind, while a kindly psychoanalyst listens and nods knowingly from time to time. After years and years, something wonderful is supposed to happen.

David D. Burns

#18. You were lost in the darkness of the world until you asked for light. And then God sent His Son to give it to you. Psychotherapy-3. III. 8:9-13.

Robert Holden

#19. Psychotherapy can be one of the greatest and most rewarding adventures, it can bring with it the deepest feelings of personal worth, of purpose and richness in living.

Eda LeShan

#20. Today many medications act across diagnostic groups. Alliance effects also transcend specific psychotherapy methods. Both may be affecting profound psychopathological processes.

Leston Havens

#21. Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.

Viktor E. Frankl

#22. One knows one's madness, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.

Glen Duncan

#23. As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.

Saul Bellow

#24. Unfortunately there are many kinds of psychotherapy and many psychotherapists involved with trying to prove themselves and their own theories rather than working with what is. In fact they find it very frightening to work with what is.

Chogyam Trungpa

#25. Psychotherapy is the art of finding the angel of hope in the midst of terror, despair and madness.

Cloe Madanes

#26. There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate.

Hans Eysenck

#27. Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.

Edward St. Aubyn

#28. He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.

Ben Aaronovitch

#29. Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#30. The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.

Rollo May

#31. For me, the term "psychotherapy" is limiting. It implies that we work with mind and emotions, but excludes the body and pays scant attention to the spirit, soul, and broader environmental issues.

Jed Diamond

#32. I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.

Irvin D. Yalom

#33. Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they're better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn't work that way.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#34. It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This

M. Scott Peck

#35. Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

H.L. Mencken

#36. You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.

James Hillman

#37. I've been through many years of psychotherapy, psycho-drama, I've taken risks in my life. I've had trials and tribulations just like every body else. You have to really think about who you are. You can't just go through life and sail threw.

Joy Behar

#38. Psychotherapy works, and some types of therapy have been shown to be much more effective than antidepressants over the long run.

Irving Kirsch

#39. The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

Thomas Szasz

#40. The person who really needs the psychotherapy ( ... ) is not the homosexual youngster who gets dragged to the psychiatrist's office by his mother, but the mother, to releive her anxieties about his homosexuality.

Frank Kameny

#41. 'Statistics' show that 66% of clients are cured with psychotherapy; what statistics don't show is that 72% are cured without it.

Thomas Szasz

#42. Psychotherapy, unlike castor oil, which will work no matter how you get it down, is useless when forced on an uncooperative patient.

Abigail Van Buren

#43. One of the reasons I've never done intensive psychotherapy or any of that stuff is that if there's anything in me that needs fixing, I want to know that I can rely on my own intuition to fix it.

Kate Winslet

#44. The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are that belated objectives of nearly all Psychotherapy

Brock Chisholm

#45. Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy.

Terence McKenna

#46. At their peak, religion and psychotherapy become one.

Marianne Williamson

#47. Psychotherapy is the prostitution of friendship.

Hans Eysenck

#48. They show that roughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not.

Hans Eysenck

#49. I've never been to rehab, I've never been to psychotherapy or the doctor or anything like that. I went to a church and I was prayed for, and I've always had a great relationship with God.

Smokey Robinson

#50. I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it's still a work in progress.

Ed Asner

#51. Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

A.S. Byatt

#52. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.

James Hillman

#53. The ultimate goal of Jungian psychotherapy is to make the symbolic process conscious

Edward F Edinger

#54. Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior.

Milton H. Erickson

#55. Psychotherapy is an art enlightened by wisdom, theory and research.

Barbara Temaner Brodley

#56. I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.

Albert Ellis

#57. I had been introduced to psychotherapy, in which the doctors let you talk, talk, talk, until you find the source of your problem or find another doctor.

Gene Tierney

#58. I'm trapped inside of me and I don't go out at all. I go to bed at eight o'clock at night. I never go out during the week. I'm in psychotherapy four days a week, pretty heavy commitment to it.

Howard Stern

#59. The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. (36)

Jonathan Kellerman

#60. I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#61. Everyone says
I'm too old
for a security blanket.
But a baby blanket
tucked in my
dresser drawer back home
is a lot less expensive
then
psychotherapy.

Sarah Tregay

#62. I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around.

Amy Bloom

#63. Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind.

Dion Fortune

#64. In my experience, psychotherapy at its best is like dual meditation - it's like a container in which you can be compassionate and mindful toward yourself.

Jack Kornfield

#65. Now, it is my contention that the deneuroticization of humanity requires a rehumanization of psychotherapy.

Viktor E. Frankl

#66. The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help (the client) acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering.

Carl Jung

#67. I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.

Samantha Morton

#68. Terence McKenna pointed out that the profundity of [halluncinogenic inebriation] and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy.

Rick Doblin

#69. In general, certain conclusions are possible from these data. They fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.

Hans Eysenck

#70. To someone who is not currently on anti-depressants, I would suggest trying other treatments first - for example, psychotherapy.

Irving Kirsch

#71. This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known.

Allen Ginsberg

#72. Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.

Aldous Huxley

#73. In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy.

Brian W. Aldiss

#74. The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness. (168)

Thomas Lewis

#75. Felix believed that the answer to every problem involved penguins; but it wasn't fair to birds, and I was getting tired of teleporting them back home. Somewhere in Antarctica, a whole flock of Magellanic penguins were undergoing psychotherapy.

Rick Riordan

#76. Lyrically and thematically, the title 'Doctor Faith', that song is about therapy, psychotherapy, and that song is about emotions and personal insight. I think all the songs on the record sort of go along with that.

Christopher Cross

#77. When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process.

Lawrence Block

#78. Probably saying a 30-second prayer at a key moment has done more good than any psychotherapy or drugs I've prescribed.

Harold George Koenig

#79. One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#80. Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

Nathaniel Branden

#81. I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

Jim Harrison

#82. The usual treatment is psychotherapy." "I know." I didn't explain that I was single. Therapy is for couples. So is Christmas. So is camping. So is beach camping.

Miranda July

#83. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.

Kay Redfield Jamison

#84. I'd been trained in the art of psychotherapy, the excavation of the past as a means of untangling the present and rendering it livable. It's detective work, of sorts, crouching stealthily in the blind alleys of the unconscious. (179)

Jonathan Kellerman

#85. In psychotherapy it is the myth of knowing this why as precondition for change which defeats its own purpose.

Paul Watzlawick

#86. Love is nature's psychotherapy.

Eric Berne

#87. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man. First

Viktor E. Frankl

#88. Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy.

M. Scott Peck

#89. What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.

Eric Kandel

#90. Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work.

Irvin D. Yalom

#91. The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

Philip K. Dick

#92. I found myself very lost after 'The Partridge Family,' and I lost my dad and I lost my manager, and I lived in a bubble, and it took me 15 years to get through that and a lot of psychotherapy, and I'm laughing about it now!

David Cassidy

#93. If ever there was an avian candidate for psychotherapy, the male blue heron is our nominee.

Carl Sagan

#94. Work is the best of all psychotherapy, in my opinion ... As well might we expect a patient to recover without food as to recover without work.

Richard Clarke Cabot

#95. I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.

William S. Burroughs

#96. Depression comes back over time in about 90 percent of people on antidepressants. Studies show that relapses are far less common when people are treated with psychotherapy.

Irving Kirsch

#97. Psychotherapy isn't a twentieth-century artifice imposed on nature, but the reinstatement of a natural healing process.

Patricia Love

#98. Psychotherapy is a practice that many different professional disciplines engage. Psychiatrists are also medical doctors and increasingly offer medication and do less and less actual therapy.

Jed Diamond

#99. Gestalt means whole, and so are you.

Jan Deelstra

#100. There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.

Neel Burton