Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom 23 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951):

Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure: whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honesty in silence before the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 215 (New York: Norton, 1979):

In every life there are experiences, painful and at first disorienting, which by their very intensity throw a sudden floodlight on the ways we have been living, the forces that control our lives, the hypocrisies that have allowed us to collaborate with those forces, the harsh but liberating facts we have been enjoined from recognizing. Some people allow such illuminations only the brevity of a flash of sheet-lighting, that throws a whole landscape into sharp relief, after which the darkness of denial closes in again. For others, these clarifications provide a motive and impulse toward a more enduring lucidity, a search for greater honesty, and for the recognition of larger issues of which our personal suffering is a symptom, a specific example.

Harry Remde, "Close to Zero," in D. M. Dooling (ed.), A Way of Working 49-55, at 55 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979):

Despite his experience, despite the sureness that he sometimes is able to reach and briefly hold, there is within him [the craftsman] as he works, a hesitation, a doubt, a fear. . . .

When he fails, the failure leaves its trace in him and a clearer perception. The trace remains for a time in his memory . . . . It is like an inner object, a weightless burden that reminds.

He continues to have a need for failure. It is the stopping place, the ultimate reluctance of his effort to continue. As he works, his reluctance accumulates, his tenseness grows. He fails--and is able to start again.

Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation 198-199 (South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1985):

Whether it be a raindrop (a raindrop that was about to fall but froze, giving birth to a beautiful icicle), be it a bird that sings, a bus that runs, a violent person on the street, be it a sentence in the newspaper, a political speech, a lover's rejection, be it anything, we must adopt a critical view, that of the person who questions, who doubts, who investigates, and who wants to illuminate the very life we live.

My suggestion is that we capture our daily alienation, the alienation of our routine, of repeating things bureaucratically, of doing the same thing every day at ten o'clock, for example, because "it has to be done" and we never question why. We should take our lives into our own hands and begin to exercise control. We should try to stand up to, and get out from under time.

In these complex societies we sometimes find ourselves living very much submerged in time, without critical and dynamic appreciation of history, as if history were flying over us, commanding and relentlessly regulating our lives. This is a fatalism that immobilizes, suffocates, and eventually kills us. History is nothing like this. History has no power. As Marx has said, history does not command us, history is made by us. History makes us while we make it. Again, my suggestion is that we attempt to emerge from this alienating daily routine that repeats itself. Let's try to understand life, not necessarily as the daily repetition of things, but as an effort to create and re-create, and as an effort to rebel, as well. Let's take our alienation into our own hands and ask, "Why?" "Does it have to be this way?" I do not think so. We need to be subjects of history, even if we cannot totally stop being objects of history. And to be subjects, we need unquestionably to claim history critically. As active participants and real subjects, we can make history only when we are continually critical of our very lives.

John Welwood, "Vulnerability and Power in the Therapeutic Process," in John Welwood (ed.), Awakening the Heart: East/West Approaches to Psychotherapy and the Healing Relationship 148-162, at 148-149 (Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala, 1983):

I'm sure we're all familiar with these moments when the meanings on which we've been building our lives unexpectedly collapse. Suddenly they lack weight and substance, no longer influencing us or holding us up as they once did. Before, we may have been motivated for success--making money, providing for our family, or seeking to be loved. Now suddenly, in this moment, we wonder why we're doing all of this, what it's all about. We may look around in vain for some absolute, unwavering reason for it all, some unshakable ground, yet all we see is the inexorable passing of time and our hopeless attempts to grasp on to something solid.

At the same time, when an old structure falls away and we don't have a new one to replace it, we usually feel a certain inner rawness. That kind of tenderness and nakedness is one of the most essential qualities of our humanness, one which we are usually masking. When an outer shell or facade or mask falls away, we get to touch what we might call our basic vulnerability.

James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology 55-56, 57, 58, 70, 71, 75, 81, 82 (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975):

Each soul at some time or another demonstrates illusions and depressions, overvalued ideas, manic flights and rages, anxieties, compulsions, and perversions. Perhaps our psychopathology has an intimate connection with our individuality, so that our fear of being what we really are is partly because we fear the psychopathological aspect of individuality. For we are each peculiar; we have symptoms; we fail, and cannot see why we go wrong or even where, despite high hopes and good intentions. We are unable to set matters right, to understand what is taking place or be understood by those who would try. Our minds, feelings, wills, and behaviors deviate from normal ways. Our insights are impotent, or none come at all. Our feelings disappear in apathy; we worry and also don't care. Destruction seeps out of us autonomously and we cannot redeem the broken trusts, hopes, loves.

The study of lives and the care of souls means above all a prolonged encounter with what destroys and is destroyed, with what is broken and hurts. . . .

* * * *

In order to approach the psychology of pathology afresh, I am introducing the term pathologizing to mean the psyche's autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behavior and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective.

* * * *

Were we able to discover its psychological necessity, pathologizing would no longer be wrong or right, but merely necessary, involving purposes which we have misperceived and values which must present themselves necessarily in a distorted form.

* * * *

To treat pathologizing as secondary and extraneous rather than as primary and inherent, neglects the reality that pathologizing is not a field but a fundament, a strand in all our being, woven into every complex. It is a belonging of each thought and feeling, and a face of each person of the psyche. To neglect the primary validity of the soul's sickness-experience distorts our notion of soul and our work with it.

* * * *

Pathologizing is present not only at moments of special crisis but in the everyday lives of all of us.

* * * *

[P]athologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives. Their styles, their concerns, their loves, reflect patterns that have pathologized strands woven all through them. The deeper we know ourselves and the other persons of our complexes, the more we recognize how well we, too, fit into the textbook sketches of abnormal psychology.

* * * *

We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.

* * * *

[S]ymptoms are demonstrations of the psyche, a mode of its being and expression, part of its fantasy and its affliction.

* * * *

We each have a predilection for pathologizing. It shows in our spontaneous fantasies. Whenever a symptom appears, or an anxiety about our state of mind or physical welfare, it is immediately carried by fantasy into its worst potential, into the incurable possibility: the stiff neck becomes immediately the incipient meningitis; the little lump, cancer; and the nightmare a presentiment of madness, accident, or ruin. There is the feeling of something "deeply" wrong, something "deeper" going on that needs immediate attention. With pathologizing comes the feeling of dark forces in the depths. . . .

Whether we bear the symptom like a hero, deserve it like a martyr, or treat it like a doctor, we are pathologizing as well by enacting the role of patient.

* * * *

The psyche uses complaints to speak in a magnified and misshapen language about its depths. . . . So let us start our revision of pathologizing by considering it a manner of telling, a way in which the psyche talks to itself.

 

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