There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.
Interpretation
Psychiatry is a serious field with important implications; seeking enjoyment in it can lead to unrealistic expectations and consequences.
Harry Stack Sullivan's quote emphasizes the seriousness of psychiatry as a discipline. While one might hope to find joy or entertainment in the therapeutic process, doing so can foster an unrealistic and overly optimistic view of mental health care, which may result in disappointment or disillusionment when faced with the complexities of psychological issues.
In practice
This quote could be used in a mental health seminar to discuss the realistic expectations of therapy.
When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.
It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.
What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those whom I love or refuse to love.
The combination of rumination and negative mood is toxic. Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel besieged, powerless, self-critical, pessimistic, and generally negatively biased.
Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. It's a nice way to explain the tendency to have one preference about the future, but a very different preference when the future becomes the present.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.
We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.
Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it's also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.
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