Noam Shpancer Quotes

Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.

— Noam Shpancer

“The process is important, regardless of the outcome, just ask Schacter.
( ... )mental health ... is not a destination but a process. It's about how you drive, not where you're going. The therapist is like a driving instuctor, not a chauffeur.”

— Noam Shpancer

“Knowledge imprisons you. You cannot escape it. What you know you cannot unknow. That's why knowledge is dangerous. Learning will redefine your world, irreversibly.”

— Noam Shpancer

“There's poetry in everything, everything is music; just listen and you will hear it.”

— Noam Shpancer

“It's a story you can break down and analyze and find analogies and lessons in it, and then it becomes a story about life. But you can also experience it whole, and then it's not a story about life. Then it is life.”

— Noam Shpancer

“A therapist who rushes to help forgets to listen.”

— Noam Shpancer

“[ ... ] the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep.”

— Noam Shpancer

“The choice in this life is not between easy and hard, but between kinds of hardship, between a hardship that gives birth to wisdom, compassion and mercy, and the hardship that keeps on replicating itself to no end.”

— Noam Shpancer

“The frame, the definition, is a type of context. And context, as we said before, determines the meaning of things. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere, or from everywhere for that matter. Our point of view biases our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view.”

— Noam Shpancer

“The good psychologist is ambivalent about people, because he knows well their treacherous nature, their potential for destruction, delusion and deceit.”

— Noam Shpancer

“Here we have the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. On the other hand, sometimes you wish to remember something, and there it stands at the doorway of your consciousness, and refuses to come in. You know you know something, the name of some useless celebrity, perhaps, and yet you cannot fish that name out of your inner aquarium. And this illustrates a critical feature of memory, which resembles, as it turns out, most of the processes in the internal realm: the same cause will regularly yield different, even opposite effects.”

— Noam Shpancer

“This moment of yours, and the telling of it, these are the tools of navigating the internal space. Knowing the moment and knowing about the moment.”

— Noam Shpancer