30 Therapy Quotes

Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.

Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

I have a terrible problem with procrastination... a friend told me, 'Well, you should go to therapy. And I thought about it, but then I said, 'Wait a minute. Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk?' And that's when I got the idea of touring.

Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor that just wanted to see what it was like in there.

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.

The simplest way that I can understand therapy is that we're born a certain way, we're taught to be something different, and we spend our whole lives trying to unravel it and ultimately align ourselves with who we really are. Life, experiences, traumas -- whatever -- they all add up to make you some altered version of what you are. So there's this battle that goes on between what you are and what you become, and it's been very important for me to unravel what I was taught to be or what I became. and to draw a direct parallel to music -- the closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets, because I think what talent I do have is connected to that person, it's not a manipulative process, it's intuitive. You can learn about chords and guitars, but there's a piece of you that makes it individual, and it's been a slow process for me to become whatever it is that I'm supposed to be.

'When I review the tape [of the show] the next day, there's lots of screaming and crying,'...'Then I recover the same way I do anytime I'm injured: ice, elevation and my Clay Aiken CD.' -Ellen DeGeneres (US Weekend Magazine)

The first words I ever heard the alcohol rehab counselor say were 'Good morning, assholes!' With that, I liked him right away.

My favourite musician happens to be the same as Shakespeare's: John Dowland. His songs are sorrowful but heal the soul by their sweetness and courage.

For me, it's not important how well the songs will be received because I think she's already an amazing influence in what she's done. I listen to her stuff a lot while I sketch and I think there is a weird sense of emotional encouragement in her work. There's something therapeutic in her voice and in her attitude, so that sometimes just listening to it can encourage you or give you some kind of energy.

Now that you have seen how I help people transition from homosexual to straight, you can buy my new book or you can purchase my therapeutic tapes, and don't forget my hope and healing videos. I'm also available for speaking engagements. And, of course, I take credit cards. God bless. Amen. Be straight.

Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him--a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware...

Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations - that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

I was traumatized into writing by war events. By going through a war in a combat situation and feeling the desperate sense of terrible need for some sort of therapy. To get it out of my gut, write it down. This is the way it began for me.

To me, song writing is so therapeutic, it's just part of my life and I can't go through the day without having some kind of song idea pop into my head where I have to write Sharpie all over my arm trying to remember the song idea.

That's what a shrink is for, my friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity. It's a bull's job and they go to school to learn how, and their courses are all variations on a theme: Slipping It to the Psychos for Fun and Profit, Mostly Profit. And if you find yourself someday lying on that great analyst's couch where so many have lain before you, I'd ask you to remember one thing: When you get sanity by stud, the child always looks like the father. And they have a very high suicide rate.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.