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Quotes of the Month

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"The mental pain of a breakdown is the echo of the pain of long-lost relationships. The echo resonates through into consciousness because a painful loneliness has descended again upon the patient....Patterns of loneliness in the present tend always to invoke their prototypes lying dormant at the roots of being....(G)enuine company can combat neurotic anxiety. Just as recent social isolation can arouse a reverberation of the separation-anxieties of infancy through into consciousness, so the return of good relationship, in which the lonely person is cared for, will replace the resonance of anxiety-provoking situations by the resonable of such other good relationships of infancy as are available on the reverberating circuits of memory....In this way, the mere provision of an attentive listener can put to flight an army of irrational fears."
--Frank Lake, M.D. Clinical Theology, pgs. 9-10.

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"Beginning in 1969 he (Dr. Lake) started to utilize Reichian and bio-energetic deep-breathing techniques, which he actually found to work just as well or better than LSD-25."
-- Stehen J. Maret, Ph.D. - Frank Lake's Maternal-Fetal Distress Syndrome, An Analysis, Dissertation, 1992, pps. 17-18.

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"The natural tendency of the ego is still to take flight from such terrors into defensive manoeuvres. This is the crux of therapy, not merely to bring the ultimate forms of mental pain to the doors of consciousness, but to endow the ego with supernatural fortitude to endure them....for the most part we have not the courage. The 'decision' to retain the defences of repression is taken out of our hands and we have no resources to alter it. British and Continental psychiatrists usually do not attempt to uncover the deeper layers of mental pain. Intensely threatening experiences, alien to the ego, are not brought to its notice. On the contrary, doctors have evolved a vocabulary of fictitious disease entities such as 'your nerves' to give of semblance of understanding a diagnosis. The patient is encouraged to think that the symptoms of impending break-down have been satisfactorily accounted for. His returning repression is consequently untroubed by doubts."
--Frank Lake, M.D. Clinical Theology, p. 27

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"Most of the drugs and physical treatments we use are directed to the same end, the repression of the potentially disruptive contents of the unconscious mind. As psychiatrists we know that even practising under ideal conditions we have not the resources required to enable human beings to come to terms with the worst forms of mental pain such as underlie the very common hysterical, schizoid, paranoid, and homosexual personality disorders. Whether in psychiatric clinics or in psychoanalytic practice we are wary of arousing expectation of cure in patients with severe schizoid ego-defect, or paranoid thinking, however eager they may be to 'get to the bottom of the trouble.'"
--Frank Lake, M.D. Clinical Theology, p. 27