Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell. – Renata Adler
The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives. – Georges Bataille
If you get hung up on everybody elses hang-ups, then the whole worlds going to be nothing more than one huge gallows. – Richard Brautigan
A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made. – Luis Bunuel
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. – Sigmund Freud
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young. – Sigmund Freud
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality. – Sigmund Freud
So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic. – Allen Ginsberg
There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event. – R. D. Laing
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair. – R. D. Laing
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. – Marshall McLuhan
The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves. – Marcel Proust
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient? – Marcel Proust
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. – Susan Sontag
Much of what is labeled mental illness simply reflects our – George Vaillant
