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How to Survive Without Psychotherapy
David Smail
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Just imagine how terrible life would be if we really could be therapeutically engineered into clones of some kind of norm of ‘adjustment’, and how inevitably therapeutic technique would become an instrument of tyrannical repression.”
“Whether or not we are able to realise our desires, put our plans into effect, do what we know to be right, will depend on our access to powers and resources which we need to acquire, or to have acquired, from the world around us.”
“the hugely unequal distribution of power works against the vast majority of people being able to live a life in which insecurity, anxiety, confusion, ignorance and pain are kept to an unavoidable minimum.”
“What caused people distress was not so much their own mistakes, inadequacies and illnesses as the powers and influences that bore down upon them from the world beyond their skin.”
“We all of us feel that we have things inside us that would make us unlovable if only people knew.”
“Though the contrast between how we feel inside and how we wish to appear to others is universal and causes most of us many an uneasy moment, the extent to which we suffer in this way depends probably on the degree to which we were allowed as children to develop private lives without the threat of adult censure.”
“The notion that we should in all circumstances be able to smile through adversity is one of the mystifications that keep the mental-health industry alive.”
“It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the way someone experiences their problems and what the causes of those problems are.”
“It is about as sensible to seek the reasons for distress inside the ‘self’ as it would be to see feeling cold as a matter of personal responsibility.”
“From the brutal racism of the least privileged, through the proverbial mean resentment of the petit bourgeois to the paranoid secrecy of the very powerful, we are all haunted by the possibility of slipping from our perch.”
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