Illusion and Reality Quotes

“Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them).”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“For shy people the Other is everywhere, and it never occurs to them that they could be the Other for others, that anyone could care what they thought about things.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Many children, however, are in some or many important respects unable to fulfill the expectations of their parents, and carry round with them, so to speak, raw, painful areas of disconfirmation which leave them exposed to sudden attacks of self-doubt and uncertainty, sudden ebbings of self-confidence which may well be experienced as 'symptoms' of anxiety or depression.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Tinkering, however 'scientifically', with our minds and bodies will never make the world a better place.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The less articulate person may have an awareness that 'something is not quite right', but will not be able to make that awareness concrete without having his or her consciousness 'raised' through the provision of finer and more sensitive (linguistic) concepts. (This is one of the ways in which the more educated exercise dominion over the lesser.)”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The 'experts' will not change the world-- they will simply make a satisfactory living helping people to adjust to it; the world will only change when ordinary people realize what is making them unhappy, and do something about it.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“... we are for the most part utterly impervious to the moral intention or significance of our conduct, and on the whole what we do is evaluated mainly in terms of what it achieves for the enhancement of our image and the augmentation of our power, status, and material advantage.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Nowhere is the necessity for courage and good faith more evident than in the search to establish the truth about relations between people, for in this process lies the threat of annihilation. As A struggles with B to lay bare the meaning of their conduct towards each other, bravely trying to stay clear of the slide into self-deception, to confess and accept his fear and vulnerability, to acknowledge his defensive strategies, his meannesses and malignancies and desperate cravings, so B can with a single act of bad faith betray the reciprocity of this process, perhaps by 'closing down' A with some sort of objectifying label which sends him spinning like a deflating balloon into the distant, icy, sterile reaches of isolation.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Science is thus not the creation of some kind of mysterious contact with or insight into ultimate reality, but the upshot of our own very human, and even culturally local, interests, concerns, and values. I suspect, also, that we are ready to give particular weight and credence to the 'evidence of our senses' because it is not in our interests to deceive ourselves about its nature (although it is certainly possible to do so).”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Even for physical science, the ultimate test of whether or not something is true lies in the individual's experience, not in some objectified, dogmatic set of rules. The sensory experiences which are predictable from natural scientific 'laws' permit agreement between individuals because those individuals share very similar physical structures, are persuaded by the same kinds of logical reasoning, and operate with a similar set of values.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Once all the technical mystique has been stripped away from psychotherapy, it does seem that a likely explanation for its almost explosive expansion over the last few decades is that it provides something which is otherwise in very short supply in a world in which a kind of watchful defensiveness against our vulnerability has replaced any kind of spontaneous generosity which people may more often once have felt for each other.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“It is also true, however, that many patients experience psychotropic medication as in itself a further source of confusion and discomfort, since it may alter their perception of the world in an idiosyncratic way, so that their experience seems to bear no relation to the meaning of actual events of their world.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“For there would be no point in painful struggle, in heroic battle against injustice, in the painstaking achievements of culture and learning, in courageous stance against cruelty or adversity, in loving self-sacrifice for others, if in fact the experience gained by just one tortured and despairing individual could simply be 'adjusted' or 'modified' by the appropriate expert.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Our feelings, then, insist on recognition even though, in our accounts, we can dissemble endlessly. Although we can fake our experience through the way we describe it, and even if we can blind ourselves to its significance, we cannot fake the experience itself.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Perhaps the anxious person's shame at his or her supposed 'difference' from others would be lessened by the realization that all of us, most of the time, do not know why we are doing what we are doing.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“On the whole, people deceive themselves through lack of courage rather than lack of clarity about the predicament in which they find themselves-- one may deceive oneself because one lacks the courage to face the implications of one's experience, or simply because that experience is so confused and puzzling that one opts for a relatively non-threatening interpretation of it.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Intimacy would involve an effort to explore each other's subjectivity, to listen charitably and experience empathetically, to shun labels and categories, to be alert to uniqueness, to allow the possibility of evolution in the psychological and relational spheres, to acknowledge uncertainty and creativity while trying to articulate and examine in good faith the stance we take to each other, and the world.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“To stand for something, whether in child-rearing or any other sphere, is of course to risk error; it is also to become conspicuous under the gaze of the Other, to give away one's position and to invite rejection. But it is also the only way through which social evolution can take a truly moral direction; it is the inescapable consequence of recognizing and taking seriously the fact that it is we who make the world, not 'it' or 'them'.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Only sensitivity to our own experience can drag us back from self-deception,”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The truth, of course, is that human existence is uncertain and vulnerable, complex and delicate, and human relationships shot through with pain threat as well as joy and comfort.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“If, on the other hand, you insist on your knowledge of the emperor's nakedness, you may not find the ready assent from others which could confidently be expected only if you assume their good faith toward their own experience; In fact, their strenuous denial that they share your experience may leave you in such isolation that ultimately not only they but you yourself begin to question your sanity.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“However much some of them might like to be and however much they are seen as such by many people, scientists and psychologists are not creators of our culture, discoverers of ultimate truths which then shape our view of the world, but rather interpreters and refiners of our most fundamental concepts and understandings (and myths).”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Most people simply deny what at another level they know to be the case, or suffer agonies of indecision over whether to trust their experience or not.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“To allow yourself to be loved by another is to put yourself totally in his or her power, to hand him or her the means of your destruction, because, by and large, we love one another only as objects.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The greatest misuse to which we put love, I believe, is to make it the conditional ground on which people can be rather than the unconditional ground from which they can do: we love people as objects rather than subjects.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“In order satisfactorily to function, we depend, throughout our lives, on the presence of others who will accord us validity, identity, and reality. You cannot be anything if you are not recognized as something; in this way your being becomes dependent on the regard of somebody else. You may be confirmed, or you may be disconfirmed, and if the latter is the case, often enough and pervasively enough, you simply cease to exist as a person.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety