It was easier for her to believe that she had no desires than that she herself was suppressing them.

He declared himself to be ‘an untherapist’: his task was to convince people that they did not need therapy; his mission was to bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry.

We are the sum of these circumstances and our reactions to them.

She did not, she told me, want to be Dorothy any longer. She thanked me and left my office with a lightness of step that I had not seen in her before.

I suppose there is something reassuring about reading about those duds who make one’s own eccentricities pale by comparison.

I loathe children, with their sticky faces, scabby knees and noise (always their infernal noise). And that is to say nothing of the horrifying matter of giving birth, or the filthy business of copulation.

The designation of ‘whore’ was generally reserved for French actresses, who were doubly damned by virtue of being both actresses and French.

Intellectuals are the trickiest nuts to crack. They are so eager to impress you with their own understanding of their condition that they tend to carry on their own commentary as they are talking.

I told her that if she was happy being ‘me’ she wouldn’t have sought the help of a therapist in the first place.