#pathology

Lying just for the fun of it is either art or pathology. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#either #fun #just #lying #pathology

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy. ↗

— Frank Tallis

#imagination #insanity #isolation #mind #pathology

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#character #develops #every #exaggerated #express

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure. ↗

— Ellen Glasgow

#analysis #pathology #psychiatrist #psychiatry #psychologist

Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#gender #homosexuality #lesbianism #morality #nature

The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#masochism #mistress #prostitute #psychopathology #sexuality

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#bipolar-disorder #depression #mania #manic #manic-depression

There are sins much more serious than socio-pathologies which really are mental illnesses, whereas self-righteousness is an illness of the soul." ~R. Alan Woods [2013] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#r-alan-woods #self-righteousness #sins #sociopathology #sociopaths

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#absolution #agnosticism #distrust #evasion #health

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological. ↗

— Charles Bernheimer

#decadent #emile-zola #feminine #joris-kerl-huysmans #nature