PSYCHOANALYSIS QUOTES II
quotations about psychoanalysis
Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth.
D. M. THOMAS
The White Hotel
Psychoanalysis does not distort the truth by accident. It does so by necessity. It is an effective system for the suppression of the truth about childhood, a truth feared by our entire society. Not surprisingly, it enjoys great esteem among intellectuals.
ALICE MILLER
The Drama of the Gifted Child
Psychoanalysis has been replaced by twelve-step programs.
SARAH SCHULMAN
Empathy
One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that 'the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother'; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications.
JEANNE SAFER
The Golden Condom and Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.
SIGMUND FREUD
New Introductory Lectures on Psychology
[Psychoanalysis] turned out to be psychology without the psyche, i.e., without the soul. Freud just did not give a satisfying account of all the things we experience. Everything higher had to be a repression of something lower, and a symbol of something else rather than itself.
ALLAN BLOOM
The Closing of the American Mind
Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science.
KARL R. POPPER
The Philosophy of Karl Popper
I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
Witness to an Extreme Century
I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
attributed, The Quote Book
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
Eros and Civilization
Psychoanalysis, which interprets the human being as a socialized being, and the psychic apparatus as essentially developed and determined through the relationship of the individual to society, must consider it a duty to participate in the investigation of sociological problems to the extent the human being or his/her psyche plays any part at all.
ERICH FROMM
"Psychoanalyse und Soziologie"
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
On the one hand, psychoanalysis is practical in the sense that there is an attempt to solve a problem, or to cure somebody, or at least to address their suffering. But the other thing that psychoanalysis does is that the project is to enable somebody to speak. It's the attempt to create the conditions in which somebody can speak themselves as fully as possible.
ADAM PHILLIPS
"Poetry as Therapy", The Guardian, March 29, 2012
Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.
ALISON BECHDEL
Are You My Mother?
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain That Changes Itself
Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. A vogue here to stay because it tells an old story in a new way. I mean the traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isn't likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id. It's the same keg of nails any way you open it.
PETER DE VRIES
Forever Painting
Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product.
MIRCEA ELIADE
No Souvenirs
The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers.
NEEL BURTON
Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
Again, your name? I was psychoanalyzing your face.
BRIAN SPELLMAN
If the Mind Fits, Shrink It
The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.
ERICH FROMM
"Psychoanalyse und Soziologie"