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David Smail QUOTES

David Smail QUOTES

1 " The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

2 " There is, I suggest, a strong positive correlation between a) the height of the rung occupied on the ladder of power, b) the strength of a sense of personal virtue, and c) the firmness of the conviction that those lower down could and certainly should act more responsibly. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

3 " Science is about our passionate conviction that we are placed within a universe that is not simply the result of our imaginings, and our longing and determination to understand it. Ultimately, science is about reality, truth and freedom. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

4 " It is incumbent upon us to do what we can, even if we cannot do much. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

5 " The principle locations of exploitation have moved, through the mechanism of 'globalisation', to where most of us can't see them and don't really care about them if we do. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

6 " For shy people the Other is everywhere, and it never occurs to them that they could be the Other for others, that anyone could care what they thought about things. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

7 " It is also true, however, that many patients experience psychotropic medication as in itself a further source of confusion and discomfort, since it may alter their perception of the world in an idiosyncratic way, so that their experience seems to bear no relation to the meaning of actual events of their world. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

8 " Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

9 " If, on the other hand, you insist on your knowledge of the emperor's nakedness, you may not find the ready assent from others which could confidently be expected only if you assume their good faith toward their own experience; In fact, their strenuous denial that they share your experience may leave you in such isolation that ultimately not only they but you yourself begin to question your sanity. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

10 " In order satisfactorily to function, we depend, throughout our lives, on the presence of others who will accord us validity, identity, and reality. You cannot be anything if you are not recognized as something; in this way your being becomes dependent on the regard of somebody else. You may be confirmed, or you may be disconfirmed, and if the latter is the case, often enough and pervasively enough, you simply cease to exist as a person. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

11 " However much some of them might like to be and however much they are seen as such by many people, scientists and psychologists are not creators of our culture, discoverers of ultimate truths which then shape our view of the world, but rather interpreters and refiners of our most fundamental concepts and understandings (and myths). "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

12 " For there would be no point in painful struggle, in heroic battle against injustice, in the painstaking achievements of culture and learning, in courageous stance against cruelty or adversity, in loving self-sacrifice for others, if in fact the experience gained by just one tortured and despairing individual could simply be 'adjusted' or 'modified' by the appropriate expert. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

13 " The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them). "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

14 " The truth, of course, is that human existence is uncertain and vulnerable, complex and delicate, and human relationships shot through with pain threat as well as joy and comfort. "

― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

15 " People can and often do ignore or deny their common humanity with others, or deny, at least implicitly, that their common humanity commits them to sympathy or compassion for those less advantaged than themselves. Indeed, such an attitude towards one's fellows can be represented as tough, uncompromising, positively heroic: the supermen versus the wimps. But just as this ruthless world may be chosen - as it is chosen by the current rulers of the globalised neo-liberal market - so it may also be rejected. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

16 " Absolutely everybody wants to be liked (law 1).

Everyone feels different inside (less confident, less able, etc.) from how they infer other people to feel (law 2).

Few honest and courageous people who have achieved anything of real value in life do not feel a fraud much of the time (law 3).

Acceptance of these three 'laws' alone would save an awful lot of people an awful lot of grief! "

― David Smail , Power, Responsibility and Freedom

17 " Our capacity as human beings for imagination and storytelling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power. "

― David Smail , Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

18 " Just imagine how terrible life would be if we really could be therapeutically engineered into clones of some kind of norm of ‘adjustment’, and how inevitably therapeutic technique would become an instrument of tyrannical repression. "

― David Smail , How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

19 " Whether or not we are able to realise our desires, put our plans into effect, do what we know to be right, will depend on our access to powers and resources which we need to acquire, or to have acquired, from the world around us. "

― David Smail , How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

20 " It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the way someone experiences their problems and what the causes of those problems are. "

― David Smail , How to Survive Without Psychotherapy