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Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety QUOTES

Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " The 'experts' will not change the world-- they will simply make a satisfactory living helping people to adjust to it; the world will only change when ordinary people realize what is making them unhappy, and do something about it. "

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

11 " Many children, however, are in some or many important respects unable to fulfill the expectations of their parents, and carry round with them, so to speak, raw, painful areas of disconfirmation which leave them exposed to sudden attacks of self-doubt and uncertainty, sudden ebbings of self-confidence which may well be experienced as 'symptoms' of anxiety or depression. "

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

12 " The less articulate person may have an awareness that 'something is not quite right', but will not be able to make that awareness concrete without having his or her consciousness 'raised' through the provision of finer and more sensitive (linguistic) concepts. (This is one of the ways in which the more educated exercise dominion over the lesser.) "

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

13 " Tinkering, however 'scientifically', with our minds and bodies will never make the world a better place. "

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

14 " 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. "

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

15 " 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. "

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

16 " 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. "

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

17 " Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception, "

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

18 " Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception. "

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

19 " 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'. "

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

20 " Intimacy would involve an effort to explore each other's subjectivity, to listen charitably and experience empathetically, to shun labels and categories, to be alert to uniqueness, to allow the possibility of evolution in the psychological and relational spheres, to acknowledge uncertainty and creativity while trying to articulate and examine in good faith the stance we take to each other, and the world. "

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