Kenny Glassman - Psychologist

01/08/2021

“My primary teaching assignment in Vienna was a course for Stanford undergraduates on the life and work of Sigmund Freud. The forty lectures I prepared became the basis of a “Freud Appreciation” course that I taught to psychiatric residents for the next fifteen years. I always emphasized to my students that Freud was not just the creator of psychoanalysis (accounting for less than 1 percent of all the therapy offered today), but that he invented the entire field of psychotherapy: it did not exist in any form prior to Freud. Though I have my criticisms of contemporary orthodox Freudian analysis, I have always felt great respect for Freud’s creativity and courage. He is very often in my mind when I do therapy. Recently, for example, I met with a new patient who was plagued with obscene obsessions about members of his family, and I immediately thought of Freud’s observation that behind such persistent obsessions there is often rage. I regret that Freud has fallen so far out of fashion. As one of my chapter titles in The Gift of Therapy declares, ‘Freud wasn’t always wrong.’”

- Irvin Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir

31/07/2021

23/07/2021

The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.

- Leo Buscaglia

21/07/2021

It's been my experience that most leaps of faith are often preceded by a shove.

- Goldie Herschlag

12/07/2021

There's no pain in change.
There's no pain in growth.
The pain is in the resistance to change.
The pain is in the resistance to growth.

- BOB EARLL

The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself, as our own spirit of resistance to it.

- JEAN NICOLAS GROU

The soul loses command of itself when it is impatient. Whereas, when it submits without a murmur it possesses itself in peace. To be impatient is to desire what we have not, or not to desire what we have. When we surrender to something unwanted, it is no longer such. Why make a real calamity of it by resistance? Peace does not dwell in outward things, but within the soul. We may preserve it in the midst of the bitterest pain, if our will remains firm and acquiescent. Peace in this life springs from surrender even to disagreeable things, not in an exemption from bearing them.

- FRANÇOIS DE LA MOTHE FÉNELON

04/07/2021

"I asked an elderly man once what it was like to be old and to know the majority of his life was behind him. He told me that he has been the same age his entire life. He said the voice inside of his head had never aged. He has always just been the same boy. His mother's son. He had always wondered when he would grow up and be an old man. He said he watched his body age and his faculties dull but the person he is inside never got tired. Never aged. Never changed.”
- Author unknown

01/07/2021

Live each day as if it were your last, ‘cause one of these days you’re gonna be right.

- ANON.

My dear friends, you who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them; you who are passing others sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with remorse if you heard that one of them were dead tomorrow morning; or letting your friend's heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give them some day,—if you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that the time is short, it would break the spell. You would would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do.

- PHILLIPS BROOKS (para.)

19/06/2021

An Ode to Procrastination
The Atlantic
James Parker
July/August 2021

The existential exhilaration of playing chicken with Time

The existential exhilaration of playing chicken with Time

14/06/2021

Join Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author—on a course that will teach you to meditate, reason more effectively, and deepen your understanding of yourself and others.

08/06/2021

I always grow poetic when I am lying to myself.

- Ursula K. Le Guin