Quotes About Psychoanalysis

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.

Surely psychoanalysis was the greatest kill-joy of the delicious pangs of love since the Church had ceased to thunder.

The renunciation of the child's sexual ambitions and dyadic unity with the mother is established through the father's presence, which stands for the regulating, organizing, symbolizing functions of language itself. Lacan

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.

As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.

The concept "penis envy," which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940's as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women.

It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves

psicoanálisis como vocación».[73] Lo metafísico seguía teniendo prioridad para él.[74] Así, entre 1938 y 1941 sacó tiempo para asistir a los seminarios de Bernfeld, un grupo de estudio que en 1942 dio lugar a la constitución del Instituto y Sociedad Psicoanalítica de San Francisco.

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.

I couldn't write a happy movie or romantic comedy to save my life. Yes, Noel Coward's an idol, but his plays are serious to me. 'Private Lives' and 'Design for Living' both have an edge. Without psychoanalyzing myself, I think I exorcise my demons in my work.

In our tabulation of psychoanalytic results, we have classed those who stopped treatment together with those not improved. This appears to be reasonable; a patient who fails to finish his treatment, and is not improved, is surely a therapeutic failure.

Anna Freud's book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936) was a partial response to this problem. It became a psychoanalytic field marshal's handbook, documenting and illustrating various unconscious defensive strategies of the ego, alerting the clinician to telltale signs of their operation in the patient's psyche. Reorienting

As with good history, good psychoanalytic interpretations must also make sense, pull together as much of the known data as possible, provide a coherent and persuasive account, and also facilitate personal growth. Psychoanalytic

It is too disturbing for the patient to feel sexually attracted to his mother; in a last-ditch effort, the resistance disguises the feelings as current impulses toward the analyst. Although

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.

Psychoanalysis [...] overestimates the linguistic character of the unconscious. Dreaming is a pagan cinema.

Fortunately [psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.

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

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

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation,' argues the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. 'Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.'72 When it comes to consumerism, perhaps the poverty that we aim to conceal lies in our neglected relationships with each other and with the living world.

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.