Faith & Spirit Quote by Emanuel Tanay

Control is the drug Tanay wants you to taper off, not through grit but through faith. The line reads like a gentle off-ramp from the modern compulsion to micromanage every outcome: career, relationships, even feelings. In Tanay's framing, faith is less a set of beliefs than a psychological muscle that relaxes the clenched fist. Strengthen it, and the payoff is almost clinical: reduced need for control, increased tolerance for uncertainty, a restored capacity for delight.

The subtext is a critique of anxious self-sovereignty. "Sense of control" is carefully phrased; he doesn't say control itself, which would be absurd, but the craving for it. That craving is what therapy rooms are full of: people trying to make life predictable so it feels safe. Tanay offers an alternate safety system: trust. Not passive resignation, but a shift from command-and-control to adaptive participation. "Things will flow as they will" isn't a metaphysical claim so much as a reality check, then a proposition: stop fighting the current and learn to swim with it.

Context matters: Tanay was a psychiatrist and professor working in the long postwar era when American psychology increasingly treated religion and spirituality as either symptoms or coping tools. This quote stakes out a middle path. Faith becomes an instrument for loosening obsessional certainty, softening the ego's demand to be in charge, and turning surrender from humiliation into "delight and benefit" - a deliberately persuasive, almost therapeutic promise of measurable relief.