I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. |
I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. |
I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among [those] in the second half of life-that is to say, over 35-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. |
I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself? |
I maintained that psychiatry, in the broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be 'normal.' It is a coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the therapist, both in principle equally subjective. |
I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about the things they know. The naïve person does not appreciate what an insult it is to talk to one's fellows about anything that is unknown to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior only in a writer, journalist or poet. |
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. |
If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. |
In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am. |
In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others. |
In the end, the only events of my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one… All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings… But my encounters with the 'other' reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved on my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. |
Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious |
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves |
It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality. |
It is indeed time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces |