Psychosis Quotes

“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”
― Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

“Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.”
― R.D. Laing

“Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane.”
― David Bowie

“A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology

“Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world).”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology

“Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning *everything*.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“He didn’t know what beget what, but he quickly learned that people with money to hide were powerful, and powerful people were violent. It was reliable math: as the amount of money being conveyed increased, so too did the level of paranoia; the psychotic behavior of his clients increasing with every figure added to the sum.”
― T. Mountebank, Sister Sable

“We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of "narcissistic psychoneuroses" for these disorders.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology

“Schizofrenia pana la ultima ei limita, refuzul total al oricarei realitati decat cea a visului, al oricarui adevar decat al viziunii.”
― Gellu Naum

“...I have sometimes imagined my own sanity as resting on the surface of a membrane, a thin and fragile membrane that can easily be ripped open, plunging me into the abyss of madness, where I join the tumbling souls whose membranes have likewise been pieced over the ages. Sometimes, when my thoughts are especially fevered, I can visualize the agent of this piercing. It is a watchful presence at the edge of things, silent and dripping, a stranger in a raincoat... When we fall into such psychosis, there are no other membranes below to catch and protect us. And the horror and helplessness of the fall are intensified by an uncaring world.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The truth, and the threat it poses, can be too overwhelming to bear, and for many women in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, the truth was that their experiences were being dismissed by the men in their lives. Although many of the women in the films of this period are clearly meant to be schizophrenic, sociopathic or downright psychotic, the underlying implication (and there always is one in horror films) is that these ‘illnesses’ come in at the break between the woman’s experience and the man’s experience of the same situation- and what is ‘true’ or ‘right’ is often whatever the man says it is.”
― Kier-la Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films

“Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“What had tormented him ever since the psychotic episode with the personnel manager at Corona Corporation was this: suppose it was not a hallucination? Suppose the so-called personnel manager was as he had seen him, an artificial construct, a machine like these teaching machines?
If that had been the case, then there was no psychosis.
Instead of a psychosis, he had thought again and again, it was more on the order of a vision, a glimpse of absolute reality, with the façade stripped away. And it was so crushing, so radical an idea, that it could not be meshed with his ordinary views. And the mental disturbance had come out of that.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“For such a patient it would probably be a complete non sequitur to attempt to kill his self, by cutting his throat, since his self and his throat may be felt to bear only a tenuous and remote relationship to each other, sufficiently remote for what happens to the one to have little bearing on the other.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“We propose a general division of delusions;   “self deceptions of common feats" (like mysticism, erotomania, identity delusions, possession delusions, grandiose delusions) and "self deception of shield feats" (delusions of jealousy, delusions of reference as being slandered, persecution as being poisoned).  The theory of the shield feats can be the connecting piece between self deception and delusions, because although always delusions of grandiosity could easily be understood as self deception to enjoy a more pleasant world, the frequency of negative delusions seems to destroy this simplistic hypothesis. However , when considering the shield feats, then it is the link that connects the intuitive hypothesis of self-deception with psychosis , which happens to be understood as a continuum of the same phenomenon”
― Martín Ross, THE SHIELD FEATS THEORY: a different hypothesis concerning the etiology of delusions and other disorders.

“If a psychosis was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static? But you dont. You get a carefully crafted and fairly articulate world never seen before. Who's doing this? Who is it who is running around hooking up the dangling wires in new and unusual ways. Why is he doing it? What is the algorithm he follows? Why do we suspect there is one?”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“We are all Believers (searching) for meaning,
and Sexual (with desire) for a reason,
and Crazy (by degrees) for Love”
― Todd Crawshaw, God, Sex & Psychosis

“In the doorway stood a figure, light forming a halo around his head.

He isn’t really there,
Tom told himself.
You’re hallucinating.
If he could split into different parts that talked to each other, perhaps one of them had gone to the door.

‘Major Fox?’ it enquired.

So polite, this hallucination.”
― Jack Grimwood, Moskva

“Religious beliefs are; in a way, a form of voluntary, self-induced psychosis. Which eliminates or softens the fall (if the real psychosis ever came). Medicine for the mind, or if you will - the soul.”
― Monaristw

“Psychosis, it seemed to some, was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan's 1968 LP The Medium is the Massage, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan believed formed a new electronic form of “acoustic space.” When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go the hospital.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

“Unpacking certain words or concepts, may reveal, [attributes] which may not always hold true to intended use. If the majority (or the influencial source) is lazy, the language adopts a lazy attitude - bundling in [other] which were observed throughout time, disregarding exceptions. Which again, may almost certainly be due to past hardships, when survival is a prefered priority. Impatience. Patience. Then. Now.

However, good things usually take time.”
― Xalaristw

“Some psychic bombardment of the will to live had begun, a new particle of love's mysterious atom had been discovered — the itch to jump.”
― Norman Mailer, An American Dream

“There is a thin line between being a creative and being crazy. Many creatives ended up in the psych ward or heavily medicated... They only needed one person to believe in their visions.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.”
― Paul Levy, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World

“An inner cancer of the soul, wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the bug in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.”
― Paul Levy, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World

“Psychosis means being locked up in a dark square and unable to find yourself.”
― Xanya Sofra Ph.D, Brainwashed: From Illusion to Autonomy

“It can be quite challenging to constantly remind ourselves that the reality we experience is merely a construct of our own minds. Despite our efforts to ground ourselves in the present, we often find ourselves getting caught up in the illusion of this fabricated world. However, it is imperative that we do not lose sight of the fact that none of this is real. The material possessions, societal norms, and societal expectations that we often place great value on are merely man-made constructs. It is crucial to maintain a sense of detachment and perspective, and to remember that ultimately, true reality lies beyond the physical realm.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“I know wholeheartedly that prescribing benzodiazepines again would restore a significant amount of the degeneration and restore the pleasure of life within a mere 20 minutes, despite the potential adverse effects. I can confidently assert that akathisia is the most detrimental condition in existence.”
― Jonathan Harnisch