Home > Author > David Smail
41 " Moral rules, as we have seen, simply do not apply in the realm of feelings, if only because feelings cannot be switched on and off at will. "
― David Smail , How to Survive Without Psychotherapy
42 " A great deal of distress could be avoided, then, if we could learn to withdraw ‘morality’ from the private world of our feelings and to concentrate instead on the rights and wrongs of our conduct. "
43 " Tinkering, however 'scientifically', with our minds and bodies will never make the world a better place. "
― David Smail , Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety
44 " Our wishfulness, it seems, is detached from our intelligence so that each in its own way threatens to run out of control. "
45 " the theoretical background (such as it is) and practical toolkit of ‘behavioural’ and ‘cognitive’ approaches in clinical psychology, apart from having a kind of deadening banality about them, just didn't seem to work. "
46 " It may certainly be true that I seem to have acquired that knowledge without even trying, but that doesn't mean that I also know how to do things differently. "
47 " not all the confident pronouncements and scientific demonstrations in the literature could be right, because many of them contradicted each other. There must be another factor at work, and the most likely was professional self-interest. "
48 " The banal assumptions of our culture, it seems, have made it more and more difficult for us to take an interest in each other's lives. "
49 " given a clear enough understanding of the causes of distress – an initial liberating break from the mystifying production of a century of psychology – there is not a great deal of need for psychotherapy itself. "
50 " I am at least as much a social as a biological construction. "
― David Smail
51 " it is solidarity with the therapist that lends heart to patients as they struggle with their difficulties. "
52 " The greatest misuse to which we put love, I believe, is to make it the conditional ground on which people can be rather than the unconditional ground from which they can do: we love people as objects rather than subjects. "
53 " To allow yourself to be loved by another is to put yourself totally in his or her power, to hand him or her the means of your destruction, because, by and large, we love one another only as objects. "
54 " In the rawness of our experience, the chaotic jumble of our impressions, impulses and dreams, we are all eccentrics. "
55 " Most people simply deny what at another level they know to be the case, or suffer agonies of indecision over whether to trust their experience or not. "
56 " we have a general understanding of what it is and is not reasonable to expect in particular situations. This understanding is precisely what the superconscientious have been prevented from developing, usually because it was not in the interests of those who had power over them that they should. "
57 " Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception, "
58 " Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception. "
59 " To stand for something, whether in child-rearing or any other sphere, is of course to risk error; it is also to become conspicuous under the gaze of the Other, to give away one's position and to invite rejection. But it is also the only way through which social evolution can take a truly moral direction; it is the inescapable consequence of recognizing and taking seriously the fact that it is we who make the world, not 'it' or 'them'. "
60 " It is important to realise that there is a lot more to character than just the idiosyncratic personal foibles which make it possible for us to recognise each other as individuals. "