Therapy Notes

"I’ve realized therapy is incredibly therapeutic." -Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me

"There are so many ways of getting strong, sometimes talking is the best way."-Andre Agassi, Open

"Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood, don’t go there alone." -Augusten Burroughs, Dry: A Memoir

"Bit by bit, Dr. Driscoll helped me to peel away the layers of protection I had built up over the years. The process was not that unlike the peeling of an onion, which also makes us cry. It has been a painful journey, and I don’t know when it will end, when I can say, “OK, it’s over.” Maybe never. Maybe sooner than I know. I recently told Dr. Driscoll that I feel the beginnings of feeling OK, that this is the right path." -Charles L. Bailey Jr., In the Shadow of the Cross

"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, neurologist

"Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history." -Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself

"…[T]hings happened when you were little. Things you don’t remember now, and don’t want to. But they need to escape, need to worm their way out of that dark place in your brain where you keep them stashed." -Ellen Hopkins, Fallout

"…[T]he recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories." -Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., psychiatrist

"Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill." -Erich Fromm, psychologist

"Then the therapist becomes less of a technician and more of an artist in the therapeutic work. It’s then when the therapist and client meet in awareness without any barrier between." -Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence, Working from Within. The Psychology of Being

"I, also, decided to get rid of the need of approval. That is a strong addiction, the need of approval, isn’t it? That – I’m on the patch right now, actually. It releases small doses of approval until I no longer crave it.” -Ellen DeGeneres, The Beginning

"If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet." -Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

"The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies." -Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

"…[ I]t is almost always the case that whatever has wounded you will also be instrumental in your healing." -Robert A. Johnson, poet

"Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives." -Viktor Frankl, neurologist

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any give set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way." -Viktor Frankl, neurologist

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our personalities." -Sigmund Freud, neurologist

"Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you." -D.W. Winnicott, psychoanalyst