“The psychotherapy patient will have to learn to fend for himself, to become a lonely wayfarer whose whole life becomes one long, transforming pilgrimage. Being in treatment may show him the way he is to journey, but it will be up to him to reclaim his salvation continually by remaining on the march for the rest of his life.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 130)
Sheldon Kopp Quotes
“The only way to be saved is to spend your lifetime on a pilgrimage.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 128)
“Confronting one’s own personal garbage is the way to begin.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 126)
“As a therapist, I do not consider myself a ‘Shrink.’ I wish to help expand consciousness, not to diminish it. I am not interested in getting people to ‘adjust’ to our rather unsatisfactory culture. At the same time, I am not a ‘Radical Therapist’ preaching revolution and social change. Instead, I hope to help the pilgrims who seek my guidance to see that all rules are mere conventions, games that one can play or not. It is only necessary to recognize that they are games, to do what you wish, and to face the consequences of your behavior.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 117)
“If we flee from the evil in ourselves, we do it at our hazard. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 109)
“When we lay claim to the evil in ourselves, we no longer need fear its occurring outside of our control. For example, a patient comes into therapy complaining that he does not get along well with other people; somehow he always says the wrong thing and hurts their feelings. He is really a nice guy, just has this uncontrollable, neurotic problem. What he does not want to know is that his ‘unconscious hostility’ is not his problem, it’s his solution. He is really not a nice guy who wants to be good; he’s a bastard who wants to hurt other people while still thinking of himself as a nice guy. If the therapist can guide him into the pit of his own ugly soul, then there may be hope for him. Once this pilgrim can see how angry and vindictive he is, he can trace his story and bring it to the light, instead of being doomed to relive it without awareness. Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 108)
“No patient in psychotherapy can recover his own beauty and innocence without first facing the ugliness and evil in himself. [Carl] Jung tells us we have ‘dealt the devil… [no] serious blow by calling him neurosis.'”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 105)
“What a waste of her life to spend herself trying to be something good enough for mother, when she was already good enough. Nothing could ever be good enough to finally satisfy such a mother. If she can face what a fool she has been to have tried and tried to transform her vitality into a power that would make this insatiable mother happy, she may then be able to reclaim her power for herself. She never had any real power over mother, or over the feelings of anyone else. Her only real power lies in taking charge of her own life, enjoying being who she is, and making her life as meaningful as she can for herself, whatever others may or may not expect of her.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 88)
“Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life, there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving. We get to keep no more than we earn by our own efforts. In a way, we each get what we deserve. Everyone is entitled to keep as much garbage as he is willing to put out or to put up with.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 85)
“What people look for in marriage, at least in part, is the other half of themselves. Each of us is in some measure incomplete, with some aspects of our humanity over-developed and others neglected. What we do not claim for ourselves, we look for in the other (for example, aggressiveness, tenderness, spontaneity, stability, and so on). This is most extreme in the marriages of neurotics whose own self-image is so skewed that they seek out mates who are caricatures of the other end of the personality spectrum (such as the timid, self-inhibiting woman who searches for a glamorous, super adventuresome epic-hero of a man, while he in turn seeks a woman too scared to let him get into trouble).”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 70)
“At present, I see monogamous, lifelong marriage as our most viable solution to loneliness, as the best setting so far available in which to raise children, and as the most practical contract for mutual support and freedom in a world so difficult for any one person to manage within.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 68)
“Patients learn in the course of telling their tales that they can discover themselves by becoming curious about the other struggling human beings with whom they live in the world. The only times that we can have what we long for are those moments when we stop grasping for it. At such times, all things are possible: ‘to a mind that is ‘still’ the whole universe surrenders.'”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 65)
“Siddhartha ‘no longer merely knows about, he understands the evils of the worldly life’ and so he is free of them.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 60)
“Psychotherapy patients also soon learn to be moved by their nocturnal visions as they discover that we are often wiser when we dream than when we are awake. Because the dreaming experience is unhampered by whorish Reason, and the dreamer is not distracted by the conventional wisdom of other people’s perspectives and expectations, we sometimes see most clearly when our eyes are closed.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 58)
“The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being. Illusions die hard, and it is painful to yield to the insight that a grown-up can be no man’s disciple. This discovery does not mark the end of the search, but a new beginning.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 56)
“The central fact of my own life is my death. After a while, it will all come to nothing. Whenever I have the courage to face this, my priorities become clear.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 42)
“The patient/pilgrim insists that there must be some meaning that he just has not yet gotten hold of or else he would be happy. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Why did all this happen to me?’ He believes that if only he could understand, if only the therapist would explain it to him, then he could live with life as it is and be happy. But ‘the meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.’ The point is that there is no point. In a world of billion[s], countless numbers long dead and an infinite number yet to be born, how important are the momentary frustrations or satisfactions of any one of us?”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 41)
“Each man has his Enkidu, his other half, his hidden self. The more he is out of touch with his double the more a man’s life is an empty and unsatisfying burlesque. When such a man comes to me as a pilgrim/patient, then like the goddess, Aruru, I try to introduce him to his double, so that they may come to embrace one another. For one strong man who lives like a brute, there is the double of his own soft helplessness to be met. Without his weak and passive double, his capacity for tenderness and gentle touch is also lost. For another sort of half-man who meets the world as Mr. Nice Guy, there is the danger of living a life of self-degrading appeasement. In order to become free to assert himself when he needs to, he must first be introduced to the ruthlessly dangerous double of his undiscovered rage.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 32)
“If I am transparent enough to myself, then I can become less afraid of those hidden selves that my transparency may reveal to others. If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone. It is enough that I must die alone. I am determined to let down, whatever the risks, if it means that I may have whatever is there for me.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 26) | ★ Featured in Matt’s Blog.
“One of the luxuries of being a psychotherapist is that it helps to keep you honest. It’s a bit like remaining in treatment all of your life. It helps me to remain committed to telling and retelling my tale for the remainder of that pilgrimage that is my life. Research in self-disclosure supports my own experience that the personal openness of the guru facilitates and invites the increased openness of the pilgrim. But I operate not to help the patient, but to help myself. It is from the center of my own being that I am moved to share my tale. That it turns out to be so helpful to the patient is gravy.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 24)
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