Quotes of Psychoanalysis - somelinesforyou

“ It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. ”

- Sigmund Freud

“ The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. ”

- Oscar Wilde

“ The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets. ”

- Karl Kraus

“ 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. ”

- Saul Bellow

“ The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated — namely, the lavatory. ”

- Karl Kraus

“ Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification. ”

- Thomas Szasz

“ Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth. ”

- Carl Jung

“ Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise. ”

- Michel Foucault

“ Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It's an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a Zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought. ”

- Sir Peter Medawar

“ Being a good psychoanalyst, in short, has the same disadvantage as being a good parent: The children desert one as they grow up. ”

- Morton Hunt

“ The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. ”

- Walter Benjamin

“ Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another. ”

- Sigmund Freud

“ Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness. ”

- Henry Miller

“ I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients. ”

- Al Alvarez

“ Fortunately is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. ”

- Karen Horney

“ 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

“ Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis. ”

- Marlon Brando

“ But psychoanalysis has taught that the dead dead parent, for examplean be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts. ”

- Jacques Derrida

“ Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution. ”

- G.K. Chesterton

“ Psychoanalysis is that mental illnes for which it regards itself a therapy. ”

- Karl Kraus

“ Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother. ”

- Germaine Greer

“ Fortunately, psychoanalysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself remains a very effective therapist. ”

- Karen Horney

“ Psychoanalysis has changed American psychiatry 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 concepts of illness and health. ”

- Karl A. Menninger

“ 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… ”

- Thomas Szasz

“ The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage — in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion. ”

- Sigmund Freud

“ The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them. ”

- Charles Horton Cooley

“ Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos … . demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive… … ”

- Claude Levi Strauss

“ Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it. ”

- Bette Davis

“ The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father. ”

- Sigmund Freud

“ 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
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