Psychosomatic Quotes

“Social gatherings, not infrequently, grow into the scenery of funny episodes on a Brueghelian canvas or become a psychosomatic arena with displays of emotional outbursts. They can indeed arouse confrontations of absence and attendance, of presence, past, and future. ("I hope she won't mind my leaving")”
― ERIK PEVERNAGIE

“Negativity is food for malady, one might say.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

“When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“And, whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.”
― Les Murray, Fredy Neptune

“Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.”
― Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories

“It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss.
To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Thus it may be said that the symptoms are often ways of containing the anxiety; they are the anxiety in structuralized form. Freud rightly remarks about psychological symptoms: "The symptom is bound anxiety," or, in other words, anxiety which has been crystallized into an ulcer or heart palpitations or some other symptom.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“- Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such.
- As birds do?
- No, he flies as a man who has taken the weed.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“my illness was assumed to be some sort of fiction, unless I could prove otherwise”
― Hilary Mantel

“ Fear ordinarily does not lead to illness if the organism can flee successfully . If the individual cannot flee, but is forced to remain in a conflict situation which cannot be resolved, fear may turn into anxiety and psychosomatic changes may then accompany e anxiety.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“..wer am meisten genießt, betet am meisten.”
― Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod

“Жизнь стиха -
тоже тиха.”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky, Poèmes, tome 4, 1924-1926

“L'histoire montre ... que moins on lit et plus on achète de livres.”
― Albert Camus, Jonas Ou L'Artiste Au Travail: Suivi de la Pierre Qui Pousse (Folio (Gallimard))

“Если бы вы могли видеть своё лицо, свои движения... Какая вам лень жить! Ах, какая лень!”
― Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

“Not every sickness is psychosomatic, but a weak psyche can indeed make a sickness worse.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine

“Она читала, далеко отставив от себя книгу: упавшая на стол рука казалась неживой.”
― Isaac Babel, Конармия

“Пеняй на самого себя!
Тебе единым на потребу
да будет - пристальность твоя.”
― Александр Блок, Возмездие

“We’re all going to be little brown gophers. We’ll all have to learn to dig down in the rubble and find the good things, because that’s where they’ll be.”
― Philip K. Dick, Foster, You're Dead

“..einmal ein Reich-Abschied von 1577 den guten Frauen das körperliche Springen verbot..”
― Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik

“Есть беспощадность в примитивах.
У них для правды нет границ -
ряды позорно некрасивых,
разоблачённых кистью лиц”
― Максимилиан Волошин, Стихотворения

“Она смеялась, потому что я был мальчик, а она девочка, и между нами появился стыд”
― Yury Olesha, No Day without a Line: From Notebooks

“The mind is a function of the brain and is created from biology.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“That's how modern medicine works: disease impresses people; illness with no evidence of the disease does not. Psychological illness, psychosomatic and functional symptoms are the least respected of medical problems.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“... [resignation syndrome was] like being in a dream that she didn't want to wake up from.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“Biological correlates are often used to give credence to the experience of psychosomatic disorders. An objective change on a blood test or scan allows others to believe in the suffering.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“... alternating between anticipation and despondency. That has physical consequences.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“Was man als Gewissen wahrnimmt, ist in Wirklichkeit das regulierende System der Psyche. Es hat den Zweck, die Emotionalität zu regulieren und das emotionale Gleichgewicht herzustellen.”
― Max Lüscher, Das Harmoniegesetz in uns: Der Klassiker der neuen Richtungen

“Das Autoregulationssystem regelt das Gleichgewicht (nicht den Ausgleich) zwischen den gegensätzlichen Polen.”
― Max Lüscher, Das Harmoniegesetz in uns: Der Klassiker der neuen Richtungen