If we focus mostly on how we might have been partly or wholly to blame for what might have been less than a perfect, problem- free... childhood, our guilt will overwhelm their pain. It becomes a story about us, not them. . . . When we listen, accept, and acknowledge, we feel regret instead, which is simply guilt without neurosis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If intercourse gives you thrombosis And continence causes neurosis,... I'd rather expire Fulfilling desire Than live in a state of psychosis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child's mind is much more public property than the adult's. What troubles the child is shared with his family, his teachers an...d school chums. That is to say, the child is going through the educational process of acquiring a "personality" (and, alas, neurosis) while the adult has likely forgotten all the trials--at home or outside--that contributed to the later pain or tension bringing him to analysis. Put differently, the adult is troubled but usually can't "remember" the exact sequence of events that are responsible for the trouble. The child often will describe quite readily what is happening about him, but may well not consider himself suffering or in danger--it is his parents or teachers who are concerned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universa...l neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The (post) structuralist temper requires too great a depersonalization of the writing/speaking subject. Writing becomes plagiarism...; speaking becomes quoting. Meanwhile, we do write, we do speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Psychoanalysis is unlike traditional medicine in that nature does not so readily supply us with a working definition of the psychi...cally "normal." Our definition of physical normality ("health") is not something we have strenuously to imagine or blindly to postulate, and there are obvious and sharp limits to possible disagreement; it is simply given to us because we are what we are. But psychoanalysis is in a more ambiguous position. Its definition of mental health has to be in good measure "thought up," and it must be done by men whose ideas are influenced by their lives and times. Psychoanalysis is always open to the accusation that its criteria of "neurosis" and "mental health" and "adjustment" have a cultural bias, and are influenced by political ideologies, national prejudices, and personal whims.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »