Psychopathology Quotes

“Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.”

“Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery:”

“Good general differ from bad generals only in the degree to which they resist the psychopathology of the very organization they serve. Norman Dixon”

“It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself” (p. 5)”

“He had learned that close-held secrets could often be cracked by going all the way to the top and there making himself unbearably unpleasant. He knew that such twisting of the tiger's tail was dangerous, for he understood the psychopathology of great power.”

“The lifetime prevalence of dissociative disorders among women in a general urban Turkish community was 18.3%, with 1.1% having DID (ar, Akyüz, & Doan, 2007). In a study of an Ethiopian rural community, the prevalence of dissociative rural community, the prevalence of dissociative disorders was 6.3%, and these disorders were as prevalent as mood disorders (6.2%), somatoform disorders (5.9%), and anxiety disorders (5.7%) (Awas, Kebede, & Alem, 1999). A similar prevalence of ICD-10 dissociative disorders (7.3%) was reported for a sample of psychiatric patients from Saudi Arabia (AbuMadini & Rahim, 2002).”

“Despite the growing clinical and research interest in dissociative symptoms and disorders, it is also true that the substantial prevalence rates for dissociative disorders are still disproportional to the number of studies addressing these conditions. For example, schizophrenia has a reported rate of 0.55% to 1% of the normal population (Goldner, Hus, Waraich, & Somers, more or less similar to the prevalence of DID. Yet a PubMed search generated 25,421 papers on research related to schizophrenia, whereas only 73 publications were found for DID-related research.”

“...American psychology effectively guaranteed its place as a cultural icon by helping to create the pathologies it simultaneously promised to treat. (p. 37)”

“Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.”