Quotes About Psychoanalysis

The death drive is the revolutionary contribution contribution psychoanalysis makes to political thought.

The fundamental wager of psychoanalysis - a wager that renders the idea of a psychoanalytic political project thinkable - is that repetition undergoes a radical transformation when one adopts a different attitude toward it. We may be condemned to repeat, but we aren't condemned to repeat the same position relative to our repetition.

Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words.

While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her

The superego, Freud wrote, is the "mischief maker which prevents the ego's coming to a friendly understanding with the instincts." It

Frankl's brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It

A psychoanalytic phrase—"unthought known"—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher

fragments of a conversation she had left a little earlier (on Rilke, not Rilke's poetry but Rilke the man, who refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius);

Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief is experience in later life.

My mom being a psychotherapist, I've been brought up with that whole psychoanalytical terrain.

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.

Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Svevo, Schnitzler, Canetti. How is it that the greatest are, in their varying degrees, violently hostile to psychoanalysis? And, ultimately, towards the end of his life, Freud himself ?

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.

Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfilment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping-ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfilment of the dream.

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can extend ad-infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals).

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't.

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.

My work as a psychoanalyst is to help patients recover their lost wholeness and to strengthen the psyche so it can resist future dismemberment.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

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.

In those days, Chicago had a joint called the Black Angus that had ribs the taste of which gave life meaning you couldn't get from religion, psychoanalysis, or great art.

It was not until I entered psychoanalysis as a last resort to my unending misery that the nausea was diagnosed as psychological, and in no time after entering analysis, I became completely cured of the attacks. If couch psychoanalysis did nothing for me but that (and it didn't), it would have been worth it.

A CHALLENGE FOR PSYCHOANALYSTS: I dreamed that a fish took off its clothes and was left naked.