“L’ésser solitari pateix, es troba pres d’una certa inquietud, perquè no pot compartir els seus pensaments, els seus sentiments, amb els altres. Quan un sent un gran plaer, voldria fer saber als altres que existeix, que sent, que estima, que viu, que lluita, que combat.”
“Like a road sign that you’re looking at that says: “Do not read this sign.” You cannot do both what it asks and implies (by being a sign) simultaneously. The double bind or paradox gives the illusion of space between the opposites, but the space isn’t really there. The effects of such paradoxical communication can be devastating, especially to those already experiencing disturbed emotions.
Unless the more vulnerable are helped to be able to untangle or unravel themselves from being trapped within the double bind or paradoxical communication to which they are exposed, they will become consumed by doubt, which will in turn reinforce enactments of repetition-compulsion.”
“I fancy I can read a little in the souls of those about me —but perhaps it is not so. Oh, when my good days come, I feel as if I could see far into others’ souls, though I am no great or clever head. We sit in a room, some men, some women, and I; and I seem to see what is passing within them, and what they think of me. I find something in every swift little change of light in their eyes; sometimes the blood rises to their cheeks and reddens them; at other times they pretend to be looking another way, and yet they watch me covertly from the side. There I sit, marking all this, and no one dreams that I see through every soul. For years past I have felt that I could read the souls of all I met. But perhaps it is not so…”
“The best thing about writing is not the actual labor of putting word against word, brick upon brick, but the preliminaries, the spade work, which is done in silence, under any circumstances, in dream as well as in the waking state. In short, the period of gestation.”
And so the analyst says ‘Adapt yourself!’ He does not mean, as some wish to think – adapt yourself to this rotten state of affairs! He means: adapt yourself to life! Become an adept! That is the highest adjustment – to make oneself an adept.
“To be sick, to be neurotic, if you like, is to ask for guarantees. The neurotic is the flounder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be spared. For him death is the only certainty, and the dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him in a living death far more horrible than the one he imagines but knows nothing about. (…)
Where then does security lie? What protection can you invent that has not already been thought of? It is hopeless to think of security: there is none. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial one which will give him no pain or trouble.”