Therapeutic Techniques Quotes

Frank Farrelly. . .must be thought of with respect (perhaps even delight?) by his clients who have so far played the game of therapy with their therapists, but, I am afraid, also a shocking example for those therapists who, in Laing's words, 'are playing at not playing a game'.

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy.

Freudian therapists do a lot of listening and very little persuading, and that was one of the reasons I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up, and you couldn't give homework to clients. While I was still an analyst, I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit psychoanalysis after practicing it for six years.

There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.

The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to the movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands... and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.

Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

I think people with anxiety do different things during different years, and for me, I waded through my anxiety during the last two years with men, and flirting, and dating, and this thing and that thing, and so that's going to stop, and that has stopped.

With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

I talk about therapy a lot because I love therapy. It has just enriched my life.

A good Dianetic auditor can take a broken-down, sorrow-drenched lady of thirty-eight and knock out her past periods of physical and mental pain and have on his hands somebody who appears to be twenty-five-and a bright, cheerful twenty-five at that.

Puppets allow a person to express things through this surrogate that wouldn't normally get expressed. You know there's famous techniques of puppet therapists. Put this hand puppet on and tell me what the problem is.