My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.
Sydney PollackRead
I think a lot of creative people are uncomfortable with therapy. Because you're basically trying to 'solve' the unconscious. And the unconscious is where it all comes from.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creative individuals may feel uneasy about therapy as it delves into the unconscious mind, which is the source of their creativity.
This quote highlights the tension many creative people face with therapy. While they often draw inspiration from their unconscious thoughts and feelings, the idea of analyzing and potentially 'solving' these depths can be intimidating. The unconscious mind serves as a wellspring for creativity, but confronting it through therapy may seem like a threat to their artistic expression.
Themes
CreativityTherapyUnconsciousPsychologyConfrontation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the challenges faced by artists, one might use this quote to emphasize the conflict between creativity and self-exploration.
More from Sydney Pollack
All quotes →And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
Sydney PollackRead
If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.
Sydney PollackRead
It's my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.
Sydney PollackRead
You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.
Sydney PollackRead
Making a movie is a network of decisions that keep multiplying as you go. You leave a trail of decisions behind you, and that's how you start to see the shape of what you've done. When you get far enough, you turn around and say, 'Ha, that's the movie.' It's only then that you find out if it's going to work or not.
Sydney PollackRead
Similar quotes
People just hate the idea of losing. Any loss, even a small one, is just so terrible to contemplate that they compensate by buying insurance, including totally absurd policies like air travel.
Daniel KahnemanRead
A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. . . . The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain
Gabor MateRead
Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves.
Martin SeligmanRead
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
B. F. SkinnerRead
Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.
Martha BeckRead
I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
Albert EllisRead