Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. — Erich Fromm
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. — R. D. Laing
the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct. — Melanie Klein
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. — Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves. — Emile M. Cioran
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. — Sigmund Freud
[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself. — Karen Horney
Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts. — Jacques Derrida
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. — Sigmund Freud
Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious — Carl Jung
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. — Sigmund Freud
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious. — Sigmund Freud
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy. — Sigmund Freud
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. — Carl Jung
Short Freudian Quotes
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. — Unknown
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. — Bob Hope
Never argue with your wife about hostility when she's a certified Freudian. — William Goldman
Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny. — Ilana Mercer
Apparently, as a kid, I used to eat spiders. Maybe there's some Freudian significance behind that. — Matt Smith
Freudian Image Quotes
Freud Quotes
Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art — Salvador Dali
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence. — William Golding
I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. — Victor Frankl
I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx. — Aaron Siskind
As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. — Joseph Campbell
Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals. — Lewis Mumford
Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility. — Malcolm Muggeridge
I am not a fan of Sigmund Freud because his theories are not testicle. — Richard Wiseman
Freud's theory was that when a joke opens a window and all those bats and bogeymen fly out, you get a marvellous feeling of relief and elation. The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost. — Ken Dodd
Psychoanalytic Quotes
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved. — Sigmund Freud
The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane. — Erich Fromm
What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation. — Bruno Bettelheim
Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death. — Otto Rank
As I say at the beginning of my workshops, 'Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation. — John C. Lilly
The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. — Jacques Lacan
Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less. — Thomas Szasz
Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed. — Anna Freud
The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society. — Jacques Lacan
Men have jobs, while women have Roles: Mother, Wife, Goddess, Temptress, etc. That's probably why it's so hard for women to rewrite the rules. You're not just changing a job description, but an ancient myth. You're revising the Bible, Poetry, Legend and Psychoanalytic Scripture. — Caryl Rivers
Psychoanalyst Quotes
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. — Billy Wilder
I'm going to my psychoanalyst one more year, then I'm going to Lourdes. — Woody Allen
I stick to simple themes. Love. Hate. No nuances. I stay away from psychoanalyst's couch scenes. Couches are good for one thing. — John Wayne
As the LSD began to take effect, I suddenly said in a very loud voice, while pounding on top of a file, “Every psychiatrist, every psychoanalyst should be forced to take LSD in order to know what is over here.” — John C. Lilly
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine. — Bernard Berenson
Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop. — Albert Ellis
I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life. — Tennessee Williams
Psychoanalysts believe that the only "normal" people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else. — A. J. P. Taylor
Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression — Gilles Deleuze
...an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a "microsurgeon of the mind" who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks. — Norman Doidge
Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you're going to do lyrics - well, there's a Freudian slip. That's not even a slip, that's a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you'll live it first. Go really get your heart broken! — David Lee Roth
Darwin's theory of evolution is the last of the great nineteenth-century mystery religions. And as we speak it is now following Freudians and Marxism into the Nether regions, and I'm quite sure that Freud, Marx and Darwin are commiserating one with the other in the dark dungeon where discarded gods gather. — David Berlinski
I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself! — Mary Daly
I'm a big fan of moustaches. I think it's because - and this is not Freudian innuendo at all - my father has a moustache. — Amanda Seyfried
Narcissism and Christianity have little in common, yet the Romantic paradigm of artistic creativity, particularly in light of subsequent Freudian ideas, has tended to foster its share of narcissism. It was the tragic fate of Narcissus that he was so preoccupied with self that he could not appreciate God, nature, or the other. — John Walford
You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed. — Slavoj Zizek
Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture. — Nawal El Saadawi
The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream. — Sergio Leone
For me it's an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism . . . We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves. — Terence McKenna
Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain. — Michio Kaku
I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss. — Woody Allen
One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him. — H. L. Mencken
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity. — Thomas Mann
They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition. — Claes Oldenburg
I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health. — Joseph Campbell
Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding. — Gian-Carlo Rota
I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it. — Albert Ellis
The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork. — Edward Albee
Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science. — Paul Johnson
Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition. — Carl Sagan
If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine. — Sherry Turkle
May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast. — Alastair Campbell
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary. — Harold Bloom
People often think of the unconscious mind as "the gut" or perhaps the Freudian "sink" of repressed sexual desires. It's neither one of those things. It's the repository of memory, and it's the seat of decision making. — Nick Morgan
I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood. — Sarah Ruhl
Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire. — Vladimir Nabokov
He grinned. “Busted. I’m a monster. Jev is my deceptively harmless — and shockingly handsome — alter ego.” “And I’m on top of it,” she announced with witty triumph. “Is that a Freudian slip?” His bluntness caught her off guard. A self-conscious blush rose in her face. — Becca Fitzpatrick
The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions - in a Freudian way - to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it. — Boris Johnson
Dream dictionaries are so disappointing. They're so limited, and I think they're just total bullshit. I really do. I don't know much about the Freudian theory of dreams; it's probably more interesting than your average hippie dream dictionary, but it's got to be a lot deeper than that. It can't all be about sex all the time, so I don't know if Freud is right either. — Neko Case
If I am told my loving you had to happen because of some Freudian stuff about my childhood, that might be degrading or deflationary, but if I am told it had to happen because you are such a wonderful person that I couldn't possibly resist your charms, or because we are so incredibly compatible, then necessity seems very romantic. — Nomy Arpaly
The Freudian tradition will never completely die because it has a few good points. For example, people have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware. Most of cognitive therapy has now adopted a similar idea. On the other hand, the relationship part of psychoanalysis - where you must have a deep, emotional relationship with the client - will, I think, get kicked in the teeth one of these days. — Albert Ellis
Freudian therapists do a lot of listening and very little persuading, and that was one of the reasons I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up, and you couldn't give homework to clients. While I was still an analyst, I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit psychoanalysis after practicing it for six years. — Albert Ellis
I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it. Then I found that it intensively went into every irrelevancy under the sun - and that it didn't work. People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change. — Albert Ellis
As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Great works - and I think Star Wars is a great work - are easily susceptible to multiple plausible interpretations. Some of them are pretty nutty, but the idea that we should see it as profoundly feminist, or as a deeply Christian tale, or as a Freudian exercise... I think all of those have some truth. — Cass Sunstein
So the older models, when you look at Freudian, when you look at Jungian thought, and there's still people who really - who really use the Jungian thought of dream analysis, is really that you would analyze the dreams. The dreams are there for a purpose. — Shelby Harris
Some Jungian or Freudian would tell me I'm just trying to go back to the womb... at gunpoint, if necessary. — Guy Maddin
You need to not be able to do anything else, to be in this business. If you have other options, in those unemployed moments, those other options will take precedent. From a directorial standpoint, I think it's really Freudian, the amount of trust I have in filmmakers because I have such a trusting relationship with my dad. — Bryce Dallas Howard
Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they've transcribed the lyrics incorrectly? — Kurt Cobain
I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don't always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun. — Claes Oldenburg
You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas. — Claes Oldenburg
In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation. — Terence McKenna
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