As told to Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Mark Gilliland
Growing up in a six-story brick tenement in the Bronx, Moisy Shopper spoke Yiddish as his first language—and didn’t realize he was smart until the scholarships started to arrive. In med school, his favorite teachers were the psychoanalysts: “They helped us understand what it means to be ill.” In 1965, Shopper joined the faculty of the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. Also a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, he serves as an expert witness in abuse, custody and murder trials.
Stupidity is a value judgment. So depending on how judgmental you are, that is how stupid everybody else is.
Power is not well understood. People who have it are often reluctant to use it, or they misuse it. People who don’t have it think it’s the culmination of life itself.
Keep as much of your childhood as you find useful.
Most people marry on the basis of an infatuation and then they learn to love each other.
A certain amount of romanticism is necessary. But if you’d grown up in another city, you would have married someone else, and you’d be about as happy with that person as you are with this one.
The interesting thing about human nature is how fearful we are of change.
It’s amazing how readily children can be taught to kill.
Evil is simply the expression of one person’s condemnation or outrage. It’s a religious concept, a moral concept. It adds no insight.
Sportsmanship has become unfashionable because it tolerates loss.
Politics has developed into a skill designed to fool all the people all the time.
Few people understand why the woman holding the scales of justice is wearing a blindfold.
Men have a really tough time with intelligent, capable, articulate women. They feel all that belongs to them, and if the woman has it, she’s stolen it.
What women don’t get about men is how very vulnerable they are.
Parents either try to be the same as their parents or exactly the opposite. As a result, they often miss what their kids are trying to tell them.
Most people don’t have one identity, they have multiple identities. You lead a more interesting life to the extent that your multiple identities interlace with one another.
We often turn out to be exactly like the person whom we hated.
Each family teaches its children what is true and what is not. When enough people teach their children in the same way, we have what we call a culture. And cultures perpetuate many untruths alongside their truths.
Parents think discord—or affairs—can be hidden. But kids know what the family secrets are. They know their parents’ weaknesses and foibles—and in most cases, love and respect them anyway.
The most important thing about talking to children is listening to them. The child leads, you follow.
If you know how to listen, children will tell you everything you need to know. Never directly, never explicitly. But through their play, their stories, their dreams.
What makes me cringe? People whose sole way of controlling their children is through fear. Fear is only as effective as the length of your arm.
There were things my parents did that didn’t make any sense to me. How could intelligent people engage in things that didn’t make any sense? That is the beginning of a psychoanalyst.
