Psychoanalysis Quotes - Page 5

• 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

  Father, Work, Home

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Doctors, Self, Talking

  "Our lady of east LA" by Jane Smiley, www.theguardian.com. April 21, 2007.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.

  Sigmund Freud

  Believe, Order, Magic

  Sigmund Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1953). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: A case of hysteria, Three essays on sexuality, and other works”

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Human life is so strangely constituted that even perfected intellectual understanding combined with the richest experience is incapable of conquering innate weaknesses. Even if it thoroughly analyzes itself, psychology (and this is one of the dubious aspects of psychoanalysis) can, to be sure, recognize its flawed native characteristics, but it cannot eliminate them. Understanding (them) is not the same as overcoming (them) and, again and again, we see the wisest of human beings helpless in the fact of their small follies which everyone else observes with a smile.

  Stefan Zweig

  Psychology, Understanding, Intellectual

  4 Copy quote

• We see in the 20th Century an unfortunate trench warfare, in which psychoanalysis, in a struggle against the internalized compulsion and superstition of a particular doctrine, has expressed itself atheistically. By contrast, theology is not merely under suspicion of talking soullessly about God. Both theology and psychology, in striving for human health, need one another like the right and the left hand.

  Eugen Drewermann

  Struggle, Hands, Talking

  Speech at a conference of therapists in Basel, Switzerland, May 21, 1977.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he later calls the super-ego. And that can be lacerated - if you think of the anorexic who sees themselves from the perspective of the image they have, of the image they have of themselves in the mirror which is false - that would be the super-ego. Super-ego is what generates depression and it is what has to be dealt with in psychoanalysis.

  Simon Critchley

  Thinking, Mirrors, Perspective

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Responsibility, Past

  63 Copy quote

• I have heard about a patient - the psychiatrist was bored with him. Of course, he was getting enough money out of him, but he was getting bored by and by - three, four, five years of psychoanalysis, and the man was repeating the same again and again and again. The psychiatrist said, 'Do one thing: go to the mountains for a few days. That will be very helpful.'

  Rajneesh

  Happiness, Men, Years

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Might, Slave

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". The Believer Interview, believermag.com. March 2014.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939....His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world....I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time.

  Matthew Fox

  Spiritual, Art, Believe

  4 Copy quote

• As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Writing, Disease, Matter

  George Bernard Shaw (2016). “The Critical Shaw: On Literature”, p.48, RosettaBooks

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Real, Media, White

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool Memories”, p.69, Verso

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

  Norman O. Brown

  Psychology, Progress, Society

  Norman O. Brown (2012). “Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History”, p.18, Wesleyan University Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Practice, Psychology, Risk

  Emile M. Cioran (1999). “All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms”, p.30, Arcade Publishing

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

  Edmund White

  Flames, Ashes, Intensity

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.117, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.

  Karl Kraus

  People, Sick, Proud

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  World, Occupation, Causes

  "Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths". Book by Karl Kraus, translated by Harry Zohn, 1986.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.

  Karl Kraus

  Rabbits, Wanted

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Self, Ideas, Psychology

  Sherry Turkle (2005). “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit”, p.282, MIT Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I looked into studying psychoanalysis, wrote to the governing body and was about to start the year where they psychoanalyse you, four times a week, before you get to do it yourself. I just thought I'd taken the ventriloquism as far as I could. My act is so deconstructive, and I'd made all the monkey jokes anyone wanted to hear.

  Nina Conti

  Taken, Years, Body

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Eugenics, May, Nonsense

  "What I Saw in America". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1922.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

  Peter De Vries

  Looks, Fads, Way

  1973 Forever Panting.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?

  W. H. Auden

  Guilt, Wealth, Drink

  7 Copy quote

• In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial.

  Judith Perelman Rossner

  Art, Memories, Discovery

  6 Copy quote

• Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Fashion, Lying, Angel

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “His Master's Voice”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source