Alice Miller Quotes

In therapy you sit down; in analysis you lie down.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

Psychotherapy works, and some types of therapy have been shown to be much more effective than antidepressants over the long run.

Only medical hypnosis is capable of opening up amnesia.

The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.

I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.

If the point of the inner-child movement is to cure adult problems, it doesn't work. Reliving childhood traumas gives you a nice afterglow, but it lasts only for hours or days. There is no evidence it changes adult problems.

In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions.

Regression to the stage of early infancy is not a suitable method in and of itself. Such a regression can only be effective if it happens in the natural course of therapy and if the client is able to maintain adult consciousness at the same time.

I don't mess around with my subconscious.

I have, since the age of about 2, been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of 10, when I was first taken to a mental hospital for evaluation and then referred to a psychiatrist for treatment, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety.

My work in general involves getting over my fears that are deeply embedded since childhood: Fear of darkness, fear of dangerous activities in general, and fear of dirt - I had a considerable obsessive compulsive disorder as a child.

Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely.

Apparently, as a kid, I used to eat spiders. Maybe there's some Freudian significance behind that.

The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you're doing - and connect your unconscious to your conscious.

My mom being a psychotherapist, I've been brought up with that whole psychoanalytical terrain.

The panic attacks - I still have them. They started when I was around 8. They always have to do with my death.

Multiple personality disorder and possession are not necessarily mutually incompatible disorders. There's some evidence that you can have both.

I had a very complex childhood, and when I met my wife, because she has a master's in psychology, she promoted me into getting help. It really has helped. I'm not healed yet, but I'm working on some issues I had as a child.

I know it's fashionable to blame your childhood for everything nowadays - thank you, Freud. The thing is, though, I really don't feel scarred by mine. But perhaps if I'd been in therapy for 10 years, and you were able to read the records, you'd disagree.

In London, it's quite a rarefied activity to be on an analyst's couch.

Trauma survivors have a deficiency in their capacity to regulate emotions - they're too prolonged and too intense and too negative. As a corollary to affect regulation, self-esteem, sense of self and inter-personal functioning all goes downhill. And that's a chronic thing that's solved in an-inter personal context.

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.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I'm not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.