8
" Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology. "
― Robert L. Moore , Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity
11
" It is sheer fantasy to think that you can ever transform your grandiose energies so they will never seduce you again, that you can ever prevent your grandiosity from being seductive. Sometimes people think if they just prayed enough, or went to enough masses, then their grandiosity would stop being seductive. Or if they became a cardinal, or a bishop, or a mother superior, it would not be seductive anymore. The truth, of course, is just the opposite, because the more successful you get, the more seductive grandiosity gets. The more traumas and tragedies you have in your life, the more grandiosity will attack you. It can tell you how impressive it is that you are still alive, or it can chide you into depression by suggesting you might as well go ahead and commit suicide. Many suicidal thoughts come from a grandiose perfectionism. "
― Robert L. Moore , Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity
12
" If you come to me for analysis and therapy, and you absolutely refuse to have any spirituality, I will still work with you, but I will have to tell you honestly that without a spiritual practice it will be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to deal effectively with your archetypal Self, its grandiose energies, and its unconscious projections. If you come into analysis with me without a spiritual life, you might project your god-complex onto me if you like me and idealize me. I will probably try to carry it, and we will be tempted to have one of those Woody Allen, twenty-year analyses. This is what happens with Freudians and other therapists who do not understand that an idealizing transference of the god-complex onto the therapist is a mythic and spiritual phenomenon. If a therapist has trouble letting people terminate their therapy, it is because it is not therapy, but unconscious religion. The therapist has become a little Holy Father with his own little pseudo-religion. "
― Robert L. Moore , Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity
