Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. — Erich Fromm
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
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. — Sigmund Freud
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy. — Sigmund Freud
[Neurotics are] torn by inner conflicts ... Every neurotic ... is at war with himself. — Karen Horney
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. — Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine. — Bernard Berenson
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. — Sigmund Freud
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
The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions. — Thomas Szasz
Psychoanalysis will fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason - its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits — Frederick Crews
To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness. — Frederick Salomon Perls
A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. — Jerome Lawrence
Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed. — Anna Freud
Short Psychoanalytic Quotes
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved. — Sigmund Freud
Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death. — Otto Rank
The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. — Jacques Lacan
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering. — Roland Barthes
LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality. — Terence McKenna
Psychoanalytic Image Quotes
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
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
Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst. — Italo Calvino
Freudian Quotes
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
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
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. — Unknown
The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream. — Sergio Leone
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother. — Bob Hope
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
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
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
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
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
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
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies. — Herbert Marcuse
People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time. — Adam Phillips
Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity. — Peter Medawar
Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me. — Amy Bloom
In my opinion, advocating, allowing and practicing psychiatric and psychoanalytic dogmas within the church is every bit as pagan and heretical (and therefore perilous) as propagating the teachings of some of the most bizarre cults. The only vital difference is that the cults are less dangerous because their errors are more identifiable. — Jay E. Adams
The water was like a physiological stimuli to the subconscious that overwhelmed people with too much psychoanalytical material, you might say. People could do 10 breathing sessions without the water, and then they did breathing sessions in the water. — Leonard Orr
Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig, but also to render it invisible. — Stanislaw Lem
Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health. — Karl A. Menninger
Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that in mental patients excessive affection often turns to violent hostility. — Karl Abraham
And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically. — Peter Gay
All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it. — John Patrick Shanley
And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts. — Robert Jay Lifton
Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life. — Thomas Szasz
Brazil obviously connotes something in my mind to do with desire, sexuality and freedom. In fantasy, in mythology, Rio is the iconography of the imagination. In essence, we're all sex tourists. I've never been to Rio and I've never been to a psychoanalytic convention, but in a sense, Rio is symbolic of desire, some sort of ultimate ecstasy. — Francis Levy
One absolutely crucial change is that feminist film theory is today an academic subject to be studied and taught. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a political intervention, primarily influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement and, in my specific case, a Women's Liberation study group, in which we read Freud and realised the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist project. — Laura Mulvey
Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood. — Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information. — Jean Baudrillard
If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true - that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound. — Heinz Kohut
Freud expressed the opinion-not quite in earnest, though, it seeemed to me-that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, 'What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?' Whereup on he, visible a bit surprised, answered evasively: 'At least psychology has a social purpose.' — Ludwig Binswanger
Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love. — Jack Kerouac
In Conclusion
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