Willard Gaylin
Willard Gaylin
Willard Gaylin is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is co-founder, along with Daniel Callahan, of The Hastings Center, and was its president since its inception in 1969 to 1993, chairman through 1994, and is now a member of the board. Gaylin received his B.A. from Harvard College, his M.D. from CaseWestern Medical School, and a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Education from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. For some 30 years...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
Willard Gaylin quotes about
We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival.
Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential.
Expressing anger is a form of public littering.
We are what we seem to be.
All of us inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependence. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way, it is a transient and passing glory.
To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.
A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.
We occupy a space of our own creation-a collage compounded by bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations.
The larger office, the corner space, the extra window are the teddy bears and tricycles of adult office life
Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.
Because we are intelligent creatures-meaning that we are freed from instinctive and patterned behavior to a degree unparalleled in the animal kingdom-we are capable of, and dependent on, using rational choice to decide our futures.
Feeling good and feeling bad are not necessarily opposites. Both at least involve feelings. Any feeling is a reminder of life. The worst 'feeling' evidently is non-feeling.
Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival.
Man, the most complicated of the animals, has a relatively short gestation period. Beyond that, he will be born, unlike most mammals, in a ridiculously helpless state.