Brian Stagoll

“Neuro-linguistic programming is to Neuroscience what Astrology is to Astronomy.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“It is a misconception that a client comes into therapy for happiness. More accurately, they come into therapy for a movement in a direction where life becomes more sustainable, enjoyable, less painful. This is not the same as happiness. It could, for instance, make a client very happy to ritualistically cut their wrists. The definition of happiness is so broad that it is almost meaningless. What has more objective truth to it is that the client comes to therapy for a change.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“When you're sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you are upset?" In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some patients gave us surprising answers: "my dog" or "my therapist" – or "nobody".”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue