They F*** You Up Quotes

“This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life

“Playfulness is the cornerstone of emotional fulfilment, a key to insight and volition. It can be activated by any kind of everyday task from gardening to washing up. Although we need to earn a living, and although there are many practical tasks we have to perform, living as playfully as possible makes our existence infinitely more worthwhile.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“Indeed, half the battle of living a playful life lies in committing yourself to authentic communication. The fun of engagement with others soon follows.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“Neurosis is the rule, not the exception’, and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“There was not a single smoker in Europe before the sixteenth century, because until then there was no tobacco there. Very few women smoked until the twentieth century; now the habit is more popular among young women than among young men. To say that individual differences in smoking are half caused by genes is simply not true. It all depends on the environment in which the individual is living.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“A man visits a psychiatrist and tells him that his wife thinks she is a chicken. The psychiatrist asks why the man does not leave her, to which the man replies, ‘I need the eggs.’ That pretty much sums up all the marriages that I have ever known: each person needs the other’s madness.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“How we react to our friends as well as who we pick as a lover, our abilities and interests at work, in fact almost everything about our psychology as an adult is continually reflecting our childhood in our day-to-day, moment-by-moment experience.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“psychiatrists who believe the illness is largely genetic find hard to explain: at least 20 per cent of schizophrenics completely recover, most of them able to live their lives without any drug treatment at all. A telling example of a recovered schizophrenic is Rufus May. Not only did he become wholly sane but, having done so, he trained as a clinical psychologist and now treats schizophrenics in a community project”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“Americans are six times more likely to suffer than citizens of Shanghai (China) and Nigeria. In general, citizens of English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer as those in mainland Europe. This is extremely unlikely to be anything to do with genes since they share the same genetic stock, and I have argued elsewhere that the reason is Selfish Capitalist governance. Likewise, if you compare rates in Singapore and China, the populations of which also share genes, they are far higher in the (Americanized-Anglicized) Singapore.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

“the UNICEF State of the World’s Children report for 2001 stated that ‘for a government that wants to improve the lot of its people, investing in the first years of life is the best money it can spend. But tragically, both for children and for nations, these are the years that receive the least attention.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition