Quote of the Day (Alfred Adler, on the Importance of Setting Goals)

“In each mind there is the conception of a goal or ideal to get beyond the present state, and to overcome the present deficiencies and difficulties by postulating a concrete aim for the future. By means of this concrete aim or goal the individual can think and feel himself superior to the difficulties of the present because he has in mind his success of the future. Without the sense of a goal individual activity would cease to have any meaning.”— Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology Alfred Adler (1870-1937), The Science of Living (1929)

Quote of the Day (Alain de Botton, on ‘The Emotionally Intelligent Person’)

“The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working lives meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.” —Swiss-born British author and philosopher Alain de Botton, introduction to The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Carl Gustav Jung, on Rationalism and Values)

“Modern man does not understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’ He has freed himself from ‘superstition’ (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.” — Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Man and His Symbols (1964)

Quote of the Day (Erich Fromm, on Giving)

“Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”— German-American psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980), The Art of Loving (1958)

Quote of the Day (Jane Smiley, on the Hidden Life)

“Most of your life is hidden from people you see every day, day after day, for years.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Jane Smiley, “It’s Funny What You Remember…”, Reader’s Digest, December 2014-January 2015 issue

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ As Barney Explains the Oedipus Complex)

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: “It’s the old mother figure bit: he loves her like a mother. Sigmund Frood wrote a lot about that.” —The Andy Griffith Show, Season 5, Episode 4, “The Education of Ernest T. Bass,” original air date Oct. 12, 1964, teleplay by Everett Greenbaum and James Fritzell, directed by Alan Rafkin

I’ve always thought that no TV character could fracture the English language so often, effortlessly and hilariously as All in the Family’s Archie Bunker. But I must say, after watching numerous episodes of The Andy Griffith Show in this year of social distancing, that Barney Fife comes in a close second.

Sheriff Andy Taylor’s lovable but flummoxed deputy brings to mind nothing so much as the couplet from Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” (Of course, Barney is more likely to think of the creator of those lines as a religious leader than as an English poet.)

Barney applies the principles of psychology far more broadly than simply to substitute mother figures. He is also a student of the criminal mind, concerned that any show of leniency is liable to be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Firearm use is a necessity, he believes. “There's Andy, and there's me, and baby makes three," he says, patting his gun.

Is it really his fault, then, that his gun goes off as soon as it’s placed in his holster?

The physical aspects of Barney Fife—the sneer and strut in front of no-account occupants of the Mayberry jail that inevitably precede his bulging, saucer eyes and sweating forehead—overshadow his extensive resort to malapropisms. But his misuse of the mother tongue also makes him one of the great subsidiary characters in sitcom history.

For his performance in this role—including his dexterity in mangling language in so many sidesplitting ways—Don Knotts was nominated five times for an Emmy, winning each one. By the end of that extraordinary streak, I’m not sure why the Television Academy didn’t simply throw up its hands and rename its Best Supporting Actor Award in his honor.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Freud’s Influence on the Man-on-the-Street)

“Today, thanks to [Sigmund] Freud, the man-on-the-street knows (to quote by an inaccurate memory from Punch) that, when he thinks a thing, the thing he thinks is not the thing he thinks he thinks, but only the thing he thinks he thinks he thinks.” —English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “Sigmund Freud,” The New Republic, October 6, 1952

Quote of the Day (Graham Greene, on Truth and the Swings of the Mind)

“It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.” —English novelist (and Roman Catholic convert) Graham Greene (1904-1991), The End of the Affair (1951)

Quote of the Day (Alfred Adler, on Principles)

“It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.”— Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870–1937), quoted in Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Cheers,’ In Which Lilith Tries to Take Cliff’s Measure)

Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane (played by Bebe Neuwirth): “Cliff, would you be interested in taking part in a university project? No, wait, let me rephrase that. Would you be interested in being a university project?”—Cheers, Season 8, Episode 4, “How to Marry a Mailman,” air date Oct. 19, 1989, teleplay by Brian Pollack and Mert Rich, directed by James Burrows

Quote of the Day (Rollo May, on Freedom as ‘Our Capacity to Mold Ourselves’)

“Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.”— American humanistic and existential psychologist Rollo May (1909-1994), Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

Quote of the Day (Alfred Adler, on Our Relation to the Meanings of Situations)

“Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”— Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870–1937), What Life Should Mean to You (1937)