“Therapy, you might say, became a kind of release valve for my life; it gave me a place to say the things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world — and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.”
Daphne Merkin
more infosource: “My Life in Therapy,” The New York Times, August 4, 2010.
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category: emotion, expression, psychology, shrink, therapy, thought
medium: magazine article
“Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.”
Robert Lowell
more infosource: letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated November 18, 1949, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 92.
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category: aquarium, past, psychology, shrink, therapy
medium: letter
“If psychoanalysis is going to divest me of all decoration, costume, adornment, flavor, characteristic, then what will be left?”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 1 1931–1934) (New York: The Swallow Press, 1966), 119.
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category: mask, psychoanalysis, psychology, shrink
medium: diary
“Counterphobic, a shrink once called it, meaning I run fast toward any event I suspect might be excruciating.”
Mary Karr
more infosource: Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 94.
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category: emotion, shrink, therapy, unhealthy behavior
medium: memoir
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