Psychopathology Quotes

“Why is it, my shadow-striding friend, that we don't fear dreams? We lose consciousness, lose control, things happen with no apparent logic and abiding by no apparent rules.... We don't fear dreams, but we do fear madness, and death terrifies us.”
― Brent Weeks, Shadow's Edge

“Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.”
― Elie Wiesel

“The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual”
― C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events, 1936-46

“The 16 characteristics of psychopaths:

1. Intelligent
2. Rational
3. Calm
4. Unreliable
5. Insincere
6. Without shame or remorse
7. Having poor judgment
8. Without capacity for love
9. Unemotional
10. Poor insight
11. Indifferent to the trust or kindness of others
12. Overreactive to alcohol
13. Suicidal
14. Impersonal sex life
15. Lacking long-term goals
16. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior”
― Hervey M. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity

“...American psychology effectively guaranteed its place as a cultural icon by helping to create the pathologies it simultaneously promised to treat. (p. 37)”
― Alvin Dueck, Peaceable Psychology: Christian Therapy in a World of Many Cultures

“Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview.”
― Zeena Schreck, Straight To Hell: 20th Century Suicides

“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about waht other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Eating disorders are a silent form of destruction: a destruction of vitality and the hope for a meaningful existence. They create the illusion of time stopping. Past, present, and future collapse: the insidious negative self-talk is too loud, and/ or the aftermath of trauma too pervasive and/or the affects too overwhelming. The body itself becomes the theater of war (McDougall, 1989) wherein the feelings, memories, longings, and stories that have led to the symptoms feel so dangerous that they are dissociated from the behaviors themselves.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Desire cannot be understood apart from the contexts, relational and cultural, that shape it. A patient with bulimia, for example, may not desire food as a substitute for mother but, rather, because that is the only available "vocabulary" through which her desire can be expressed. The analyst's task becomes not only to uncover desires that have been defended against but also to help the patient begin to want freely so that, over time, new containers of desire can emerge, both inside and outside the analytic relationship.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Kernberg (1995) observes that patients with anorexia tend toward sexual inhibition, whereas those with bulimia are more likely to enact sadomasochistic sexual interactions, especially when eating disturbances temporarily recede.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Patients with eating disorders contend with an emotional landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. Help with these struggles will never be found in a pill or a set of therapeutic exercises, in spite of the potential usefulness of both. It is only through a meaningful emotional connection that we can help patients begin to "bear the unbearable and to say the unsayable".”
― Tom Wooldridge, Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction

“Goodsit (1997), for example argued that patients with anorexia nervosa manifest a facade of pseudo- self-sufficiency when confronted with parents who are themselves self-absorbed, anxious, or otherwise unavailable. In this process, the maturation of the anorexic's self-object and self-regulatory capacities are unable to fully develop, leaving them painfully dependent upon others for their well-being. Bulimic patients, in contrast, are seen as more tension-ridden impulsive, and conflicted about whether to pursue their own lives or to remain available to a parent who utilizes them to maintain his or her own psychic equilibrium. In this context, symptoms - whether self-starvation, bingeing, and/or purging - emerge as last-ditch efforts at self-soothing and tension regulation. Over time, eating disorders become chronic conditions that provide patients with a compensatory identity and sense of self.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“With an eye toward the striking difference in prevalence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa between males and females, Sands (1989) suggested that young girls are presented with culturally shaped barriers to obtaining developmentally necessary mirroring and idealization. Whereas boys' needs for mirroring may be gratified through "showing off, being cocky, acting smart or aggressive”, girls are expected to be "lady-like." It is only in the realm of physical appearance that girls are encouraged to seek mirroring and, thus, in later life women are more predisposed than men to manifest psychopathology through bodily symptoms such as eating disorders.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“While many anorexic and bulimic patients describe themselves as feeling disconnected from their bodies, or even like heads without bodies, they are also trapped in an inability to differentiate affect from bodily state, as evidenced through difficulty articulating feelings verbally, and the use of food and the body as the primary or only means of self-expression.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“If the eating disorder is concretized by the "not-me" ED, the patient is allowed the safety to look around comers, to follow this "other self' into the kitchen; the bathroom; yes, even the bedroom; to observe. Shame and blame are reduced; curiosity is enhanced. Conceptually this is interesting. Many patients are able to observe once allowed to look. They know well who they are at these moments. Relationally, however, they have never been entitled to look, and, as a result, self-observation and understanding have been thwarted by relational constraints and consequent immediate behavioral enactments.
Ongoing, the patient is asked to consider what alternative behaviors can replace eating, purging or restricting. If the patient weren't thinking about food or weight, what else would she be thinking about? What else is needed? As the patient begins to consider concrete alternatives to symptomatic behavior, "contracts" are developed between patient and therapists.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Becoming visible and substantial means that anxiety must be contained long enough to become available for emotional experience, thought and symbolization instead of immediately discharged into eating disorder symptoms.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“If mental health has been associated with the ongoing development of resilient and adaptive coping through early positive attachment experiences, psychopathology later in life has been associated with disturbances in attachment, characterized by deficits in coping with novelty and stress (Schore, 2001). For those who go on to develop eating disorders, there have often been pathological failures in early maternal responsivity, as well as maternal impingements. Bruch (1973), one of the first psychoanalysts to theorize about and treat eating disorders, noted that often. these patients have what she calls an interoceptive problem - difficulty distinguishing between inside and outside and between self and other - as the result of having their mothers' needs imposed upon them throughout development. As a result, the potential, or transitional space, never achieved as a space between two people, becomes an embodied, or "in-myself' space (Boris, 1984).”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Moreover, the body is the projection screen for deadly objects stemming from primary, traumatic links with caretakers, compulsory binges and food rejection may amount to an angry response aimed at denying and attacking the body.

Additionally. dysfunctional eating behaviors are often attempts to regulate extremely painful emotions, especially those that may influence an individual's narcissistic balance. This condition is shared with different forms of psychic distress, whereby an object or a behavior plays the role of regulating the "'outer" emotions in response to a lack of adequate internal resources to contend with traumatic stressors. From this perspective, EDs can be conceptualized as dysfunctional strategies of affect regulation that are connected to an impaired capability to recognize, metabolize, and mentalize affects (Lunn & Poulsen, 2012).”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Moreover, the body is the projection screen for deadly objects stemming from primary, traumatic links with caretakers, compulsory binges and food rejection may amount to an angry response aimed at denying and attacking the body.

Additionally, dysfunctional eating behaviors are often attempts to regulate extremely painful emotions, especially those that may influence an individual's narcissistic balance. This condition is shared with different forms of psychic distress, whereby an object or a behavior plays the role of regulating the "'outer" emotions in response to a lack of adequate internal resources to contend with traumatic stressors. From this perspective, EDs can be conceptualized as dysfunctional strategies of affect regulation that are connected to an impaired capability to recognize, metabolize, and mentalize affects (Lunn & Poulsen, 2012).”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Controlled mentalization, identification and understanding of emotional reactions, and emotional regulation are significant problems for eating-disordered patients. In general, bulimia nervosa patients show problems in emotional hyperarousal and flooding. The opposite, a dominance of detached and flattened effect, is typically seen in patients with anorexia nervosa.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“…interoceptive confusion and body image distortions are forms of impaired embodied mentalizing and expressions of pre-mentalistic thinking. For example, psychic equivalence demonstrates how patients’ painful self and affect states are expressed though extreme body hatred and the mistaken belief that being “skinny” will bring them self-acceptance, "confidence," and agency. The teleological stance explains the obsessive drive for thinness as a method to obtain self-acceptance and the approval of others. In short, subjugation of the body is a confused attempt to gain mastery and control over feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of self-worth.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Hypermentalization, frequently seen in patients with bulimia nervosa, is when the patient is so outer-directed that she is prone to obsessively interpreting others' minds but not in an accurate way. Hypermentalized fantasies about another's mind is an effort to meet and satisfy that person's perceived desires and needs (Buhl, 2002; Skarderud, 2007), and based on inaccurate interpretations of self/other mental states because of attachment anxieties. Similarly, pseudo-mentalizing is when the patient appears to be expressing or talking about feelings and thoughts, but the narrative lacks emotional connection. instead, words and expressions are empty of meaning and serve to defend against feelings of worthlessness, insignificance, or desolation (Skarderud & Fonagy, 2012).”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“The focus on one's own body as an object inhibits self-awareness and leads to stultifying self-consciousness.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“A person struggling with an eating disorder keeps their rituals and disordered behaviors secret - it is a double life of sorts - and the behaviors themselves could be thought of as a maladaptive attempt at a solution. The symptoms are used to maintain a state of mind, full of fantasies of the possibilities of a 'moment' or a 'life', without what 'feels' unbearable. The person, in the eating disorder (ED) 'body-state,' truly believes that there is no other way.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Sadly, fierce in-group/out-group biases live within the eating disorder complex, generating and sustaining an ethical code of the culture as girls and women project their shadow upon one another. Individuals with anorexia secretly scorn those who struggle with bulimia or binge eating, those with bulimia and binge eating feel gross, often “wishing to be anorexic,” yet detesting their slim sisters with vicious jealousy. A callous hierarchy is formed, with anorexia as the ideal; bulimia, as a very distant underworld second; and binge eating, clearly at the bottom of acceptability.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak

“In other words, a complex resides in the unconscious. Which means it possesses autonomy, exerting force upon the individual regardless of his/her conscious intent.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“Complexes and their associated archetypes are the building blocks or blueprints of earliest human experience.”
― Tom Wooldridge, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

“I especially liked it when, at the end, they begged for their lives. When they did that—and they all did that eventually—I would pretend to hesitate and see in their eyes the glimmer of a final, desperate hope. I let them have that for an instant. Then, I took it away. That—that extinguishing of their very last hope—I savored more than anything, even more than the extinguishing of their lives.
You see, it was at that moment they could feel the presence of the Devil and would beg God to come and deliver them from him. And it was in that moment that I made them see—that they finally realized—God had been there all along. It was then they understood: the Devil was just God in his night attire.”
― Craig Russell, The Devil Aspect

“Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses”
― Peter Weiss

“Oh, sure, one can overdo it, and our history is darkly stained with abortive religious movements inspired by messianic crackpots. But it appears to be a continuum: too much and you end up in the realm of a Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Charles Manson, all of whom were able to lead others into a maelstrom of paranoid delusion. In the cases of Jones and Koresh, one can only do armchair forensic psychiatry to try to guess their afflictions, but Manson, alive and well, is a diagnosed schizophrenic. However, if you get the metamagical thoughts and behaviors to the right extent and at the right time and place, then people might just get the day off from work on your birthday for a long time to come.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament