PSYCHOANALYSIS QUOTES
quotations about psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.
SAUL BELLOW
The Dean's December
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the imaginary level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis.
TERRY EAGLETON
Literary Theory: An Introduction
As a practice and sensibility, psychoanalysis remains attuned to superficiality; it constitutes a search for depth on the surface of things.
AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT
Atomic Light
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.
ERICH FROMM
Psychoanalysis and Religion
Where id is, there shall ego be.
SIGMUND FREUD
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Psychiatrists -- the dominant lay priesthood since the First World War.
J. G. BALLARD
A User's Guide to the Millennium
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.
GERMAINE GREER
The Female Eunuch
There is considerable danger that psychoanalysis, as well as other forms of psychotherapy and adjustment psychology, will become new representations of the fragmentation of man, that they will exemplify the loss of the individual's vitality and significance, rather than the reverse, that the new techniques will assist in standardizing and giving cultural sanction to man's alienation from himself rather than solving it, that they will become expressions of the new mechanization of man, now calculated and controlled with greater psychological precision and on a vaster scale of unconscious and depth dimensions -- that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general will become part of the neurosis of our day rather than part of the cure.
ROLLO MAY
The Discovery of Being
The ego is not master in its own house.
SIGMUND FREUD
A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis
It is almost always the case that whatever has wounded you will also be instrumental in your healing.
ROBERT A. JOHNSON
She: Understanding Feminine Psychology
For our purposes, the essential discovery of psycho-analysis is this: that an impulse which is prevented, by behaviourist methods, from finding overt expression in action, does not necessarily die, but is driven underground, and finds some new outlet which has not been inhibited by training. Often the new outlet will be more harmful than the one that has been prevented, and in any case the deflection involves emotional disturbance and unprofitable expenditure of energy. It is therefore necessary to pay more attention to emotion, as opposed to overt behaviour, than is done by those who advocate conditioning as alone sufficient in the training of character.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Education and the Social Order
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
New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1994
Classical psychoanalysis regards conscious thoughts as a disguised representation of unconscious conflicts that are presumably causing the problem. The patient's own explanations are regarded as spurious rationalizations, his coping mechanisms as defenses. Consequently, his conscious ideas, his reasoning and judgements, his practical solutions to problems are not taken at face value: they are treated as stepping-stones to deeper, concealed components of the mind.
AARON T. BECK
Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders
I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills.
STEPHEN KING
interview, September 14, 2000
Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
Eileen
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
SIGMUND FREUD
letter to Carl Jung, 1906
Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Existential Psychotherapy
Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering.
MELANIE KLEIN
attributed, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and how They Shape Our Capacity to Love
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
SIGMUND FREUD
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis.
NORA EPHRON
The Guardian, June 26, 1995