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[acr398]

The Tavistock Seminars

Wilfred R. Bion

“If anybody is at all curious, you can stuff an answer down their throat or into their ears and that will stop them doing any further thinking.” (Bion, 1976 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 8)])

“And if the worst comes to the worst, the person can always commit a crime to match the feeling, so that the morality will actually precipitate the crime as a kind of therapeutic attempt; the person concerned can feel, “Yes, I may feel guilty, but who wouldn’t? Look what I have done.” In reality, I think that someone can really commit a murder in order to be able to feel that at least his murderous feelings of guilt are rational. But all this usually means that the so-called rational event is one that we are capable of understanding according to our logical rules. This is a matter of human limitations – it has nothing to do with the universe in which we live.” (Bion, 1976 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 9)])

“But at some point it can become clear to you that a change has taken place: the patient is, in fact bothered by something he can do something about. Then it becomes important to be able to draw his attention to this: that while he is talking in the same way as yesterday, or last week or last year, it doesn’t sound as if that is the case. Of course, you do not want to be flattering, but the patient is much more likely to believe that you are sating this to suggest some improvement.” (Bion, 1976 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 9)]) 

“I find it extremely dull having questions answered that I haven’t asked. So I think it would be preferable if I give you a rough idea of what I propose to say, and then if you will ask any questions you care to. I don’t say that I shall answer them, but I can usually find a few more questions to ask you – a natural development, because most questions cause a whole lot more to occur. We never seem to get to the point of an answer unless we look back on it and think we have apparently gathered some kind of experience in the meantime.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 13)])

“We never seem to get to the point of an answer unless we look back on it and think we have apparently gathered some kind of experience in the meantime.” – Bion

“For instance, you will hear something like this: “Will you come and look after these people in this particular ward of the hospital – they are terminal cancer patients.” Terminal cancer: you only have to think about it to realise what a ridiculous phrase it is. How do they know what is terminal? Terminal of what? What is it the end point of? And in any case, we are not really concerned with funeral arrangements or something of that nature. What we are concerned with are living people, and if there is a job to be done for making the lives of people in a particular ward bearable for such time as they have to live, then there is something to be done. That has nothing to do with “terminal cancer”; it has to do with making such life still to come, still left over, still “in the bank” so to speak, tolerable and available, and finding some method by which patients can be given a chance of getting onto that wavelength where you bother with what can be done and don’t bother overmuch with what you can’t do.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 15)])

“And in any case, we are not really concerned with funeral arrangements or something of that nature. What we are concerned with are living people, and if there is a job to be done for making the lives of people in a particular ward bearable for such time as they have to live, then there is something to be done” – Bion

“The trouble with the myelinated fibres is that the person who has them is often so rigid, so structured, that you can’t get another idea through their myelin. On the other hand, if you have a reasonably intelligent baby and quite early in the proceedings you put it on a potty, its non-myelinated bottom seems to know what to do and then proceeds to perform adequately without any fuss or bother.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 15)])

““Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” – the question asked by Macbeth referring to Lady Macbeth sleepwalking. The answer would presumably have to be something like, “Well, not at the moment, but in four hundred years come along again and I’ll tell you what we can do.” Similarly today: “Come along again in four hundred years and we’ll give you an idea.” But in the meantime, each one of us lives this very short, ephemeral existence in which we can possibly use this hypothetical “mind” I am talking about to contribute something to the general fund.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 16)])

“I would like to consider the patient you will see tomorrow. I have a great advantage because I know nothing whatsoever about it, so I am not so easily misled as you, who probably thinks that you saw or heard that patient today. But I suggest that while it has its advantages, it is also a bit of a nuisance because it stands in the way of the fact that the patient has gone on living and thinking and will not be the same patient tomorrow as today – or at the end of the session as at the beginning. This point is curiously difficult to grasp in the actual practice – and that is what I am trying to talk about here. I am not very interested in the theories of psychoanalysis or psychiatry or any other theories; the important point is what I call “the real thing”, the practice of analysis, the practice of treatment, the practice of communication. The question which then arises is: how are you to speak to this patient, the one you have never seen before but are liable to think that you have because you saw him yesterday? The difficulty is this: when you are dealing with a mind or character, the boundaries are not so clearly marked as they appear to be when you are dealing with the anatomy or physiology.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (pp. 16-17)])

“I am not very interested in the theories of psychoanalysis or psychiatry or any other theories; the important point is what I call “the real thing”, the practice of analysis, the practice of treatment, the practice of communication. The question which then arises is: how are you to speak to this patient, the one you have never seen before but are liable to think that you have because you saw him yesterday?” - Bion

“we can talk about the past, about infancy: in infancy the patient felt such-and-such, had this-or-that trauma and it had this-or-that effect. That is very useful if you consider the patient as developing in a line: born-married-died, hic iacet, finished. But the patient you see tomorrow is not like that; you don’t see somebody who is “born-married-died”. It is very difficult indeed to see what goes on between the beginning of a session and the end of it. One reason for this is that the noise is so deafening, the information we are constantly bombarded with through our auditory apparatus is so deafening. You know so much about your history, so much about the patient’s history, so much about psychoanalysis, medicine, physiology, music, painting and so on, that it is very difficult to detect “thing” that we are really observing – or wanting to observe. That is one reason why I think it is easier to “forget” what you know and “forget” what you want, get rid of your desires, anticipations and also your memories so that there will be a chance of hearing these very faint sounds that are buried in this mass of noise.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 17)])

““forget” what you know and “forget” what you want, get rid of your desires, anticipations and also your memories so that there will be a chance of hearing these very faint sounds that are buried in this mass of noise.” – Bion

“Physicians usually call these things “diagnoses”, but in fact they are interpretations – interpretations of the information brought to them by their senses. What information is brought to your patients by their senses one doesn’t know, but you can get an idea of what information is brought to you by your senses if those sense have a chance of seeing, hearing, smelling whatever it is that does present itself; and then you can try to transcend those senses to find their meaning, their origin.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 19)])

“Physicians usually call these things “diagnoses”, but in fact they are interpretations – interpretations of the information brought to them by their senses.” – Bion

“Putting this very crudely: in an analytic situation there is the analyst, a patient and a third party who is watching – always. So there are three people anyhow; very often there are others, much more shadowy – relatives, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children. Those “objects” – I use the vague word deliberately – exert an influence. So I am aware of something I call “hearsay evidence”, the evidence I hear said, and I rate that very low indeed. If I try to evaluate it, I could say that the evidence I get from my senses while the patient is with me is worth 99, and all the rest share the remaining 1 between them; it is of such a low order that it is hardly worth bothering with. I can hear all kinds of things the patient has heard about me, has been told or believes, but what I want to hear is something that is buried in all this noise.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 19)])

“I think the theory of the conscious and the unconscious – which is extremely useful and, like all these things, becomes a bit of a pest after a time because it gets in the way of being able to see other things that one doesn’t know – stands in the way of one’s own ignorance, so that there is very little chance of investigating this realm of ideas that have never been conscious and this state of mind that is not available when  person is talking to you with all his wits about him in broad daylight, and you are listening to him with all your wits about you.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 21)])

“there is very little chance of investigating this realm of ideas that have never been conscious and this state of mind that is not available when  person is talking to you with all his wits about him in broad daylight, and you are listening to him with all your wits about you.” – Bion

“I have tried to tell people that no matter how difficult , how awkward, how obstructive your patient happens to be, there is one thing it is as well to realise, because as you realise it, it becomes more and more useful – that the best collaborator you are ever likely to get is not your supervisor, or your teacher, or whoever you go to for a second opinion, but your patient: you are going to get your real cooperation from this person who appears to be so hostile, so negative, so uncooperative.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 22)])

“the best collaborator you are ever likely to get is not your supervisor, or your teacher, or whoever you go to for a second opinion, but your patient” – Bion

“I haven’t had the experience of analysing somebody who has become a composer, but I see no reason why a patient should not find that he is, in fact, capable of being a composer or a painter. Those are things that might come about if the person concerned allows his ideas to germinate in the way they would. Unfortunately it is much more difficult than it sounds; it is extraordinary how much one has an itch to want the patient to say it in his own words. But it may not be his method of communication anyway – he ought to be learning to draw or paint or compose music. That is what makes the actual practice of analysis difficult: you are trying to listen and observe, but you may be observing it in the wrong spot. If you do that, you don’t observe where the germ is germinating in the patient because your mind is focussed in the wrong direction.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (pp. 22-23)])

“it is extraordinary how much one has an itch to want the patient to say it in his own words. But it may not be his method of communication anyway – he ought to be learning to draw or paint or compose music.” – Bion

“In your practice you will find yourself under pressure. You say whatever you have to say, and then there is an entirely new situation. You don’t really know what is going on because it isan entirely new situation, things will not be the same. It is likely enough that the patient will say, “Why don’t you say something?” Or if not the patient, the relatives – “Why don’t you dosomething?” So you are always under pressure prematurely and precociously to produce your idea. Poor little thing! Pull it up by the roots and have a look at it – it hasn’t got a chance. So you have to act as a sort of parent to the idea – protect it and give it a chance to grow in spite of these pressures; you have to be able to tolerate this state of ignorance. Coming towards the week-end break or some other break, you are under pressure to produce some sort of result. I say “some sort of result”, but what you are really hankering after is spectacular cure, something you could really notice, that could really be shown.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 23)])

“you are always under pressure prematurely and precociously to produce your idea. Poor little thing! Pull it up by the roots and have a look at it – it hasn’t got a chance. So you have to act as a sort of parent to the idea – protect it and give it a chance to grow in spite of these pressures; you have to be able to tolerate this state of ignorance.” – Bion

“I have often felt that that man, who had had no chance of education after the age of fourteen, knew what a university was, while I very much doubt whether I or many of my contemporaries at Oxford knew that, even when we left. You could get a swimming blue, a rugger blue, a third in classics, a first in Greats, and so on through the list, but all those are irrelevant compared with having learnt what a university is. We had plenty of mental nourishment – so much, indeed that I think the main point escaped us.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 26)])

“We had plenty of mental nourishment – so much, indeed that I think the main point escaped us.” – Bion

“I would be tempted to think that he hadn’t learnt anything if he thought he had learnt it exactly… We ought to have a great deal more to say about probability than anybody. When we are dealing speculative reasons and speculative imagination, our only justification is to say, “This is not an exact science, it is not exactly anything.” We could say that that introduces a certainty, but in this particular area where there simply is not enough evidence to amount to a fact, we resort to probability – it is probable that such-and-such will happen – and we have to be content with that. We have to leave the certainties to other people, and when they have got tired of the certainties they will want to know a bit more about the probabilities.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (pp. 26-27)])

“I would be tempted to think that he hadn’t learnt anything if he thought he had learnt it exactly.” – Bion

“where there simply is not enough evidence to amount to a fact, we resort to probability – it is probable that such-and-such will happen – and we have to be content with that. We have to leave the certainties to other people, and when they have got tired of the certainties they will want to know a bit more about the probabilities.” – Bion

“People seem to talk frequently as if they thought that the human character or the actual person behaves logically and rationally, but when you look into the matter that really means the person behaves in a way comprehensible to the analyst – which is quite possible if they obey the laws of ordinary social intercourse, the laws of grammar, the laws of articulate speech. But the fact the something is comprehensible to a mere human being is no justification for believing that therefore the universe in which we exist obeys the laws of human grammar, reason or logic.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 28)])

“the fact the something is comprehensible to a mere human being is no justification for believing that therefore the universe in which we exist obeys the laws of human grammar, reason or logic.” – Bion

“I remember being asked a long time ago, “Does the analyst ever do anything except talk?” I said “Yes, he remains silent.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 29)])

“Does the analyst ever do anything except talk?”

“Yes, he remains silent.” – Bion

“La réponse est le malheur de la question (“The answer is the disease, or misfortune, of the question.”). In other words, that is what kills curiosity. When you have the question answered, that’s the end of your curiosity if it is allowed to happen too often.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 30)])

““The answer is the misfortune of the question.” In other words, that is what kills curiosity. When you have the question answered, that’s the end of your curiosity if it is allowed to happen too often.” – Bion

“I find it useful to suppose that there is something I don’t know but would like to talk about… I think one is a prisoner of the information one’s senses bring – sense of touch, sight, hearing and so on. I don’t think, though, that it is a good thing to suppose that there is nothing except what is open to our senses – that seems to me to verge on the ridiculous.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 33)])

“I find it useful to suppose that there is something I don’t know but would like to talk about” – Bion

“I think one is a prisoner of the information one’s senses bring – sense of touch, sight, hearing and so on. I don’t think, though, that it is a good thing to suppose that there is nothing except what is open to our senses – that seems to me to verge on the ridiculous.” – Bion

“If an individual finds that he cannot see, then the chances are that he will use a stick which he waves about, prods the ground, and seems to rely upon it to give him information. He learns how to use it and appears to be able to diagnose or interpret what he gets from striking other objects or feeling that the ground is soft or sandy. What kind of stick or instrument do we use when we are concerned with what is supposed to be the human mind in order to supply us with facts we might be able to interpret? Psychoanalysis is alleged to be one of them.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 40)])

“there continue to be people who think they have had an experience they would like to communicate. Melanie Klein was one of them; Abraham another; Jung, Stekel, and many more. But suppose someone thought that music might be a way of exploring – that is one human activity that plays a great part; philosophy is another; mathematics another.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 41)])

“I had occasion not so long ago to talk to some rather distressed parents and a very distressed teacher; the child in question could not learn mathematics. There didn’t seem to be much the matter with the child – quite intelligent, but an absolute b.f. when it came to mathematics. Very puzzling: “2 and 2 makes 4”; he could learn that by heart one day but had forgotten it the next. I asked the teacher, “You must be able to hear what he says about this.” “Yes.” “So, can you tell me what he says 2 and 2 doesmake? Obviously it doesn’t make 4 – that is something he has picked up from you and his school. But even so, he cannot grasp what it means, and forgets it.” It turned out that the teacher didn’t know what 2 and 2 meant to the child, so I said, “You had better listen to this boy doing mathematics and find out what hismathematics are, and what 2 and 2 does add up to.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 41)])

“It turned out that the teacher didn’t know what 2 and 2 meant to the child, so I said, “You had better listen to this boy doing mathematics and find out what his mathematics are, and what 2 and 2 does add up to.” – Bion

“Indeed, I feel that most people reach an age where they have so much knowledge that they can’t penetrate through to the wisdom – it’s a new kind of forest that you can’t see for the trees: you can’t see the wisdom for the knowledge. It is peculiarly harassing to listen to someone like that; it comes over in this way: “yes, I know”, “yes, I know”, “yes, I mean to say”, “but you know…”, “what I mean is…”, and so on ad infinitum. Rather more harassing, because it appears to be slightly more meaningful, is the command of masses of psychoanalytic theory. The noise that those theories make is so great that you can hardly hear yourself think. I find it is then useful to be able to shut off one’s awareness of what is going on so as to cut down the turmoil enough for some relevant fact to get through, something we could call “evidence” on which to base our judgement.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 43)])

“Rather more harassing, because it appears to be slightly more meaningful, is the command of masses of psychoanalytic theory. The noise that those theories make is so great that you can hardly hear yourself think.” – Bion

“when the patient enters the consulting-room, I regard myself as fortunate because he is so cooperative as to have taken the trouble to get there and present himself, and I am lucky enough to have a chance to observe this person who is not me.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 43)])

“The communication, whether it is what I can see or hear, presents me with what I now think of as “mental debris” – all this stuff that has accumulated between the time of birth and that particular morning; the stuff learnt in school, from parents, from the senses… I can see that in this sense the debris I am talking about can be a very considerable collection.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 43)])

“Somewhere hidden amongst all this debris you can get a glimpse of actual suffering. It is rather difficult for analysts because we get almost hardened to human suffering – like doctors or surgeons who become so used to hearing about anxiety and so forth that they forget that it hurts. So we have to beware thinking that we are hearing about the real thing when what we are really hearing is the remnant of psychoanalysis. We cannot discard it on the grounds that it is simply a remnant. Therefore, we have to go through it all, whatever we are feeling like, on the off-chance that buried somewhere in this stuff is something that really matters.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 45)])

“As he goes on talking – it may be for as much as a month or so – I begin to feel there is a pattern of his behaviour that shows he is not experiencing the kind of events that I am experiencing. There are lots of words like “hallucinations”, “delusions” and so on; they are very inadequate formulations because the experience I appear to be witnessing is much more subtle – so much so, indeed, that I couldn’t very well give you a description of it.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 47)])

“If I were offered the choice of seeing how Shakespeare thought that human beings behave, or the chance of hearing a psychoanalyst’s description of how a human being behaves, I think I would get a much better impression from Shakespeare. What he says reminds me of people; it makes me think that the sort of person he is talking about could possibly behave just like that. But most scientific papers don’t throw me in that way; I don’t look forward with a vast and vivid interest to the next edition of a learned journal, because I don’t think it’s going to remind me of how human beings behave or, indeed, of how I or other people I see for myself behave.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 47)])

“But what is “perfectly obvious” is of no importance; what is important is what is behind that. If the patient finds that the universe he lives in isn’t good enough and he has imaginatively to construct a better one, then what matters is why he has to construct a better one. Is it just cussedness on his part? Or is there actually something wrong with the universe we occupy?” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 48)])

“what is “perfectly obvious” is of no importance; what is important is what is behind that. If the patient finds that the universe he lives in isn’t good enough and he has imaginatively to construct a better one, then what matters is why he has to construct a better one.” – Bion

“Kleinian theories bear a great resemblance to sin: everybody is against them, but everybody practices them in secret.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 50)])

“I do sometimes wonder if the human race has reached the end of the road: its capacity for thinking clearly is just not adequate for the job that has to be done.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 50)])

“The laws of chemistry etcetera seem to me to be not of much higher status than the laws of grammar or English speech - very useful for purposes of verbal communication – but to suppose that the universe itself obeys the laws of English grammar seems to be entirely futile. And yet we often behave as if there really were these laws that are something more than symptoms of our logical capacity.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 51)])

“The capacity to think has so very few prizes to offer, in contrast to material possessions, that it is hard to get people to realise that there might be something to be said for thinking as being both enjoyable and useful” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 50)])

“But there are things that seem to me to suggest this combination between the body and the mind. Why do the old anatomists call part of the brain the “rhinencephalon”? Why a nose brain? Why is a patient always complaining of rhinitis? Psycho-somatic? Soma-psychotic? Take your choice “Pure and eloquent blood spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought, that one might almost say, her body thought” [Donne, “The Second Anniversary”]” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 51)])

“Although I am concerned with talking to the patient, I am also concerned with the fact that he has a body and a mind. That division – body and mind – is convenient for conversational purposes, but it is a distortion of the facts because he is not “a body and a mind”: I find it useful to think of a person as “your Self”.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 57)])

“these patients are not only improved but are more sensitive in a way that most people are not. The result is that they can become painfully aware of the reality or hostility and envy. Whether they are able to stand finding out what sort of universe they live in will depend on how robust they are. I use the word “universe” to mean anything from their private and immediate contacts to the society of which they are members.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 65)])

“Comment: "I am wondering if there is a psychoanalytic way to the truth"

Bion: "None whatever... Any idea that it inevitably causes you to speak the truth or discover the truth is pure rubbish." (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 87)])

“Psychoanalysis is an attempt to know what it is that interrupts us, or makes it impossible to think clearly or to have any respect for the facts that are available to us; it is an attempt to investigate what it is in ourselves that causes so much trouble, not because we cause trouble but because it is the only thing about which we can say anything at all. We can do nothing about these powers and forces that are out of our control.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 91)])

“what we really need is to be able to detect is where the blockage occurred and what form the collateral circulation has taken. I am sure that analysts who work with children must be familiar with the situation in which they feel the real blockage is something between husband and wife, and the collateral circulation is to send their child to an analyst. So the analyst + child is a kid of collateral circulation of something that lies outside that relationship. This is one the complexities of our approach to these difficulties; that is why I say it is the old system of co-ordinates by which one can localise the pain. It is quite easy to flog away at the relationship between analyst and analysand, to go on analysing ad infinitum – as I said before, transference, countertransference and so forth – without really being able to locate where the real trouble lies.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (pp. 93-94)])

“In psychoanalysis, when approaching the unconscious – that is, what we do not know – we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. In every consulting room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 104)])

“In every consulting room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.” – Bion

“I sometimes think that an analyst’s feelings while taking a group – feelings while absorbing the basic assumptions of the group – are one of the few bits of what scientists might call evidence, because he can know what he is feeling. I attach great importance to feelings for that reason.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 105)])

“You as an analyst can see for yourself what a shocking, poverty stricken vocabulary it is for you – I’m frightened, I feel sexual, I feel hostile – and that’s about it. But that’s not what it’s like in real life. In real life you have an orchestra: continuous movement and the constant slither of one feeling into another.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 105)])

“When human beings are born, they change from a watery fluid to a gaseous fluid – the air. The person takes some kind of fluid with him in the form of mucus; the nose can still operate but on a greatly diminished level. Of course, if there is too much of it, then we have what we call catarrh and the watery element downs our sense of smell… You’ve got to be a gatherer of your sense impressions, but it is fatal if you allow yourself to be drowned in impressions – so much mucus, so to speak, that you can’t even smell – so that instead of your perception being an advantage, it becomes a liability.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (pp. 105-106)])

“You’ve got to be a gatherer of your sense impressions, but it is fatal if you allow yourself to be drowned in impressions” – Bion

“I don’t know of anyone who can say at what point animate changes into inanimate. Take, for example, a dung heap. It seems inanimate, and then maggots appear, and it becomes animate. What usually happens is that institutions (societies, nations, states and so forth) make laws. The original laws constitute a shell, and then new laws expand that shell. If it were a material prison you could hope that the prison walls would be elastic in some sort of way. If organisations don’t do that, they develop a hard shell, and then expansion can’t occur because the organisation has locked itself in… The curious thing is that the mind itself seems to be able to produce a shell of its own. People say things like “I don’t want to hear any more of these new ideas. I’ve been very happy. I don’t want to have my ideas upset. If you start making me think of this and that, well then, I might have to bother about the troubles of Los Angeles. Why can’t I live here in peace and quiet?” I think there is always resistance to development and change and a tendency to think what a horrible thing this maggot is that tries to animate the dung heap.” (Bion, 1977 [The Tavistock Seminars, 2005 (p. 107)])

“What usually happens is that institutions (societies, nations, states and so forth) make laws. The original laws constitute a shell, and then new laws expand that shell. If it were a material prison you could hope that the prison walls would be elastic in some sort of way. If organisations don’t do that, they develop a hard shell, and then expansion can’t occur because the organisation has locked itself in.” – Bion

“The curious thing is that the mind itself seems to be able to produce a shell of its own. People say things like “I don’t want to hear any more of these new ideas. I’ve been very happy. I don’t want to have my ideas upset. If you start making me think of this and that, well then, I might have to bother about the troubles of Los Angeles. Why can’t I live here in peace and quiet?” I think there is always resistance to development and change and a tendency to think what a horrible thing this maggot is that tries to animate the dung heap.” – Bion

[acr398]

Quotes

“Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.” – Frank O’Hara, p. xiii

 “I heard this wonderful quote – ‘Only the brave show what they love’ It’s embarrassing to approach somebody and say you want to look at them. But without that risk taking, nothing can happen, so I have to make myself vulnerable.” – Wolfgang Tillmans

 “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson

 “There is no sense talking about ‘being true to yourself’ until you are sure what voice you are being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.” – Marion Woodman

 “All of our days are numbered; we cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world, a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame great things can be constructed around it that are massive and powerful and world changing – all held up by the tinniest of ideas.” – Nick Cave

 “The object of life is not to simplify it.” – Richard Ellman (Oscar Wilde biography)

 “Many young men die at age 25, but are not buried until they're 75.” – Benjamin Franklin

 “What you seek is nowhere to be found by answering questions.”

 "The relation between doctor and patient turns the patient [into] nothing but an object, turning the [doctor] into an absolute signifier, who deciphers the language of illness by means of hermeneutics, the secret of which he alone claims to know" – Sartre

 “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." – Max Planck

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." – George Bernard Shaw

 “The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost, Seven Servants

 “The less those [natural] expectations are met by the rearing environment in early years, the more distorted we become because the more we have to adapt to something less than what we need.– Mate, Tom Bilyeu podcast

 “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” – Hannah Arendt (1951)

 "Tears come from the heart and not from the brain."  – Leonardo da Vinci

 “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” – Ralph Linton (Social Anthropologist)

“A medical man cannot practice psychoanalysis because he always has medicine in his mind" – Freud

“It’s one of the promises of coming at this psychoanalytically, is that at least while it all goes wrong you’ll have a really good conversation about it. Whereas if you do CBT, you won’t.” – Anouchka Grose

 “A good therapist is one who can bear not knowing longer than the group.” — Foulkes

 “For other therapies [than psychodynamic psychotherapy] the best the patient will ever look is on the day therapy ends.” – Jonathan Shedler

 “History makes people feel they belong” – Richard King. Welsh Plural or Brittle with Relics

 "Kohut once asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I knew his definition of a good marriage. It is, he said, when only one person is crazy at a time." – Charles Strozier

  “Silence is not absence of something but the presence of everything.” – Gordon Hempton

 “In drains begin responsibilities.” – Neville Chamberlain

 “We kill all the caterpillars then complain there are no butterflies.” – Sign found in ?London by ?Ines @floatingconcrete

 “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” – Noam Chomsky

 “I’m still happening” – Teresa von Sommaruga Howard in her talk 

 “Myths are lies that tell the truth” – Michael Meade

 "The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self–healing. The psychotherapist's job, like that of the orthopaedic surgeon, is to provide the conditions in which self–healing can best take place." – John Bowlby

 “God placed the best things in life on the other side of terror.” – Will Smith [Thanks, God]

 “The decline of a culture follows its failures of imagination, that’s lead to the cultural forces of creation gradually withdrawing, leaving hardened laws, polarisation, and forms that continue to rigidify, as if foreshadowing death.” – Michael Meade, podcast 244

 “You don’t stop loving someone just because you hate them.” – Hanif Kureishi, playwright and novelist (in Breaking Up Blues)

 “Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hold on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.” – Carol Shields, writer (in Breaking Up Blues)

 “Most doors we make.” – Inês, poem with pictures on WhatsApp April 2020

 “There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing” – Jane Hirschfield, Envoy

 “Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.” – Alan Watts

 “The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief in our society.” – Rupert Sheldrake

 “You’ve got to act. You got to be willing to crash and burn.” – Steve Jobs

 “If you don’t love it, you’re going to give up.” – Steve Jobs

 “Body is one of the big hibernators of unconsciousness. Boy bears lie inside the word ‘body’, asleep

  'Everyone's gotta plan. ‘til you're punched in the face' – Mike Tyson 

 “Memory by itself is a dead thing. We give it life because it gratifies us.” – Krishnamurti

 “Frosties are just cornflakes for people who can’t face reality.” – Mark, Peep Show

 “We spend far too much time thinking about intentions and motivations, with altruistic behaviour, and not enough about consequences. This comes through in different ways, we have virtue signalling and different ways we show our well–meaningness, without [considering] whether we’ve actually done any good or not.” – Paul Dolan

 “True insight is never confined to the one place where it occurs.” – Neville Symington (Psychotherapy with Psychosis talk)

 “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.” – Whitman, from Song of Myself

 “All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments, It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the women's chorus, It is nearer and farther than they.” – Walt Whitman (Symington lectures)

 “Everything you can imagine is real.” – Picasso

 “To get something you never had, you’ve got to do something you never did.” – Denzel Washington (‘s wife)

 “There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you're on the wrong wall.” – Joseph Campbell

 “The gods are not in Greece, or in myth books, or even in Campbell’s books, but are right on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, waiting for the lights to change.”

 “To be able to act, or speak, we may need to sometimes be less impressed by our guilt.” – https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X05q–KEcSB8

 “We are taught to desire, and therefore discriminate.”

 “Racism, among other things… a decision about which people we believe we can learn from.”

 “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” – Simone Weil (from The Lost Daughter)

 “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” – Einstein 

 “when carried over into adulthood, the psychic techniques that helped the patient preserve his sanity and his life in infancy and childhood may become severely limiting of his capacity to learn from experience, to engage in mature relationships with both inter– nal and external objects, to become himself in as full a way as he might. The patient’s experience of these limitations, and the psychic pain associated with them, are almost always the underlying forces that lead the patient to seek out help from analysis.” – Ogden

 “If an analysis has progressed to any significant degree, differences can be felt by both the patient and me between the pre– sent situation and what we imagine to be the patient’s childhood experience.” – Ogden

 “We’ve judged ourselves at the expense of finding out who we are. Privileging judgement over experience 

 "The actual mother may have very little to do with the internal structure that is established in the baby. The labile and fluid nature of early infancy is too complex to be identified with a single external parental figure." – Christopher Bollas, Three Characters

 "The obsessive act is to displace actual life with mental possibilities. Doing this is a good way to turn an existential crisis into a mental one that may be controlled." – Christopher Bollas, Three Characters

 “This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” – Alan Watts 

 "an incredible relief in seeing that something you had been trying to do, and that you thought your sense of self–worth was dependent upon, was structurally impossible, logically impossible. Not that you just hadn't just found enough self–discipline, or the right techniques, or that you were uniquely useless compared to all the good people, but that it's just not part of the human gift to be able to reach this position of control and security with respect to time" – Oliver Burkeman, On Being 1023

 “Adam and Eve would have been good friends. And that would have been that.”

“You were in on the heist. You just didn’t like your cut.” – Dave Chapelle

 You have to live through all of it and not be destroyed – I can’t remember!

“You can’t surprise yourself. That’s why a guru or teacher is necessary... Then there are gurus who are not people. A situation, a problem, a book, a friend...” – Alan Watts

 “Okay, so believe the diagnosis. Now you can do something about it. But don’t believe the prognosis... It’s like telling the average temperature for the year. If you’re from New York City and the average temperature is 75 degrees, it doesn’t tell me what the temperature is now.” – Deepak Chopra

“If it doesn’t work, you learn from your mistakes and try again” – Mårten Ajne, skater (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3O9vNi–dkA&ab_channel=NationalGeographic)

 “Though lovers be lost, love shall not, And death shall have no dominion.” – Dylan Thomas

 “You as an individual being can make a poem, or read a poem, that will honour your individual identity, or your existence. What’s beautiful about a poem is that you take on this chaos, and this responsibility, and shape it into order. Make something of it. Emerson says we have to become active souls. When you make a poem you become an active soul.” – Gregory Orr (On Being, 24:00)

 “To be a human is to be continually at risk. Risk is the our existential condition. None of us knows what’s going to happen next.” – Gregory Orr (On Being, 19:00)

 “My experience of trauma was... there’s the board with the games pieces on it and in one gesture all the pieces are scattered off the board. But it’s such a powerful gesture that the board itself is erased... It’s just a blank. This is the abyss. This is the world of no meaning.” – Gregory Orr (On Being)

 “Trauma... the integrity of the self is also threatened, even destroyed... it shatters us.”

 “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” – Karen Blixen (cited by Gregory Orr, On Being)

 “If you feel an instinct that’s been around for a long time, be wary of fulfilling it with something that’s been around ten years.” – Cal Newport

 “We’re made to believe that a whole lot of things, a whole lot of crap, is normal. Like war and disease and mental disorders. It’s made sort of playful, like ‘Yeah, that’s life. Life can be a tough bitch’ and all that shit. I don’t believe that.” – Wim Hof

 “Some people say, ‘How can you live without knowing?’ I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.” – Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All, Lecture I: The Uncertainty of Science

 “Most of us don’t take up nearly the space the universe intended for us” – Unknown (Found in my phone notes: 27 July 2020 at 06:32)

 “Insight, hindsight, and foresight. That’s complete sight.” – Ruby Sales [On Being]

 “The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.” – Wilfred Trotter (from William)

 “The responsibility of love: To keep another’s heart safe” – Brigett Devou (from Shriya Misra)

 “The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage” – Jack London (from Shriya Misra)

 “Deathbed

When I die plant flowers over my grave,

So when the seeds bloom,

You can pick me and

Hold me again”

– Witchy Woman (from Shriya Misra for the Poetry Exchange emails, April 2020)

 "God gave man two ears, but only one mouth, that he might hear twice as much as he speaks.” – Epictetus, c.55–c.135 AD, Greek philosopher

 “Okay, so believe the diagnosis. Now you can do something about it. But don’t believe the prognosis... It’s like telling the average temperature for the year. If you’re from New York City and the average temperature is 75 degrees, it doesn’t tell me what the temperature is now.” – Deepak Chopra

 “You can’t surprise yourself. That’s why a guru or teacher is necessary... Then there are gurus who are not people. A situation, a problem, a book, a friend...” – Alan Watts

 “It’s a very noble thing to be an artist. You’re a pilgrim on the road to meaning.” – Grayson Perry (Reith Lectures)

 “In the old days they loved wisdom. Nowadays they love the title philosopher” – Kierkegaard, cited by Grayson Perry (Reith Lectures)

 “I could have made a 100,000 ready mades in ten years easily, and they would have all been fake. Abundance production can only result in mediocrity.” – Marcel Duchamp, cited by Grayson Perry (Reith Lectures)

 “Proust said something to the effect that we only see beauty when we’re looking through an ornate gold frame.” – Grayson Perry (Reith Lectures)

 “You’ll never have a successful art career unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block.” – Grayson Perry (Reith Lectures)

 “You must make your work your best friend, that you can go to it whatever you’re feeling.” – Lett Haines, cited by Maggie Hambling

 “Everything has to be an experiment, otherwise it’s dead” – Maggie Hambling

 “When the critics are divided the artist is at one with himself” – Oscar Wilde, cited by Maggie Hambling

 “Good, honest, hardworking people – white collar, blue collar – it doesn’t matter what colour shirt you have on; good, honest hardworking people continue – these are people of modest means – continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you, at all. At all. At all.” – George Carlin

 “It called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it” – George Carlin

 “I guess being crazy is a way to escape unbearable mental pain” – Christopher Bollas (podcast)

 Adam Phillips

 “Not organising a pleasure, you’re organising the pre–conditions for a pleasure you don’t entirely know about.” – Adam Phillips (Unforbidden Pleasures talk [with Chris Oakley])

“Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.” – Adam Phillips

“Who am I going to ask who can tell me [if I am cured]?” – Adam Phillips, On Getting Better

“You can’t reason a person out of something they weren’t reasoned into” – Paraphrasing Jonathan Swift (Adam Phillips, Wolfson College lecture podcast; 22/11/2012)

 “A man’s liberty is gone the moment he becomes official” – Benjamin Robert Hayden (cited by Adam Phillips, podcast, BBC one?)

 “When you talk to other people they eventually lose interest. When you talk to yourself they want to listen in” – John Ashbury (cited by Adam Phillips, podcast, BBC one?)

 “Imitation is suicide” – Emerson (cited by Adam Phillips, podcast, BBC one?)

 “Uninteresting work comes from arguing with the wrong people” – Bernard Williams (cited by Adam Phillips, podcast, BBC one?)

 ““people for whom the political situation is their personal solution.” – ? Adam Phillips

 “Every reiteration is always somewhere a improvisation.” – ? Adam Phillips

 “The only way of soothing the world is to call up its demons” – Jacqueline Rose (podcast interview on her book, Mothers)

 “Mothers are hated because they scrape off the surface the membrane between the ego and the unconscious.” – Jacqueline Rose (podcast interview on her book, Mothers)

 “At some point... I come to realise that there are things going on within me that are powerful yet are never going to be captured by a representation called an interpretation.” – Barnaby Barratt (New Books podcast)

 “We try to open ourselves to listening to things that will never make sense yet are actually quite powerful forces within our lives” – Barnaby Barratt (New Books podcast)

 “The mind for them is the most hazardous thing that’s ever happened to them.” – Christopher Bollas (on ‘schizophrenia’)

 “... morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” – Abraham Heschel (On Being podcast)

 “Not everything we have inherited is worthy of being passed on.” – Abraham Heschel (On Being podcast, 30:00)

 “We have to read some of those sacred words as metaphor, as bygone models, as invitations for creativity... receive these texts as useful, these narratives as holy, not as literal.” – Abraham Heschel (On Being podcast, 30:50)

 This is what the things can teach us: 

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

 “Let’s reach the person in front of us. However we do that, I don’t care... Whatever works... [On behaviour therapy and psychoanalysis] and why not both. Together.” – Valery Hazanov (New Books podcast)

 “He doesn’t come with a set theory he wants to present to the patient. His theory of mind is his patient’s theory of mind. That’s where he connects to the patient.” – Valery Hazanov (New Books podcast)

 “I am often asked about my psychotherapeutic or analytic method. I cannot reply unequivocally to the question. Therapy is different in every case. When a doctor tells me he adheres strictly to this or that method I have my doubts about his therapeutic effect” – Jung (in Valery Hazanov’s New Books podcast interview)

 “When you develop a language together you’re developing an intimacy together. It’s a very intimate thing to have a language with someone that only the two of you really understand fully.” – Sandra Beuchler (New Books podcast)

 “When you are feeling bad do one thing a day to make your heart dance. It could be a simple thing like looking up at the sky. The blue of the sky is the colour that is always in my mind. I guess it’s my favourite.” – Yoko Ono

 “Ever tried.

Ever failed.

No matter.

Try again.

Fail again.

Fail better.”

– Beckett, Worstword Ho

 “I am the other” – Gérard de Nerval

 “We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.” – Wittgenstein

 “Picasso is a man and a woman deeply entwined... a living ménage... Dora is a concubine with whom he is unfaithful to himself. From this ménage marvellous monsters are born.” – Jean Cocteau on Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar

 “No woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother... [He had a] mistrust and fear of women. Which he suffered from always, and made women suffer; and which shows in his writing.” – Martha Gellhorn on Ernest Hemingway 

 “Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. And it's not advice, it's an observation.” – James Baldwin, on coming out

 “In drains begin responsibilities” – Joseph Chamberlain (from The Drowned Book by Sean O’Brien, p. 11)

 “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto / I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” – Terence, The Self Tormentor

 “Something there badly not wrong” – Beckett, Worstward Ho

 “And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.” – Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) [Book in Hay] [Link to deferred action]

 “Whether you have the skills or not you still should try and make something.” – From Industrial Music documentary after Art & Mind

“We need to move beyond the failure–success dichotomy to embrace new, non–quantifiable criteria for what is a good work of art.” – Olafur, Tate exhibition

 “However much a patient’s acting–out, or acting–in, constitutes an attempt to disrupt the analysis, for someone to be in analysis at all indicates an underlying impulse toward psychic health, and it is important to try, actively and persistently, to keep contact with that area of the patient’s being.” – Parsons

 “A patient’s aggressive attacks on the analyst need not be a matter of anxiety–driven resistance, or hostile attempts to destroy the analysis, but may rather be attempts to establish the analyst as an object that can be made use of.” – Parsons 

 “You see a society that creates artificial needs, rather than meeting people’s genuine needs” – Gabor Mate (interview with Russell Brand)

 “For western society to function we have to separate people from their souls. Because if people had souls we would not treat them the way we do.” – Gabor Mate (interview with Russell Brand)

 “The treatment is because we’re not looking at real human beings, we’re looking at external behaviours.” – Gabor Mate (interview with Russell Brand)

 “You’re asking me to practice evidence–based medicine. How about you practice evidence–based politics.” – Gabor Mate (interview with Russell Brand)

 “With every crown comes the guillotine. Without the guillotine you cannot wear the crown. But why does one have to put someone under the guillotine. Because of their strength. They want to destroy their strength. And in spite of the guillotine they haven’t killed me yet. They haven’t killed my spirit yet. No matter where I go I will always wear the crown. While I’m not afraid of being under the guillotine.” – Sila, Wild Wild Country

 “If we do that which we’re not supposed to do, then we feel like we’re really doing what we want.” – Esther Perel

 “I believe the individual should take on the universality inherent in the human condition.” – Fanon, (1986, p. 12)

 “Psychoanalytic research is perhaps always to some extent an attempt on the part of the analyst to carry the work of his own analysis further than the point to which his own analyst can get him.” –Winnicott (1929, p. 70)

  “I think it is of the utmost importance that in his countertransference the analyst should be able to bear the anxiety of not knowing and even of not knowing that he does not know… This ‘not knowing’ on the part of the analyst guarantees that it is the patient’s history that becomes the organiser of new meanings.” – Faimberg, The Telescoping if generations, p.7

 “When we excuse the destructive behaviour of anyone by citing their humanity, we commit a crime against the function of humanity.” – Bollas, The Fascist State of Mind (1992)

 “Man lives simultaneously in two societies—one we know as the people in the real external world, and the other in a phantom world of unconscious phantasy in which the objects are created, updated, recreated, and subjectively experienced in relation to the self. We interact with our objects in both these worlds and spend much of our waking life trying to modify ourselves and our environments so that the discrepancy between the two is minimized. From these attempts flow transference, projection, rationalization, and many other familiar everyday phenomena.” (Sandler & Sandler, 1998, p. 88)

 "For psychoanalysis, the symptom is not a "disorder", it is a silenced truth that needs to be heard. The symptom includes the paradoxical satisfaction that leads to suffering ("jouissance"). Treatment is a dialectical procedure, which brings to the surface the weight of jouissance that words carry. Words encircle the truth without the subject being aware of it. Grasping these two faces of the symptom – language and jouissance – allows the subject to read his story and to make it his again. Then he can let go of a part of his jouissance and become responsible for its remainder in a life that does not necessarily conform to common morality, but is no less lawful for it. The psychoanalyst, having been analyzed himself, is one who has detached himself from this fantasmatic juouissance. Free of prejudice, he can then enable the patient to invent his own bespoke response, the one that fits him." ― Agnes Aflalo, The Failed Assassination of Psychoanalysis: The Rise and Fall of Cognitivism

 “What part of the subject

in what state

situated where in space and time

does what with what motivation

to what part of the object

in what state

situated where in space and time

with what consequences for the object and the subject?”

– Henri Rey’s model of thinking

 “Everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves.” – Maude

 “What has never properly begun cannot properly be ended.” – Ron Britton, Narcissistic Problems in Sharing Space p. 169

 "The need for agreement is inversely proportionate to the expectation of understanding" – Ron Britton

  “he sits inside the shrine room all day so that God has to go out and praise the rocks.” – Kabir

 “the standard analytic situation – the patient lying on the couch, freely associating as well as he can, the analyst behind the patient listening to and being with the patient, occasionally commenting or offering an interpretation, and the sessions of a fixed frequency beginning and ending on time.” – Stewart, p. 103

 “It has struck me that this is the nature of man; he is an inveterate collector of paradigms.” – Kelly

 “For mental health clinicians the work, if done well, disturbs the practitioner.”– Cooper & Lousada, cited in Psychoanalysis, the NHS, and Mental Health Work Today (p.166)

 “What are you going to do?” “Before I do, I shall listen, and then we shall think” – Mills & Smith, in Psychoanalysis, the NHS, and Mental Health Work Today (p.114)

 "If you understood everything I said, you'd be me." – Miles Davis

 "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. fail again. fail better." – Samuel Beckett

 "One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often" – Erich Fromm

 “I support neuroscientific investigation. I just don’t support turning that into some sort of divinity that we believe in, it’s kind of faith directed, and somehow it’s going to lead us to a cure of people.” – Christopher Bollas

 “Conquer anger by love, evil by good, conquer the miser with liberality, and the liar with truth.” – from What the Buddha Taught

 “Fuck off Hans. You’re the fifth Beatles, I’m the other four.” – Jeremy, Peep Show

"rigid adherence to anything – nationalism, communism, fascism, the market, psychoanalytic theory, or any other belief that argues that it alone represents the 'truth' – is a failure to face up to the reality of difference." (in Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary States of Mind by Minsky)

 “Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death” – Otto Rank

 "One needs to have ideas, in order to observe with. But they have to be flexible and fluid, so that they're not absolute convictions. Because then of course we project those onto our patients." – Julian Lousada

 “If you think about it, the act of being born is an eviction” – Julian Lousada

 “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need” – Eric Hoffer

 “Can I see another’s woe

And not be in sorrow too?”

– William Blake (in Managing Vulnerability edited Tim Darlington)

 “Treat the earth well

It was not given to you

by your parents

It was loaned to you

by your children”

– Ancient Indian Proverb

 “You may not be overtly racist but you may still behave in ways that perpetuate racism”

 “Dying in a war never stopped wars from happening” – Charles Bukowski

 “We need to attend, in order to allow what is in front of us to make its impression – not just to scan it for what fits our agenda" (in Attention Cooperation Purpose by French & Simpson)

 "One can observe... that dreary phenomenon, the middle–class person who is an ardent socialist at twenty–five and a sniffish Tory at thirty–five." – George Orwell

 "You're born secure, you were secure, you're not now, because you know, shit happens." – Fonagy, 20 mins in YouTube video of a lecture

  “Do not let us submit… to the delusion that experience is made up of the events at which we are present.” – Trotter (Britton, p. 98)

 "The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about." – John Ashbery

 “These thoughts did not come to me in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.” – Einstein

 “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” – Thomas Berry

  “When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions, you should just listen to them, observe what their way is…. Usually, when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion, you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or maybe not even really hear it” Shunryu Suzuki (1905–71) [from Carlos]

  "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." – Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

 "Where I grew up in Brooklyn no one committed suicide. Everyone was too unhappy." – Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors)

 "the reinforced institutional division between the sciences and the humanities had the consequence of making much more difficult the comprehension of situations in which material phenomena and moral phenomena are combined. The sciences that had chosen as their object of study the relationship between the physical dimensions and the cultural dimensions of human activities – geography, psychology, or ethology, for example – ultimately found themselves divided from within between the partisans of one approach or the other, each finally deciding upon a divorce, amicable in the best cases." – Philippe Descola

 “Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.” – Samuel Ullman

 "They say 'If the rich get richer the wealth will trickle down.' It ain't trickling." – Russell Brand

 "I don't see how anybody can get an O Level in maths if they think randomised controlled trials can be used for the talking therapies." – Del Lowenthal

 “Psychic suffering is neither measurable nor open to evaluation.” – Snell, 2007 (In L’Anti–Livre noir de la Psychoanalyse)

 "So much of what is called science is just technical thinking at best." – Del Lowenthal

 “The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it." – Abbie Hoffman, Steal this Book (1971)

 “The hyphen in nature–culture is the new pineal gland in the little Cartesian heads that this analytic unwittingly engenders at all scales, even when those mind–body parts do not precede their relating." – Eduardo Kohn, Lecture

 "I think being true to the world means being ontologically precise about how we conceptualise the ways in which the human relates to that which lies beyond it." – Eduardo Kohn, Lecture

 "the recognition of representational processes as something unique to, and in a sense even synonymous with, life allows us to situate distinctively human ways of being in the world as both emergent from and in continuity with a broader living semiotic realm." – Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think

 "Most of us have long abandoned any myth of pure objectivity, and yet we somehow make the unfounded assumption that human subjectivities will naturally coincide in their own best interests. They do not." – Feltham

 "Professional psychology is filled with words that long ago lost their imagistic resonance to become hollow categories in which to stuff behaviour and personality." – Moore

 “Psychiatrists, of course, do ask for tests such as CT scans on their patients, but these are to exclude the possibility of brain damage. In other words, they are checking to see if there is a real brain problem, evidence of illegal drug use or whatever. Once they have concluded that there is nothing demonstrably amiss with the patient's brain or biochemistry, they tell the person that they have a condition that results from a biochemical problem.” – Craig Newnes, Guardian article

 “one of the most mysterious of semi–speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another” – John Keats, note on his copy of Paradise Lost, 1.59–94 (from Chris)

 “It is a paradox of modern epidemiology that as material inequalities grow, so the pursuit of non–material explanations for health outcomes proliferates.” – Friedli, 2014

 “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky

 "Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull–fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two–horned topics?" – Ortega y Gasset

 “I think our culture is so anti–mind. With violent attacks on the mind. Because our minds may not go along with the policies of the rich, and mighty, and imperialistic ones. So there’s everywhere an attack on the mind, and it seems to be changed into figures, numbers.” – Hanna Segal

 "It is very important to keep optimism. I think there's a characteristic of the left to be professionally pessimistic. I don't go for that. I think progress has been made by two flames that have always been burning in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope you can build a better world." – Tony Benn

 “To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.” – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

 “After all, how is an ‘invented reality’ to get itself invented, if we all sit on the sidelines, feigning neutrality and waiting for something interesting to crop up?” – Efran & Clargield

 "It is the glorious privilege of academics to know that they are on the track of knowing everything. It is the humble gloom of the practitioner to know that nearly everything remains uncertain and paradoxical." – Hinshelwood

 “True love will triumph in the end – which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, then it’s the most beautiful lie we have.” – John Green

 “There no impermeable line between the ideas that there is something different about someone and something wrong with that someone, and as a next step, between the ideas that something is wrong psychologically and something is wrong morally.” – Schafer [from Iva's paper]

 “It is no measure of health to be well–adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

 "A personal debt I owe to nearly 15 years of Tory rule is that it has removed from my thinking the last vestiges of a concept of responsibility that I once subscribed to quite strongly." – David Smail, 1994

 "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." – Nietzsche

 "Intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty" – Kant

 “It is the job of the thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners." – Albert Camus

 "Therapists sometimes have to tolerate extended periods during which they may feel ignorant and helpless. In this sense students are privileged; they have licence not to know, though many still succumb to pressures that prompt them to strive to appear certain, as if this were a mark of competence." – Casement, p. 3

 "Only when you can bear what is going on inside yourself, in your own mind, can you bear what is going on in your patient." – Betty Joseph

 "We decided the thing we had in common was love, and from love came peace." – John Lennon

 "Making things more explicit doesn't actually make them easier to understand. It means we understand something other than what it is we're seeking to know." – Iain McGilchrist

 “All patients have become ill through excessive use of pathological methods of self–cure; and in the process of analysis, all patients will need to make their analysts ‘ill’ through unconsciously infecting them with their own kind of psychic experience.” (Sodre, 2014)

  "This then is the myth of the hero–innovator: the idea that you can produce, by training, a knight in shining armour who, loins girded with new technology and beliefs, will assault his organisational fortress and institute changes both in himself and others at a stroke. Such a view is ingenious. The fact of the matter is that organisations such as schools and hospitals will, like dragons, eat hero–innovators for breakfast." – Georgiades & Phillimore, 1975

  “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” – C. S. Lewis

 "What makes the mind–body problem unique is only the fact [that]: when it comes to the human mental apparatus, the observer *is* the instrument that he or she uses to observe it." – Solms/Turnbull in The Brain and the Inner World

 "Loath as we may be to admit it, the testable hypotheses that scientists can work with are embedded in sets of broader propositions that are themselves untestable. These broader propositions define the world–view (Weltanschaung) within which a scientist operates; and world–views are not subject to proof. Science is limited to answering questions that can be asked *within* a particular world view; it cannot test the world view itself." – Solms/Turnbull in The Brain and the Inner World

 "Nothing in life will call upon us to be more courageous than facing the fact that it ends. But on the other side of heartbreak is wisdom." – Wish I Was Here

 "All mainstream approaches to 'therapy' locate the origin of psychological difficulty within the individual... Certainly this is the way we often experience our distress since such experience is inevitably interior. But experience and explanation are two very different things." – Midlands Psychology Group, Draft Manifesto

 "It is essential to get to know the other, understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it." – Daniel Barenboim

 "When you talk about relationship or about the working alliance, you're talking about the two parties making an attachment to each other, which is just a fancy word for love." – Nancy McWilliams, in interview

 "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." – Nietzsche

 "Objectivity is itself a subjective striving." – Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action

 “In the case of a complete analysis, it is not that there are no more conflicts, but that one is in a position to understand actively, in one's living, what those conflicts are. One is able to take some action with respect to them, and above all, one is able to avoid being lived by them. The process of actively and understandingly living with one's conflicts – of "making the unconscious conscious" – is itself the life of becoming a certain kind of subject. It is not something one completes once and for all; it is something that is always fresh, always beginning. It is only when one gets trapped by one's conflicts that things get old, that one starts to go dead as a subject." – Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action

 "Doesn't a set of standards enable a profession to forget about standards... act as if they already know what high standards are?" – Jonathan Lear, Therapeutic Action

 "You can't necessarily show your sadness to just anyone" – Tom Anderson

 "Repetition is the stuff of life that makes difference possible." – Glenn Larner, Towards a common ground in psychoanalysis and family therapy

 "If the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen." – Michael Parsons

 "Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see? I just have a strong sense it's not another CBT therapist. I think he wants to go out and search for somebody who's wise and can help him explore deeper levels. There's probably psychotherapy research out there that I haven't read, but it would be interesting to know that. If you come across the data let me know. I certainly see a lot of them in therapy." – Irvin Yalom

 "Psychotherapy is a process of making friends with unacceptable parts of oneself" – Joseph Sandler

 "In the analytic situation the patient unpacks the object aspects of his mental furniture, so to speak, and tries to position this furniture in ways that make it seem as if it belongs and is appropriate." – Joseph Sandler, On Internal Objects (1990)

 "Interpretations are not merely ideas generated by a conceptual framework possessed by the therapist and fed by him into the patient's psychic apparatus, but also sentences uttered by a real, live person who is devoting time and attention to another real, live person." – Charles Rycroft,

 "Heinrich Racker (1968), a South American analyst influenced by Klein, offered the clinically useful categories of "concordant" and "complimentary" countertransferences. The former term refers to the therapist's feeling (empathically) what the patient as a child had felt in relation to an early object; the latter connotes the therapist's feeling (unempathically, from the viewpoint of the client) what the object had felt toward the child." – McWilliams

 "Why is this particular patient presenting with these particular symptoms at this particular time in his or her life?" – Meyer paraphrased

 "Anxiety may be modified, mitigated or managed, but not eradicated." – Gomez

 "Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy – to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work." – Kierkegaard

 "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves" – Rilke

 "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." – Gilbert

 "That's your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don't contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you're not thinking" – Gladwell

 "Everybody's talking and no one says a word" – Lennon

 "It's not about the Trusts, it's about the people who are commissioning them... The government." – Radio 4, 6th May 2014

 "The most widely cited evidence bases for psychiatric medication and talking therapy are overly–optimistic catalogues plagued by inadequate methodological procedures, unreliable clinical outcome measures of limited real life significance, and the selective publication of favourable results." – Clinical Psychology Forum magazine manifesto April 2014

 "How can a self–respecting scientist go along with a construct like the id? Can you see an id? Can you touch it?" "No, but you can hear it." – McWilliams citing Waelder (1965) in Making Diagnosis Meaningful

 "The child's view of its frightening world is refracted through the prism of adult functioning and experience, thereby resulting in varying painful distortions. The play was written in childhood and since its premiere has been played to limited but selected audiences whose participation may be required. Unless, by appropriate therapy, we can divest it of its instinctual backing, the 'living theatre' is guaranteed a very long and agonising run." – Rice (1974, pp. 70–71)

 "What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." – Goodall

 "Human beings have a problematic tendency to endow prosaic and imperfect documents with more than their share of authority, perhaps in an effort to avoid the discomfort caused by ambiguity and uncertainty." – Nancy McWilliams

 "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." – André Gide

 "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." – André Gide

 "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again." – André Gide

 "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." – Abraham Lincoln

 "It's better to be silent and thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt." – Abraham Lincoln

 "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." –  Voltaire

 "I don't do DSM. I'm not involved. And that maybe tells you more than anything. NIMH is not involved in DSM 5." – Dr Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

 "The demand on us is that, if we want to be included in the psychiatric world, we have to 'prove', and we have to use the sort of methods that are used in science in general, which don't happen to be applicable. We can't do that; we haven't got a microscope, we have an analytic session, and we have our own psyche, our own mind, in order to make the observations. So it's all subjective and it's all relative, and we're into uncertainty principle and relativity theory, if we use our methods. The demand on us is to 'prove'. I don't think we'll ever satisfy that demand, and the minute people do, I think they are on, from our point of view, shaky ground. They're leaving out essential bits." – Laufer

 "The more interesting the psychological question, the less precise we can be in answering it. The more precisely we can specify a general law in psychology, by and large, the less interesting is the phenomenon." – from The Great Ideas of Psychology lectures by Daniel Robinson

 "Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything." – Anton Chekhov

 "Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential." – Bruce Lee

 "Revive the 'disappearing idea that a psychologist enters his profession almost like a religious order, making himself a part of his own subject matter, and baring his soul.'" – Julian Jaynes

 "If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito." – Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)

 ''Statistically significant' does not mean 'very important'" – Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences by Nolan & Heinzen

 "He saw reality too clearly; faulty denial mechanism. Failed to block out the terrible truths of existence. In the end his inability to push away the awful facts of being in the world rendered his life meaningless." – Psychoanalyst, Stardust Memories

 "It's a shame. Poor fool he's dead and he never really found out the meaning of life." – Nurse, Stardust Memories

 "You fiend. Never have I encountered such corrupt and foul–minded perversity. Have you ever considered a career in the Church?" – Blackadder II, Episode 4 Money

 "It is far more useful clinically to describe in plain language what the patient is trying to do and why they need to do it than to use the shorthand of labels" – Alessandra Lemma, Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, pp. 210–211

 "But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at all the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful." – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter One

 "I know I'm facilitating a good meeting when I can feel my top lip touching my bottom lip" – SMART group facilitator

 "You chose psychoanalysis over real life? Are you learning disabled?" – Woody Allen, Anything Else

 "Critical Pedagogy: Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." – Lecturer's email sign off

 "Why don't you tell us your life story? Then we won't be strangers anymore." – Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

 "I think that we are living in an epidemic of obedience" – More Time to Think Book (by Kline)

 "So if it's not all about wisdom (evidence), what is it all about? It is about power: who has it, and how they use it"– Forum article (professor at Hertfordshire uni)

 "Most human beings behave as if death were nothing more than an unfounded rumour" – Aldous Huxley

 "It's them they know, not me" – Cat Stevens

 "Condemned to be free" – Jean–Paul Sartre

 "Whatever works" – Woody Allen

 "Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now" – CS&N

 "During World War I a Jewish army doctor was sitting in a fox hole with his gentile friend, an aristocratic colonel, and heavy shooting began. Teasingly the colonel said, "You're afraid, aren't you? That's just another proof that the Aryan race is superior to the Semitic one." "Sure I'm afraid," was the doctor's answer. "But who is superior? If you, my dear colonel, were as afraid as I am, you would have run away long ago." – Viktor Frankl

 "The ruby is a precious stone which abhors red. It absorbs and holds on to all the other colours of the spectrum. It rejects red, yet that is what it presents to our eyes." – On hysteria, Jacqueline Schaeffer quoting Michel Cachoux

 "the deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him...a revolutionary difference from the attitude of previous physicians..." – Ernest Jones

 "You think quantum physics has the answer? I mean, what purpose does it serve, for me, that time and space are exactly the same thing? I ask a guy what time it is; he tells me six miles. What the hell is that?" – Woody Allen

 "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" –The Beatles

"Pravda a láska zvítězí nad lží a nenávistí" – Vaclav Havel

 "Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from a peculiar position in which he stands" – William James

 "If a thing is hardly worth doing, it is hardly worth doing well" – George Miller

 "The problem, then, in most rudimentary form is, How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?" – Yalom

 "I understand why the establishment felt threatened by what The Beatles were doing; if everyone grew their hair long, who would be in the army?" – From Magical Mystery Tour documentary

 "How many of you have had the pleasure of reading pornography in the comfort of your own pew?" – Drew Western on reaction formation

 "though some psychiatrists state that life–meaning is nothing but defence mechanism and reaction formations, speaking for myself I would not be willing to live merely for my defence mechanisms and would be even less inclined to die for my reaction formations" – Viktor Frankl

 "You can make it all true" – Cat Stevens

 "If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free... It's easy" – Cat Stevens

 "Everyone has choice, when to and not to raise their voices" – George Harrison, Run of the Mill

 "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail" – Abraham Maslow

 "Well, I wrestled with reality for 35 years Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it" – Elwood P. Dowd

 "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me" – Nathaniel Lee English

 "Minds are like parachutes – they work best when they are open" – Thomas Dewar

 "The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory" – Henri Bergson

 "If a pistol appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired" – Anton Chekhov

 "The life of a couple is lived on the mental level of the more mediocre of the two beings who compose it" – André Maurois

 "Small clouds don't bring rain" – from The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean Francois Revel

 "If you cannot manage the spark what will you do when the whole forest is on fire?" – from The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean Francois Revel

 "If you throw a stone up in the air it's no good being astonished if it falls back down on your head" – from The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean Francois Revel

 "Remember where you're climbing and don't just stick to the ladder" – from The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean Francois Revel

 "Chains of gold are no less chains than chains of silver" – from The Monk and the Philosopher by Jean Francois Revel

 "We have no reason to fear death – we'll never encounter it!" – Epicurus

 "Never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!" – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

 "It is in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present" – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

 "... the qualities she has, and not by the qualities sh may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child, you must just accustom yourself to do without them"

 "Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass. You know his faults now let his foibles pass. Life is one long enigma my friend. So read on, read on, the answer's at the end" – Frankie Crisp

 "climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step and from the beginning think what may be in the end" – Edward Whymper, Scanbles Amongst the Alps

 Bion

“As we all know, the _Titanic_ was unsinkable, it was the latest thing – but it hit up against a fact, and that sank it.” – Bion

“People get medically and psychoanalytically qualified, and they may be just like psychoanalysts or doctors, but they are not psychoanalysts or doctors. They may be becoming doctors, or psychiatrists, or psychoanalysts, but they are not doctors, or psychiatrists, or psychoanalysts. They are only ‘qualified’.” – Bion

 Wisdom cometh to the learned man by opportunity for leisure (Ecclesiasticus, xxxviii, 24)

 “In every consulting room there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psycho–analyst. If they are not, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.” [from Brazilian Lectures, p. 5.]

 "Every session must have no history and no future – the only point of importance in any session is he unknown." [from Francesca Bion’s The Days of Our Years]

 "It appears that our rudimentary equipment for "thinking" thoughts is adequate when the problems are associated with the inanimate, but not when the object for investigation is the phenomenon of life itself." – Bion, Learning from Experience (p.14)

 "The photograph of the fountain of truth may be well enough, but it is of the fountain after it has been muddied by the photographer and his apparatus; in any case the problem of interpreting the photograph remains." – Bion

 “It is only after you have qualified [as an analyst] that you have a chance of becoming an analyst. The analyst you be–come is you and you alone; you have to respect the uniqueness of your own personality—that is what you use, not all these interpretations [these theories that you use to combat the feeling that you are not really an analyst and do not know how to become one].” – Bion

 "Many people mistake the practice of psycho–analysis for an adequate substitute for real life. I don't know what 'real life' is, but I am jolly sure that psycho–analysis is no good unless it resembles it." – Bion [from All My Sins Remembered]

 “There is a scarcity of time; a scarcity of knowledge; scarcity of availability. Therefore choice becomes of fundamental importance – choice of time, theories, and facts observed.” – Bion [from The language of Bion: A dictionary of concepts]

 “But there is no solution once and for all; each solution opens another universe.” – Bion [from The dictionary of the work of…]

 “It takes a long time to find out who is the biggest nuisance – the doubter or the believer.” – Bion [from The dictionary of the work of…]

 "Psycho–analysts must be able to tolerate the differences or the difficulties of the analysand long enough to recognise what they are." – Bion [from Learning from the Patient by Casement]

 "anything to hold at bay the dark and sombre world of thought." – Bion

 Hillman

 “The aim of therapy is the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.” – James Hillman

 "I always thought that psychology goes on in the writing. So one of the questions I used to ask myself was how do you write psychology? Well, you must write it so that it touches the soul, or it's not psychology. It has to have that moving quality of experience, and that means it has to have many sorts of metaphors and absurdities and things that go with life. Otherwise you're writing an academic or a scientific description of something but it's no longer psychology." – Hillman

 "We invented the diagnoses with which we declared ourselves insane." – Hillman

 "Meaning is not something given by the analyst to a crazy–quilt of dreams and events. It is not put in, but rather brought out. It therefore precedes interpretation and makes interpretation possible, for if meaning were not already there as a potentiality in every psychic event no interpretations would click." – Hillman, Suicide and the Soul (p. 149)

 "it is in life that suicide arises." – Hillman

 "For psychopathology does not belong to a field of specialists. It is something we suffer in our experience and a perspective we take toward certain kinds of experiences, so that it too can be opened to new psychological insight." – Hillman

 "We do not face emotion in honesty and live it consciously. Instead emotion hangs as a negative background shadowing our age with anxiety and erupting in violence." – James Hillman

 "Whenever treatment directly neglects the experience as such and hastens to reduce or overcome it, something is being done against the soul." – Hillman  [from Suicide and the Soul]

 "The empiricist is doing something with what is. The phenomenologist is, first of all, allowing the phenomenon to have its say." – Hillman

 "Sometimes the psyche upsets us in order for us to go further with our lives and our thoughts." – Hillman

 "A person goes to therapy because of a symptom, a problem, as we call them, or an upset, disturbance. The question is not so much how to get rid of that as it is 'Why is this disturbance coming in my life? What does it want? What kind of a life have I got that it needs this disturbance to it?'" – Hillman

 “Look at all the people who have taken psychology courses and the lack of psychology in our government, in our attitudes, we haven't a clue." – Hillman

 "We go around the world as if there was no such thing as a psyche, no such thing as a soul. We bomb, exploit, and take and kill as if this had no effect in the soul of our own people, let alone other people." – Hillman

 "I think [psychology as a profession is] afraid of it [soul]. I think it invents boxes, diagnosis, tests, statistics, graphs, rules, laws, to keep it away." – Hillman

 "Psychology should mean the study of the soul. But I don't think psychology is the study of the soul as universities present it." – Hillman

 "Is it possible that the more we internalise, the more we neglect the political world?" – Hillman

 "The self is the interiorisation of community." – Hillman

 "Psychic numbing" – Hillman

 "Anaesthesia" – Hillman

 "We live in a culture of denial." – Hillman

 "I don't think it's the job of the psychologist to have a programme. It's the job of the psychologist to wake people up." – Hillman

 "The person who walks into the consultation room is first a citizen and then a patient." – Hillman

 "You fight not because you're going to win. You fight because something is important and you need something to live for." – Hillman  

 “Psychology always has the opportunity to see through its main convictions and assumptions. It can bring psychological reflection to itself.” – Hillman

 Freud

 "There is a precondition for the existence of a symptom: some mental process must not have been brought to an end normally – so that it could become conscious. The symptom is a substitute for what did not happen at that point." – Freud

“How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.” – Freud

 “There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved” (Freud, 1930, p. 83, Civilization and Its Discontents)

“A dream is an awakening that is beginning” – Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, p. 575)

[ This means the dream is remembered because the person is already waking up, however I am taking it to mean that the dream is an awakening into a new psychic reality)

 “A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology, and who thinks psychoanalysis is ‘far–fetched’ can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is commonsense which produces all the ills we have to cure.” – Freud

 “No one would expect a man to lift a heavy table with two fingers as if it were a light stool, or to build a large house in the time it would take to put up a wooden hut; but as soon as it becomes a question of the neurosis… even intelligent people forget that a necessary proportion of time must be observed between time, work and success.” – Freud, On Beginning the Treatment (1913)

 "His [Otto Rank] hope was that this one small piece of analytic work, for which a few months should suffice, would do away with the necessity for all the rest. It was a premature attempt, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the post–War misery of Europe and the 'prosperity' of America, and designed to accelerate the tempo of analytic therapy to suit the rush of American life. Probably it has not accomplished more than would be done if the men of a fire–brigade, summoned to deal with a fire from an upset oil–lamp, merely removed the lamp from the room in which the conflagration had broken out. Much less time would certainly be spent in so doing than in extinguishing the whole fire." – Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937).

 "[A] delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego's relation to the external world" – Freud

 "There are many ways and means of practicing psychotherapy. All that lead to recovery are good." – Freud (1905, p. 259)

 "A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct to the world." – Freud in a letter to Ferenczi (cited in Margolis (1966). Cited by McWilliams in Making Diagnosis Meaningful)

 "It seems to me we concentrate too much upon symptoms and concern ourselves too little with their causes" – Freud (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five–year–old Boy [p. 300 in Penguin])

 "We are obliged to pay as much attention in our case histories to the purely human and social circumstances of our patients as to the somatic data and the symptoms of the disorder" – Freud

 "I do not wish to arouse conviction. I wish to stimulate thought and upset prejudices." –Freud

 "What progress we have made. In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me, now they are content with burning my books." – Freud (cited by Jones, 1955)

 "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" – Sigmund Freud

 "The insurance agent, a free–thinker, lay at the point of death and his relatives insisted on bringing in a man of God to convert him before he died. The interview lasted so long that those who were waiting outside began to have hopes. At last the door of the sick chamber opened. The free–thinker had not been converted; but the pastor went away insured." – Freud

 "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone" – Freud http://clubtroppo.com.au/2010/04/12/sigmund–freud–and–the–gestapo/

 "Stekel put the matter very aptly when he remarked, clarifying his position on Freud, that a dwarf standing upon the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant himself." – Frankl

 "Everything Freud said is correct. Those who disagree have either not read enough or aren't bright enough." – Psychiatrist on Iva's training (May 2014)

 "Every psychologist is obliged to admit even his own weaknesses, if he thinks by that he may throw light on a difficult problem." – Delbœuf, cited by Freud

 “Just as all neurotic symptoms, and for that matter dreams, are capable of being overinterpreted, and indeed need to be if they are to be fully understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind and are open to more than a single interpretation.” – Freud (cited by Adam Phillips, ?Against Self Criticism or ?Wolfson College Lecture)

 “You can only understand anything that matters – dreams, neurotic symptoms, people, literature – by overinterpreting it. By seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses.” – Freud (cited by Adam Phillips, ?Against Self Criticism or ?Wolfson College Lecture)

 “There is an intimate connection between the story of a patient’s suffering and the symptoms of their illness.” – Freud (Adam Phillips, Wolfson College lecture; podcast; 22/11/2012)

 “We have to be attentive to the wistfulness at work, even in our most painful stories. Especially in our most painful stories.” – Paraphrasing Freud (Adam Phillips, Wolfson College lecture podcast; 22/11/2012)

 “The big idea is that we don’t necessarily need big ideas. That’s the kind of experiment he [Freud] is inviting us to do.” – Adam Phillips, 10:15

 Jung

"I console myself with the thought that only a fool expects wisdom." – Jung

 Adam Phillips

 “Psychoanalytic theory has always had a problem keeping the unconscious unconscious.” – Adam Phillips, Futures, Christopher Bollas book

 "To speak freely, with someone freely listening, is a radical act... historically unprecedented... uncanny... unpredictable." Adam Phillips, Bollas Reader Foreword

 “A psychoanalyst has to learn how not to know what he is doing and how to go on doing it.” – Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (p. xiv)

 “Psychoanalysis is an interesting experiment in this. Which is: If you can in any way modify internal intimidation, what do you then think and feel and want? What free association is persuading us of is that we don’t know the value of what we think and feel before we say it. In other words: it’s in the saying of it we might discover that. Whereas, of course the internal judgement – the superego, in its omniscience – has already decided, in this story, what it is permissible for us to say and think and feel. So I think the so–called method of free association is an attempt to loosen this up; to find out what you might say in so far as you are able to suspend these judgements. And I think what it is does is, it puts a great onus on the listener; it means the joke is only as good as its listener. So that you’re dependent upon the person you’re talking to not colluding with the internal authorities. So, if you say something that feels inadmissible and the other person calls the police, you’re in trouble. And psychoanalysis is an attempt not to call the police. Not with a view to being ‘immoral’ or breaking the law in some supposedly exciting way, but finding out what else might happen then; if you don’t call the police. And it’s an experiment. It’s not as though it promises a better life; but it might do. I think the point is… Something is a symptom because it doesn’t get us the life we want – I mean it’s only a problem because it doesn’t get us the life we want. So, the question is: How free are we internally to think about what a life might be that we would want? Well it’s very hard to do that if you’ve got a bully staring you in the face.” – Adam Phillips, Against Self–Criticism talk (at 46:00)

 “the ways in which we have been taught to know ourselves has become the problem rather than the solution.” – Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud (p. 5)

 "No adult is really satisfied by money because it is not something that satisfies young children." Freud paraphrased by Adam Phillips

 “If you can find someone who can bear what you’ve got to say, and who happens to be able to not need to give you advice, cure you or get you to behave differently, it’s very, very powerful. Because then you can hear what you say. And find out what you feel in the saying of it.” – Adam Phillips [from Against Self–Criticism?]

 "It seems to me if you're really suffering from something, a bit of a statistical data isn't going to be a huge help." – Adam Phillips

 "Catherine Mathelin describes a child analyst who had been, quote, seen in consultation by a father who said to her while taking out his cheque book with an expansive gesture, 'Ask any price you want, my son doesn't talk. So do whatever you want as long as you make him talk and then let's not talk about it anymore.'" – Adam Phillips (YouTube video)

 "You're depended upon the person you're talking to not colluding with the internal authorities. So if you say something that feels inadmissible and the other person calls the police, you're in trouble. And psychoanalysis is an attempt not to call the police. And not with a view to being immoral and breaking the law in some sort of supposedly exciting way. But finding out what might happen then. If you don't call the police." – Adam Phillips [from Against Self–Criticism]

 "For the anti–psychiatrists the available versions of sanity as a picture of what contemporary people could or should be like didn't do justice to the complexity of people's lives." – Adam Phillips [from Going Sane]

 “Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.” – Adam Phillips

 “Madness is the news to be believed” – Winnicott, cited by Adam Phillips

 “People are having a bodily effect on each other which is way beyond their capacity to represent it.” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “It’s much more about a certain kind of fluidity, in a certain way, it’s much more about people being able to be in their own delirium with each other and for there to be interactions that may be unperceived” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “Your analyst is someone who doesn’t talk on your behalf” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “It’s very interesting to know what can happen if you stop at the point at which you begin to want to impose yourself on somebody else, or you stop at the point at which you want to be agreed with, because clearly that’s the moment of anxiety. The moment at which we want someone to agree with us is the moment at which something else is happening, or could happen that’s being foreclosed by –agreement. And so it’s seems to me that we could value consensus in certain realms without needing it all the time to be the dominant principle. And it wouldn’t be merely ‘We can agree to differ’ and all that sort of stuff but that we could actually say more interesting things to each other if there was no pressure to believe or be believed” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “Ones unlived life is a formulation of a frustration. There is a lot in that of value.” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “Regret and complaint are a total waste of time, and they’re refuges for what’s engaging with what’s going on” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “If you wrote something it’s a love test to the world. You’re both profoundly curious about how the world will respond and dread how the world is going to respond.” – Adam Phillips (podcast, BBC one?)

 “The more convincing / compelling the interpretation the less convincing it is. If we understood Hamlet there would be no need for Hamlet anymore.” – Adam Phillips (?Against Self Criticism, ? Wolfson College Lecture)

 “[The] conscious can seduce us into betraying ourselves” – Adam Phillips (?Against Self Criticism, ? Wolfson College Lecture)

 “Talking about suicide is a way of taking about experiences one has never really had before” – Adam Phillips (?Against Self Criticism, ? Wolfson College Lecture)

 “What we are suffering from, Freud will reveal, is all the ways we have of avoiding our suffering.” – Adam Phillips, Wolfson College lecture (Podcast; 22/11/2012)

 “Histories are both the way we acknowledge and disavow the past” – Adam Phillips (Wolfson College lecture podcast; 22/11/2012)

 Neville Symington

 p. 74 “The phantasy has the power to create that which it imagines.”

 p.75 “phantasy is a psychic reality located intrapsychically within the preverbal human communication system, whose goal is to muffle truth and throttle development.” 

 p. 81 “The psychoanalyst cannot alter the ego’s policy by attacking it, but only by removing himself from the position of being a host to the phantasy’s activity.”

 David Whyte

 "Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences... To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made." – David Whyte

“If you’re sincere about your work it should break your heart.” – Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Lu85L111Y

 “Whatever context you’ve arranged for yourself there’s always another context that makes your context absurd.” – Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nup6deehcck

 “Poetry is language against which we have no defence” – Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nup6deehcck

“Beginning well or beginning poorly,

what is important is simply to begin,

but the ability to make a good beginning

is also an art form.

Beginning well involves a clearing away

of the crass, the irrelevant and the complicated to find the beautiful,

often hidden lineaments

of the essential and the necessary.”

– David Whyte, Consolations

“Go beyond yourself” – David Whyte (On Being podcast)

 “You’re actually a little bit more generous than that. You’re larger than that. There is more about you than you think.” – David Whyte (On Being podcast)

 “Be more generous than you thought you could be the first time” – David Whyte (On Being podcast)

 We fear to love in a very imperfect word.” – David Whyte

 The only cure for grief is grief… Grief is it’s own cure.” – David Whyte

 “Every real conversation begins by definition with you not understanding what’s happening, and what about to occur, and doing so in a very bodily way.” – David Whyte

 Stephen Jenkinson

 “Life’s a near death experience” p. 3 – Stephen Jenkinson, A Generation’s Worth, p. 3

 “Angels and demons… make amnesia harder to sustain.” – – Stephen Jenkinson, A Generation’s Worth, p. 5

 “Friends, there’s such a  thing as ‘too late’ in these matters. If you don’t live as if you’re going to die, you’ll die as if you’re going to live. ‘Too late’ isn’t futility. It’s wisdom, for grownups.” – Stephen Jenkinson, A Generation’s Worth

 “The more the world agrees with you, or resembles you, the flabbier you get.” – Stephen Jenkinson

 "Learning is the unwelcome encounter with things you thought you knew... Endings, and dying so pretty good example of ending, calls so deeply into question what we've grown accustomed to, that the first reaction could be, and certainly in a culture like ours, trauma." – Stephen Jenkinson, interview 17:30 https://youtu.be/3TrejXa3f98

 “There is a law in physics known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and it goes something like this: In the realms of small particle science, the small particles themselves are altered by the technology you have to use and find them. It can’t be otherwise. If you expand that by a few orders you get this: However it is that you approach the thing you seek, that thing responds to your approach and your way of seeking, so much so that what you end up finding is the sum of the reactions of the sought–after thing to your way of trying to find it. You find your looking, in other words, and you will see your eyes. What you will find is a faithful rendering of your own consequences.” – Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise (p. 92)

 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 "it is through our bodies that we experience the world and know others" – Egle Laufer

 "It is necessary for the person to have a pre–adolescent feeling of being loved" – Egle Laufer

 "Freud called the finding of a new object the re–finding of the old one" – Egle Laufer

 "We know that adults can regress to adolescence, and in the morning get up and go to work" – Egle Laufer

 "It is a terrible thought that the mind you depend on cannot bear it" – Robin Anderson

 "Listen to manifest [psychotic] content as if it were a dream. Look for the meaning." – Carine Minne

 "Beware of colluding with delusions of normality" – Carine Minne

 "History, history, history. As clearly as possible. What happens in the first three years is repeated." – Carine Minne

 "A return to the disturbed oblivion is often more comfortable than the difficult positions in therapy" – Carine Minne

 "Supervision was the only thing that allowed me to be a non–retaliatory object – something she had never experienced before" – Carine Minne

 "The patient asked 'How come you get to sit next to the buzzer to call for help?'" – Carine Minne

 "Some patients will hate the experience of containment and therefore attack it, and therefore the object, or mother" – John Steiner

 "His majesty the baby" – John Steiner

 "The analyst tries to help in order to repair his own ego" – John Steiner

 "Understanding can be a defence. We can be so keen to understand that we're not listening." – John Steiner

 "A traumatised human being is one who has been exposed to a sense of helplessness too intensely and for too long" – Caroline Garland

 "Trauma damages the mind's capacity to filter the things that can damage the mental apparatus" – Caroline Garland

 "One must resist the need to solve the problem, and not be overwhelmed by the patient's sense of helplessness in the countertransference. One must cope with the patient's emotions as well as one's own. If one does not, then the patient may feel that the terror of the experience cannot be beared." – Caroline Garland

 "Never treat the trauma in isolation. But a human being with a history." – Caroline Garland

 "The validity is always questionable. The facts are much less important than the derivatives, or the individual's sense of reality, in the psychoanalytic setting." – Caroline Garland

 "Denial allows one to take in information at a pace that is manageable" – Caroline Garland

 "Action is a defence against thought" – Caroline Garland

 "Mental health workers must continually scrutinise themselves for anxieties, judgments, phobias, fears." – Don Campbell

 Yalom

"The function of the interpretation is to provide the patient with a sense of mastery; accordingly, the value of an interpretation should be measured by this criterion. To the extent that it offers a sense of potency, insight is valid, correct, or "true." Such a definition of truth is completely relativistic and pragmatic. It argues that no explanatory system has hegemony or exclusive rights, that no system is correct, the fundamental, or the "deeper" – and therefore better – one." – Yalom

 "The superego, the id, the ego; the archetypes, the idealized and the actual selves, the pride system; the self system and the dissociated system, the masculine protest; the parent, child, and adult ego states – none of these really exist. They are all fictions, all psychological constructs created for semantic convenience, and they justify their existence only by virtue of their explanatory power. The concept of the will provides a central organising principle for these diverse explanatory systems. They all act by the same mechanism: they are effective to the degree that they afford a sense of personal mastery and thus inspirit the dormant will." – Yalom

 "I listen to a woman patient. She rambles on and on. She seems unattractive in every sense of the word – physically, intellectually, emotionally. She is irritating. She has many off–putting gestures. She is not talking to me; she is talking in front of me. Yet how can she talk to me if I am not here? My thoughts wander. My head groans. What time is it? How much longer to go? I suddenly rebuke myself. I give my mind a shake. Whenever I think of how much time remains in the hour, I know I am failing my patient. I try then to touch her with my thoughts. I try to understand why I avoid her. What is her world like at this moment? How is she experiencing the hour? How is she experiencing me? I ask her these very questions. I tell her that I have felt distant from her for the last several minutes. Has she felt the same way? We talk about that together and try to figure out why we lost contact with one another. Suddenly we are very close. She is no longer unattractive. I have much compassion for her person, for what she is, for what she might yet be. The clock races; the hour ends too soon." – Yalom

 "Frankl is fond of commenting that, "though some psychiatrists state that life–meaning is nothing but defence mechanism and reaction formations, speaking for myself I would not be willing to live merely for my defence mechanisms and would be even less inclined to die for my reaction formations."" – Yalom (p. 445)

 "It is primarily the process (that is, the provision of insight), rather than the precise content of the insight, that is important." – Yalom

 "Will is blocked by obstacles in the path of the child's development; later these obstacles are internalised, and the individual is unable to act even though no objective factors are blocking him or her. The therapist's task is to help remove these obstacles. Once that is done, the individual will naturally develop – just, as Horney put it, as an acorn develops into an oak. Thus, the therapist's task is not to create will but to disencumber it." – Yalom

 "underlying strategy of encouraging patients to take responsibility for their lives through the process of taking responsibility of their therapy. " – Yalom

 "The therapist who has a sense of being heavily burdened by a patient, who is convinced that nothing useful will transpire in the hour unless he or she brings it to pass, has allowed that patient to shift the burden of responsibility from his or her own shoulders to those of the therapist. The patient refuses to accept responsibility for change just as, outside the therapy hour, he or she refuses to accept responsibility for an uncomfortable life predicament." – Yalom

 "the analyst must approach the patient phenomenologically; that is, he or she must enter the patient's experiential world and listen to the phenomena of that world without the presuppositions that distort understanding. As Ludwig Binswanger, one of the best known of the existential analysts, said, "There is not one space and time only, but as many space and times as there are subjects." – Yalom

 Me!

"When the time comes love seems to insist." – Me

 "The psychoanalytic approach soon came under attack for its sterile 'blank canvas' approach. The attack may be valid. Still, overlooked was the richly painted *other side* of the canvas; the inner world of the analyst, alive with projected colours, stirrings and texture. Workings going on in the aid of healing the patient. We might say that the trouble with modern approaches to healing, such as the widely adopted cognitive–behavioural therapy, is that the canvas has been turned around on its easel." – Me

 Quotations from Music

 “You sip your Napoleon brandy, but never get your lips wet” –  Peter Sarstedt, Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)?

 “And here I go I’m pushing my wheel of love / I’ve got love in my tummy and a tiny little pain / And a ten ton catastrophe on a softy pound chain” – Nick Cave, Jubilee Street

 “I’ve been chasing ghosts and I don’t like it / I wish someone would show me where to draw the line” – John Cale, Dying on the Vine

“And her husband was one of those blokes / The sort that only laughs at his own jokes / The sort a war takes away / And when there wasn't a war he left anyway / Darkest sky is just before the dawn

 “The real truth about it is, we’re all supposed to try.”

 “Didn't you know, you can’t make it without ever even trying?” – Karen Dalton, Something’s on Your Mind

 “I feel proactive, I pull out weeds. All of a sudden, I’m having trouble breathing in. I’m not that good at breathing in” – Courtney Barnett

 “I’m just waiting for the day to become night.” – Courtney Barnett, Rae Street

 Quotations from Poetry

 Mary Oliver

“Just because something’s physical doesn’t mean it’s the greatest.” (I Am Pleased to Tell You)

 “In all the works of Beethoven, you will not find a single lie” (Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way)

 “Why do people keep asking to see God’s identity papers when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough? (I Wake Close to Morning)

 “Poems arrive ready to begin. Poems are only the transportation.” (Humility)

 “Every day has something in it whose name is Forever” (Everything That Was Broken)

 Gregory Orr

 Derek Mahon

“The sun rises in spite of everything” (Everything is Going to be Alright)

 John McCullough

You cannot kill an electron / It has no substructure

 Quotations from Artists

 “You must make your work your best friend, that you can go to it whatever you’re feeling.” (Lett Haines) – Maggie Hambling

 “Everything has to be an experiment, otherwise it’s dead” – Maggie Hambling

 “What you are not focussing on is always part of your visual environment” – Harold Ancart

 Take a promenade. Be a flaneur (to walk without aim but to be attentive) – Harold Ancart

 “I like the idea that you can wander through paint without having to worry too much about historical precedents that are weighing on your shoulders.” – Harold Ancart

 “You want to focus on what you are doing and maybe at some point start following the brush, or follow the paint itself. This way things end up being the way they are and not the way you want them to be.” – Harold Ancart

 “I didn’t conceive the exhibition accordingly, but I guess meaning always catches up on you.” – Harold Ancart

 “A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.” – Mark Rothko

 Grayson Perry

 “I’ve called this series of lectures Playing to the Gallery, and not, you may note, Sucking up to an Academic Elite.” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Certainty freaks” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Proust said something to the effect that we only see beauty when we’re looking through an ornate gold frame.” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “You’ll never have a successful art career unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block.” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Validation characters” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “The most important currency is seriousness” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “She said of a previous editor [of Art Forum] ‘English wasn’t her first language, so the magazine suffered from the wrong kind of unreadability.” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “It sounds a bit like inexpertly translated French” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Borrowed importance” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Is it a boring version of something else?” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Art... it’s most important role is probably meaning making” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “My art teacher, he probably saw my unconscious leaking...” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “Art is not some kind of fun add–on” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “It’s a very noble thing to be an artist. You’re a pilgrim on the road to meaning.” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures

 “In the old days they loved wisdom. Nowadays they love the title philosopher” – Kierkegaard

 “I could have made a 100,000 ready mades in ten years easily, and they would have all been fake. Abundance production can only result in mediocrity.” – Marcel Duchamp

 “Art... is an inner shed in which I can lose myself” – Grayson Perry, Reith Lectures