Quotes About Psychoanalysis

It is when patients begin to throw such things into question-when the what, why, and who of their utterances become problematic to them-that they are genuinely engaged in analysis.

Patients do not spontaneously home in on the subjects that are most important, psychoanalytically speaking; they spontaneously avoid them, for the most part. Even if they recognize that sexuality should be dwelt upon, for example, they nevertheless tend to avoid associating to the elements in dreams and fantasies that are the most sexually charged.

All education is based on a middle-class morality that finds its psychoanalytic equivalent in a powerfully developed reality principle which insists that one must largely forego present pleasure for greater gains in the future. The trouble is that this, too, is not learned on a rational basis, but through anxiety instilled by the parents and by their example. If parents do not live by a stringent morality and by the reality principle, neither will their children.

The early-twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinker Carl Jung, says Kagan, originated the concept of introverted and extroverted personalities. Jung also believed that each had a slightly different brain structure.

Psychoanalysts believe that the only 'normal' people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anyone else.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

Official criticism participates in the pitiable fate of Proktophantasmist and his lamentation in the Walpurgis-night: "You still are here? Nay, 'tis a thing unheard! Vanish at once ! We've said the enlightening word." Such criticism has omitted to take to heart the truth that all that exists has sufficient right to its existence: no less is it with psychoanalysis.

But since I could find nothing equivocal or neurotic in the facts about the son's relation to his father, I had no warrant for disturbing the young man's feelings with such a destructive pronouncement. To do so would have prejudiced the outcome of the treatment.

It is well known that Freudian psychoanalysis is limited to the task of making conscious the shadow-side and the evil within us. It simply brings into action the civil war that was latent, and lets it go at that.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, published two years before his jocular announcement, Freud had laid down his first principle of understanding the problems of dreams: "A dream is the fulfillment of a wish.

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that's why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that's what I am experiencing right now.

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, and that is what I am experiencing just now.

Cunts that try and psychoanalyse the fucked-up miss the crucial point: sometimes ye jist dae it cause it's thaire n that's wey ye are.

I know people often think that psychoanalysts are analysing them in social situations but that is not the case. Psychoanalytic understanding comes from the special conditions of the consulting room and the analytic relationship. That is when it is at its strongest and most convincing.

Neither he [Ferenczi] nor Freud believed that a person should be exempted from legal punishment--or worse, that he should be punished by compulsory psychiatric treatments--because of psychoanalytic information about him. In the light of current thought, this is a startling and sobering fact.

Freud put it beautifully: the aim of psychoanalysis is to help the patient let go of the delusional suffering of his neuroses and experience the misery of actual reality.

Psychoanalysis, however, calls into question the idea that we primarily act on behalf of our own interest. It allows us to see another power operating beneath the apparent predominance of self-interest. Of course, the commonsensical understanding of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of this, contending that psychoanalysis reduces everything to self-interest.

Marxism allows us to understand the role of economic and social contradictions in driving the movement of history, but it often provides an inadequate explanation of the actual politics of historical transformation—why change does or does not occur at a given time. It is on this question that psychoanalysis proves indispensable.

I am going to give my psychoanalyst one more year, then I'm going to Lourdes.

Those modern analysts, they charge so much! In my day, for five marks Freud himself would treat you. For ten marks he would treat you and press your pants. For fifteen marks Freud would let you treat him - that included a choice of any two vegetables.

Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.