Peter D. Kramer Quotes

Support has no direction. Our plan is to hold the patient - to strengthen the container - until the patient develops his own container-strengths or until the contents settle down. We do not know just how or when all this ought to happen. Worse we do not have a particularly cogent rationale for limiting our own actions...

What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?

The advice that I have valued in my own life has never turned on fixed maxims or canned metaphors. More crucially, lists of precepts don't work like targeted advice because lists contain inherently constraining messages. They seem to say that complex matters are knowable, that a given process leads to foreseeable results. It implies a thin and predictable world, whereas the sort of advice that has mattered to me bespeaks a quite tentative optimism, the optimism of the quest whose outcome is finally unknowable.

Swimming, Freud favors the breaststroke, to keep his beard dry.

Part of the impetus for my writing is the pain I've seen my friends experience both in their marriage and in their dreams.

I do not like to see men walk away from women in late middle age.

In supportive work, the therapist cedes great control to the patient. It may seem otherwise. The therapist is setting limits, perhaps implicitly commenting on the patient's behavior or sense of self, and so forth, and on the surface it seems that the therapist is taking responsibility for the patient's progress. but all this activity leads nowhere except, if we succeed, to stability. In supportive therapy, change arises in a more or less miraculous way , through the patient's suddenly feeling secure enough to move in a certain direction, perhaps one unanticipated by the therapist. It is this pathless quality of supportive work - the degree of blind faith it requires of the therapist - that makes it most uncomfortable.

The success of Prozac says that today's high-tech capitalism values a very different temperament. Confidence, flexibility, quickness, and energy - the positive aspects of hyperthymia - are at a premium.

When a psychiatrist writes a bestseller, he is then urged to write a book of advice. But I think our culture's awash in advice. The problem is we don't know whether it applies to us or whether we're an exception.

Suicide is what the death certificate says when one dies of depression.

Depression, in its insidious way, acts as a degenerative disease, harming nerve cells. Like

When people come into the office and say they've tried to make their marriage work, and I hear what the effort was, it seems to me that there's some lack of understanding of what effort is.