It was a fire of conscience, and meanings that made up packages of hell which seared into the mind. And what could we do? Supply a variety of survival strategies that made sense of the cacophony of survival?

Humans need their lives to make sense and to have meaning and purpose. Lack of meaning and purpose can override both the natural pace of progression to death and the instinctive struggle for life. People may sacrifice their lives in order to achieve meaning and purpose, or they may commit suicide in order to avoid meaninglessness. The role of medicine here is to expose false beliefs for which people may sacrifice themselves, and to help find realistic meanings that make life worthwhile.

The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, prevents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. The sheer volume and variety of helf-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it.

The purpose behind discerning the nature of love is not to satisfy ivory tower discussions or to produce fodder for academic delectation. Instead, as our work makes all too clear, the world is full of live men and women who encounter difficulty in loving or being loved, and whose happiness depends critically upon resolving that situation with the utmost expediency.

The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness. (168)

Our society’s love affair with mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything that does not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people now suppose, including their hearts.

First, psychotherapy is an art. It is not a science (the human-beings-are-laboratory-rats mentality of the behaviorist notwithstanding). A friend of mine, a philosopher of esthetics, defines art as: anything that people treat as art. So it is with psychotherapy. Any mad school that springs up and gets people to call it "psychotherapy" then becomes a "psychotherapy." But is it good psychotherapy or just mad?

Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort.

Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.

The establishment of an authentic relationship with patients, by its very nature, demands that we forego the power of the triumvirate of magic, mystery, and authority.