Kenny Glassman - Psychologist

01/08/2021

“My primary teaching assignment in Vienna was a course for Stanford undergraduates on the life and work of Sigmund Freud. The forty lectures I prepared became the basis of a “Freud Appreciation” course that I taught to psychiatric residents for the next fifteen years. I always emphasized to my students that Freud was not just the creator of psychoanalysis (accounting for less than 1 percent of all the therapy offered today), but that he invented the entire field of psychotherapy: it did not exist in any form prior to Freud. Though I have my criticisms of contemporary orthodox Freudian analysis, I have always felt great respect for Freud’s creativity and courage. He is very often in my mind when I do therapy. Recently, for example, I met with a new patient who was plagued with obscene obsessions about members of his family, and I immediately thought of Freud’s observation that behind such persistent obsessions there is often rage. I regret that Freud has fallen so far out of fashion. As one of my chapter titles in The Gift of Therapy declares, ‘Freud wasn’t always wrong.’”

- Irvin Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir

31/07/2021

23/07/2021

The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.

- Leo Buscaglia

21/07/2021

It's been my experience that most leaps of faith are often preceded by a shove.

- Goldie Herschlag

12/07/2021

There's no pain in change.
There's no pain in growth.
The pain is in the resistance to change.
The pain is in the resistance to growth.

- BOB EARLL

The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself, as our own spirit of resistance to it.

- JEAN NICOLAS GROU

The soul loses command of itself when it is impatient. Whereas, when it submits without a murmur it possesses itself in peace. To be impatient is to desire what we have not, or not to desire what we have. When we surrender to something unwanted, it is no longer such. Why make a real calamity of it by resistance? Peace does not dwell in outward things, but within the soul. We may preserve it in the midst of the bitterest pain, if our will remains firm and acquiescent. Peace in this life springs from surrender even to disagreeable things, not in an exemption from bearing them.

- FRANÇOIS DE LA MOTHE FÉNELON

04/07/2021

"I asked an elderly man once what it was like to be old and to know the majority of his life was behind him. He told me that he has been the same age his entire life. He said the voice inside of his head had never aged. He has always just been the same boy. His mother's son. He had always wondered when he would grow up and be an old man. He said he watched his body age and his faculties dull but the person he is inside never got tired. Never aged. Never changed.”
- Author unknown

01/07/2021

Live each day as if it were your last, ‘cause one of these days you’re gonna be right.

- ANON.

My dear friends, you who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them; you who are passing others sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with remorse if you heard that one of them were dead tomorrow morning; or letting your friend's heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give them some day,—if you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that the time is short, it would break the spell. You would would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do.

- PHILLIPS BROOKS (para.)

19/06/2021

An Ode to Procrastination
The Atlantic
James Parker
July/August 2021

The existential exhilaration of playing chicken with Time

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/an-ode-to-procrastination/619018/

The existential exhilaration of playing chicken with Time

14/06/2021

Join Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author—on a course that will teach you to meditate, reason more effectively, and deepen your understanding of yourself and others.

08/06/2021

I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

08/06/2021

As the years go by, adolescent death concerns are pushed aside by the two major life tasks of young adulthood: pursuing a career and beginning a family. Then, three decades later, as children leave home and the end points of professional careers loom, the midlife crisis bursts upon us, and death anxiety once again erupts with great force. As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind. It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it.”

- I. Yalom, Staring at the Sun, pp.3-4

04/06/2021

For eons, thoughtful philosophers have attempted to dress the wound of mortality and to help us fashion lives of harmony and peace. As a psychotherapist treating many individuals struggling with death anxiety, I have found that ancient wisdom, particularly that of the ancient Greek philosophers, is thoroughly relevant today. Indeed, in my work as a therapist, I take as my intellectual ancestors not so much the great psychiatrists and psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Pinel, Freud, Jung, Pavlov, Rorschach, and Skinner - but classical Greek philosophers, particularly Epicurus. The more I learn about this extraordinary Athenian thinker, the more strongly I recognize Epicurus as the proto-existential psychotherapist.

- Irvin Yalom, Staring at the Sun

01/06/2021

Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut, was one of the first people to see the earth from outer space. As he later recounted: “In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

30/05/2021

When we are disturbed, it is because we find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of our lives—unacceptable to us, and we can find no serenity until we accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is. Unless we accept life completely on life’s terms, we cannot be happy. We need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in us and in our attitudes.

- P. OHLIGER (para.)

Our whole trouble in our lot in this world rises from the disagreement of our mind therewith. Let the mind be brought to the lot, and the whole tumult is instantly hushed; let it be kept in that disposition, and we shall stand at ease, in our affliction, like a rock unmoved with waters beating upon it.

- T. BOSTON (para.)

30/05/2021

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

- Carl Rogers

30/05/2021

A brain that is caught in problems, in fear, in despair, in the desire to fulfil this or that, is always creating illusion, and therefore is in a state of neurosis.

- J. Krishnamurti