Friend

We have never imposed models, each person follows their inspiration, feelings, grudges. What matters is to accompany the client on this trip. 
– Nise da Silveira

It will take perseverance, patience, and an environment free of any coercion so that relationships of friendship and understanding can be created. Without the bridge formed by that relationship, healing will be almost impossible.
– Nise da Silveira

It is the emotional contact between people that improves the treatment. It is joy that heals, it is is the lack of prejudice that heals.
– Nise da Silveira

In the age of the machine, the soul is relegated to second place.
– Nise da Silveira

 I am a bookworm. Whenever I see a book, I grab it. I love books. In bookstores, when I had no money to buy them, I hid them. I asked friends of mine with long arms—like Marcos Moreira, for example, who was very tall—to go with me. Some weeks later, when I had got money, I would say:
– Let’s go get the book.
Then, a client who worked in the carpenter’s shop felt, sniffed, sensed that I loved books. And he gave me one as a gift. It was a wooden heart with a small book at its core, also carved from wood. And he simply said to me:
– A book without a heart isn’t worth a penny.

And that is one of the characteristics of my service. Affection. I have never called anyone “patient”. I called everyone by their names—Maria, Adelina, Fernando;—, it brings people closer.”

Nise wrote a book entitled Cartas a Espinosa (“Letters to Spinoza”), a collection of seven letters in which she addresses Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza as her Master, discussing the value of his scientific and philosophical work as a basis for her work at the psychiatric hospital.
According to Spinoza, affection, derived from the verb to affect, is what drives, touches, moves the person’s soul. These affects can be of any nature, are unique in each one of us, and can only exist in the realm of our subjectivity. What we learn from Nise and Spinoza is that the perception of our affects is often overlooked because we live in a world that overestimates rationality.
Does everything offered to me, everything I consume, from goods to relationships, affect me positively? Or could it be that, somehow, even my affects are conditioned, and I force myself to feel this way? In order for this awareness to arise, time and a deep inward look are necessary, but it seems a fundamental exercise since it is the capacity to affect and be affected that makes us truly human.