Famous Quotes

Some famous quotes from famous psychiatrists, psychologists and specialists in related fields ...

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. ~Author Unknown

[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. ~Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, 1945

Behavioral psychology is the science of pulling habits out of rats. ~Douglas BuschWhy waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression. ~Mark Epstein

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution. ~G.K. Chesterton

The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating. ~Unknown psychology professor

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin: Psychology, 1973

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. ~Vladimir Nabokov, 1951

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding. ~Wilhelm Stekel

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. ~Paul Dudley White

The reflex is physiology below the collar button. Psychology is physiology above the collar button. ~Martin H. Fischer

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. ~Carl Jung

I don't go for this auto-cannibalism. Very damaging. ~Peter O'Toole, on psychoanalysis

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. ~Alan Watts

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy. ~Sigmund Freud, attributed

If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves. ~Gabrielle Roth

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing. ~Joey Adams

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere. ~C.G. Jung

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. ~Ben Williams

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. ~Carl G. Jung

Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960Words are the physicians of a mind diseased. ~Aeschylus

The sun is nature's Prozac. ~Astrid Alauda, 1990Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio. It's the same with the mind. ~Moses R. Kaufman

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unseasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night. ~James Thurber

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort. ~Mason Cooley

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well. ~Rainer Maria Rilke, on leaving psychotherapy

If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology. ~D.H. Lawrence

There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises. ~Sigmund Freud

Sure you can psychoanalyze! But as Baehr used to say, why bother to sort garbage? ~Martin H. Fischer

Thoughts shut up want air,And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Work cure is the best of all psychotherapy, in my opinion.... As well might we expect a patient to recover without food as to recover without work.... The sound man needs work to keep him sound, but the nervous invalid has an even greater need of work to draw him out of his isolation, and to stop the miseries of doubt and self-scrutiny, to win back self-respect and the support of fellowship. ~Richard C. Cabot

Psychology doesn't address the soul; that's something else. ~David Chase, The Sopranos, "Pilot," original airdate 10 January 1999, spoken by the character Carmela Soprano

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex. ~S.N. Behrman

It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature. ~G.K. Chesterton, London Observer, 9 December 1934Psychology has a long past, but only a short history. ~Hermann Ebbinghaus

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. ~Jerome Lawrence

A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant and ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality. ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Depression is rage spread thin. ~George Santayana

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all. ~Voltaire

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. ~Paul Valéry, Tel Quel, 1943

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. ~E.M. Cioran

To be too conscious is an illness - a real thoroughgoing illness. ~Fyodor Dostoevski

Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries. ~M. Robin D'Antan

Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. ~Thomas WolfeHandwriting is autobiography. ~Carrie Latet

Psychiatry is probably the single most destructive force that has affected the American society within the last fifty years. ~Thomas S. Szasz

Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much? ~Jason Love

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is - a vice? ~Friedrich Nietzsche, alluding to the proverb "Idleness is the beginning of all vices"

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis. ~Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one. ~William Menninger

To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness. ~Fritz Perls

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work. ~Geoffrey Norman

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression. ~Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle

Psychiatry's Views on Education

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future"
Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Psychiatrist, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

"We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers, and others with a vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,’ good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage… The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in."
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, President, World Federation of Mental Health

Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
John Dewey, Educational Psychologist

The school curriculum should "…be designed to bend the student to the realities of society, especially by way of vocational education… the curriculum should be designed to promote mental health as an instrument for social progress and a means of altering culture…"
Report: Action for Mental Health, 1961

"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810

"…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government – one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people."
Harold Rugg, student of psychology and a disciple of John Dewey

"Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) sponsored report: The Role of Schools in Mental Health

"This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable."
Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE) Info

"Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?"
Charles F. Potter, Humanist

"Men are built, not born…. Give me the baby, and I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood…. I’ll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless…"
John B. Watson, psychologist, founder of "Behaviorism"

"Of course, Behaviorism 'works.' So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public".
W. H. Auden

"Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines… Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness… Elimination of the unessential by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum."
Edward Lee Thorndike, pioneer of "animal psychology"

"We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, "Strategic Planning for Mental Health", June 18, 1940

"Psychology, and child-study stand first in order among the required subjects of technical nature… The course of child-study is supplementary to the prescribed courses in systematic and applied psychology."
1899 Teachers College Course

"...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong". "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings."
Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in "Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives", p. 185, 1956

"The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection."
Paul Popenoe, Behavioral Eugenist and co-author: "Sterilization for Human Betterment"

Psychiatry's Views on Religion

"Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis."
Sigmund Freud, defining spiritual belief

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."
Sigmund Freud

"The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such..."
Sigmund Freud

"Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up."
Sigmund Freud

"In short, the nature of the hallucinations of Jesus, as they are described in the orthodox Gospels, permits us to conclude that the founder of the Christian religion was afflicted with religious paranoia."
Psychiatrist Dr. Charles Binet-Sangle: La Folie de Jesus (The Madness of Jesus), 1910

"…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern psychiatric treatments."
William Sargant, British psychiatrist, 1974

"No one knows just how the idea of a soul or the supernatural started… It probably had its origin in the general laziness of mankind."
John B. Watson, behavioral psychologist

"This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience."
John B. Watson, behavioral psychologist

"I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion"
Sigmund Freud

"The soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain. Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them."
Statement delivered at the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy at Harvard University

"…humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith." "Traditional moral codes… fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow…" "Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful… The total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body."
The Humanist Manifesto 2, 1973

"All neurotics seek the religious"
Psychologist Carl Jung

"It should be recognized that an acceptance of the mental health viewpoint… carries an obligation to examine critically some of the teaching of the churches in the light of present-day insight into what seems to be essential to wholesome personality development and into what is now known to be detrimental to the growing personality of the child."
Psychiatrist at World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH) Conference

"Pastoral psychology understands itself as a help for the communities in view of ‘group dynamic’ proceedings –e.g., the processes of rivalization, or the search for scapegoats, harmonization or shifting guilt, which… can determine life in a community so strongly that the succession of Jesus Christ is no longer paid heed"
The German Association for Pastoral Psychology Magazine – Ways To Man

"What is the relationship between wholeness and holiness?… What does personal responsibility mean in the light of the findings or psychoanalysis? Do the words right and wrong, have any further usefulness in the light of our new knowledge of compulsive behavior patterns? I believe it’s one of the tragedies of Christianity that it has got itself all mixed up with morality…"
Canon Sydney Evans, National Association for Mental Health, 1967

"The word soul has lost its meaning and even its plausibility…. Faith, hope and love can no longer be seen simply as virtues or graces; they are processes in flesh and blood… (the clergyman) will find that whether he wants it or not, he is also a front-line mental health worker or he will be so regarded by the specialists in mental health. It is on the pastoral role and the tasks of shepherding that the psychological disciples have the greatest impact in theological work."
Paul Pruyser, psychologist, author: "The Seamy Side of Current Religious Beliefs"

"In recent years pastoral counselors have separated from their parishes and emerged as a psychotherapy profession…. This professionalization process includes a shift away from parish-based counseling to counseling centers or medical settings, declining interest in religious practices and convictions, increased interest in psychological practices and theories, the charging of fees, and increased institutional and professional barriers to those individuals perceived as poor counseling clients or unable to pay…. There is also… growing deviation from a religious orientation to a pseudopsychiatric orientation."
American Journal of Psychiatry, March 1986

"We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, "Strategic Planning for Mental Health", June 18, 1940

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas..."
G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health

"The danger is that these psychologies may, to one degree or another, replace Christianity without most people even noticing that any substitution has taken place."
Christianity Today, 1994

Psychiatry's Views on Creating a Slave Society

"We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood."
Carl R. Rodgers, Former President of the American Psychological Association (APA)

Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
John Dewey, Educational Psychologist

"It will of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common wheel."
Edward Thorndike, Key Psychology Theorist, member of the "Eugenics Committee of the USA"

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. . . Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. . . . We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain."
Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, Director of Neuropsychiatry at Yale University Medical School, Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118, Feb. 24, 1974. Delgado was reported as part of the "MK-Ultra" CIA mind-control program.

"The reduction of intelligence is an important factor in the curative process… The fact is that some of the very best cures that one gets are in those individuals whom one reduces almost to amentia (feeble-mindedness)…"
Dr. Abraham Myerson, Harvard Psychiatrist, 1942

"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810

"One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
K.M. Heaton, The National Educator

"Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society." A "utopia" could be found – providing "a sense of stability and certainty, whether realistic or not."
Attributed to psychiatrist Nathan Kline, 1967

". . . yet almost everyone attributes human behavior to intentions, purposes, aims and goals. . . . as if they had wills, impulses, feelings, purposes, and other fragmentary attributes of an indwelling agent. We shall not solve the problems of alcoholism and juvenile delinquency by increasing a sense of responsibility. It is the environment which is 'responsible' for the objectionable behavior, and it is the environment, not some attribute of the individual, which must be changed. "If all else fails, punishable behavior may be made less likely by changing physiological conditions. Hormones may be used to change sexual behavior, surgery (as in lobotomy) to control violence, tranquilizers to control aggression, and appetite depressants to control overeating."
Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity"

"Of course, Behaviorism 'works.' So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public."
W. H. Auden

"The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion."
John Dewey in "The Primary Education Fetich"

"The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State."
Hegel (who influenced Karl Marx)

Psychiatry's Views on America

"America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless."
Sigmund Freud

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud

Psychiatry's Views on World Government

"Principles of mental health cannot be successfully furthered in any society unless there is progressive acceptance of the concept of world citizenship. World citizenship can be widely extended among all peoples through applications of the principles of mental health."
National Association for Mental Health, 1948

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health

"One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
K.M. Heaton, The National Educator

Freud on Marxism

"The strength of Marxism obviously does not lie in its view of history or in the prophecies about the future which it bases upon that view, but in its clear insight into the determining influence which is exerted by the economic conditions of man upon his intellectual, ethical and artistic reactions."
Sigmund Freud

Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment

"...legal systems have been established in a majority of states for involuntary and compulsory hospitalization and treatment of neurosis. These state laws have been based on a prototype bill published originally by the Federal Security Agency of the Public Health Service, now a part of the Department of Health, Education & Welfare. Entitled a Draft Act Governing Hospitalization of the Mentally Ill, it is, in fact, a skeleton bill designed for adoption uniformly by federal, state, and territorial governments to radically alter commitment procedures... if you won't consent to voluntary treatment, a police officer can arrest you. You can be subjected to 3 to 5 days of treatment of the psychiatrist's choosing before you even get a hearing to protect your rights in most states. Treatment can include electric shock treatments, chemotherapy, hypnosis or conceivably a frontal lobotomy... Basically, all that is necessary to revoke all the constitutional rights of any citizen is to accuse him of being mentally-ill."
John A. Stormer, "None Dare Call it Treason"

"In all my research on violence for a book published several years ago, I had not seen one credible study — meaning that the small amount of research done in this area is not worth a damn - showing that society has more to fear from patients labeled "mentally ill" than other people in the community. For example, there has never been any appropriate follow-up of patients that has determined whether the absence of treatment leads to violence. The very foundation of forced treatment is ideology and fear-mongering and not science."
Nicholas Regush, Editor, redflagsdaily.com


Psychiatry Promoting Euthanasia, Eugenics, Racism

"Should it turn out that in spite of in the new-born is a weakly and ill-bred child, then a gentle death will be provided for him by the medical board, which decides over the citizenship papers of the society, let’s say through a small dose of morphine… (The parents) will not give themselves over to rebellious feelings for long but will try it fresh and happily a second time, if they are permitted to do so and have a certificate granting them the right to the procedure."
Dr. Alfred Ploetz in 1895; German psychiatrist who founded eugenics in Germany, paving the way for the horrors of Hitler's genocide.

"It was only through the political work of Hitler that the meaning of racial hygiene has become publicly manifest in Germany, and it is only due to him that our thirty-year-old dream to put racial hygiene into practice has become a reality."
Dr. Ernst Rudin, Nazi psychiatrist, explaining how psychiatrists in Germany originated the ideas of genocide which Hitler later executed.
Note: Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger published Rudin's article in the U.S.: "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need"

"The most effective race preserving measure is that which gives the greatest support to the natural defenses....We may and we must rely on the healthy instincts of the best of our people...for the extermination of elements of the population loaded with dregs. Otherwise, these deleterious mutations will permeate the body of the people like the cells of a cancer."
Konrad Lorenz, Nazi lecturer in psychology, University of Konigsberg, 1940

Psychiatry's Views on Morality and Families

"If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility"
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health

"The re-interpretation and eventually (sic) eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith… are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy. The fact is, that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely."
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, 1945

"...the pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of any extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely."
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm in: Psychiatry: Journal of Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations 9, no. 1, February 1946

"Old conventions, customs and values… to be challenged… The aim should be to control not only nature, but human nature." He recommended two slogans for "spreading world-wide the gospel of mental hygiene": "To learn to think internationally" and "The necessity to disarm the mind."
Dr. J.R. Lord, psychiatrist

"Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation."
Sigmund Freud

"The family is now one of the major obstacles to improved mental health, and hence should be weakened, if possible, so as to free individuals and especially children from the coercion of family life."
International Congress on Mental Health, London, 1948

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future"
Psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, Address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

"We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers, and others with a vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,’ good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage… The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in."
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health

"Where is the direction of influence going to run? It’s going to run – and the research confirms this again and again – it’s going to run from the experienced to the inexperienced. The net outcome of sex education, styled as Rogerian encountering, is more sexual experience."
Dr. William Coulson, Psychologist

"Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity… Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’"
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health

"Society's excessively moralistic and punitive reactions toward pedophiles go far beyond what I consider to be the gravity of the crime."
Dr. Richard Garner, clinical professor of child psychiatry, quoted in Insight Magazine, 1999

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, for there are plenty of others."
Otto Rank, Psychologist, Diary, 1904

Quotes About the Psychiatric and Psychological Industries

"The danger is that these psychologies may, to one degree or another, replace Christianity without most people even noticing that any substitution has taken place."
Christianity Today, 1994

"So we must shun the false guides of men and their false religions, babbling psychologists, wordy psychiatrists and polluted politicians, all of which have built up such tremendous reputations as colossal failures. Look at the messes they have made, know them by their rotten fruits, reject them for their fruits."
The Watchtower (Catholic publication), W-52 1/15, p53

"The second reason for our critical times is modern man's rejection of God's Word the Bible. Enemies such as Wellhausen and his prejudiced school of higher critics, Darwin and his evolutionists, Freud and his theories, Marx and his atheistic revolutionists-all these have played a sinister role in destroying the guiding influence of the Bible for many; especially since so many of the clergy have adopted such worldly wisdom... According to Freud, one of psychiatry's chief authorities, religion is a great illusion that man will get rid of someday. Psychiatry stresses, "Know thyself," as if an enlightened self-love is sufficient for successful living. More than ignoring God, (psycho)analysts often contradict God by advising those with guilty consciences that fornication, adultery and sodomy are not wrong in themselves. The charge rightly has been made that such counsel tends to exterminate the conscience".
The Watchtower, W-63 1/15, p37-8

"Recent research has shown, that the vast majority of people who are violent do not suffer from mental illnesses."
American Psychiatric Association website

"... the proponents of the mental health program have been quick to elaborate a series of legislative proposals.... This is the age-old subterfuge of the collectivist, whose only solution for any problem, be it economic, social or political, is the passage of another law, the imposition of another tax, and the establishment of another bureau."
Dr. Lewis Alesen, former surgeon and president of the California Medical Association, 1960

"The mental health establishment has snowed the American people: it launches the most unimaginable brutal psychological and physical assault on human beings in distress, calls this 'medical treatment', and then blames the outcome on 'mental illness'.
Seth Farber, PhD

"So part of what we're seeing is nothing more than the creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as long as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs. So there's a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in as broad terms as possible, and to find ordinary, distressing emotions or behaviors that some people may not like and label them as mental illness."
Robert Whitaker, in the August 2005 American Friends Service Committee's "Street Spirit." Whitaker is the author of "Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill"

"Most of the almost innumerable books, pamphlets, and other publications issued by the sponsors of the mental health program are purposely and craftily disingenuous, disguising its real and ultimate purpose: ... the ultimate reduction of every individual in this world, except the favored few who conceive of themselves as possessed of an incomparable genius in their ability to direct the affairs of others, into... a common servile obeisance to his master, the State...."
Mental Robots, by Dr. Lewis Albert Alesen

The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children. These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs...they are not isolated idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers. Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao.
Thomas Sowell, writing in Forbes, 1991

"A growing proportion of many school budgets is devoted to counseling and other psychological services. The curriculum is becoming more therapeutic: children are taking courses in self-esteem, conflict resolution, and aggression management. Parental advisory groups are conscientiously debating alternative approaches to traditional school discipline, ranging from teacher training in mediation to the introduction of metal detectors and security guards in the schools. Schools are increasingly becoming emergency rooms of the emotions, devoted...to repairing hearts. What we are seeing....is the psychologization of American education."
Atlantic Monthly, April 1993

In the old days during electroshock "we used to break arms… leg(s) and elbows."
Dr. Harry Bailey, Psychiatrist

"Psychology is the science of intellect, characters, and behavior of animals, including man."
Edward Lee Thorndike, pioneer of "animal psychology"

"...every person who comes into this office who has had an experience with another therapist has some kind of horror story to tell, about some major failing on the therapist's part, including, quite often, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, things that cross the boundary of mere bad technique and come pretty damn close to the criminal."
Thomas Maeder, clinical psychologist: "Wounded Healers", Atlantic Monthly, January, 1989, p. 38

"The changes one sees when electroshock is administered are completely consistent with any acute brain injury, such as a blow to the head from a hammer. In essence, what happens is that the individual is dazed, confused, and disoriented, and therefore cannot remember or appreciate current problems."
Dr. Lee Coleman, psychiatrist, 1977

"Over the years it [the National Committee for Mental Hygiene] has championed for the promotion of 'mental health' despite the fact that nobody knows what it is or how to do it."
E. Fuller Torrey, psychiatrist, "Nowhere To Go", Harper and Row, 1988

"The field of mental health is highly subjective, capricious, and dominated by whims, mythologies, and public relations. In many ways it is a pop culture with endless fads but with no real substance."
Dr. Walter Fisher, Assistant Superintendent, Elgin State Hospital, in "Power, Greed, and Stupidity in the Mental Health Racket"

"If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity. If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity ... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists'."
Dr. John Rawlings Rees, psychiatrist "Strategic Planning for Mental Health", Mental Health, v.1 no.4, p. 103-6

"[it is] a high class kind of subversion, very high class. We're not second story burglars. We go right in the front door."
Mike Gorman, psychiatric publicist, remarking on National Institute of Mental Health fundraising tactics in Drew, "The Health Syndicate", The Atlantic Monthly, December 1967, P. 76

"What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession."
Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly, p. 126

"...Now it is time to ask the original question; who truly profits from the Psychiatric Interventions? I can provide a list, in order of who profits the most. #1. Pharmaceutical companies make billions on psychotropic medicines. #2. The Hospital probably makes between $500 and $1000 a day on the patient. #3. The Psychiatrist makes from $100 to $300 per visit. ..."
Baker Act (Florida) discussion

"Much of today's psychiatric science is based on wish, myth, and politics..."
Loren Mosher, M.D., Former Chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia, The National Institute of Mental Health

"It is the 'zoomorphic' or 'rattomorphic' fallacy -- the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man -- which makes American psychology so profoundly disturbing."
Ludwig von Bertlanffy, Robots, Men and Minds. NY, George Braziller (1967), pp. 15-16.

"A psychiatrist is a man who has studied medicine, which he does not practice, but practices psychology, which he has not studied."
Dr. Harriet Babcock, former Chief Psychologist, Bellevue Hospital

"Few legislators who passed these mental health laws realized that (Brock) Chisholm and his associates defined mental illness as a sense of loyalty to a particular nation, a sense of loyalty to a moral code, and strict adherence to concepts of right and wrong. Chisholm has been obsessed for years with the idea that instilling concepts of right and wrong, love of country and morality in children by their parents is the paramount evil."
John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason, Chapter IX, Mental Health

"The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health." These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior).
Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in "The Death of Psychiatry", 1974

"Contrary to the popular public conception, this happenstance is NOT a form of health care, but the result of a fraudulent system being granted police powers by the State. By calling the harmless 'insane', (who statistics prove to be no more violence-prone than the average citizen, unless hopelessly deranged by damaging psychiatric 'treatment'), dangerous and justifying their own existence by the 'need' to deal with that inflated 'danger', the mad-doctors themselves pose the greatest threat to liberty, property and democracy in our times."
Citizens for Higher Ethical Standards in Medicine

"Mental illness is often used as an ad homonym to discredit the individual. This has been a common use of psychiatric diagnosis in psychiatry in Russia. " ... there are two main groups [of schizophrenia patients] ... 1) people admitted to the mental hospital long before they had been political dissenters ... 2. others who ... have put forward complex social and economic theories as alternatives to orthodox Marxism..."
Wing, cited in "Pseudoscience in Psychology", by Dr. Szasz, p. 126

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, who praised both Hitler and Musolini

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.."
J. Krishnamurti

"In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults".
Thomas Szasz

"Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it".
Thomas Szasz

"Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine."
Thomas Szasz

"We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead."
D. H. Lawrence

"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me."
English playwright Nathaniel Lee (on being consigned to a mental institution)

"...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology.... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise."
The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell

"Nothing has harmed the quality of individual life in modern society more than the misbegotten belief that human suffering is driven by biological and genetic causes and can be rectified by taking drugs or undergoing electroshock therapy. ... If I wanted to ruin someone's life, I would convince the person that that biological psychiatry is right - that relationships mean nothing, that choice is impossible, and that the mechanics of a broken brain reign over our emotions and conduct. If I wanted to impair an individual's capacity to create empathetic, loving relationships, I would prescribe psychiatric drugs, all of which blunt our highest psychological and spiritual functions."
Peter R. Breggin, M.D., in the foreword to "Reality Therapy in Action" by William Glasser, M.D., p. xi

"A Trojan horse full of dangerous psycho-fantasies has been professionally prepared for us by Christian psychiatrists and psychologists... At the base, such therapies stand upon dogma, not scientific observations, and the dogma is the odious one of Freud and his followers who were some of the century's most anti-Christ teachers. No amount of well-intentioned refinement of deadly doctrines will make them clean for Christians."
Dr. Hilton P. Terrell, M.D.

"Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them."
"Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Drugs", by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. & David Cohen, Ph.D.

"Psychotherapy may be known in the future as the greatest hoax of the twentieth century."
Dr. Lawrence LeShan, former president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology

"Nearly half a century has passed since Watson proclaimed his manifesto. Today, apart from a few minor reservations, the vast majority of psychologists, both in this country and in America, still follow his lead. The result, as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness."
Sir Cyril Burt in British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 53, No. 3, 1962, p. 229.

"...there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment"
An analysis of psychotherapy versus placebo studies, by Leslie Prioleau, et al., The Behavioral and Brain Sciences Vol. 6, p. 275, 1983

"These misguided myth-makers have encouraged us to believe that the infinite mysteries of the mind are as amenable to their professed expertise as plumbing or an automobile engine. This is rubbish. In fact these talk therapists, practitioners of cosmetic psychiatry, have no relevant training or skills in the art of living life. It is remarkable that they have fooled us for so long. ... Cowed by their status as men of science, deferring to their academic titles, bewitched by the initials after their names, we, the gullible, lap up their pretentious nonsense as if it were the gospel truth. We must learn to recognize them for what they are - possessors of no special knowledge of the human psyche, who have, nonetheless, chosen to earn their living from the dissemination of the myth that they do indeed know how the mind works".
Psychiatrist Garth Wood, M.D., in "The Myth of Neurosis", 1986

"In the 14-year period between 1950 and 1964, more American deaths occurred in state and county mental institutions than in all of the nation's armed conflicts beginning with the Revolutionary War and ending with the Persian Gulf War. Between 1965 and 1990, the total number of mental-hospital inpatient deaths exceeded the number of battle deaths in the same wars by 70 percent. Inpatient deaths topped out at 1,103,000 during this 25-year period, compared with 650,563 recorded deaths in battles."
Kelly Patricia O’Meara: "The Forgotten Dead of St. Elizabeth's", Insight Magazine, June 16, 2001

"The similarities between street drug abuse and psychotropic prescription drug use are disturbing. Both types are toxic. Both can cause psychosis, damage the brain and other organs, and even cause death. And neither type of mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, treats disease. It's important to recognize that the only significant difference between many prescription psychotropic drugs and street drugs such as "speed" and "downers" is that prescription drugs are legal."
Neuro-psychiatrist Sydney Walker in "Dose of Sanity"

"Clearly this business of treating minds, particularly this big business of treating young minds, has not policed itself, and has no incentive to put a stop to the kinds of fraudulent and unethical practices that are going on."
Pat Schroeder, U.S. Representative, 1992