...an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a microsurgeon of the mind who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.

If you want to lift a hundred pounds, you don't expect to succeed the first time. You start with a lighter weight and work up little by little. You actually fail to life a hundred pounds, every day, until the day you succeed. But it is in the days when you are exerting yourself that the growth is occurring.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

We often praise 'the ability to multi-task.' While you can learn when you divide your attention, divided attention doesn't lead to aiding change in your brain maps [lasting changes].

We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.

Everything having to do with human training and education has to be re-examined in light of neuroplasticity.

All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)