Emma Forrest Quotes

The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.

We're all controlled neurotics.

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

Everybody's a bit screwed up, you know. You can take it as symptoms of a disorder, or you can take it as personality. Me, I'd rather think it as parts of personality.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.

Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.

It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

Mostly in life people are trying not to have emotions.

The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.

I think I'm lucky in that I can park things. I don't dwell. I've got a selective memory. I only remember the good things. I don't know what a psychologist or a psychiatrist would say about that.

I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.

I'm asked daily about how and why I don't have PTSD. I'm probably the last person on Earth you should ask about this stuff.

I'm a lunatic.

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.

Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.

Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.