Psychoanalysis quotes:

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  • Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy. -- Karl Kraus
  • Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. -- D. H. Lawrence
  • 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
  • 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
  • Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it. -- Jacques Lacan
  • Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. -- Sigmund Freud
  • Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis. -- Norman O. Brown
  • 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
  • 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 is the confession without absolution. -- Germaine Greer
  • Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts. -- Jacques Derrida
  • Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure -- Karl Kraus
  • Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors. -- Norman Doidge
  • Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. -- Peter De Vries
  • Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother. -- Germaine Greer
  • The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. -- Walter Benjamin
  • Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash. -- Edmund White
  • Psychoanalysis wants to heal with words and speaking, but sometimes with speaking, you realize nothing. -- Alejandro Jodorowsky
  • An actor shouldn't undergo psychoanalysis, because there are a lot of things you're better off not knowing. -- Paul Lynde
  • Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there. -- Karl Kraus
  • Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence. -- Norman Mailer
  • 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 teaches one thing, he thought: Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. A single bad act can have all sorts of repercussions. -- John Katzenbach
  • The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition. -- Sigmund Freud
  • 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
  • Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both. -- Siri Hustvedt
  • I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience. -- Stanislav Grof
  • 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
  • Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • 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
  • 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
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  • Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop. -- Vivian Gornick
  • Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream. -- Malcolm Morley
  • In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. -- Norman O. Brown
  • 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
  • As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension. -- Jacques Lacan
  • All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs. -- Janet Malcolm
  • 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
  • A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex. -- S. N. Behrman
  • Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears. -- Matthew Arnold
  • This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. -- Sigmund Freud
  • I said I would never go to a psychiatrist, and I spent much of my life in psychoanalysis. -- Diane Keaton
  • It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. -- Sigmund Freud
  • 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 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
  • 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; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis. -- D. M. Thomas
  • 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
  • In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be. -- Mason Cooley
  • The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you're doing - and connect your unconscious to your conscious. -- Tucker Max
  • I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something? -- Noam Chomsky
  • Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith. -- Tony Campolo
  • Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names. -- Sherwin B. Nuland
  • Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people, working really hard and pleasing people, which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland, I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled. -- Steve Martin
  • In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant. -- Eric Kandel
  • I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it. -- Orson Welles
  • I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain. -- Eric Kandel
  • I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become. -- Stephen King
  • While there are many experts in the psychoanalysis of individuals, there seems to be little active authority or understanding in the matter of the persistent shared madness in everyday life. It's as if collective mental illness doesn't exist except in the vernacular and in contemporary folk myth, where it remains trapped and politically useless. -- Michael Leunig
  • In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion. -- Jane Smiley
  • Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis. -- Salvador Dali
  • One day fascism will be treated with psychoanalysis. -- Ennio Flaiano
  • miracles occur in psychoanalysis as seldom as anywhere else. -- Karen Horney
  • Philosophy is to religion as psychoanalysis is to pseudoscience -- Christopher Marshall
  • Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. -- Mason Cooley
  • The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money. -- Nora Ephron
  • Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. -- Robert Hughes
  • Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow. -- Sebastian Horsley
  • The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis. -- Marlon Brando
  • The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis. -- Thomas Szasz
  • I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged. -- Eric Kandel
  • Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man. -- Erich Fromm
  • I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
  • My films are a form of psychoanalysis, except that it is I who am paid, which changes everything. -- Woody Allen
  • As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering. -- Muriel Barbery
  • The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy. -- Sigmund Freud
  • The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. -- John Updike
  • There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere. -- Carl Jung
  • So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes--with the exception of their occupation. -- Karl Kraus
  • If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience. -- Jacques Lacan
  • The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world. -- Sigmund Freud
  • But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told. -- Shulamith Firestone
  • People once said they were in psychoanalysis, meaning they were committed to a long immersion. In a sense, they were writing their autobiographies -- R. Z. Sheppard
  • After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty? -- Umberto Eco
  • Ever since the introduction of psychoanalysis there have been too many terms to excuse behavior and phrases that can be [used] to explain everything. -- Sean Connery
  • The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently. -- Donald Barthelme
  • I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years. -- Albert Ellis
  • So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It's cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting. -- Nora Ephron
  • The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years. -- Mignon McLaughlin
  • Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ... -- Iris Murdoch
  • The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine. -- Sherry Turkle
  • I think that it is a good plan to bear in mind that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis. -- Sigmund Freud
  • A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
  • I believe that the Welfare State redistributes poverty and reduces income. As Karl Kraus once said of psychoanalysis, the Welfare State is the disease which it purports to cure. -- Arnold Kling
  • Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you. -- Woody Allen
  • For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. -- J. D. Salinger
  • I don't know of any way to control the subject of one's dreams although I'm fairly certain there are more than a few types of psychoanalysis dedicated to the topic. -- Mallory Ortberg
  • My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it. -- Sigmund Freud
  • We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad. -- Ernest Becker
  • I've had a very productive life. I've worked very hard, I've never fallen prey to depression. I'm not sure I could have done all of that without being in psychoanalysis. -- Woody Allen
  • The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas. -- Eric Kandel
  • Freud is usually viewed as the person who linked psychoanalysis to some issues in the environment, usually man-made. So I thought it would be fun to throw that in the mix. -- DJ Spooky
  • I started in '69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that's I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue. -- Bernardo Bertolucci
  • Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all. -- Vivian Gornick
  • Scripture does what psychoanalysis can't do-it pierces the heart, penetrates deep into the soul and judges the motives. To see yourself in the light of Scripture, is to see yourself as you really are. -- John F. MacArthur Jr.
  • Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you. -- Andrew Sarris
  • Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like. -- Joseph Sobran
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