Quotes About Psychoanalysis

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis.

Lacan is concerned with lack as the ontological underpinning of human existence.

As we have discovered, although on one level psychoanalysis allows us to attain higher levels of perception and self-awareness, on another level it is an exercise in becoming reconciled to the idea that we can never entirely know ourselves.

One might say that instead of regarding psychoanalysis primarily as a therapeutic method, Lacan envisions it as a profoundly philosophical undertaking that—a bit like traditional renderings of the art of living—possesses the potential to revise the subject's perception of the basic orientation of its existence.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

I think the absence of love in the family and the need to create a family with art world and public is really strong. Psychoanalyst would say it's a clear picture! But it didn't appear like that in the beginning.

Psychoanalysts learn a great deal about patients by listening to their humor. And you can learn a great deal about your own psychological makeup by constantly asking yourself (and answering truthfully), Why did I laugh at this joke and not at others?

Psychoanalysis is for hysterical pathological cases, not for silly rich American women who should be learning how to darn socks.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

Martin Seligman once told me, "The best it [psychoanalysis] can do is to bring us from minus ten to zero.

There is no longer any great risk that Freudian research will shock us by recalling what there is of the 'barbarian' in us; the risk is rather that its findings will be too easily accepted in an 'idealist' form…Today there is a race toward psychoanalysis, just as there was once a flight from it. Yesterday it was the spirit of evil; today one trims its claws and adopts it.

We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.

Freudians argue that the psychological structure is the cause of civilization. Malinowski replaces a psychological causality with a sociological causality and takes the Oedipus complex as a product of civilization. But it is evident that the one thesis and the other are both inseparable and contradictory. We must construct a psychoanalysis and a sociology...which overtakes and synthesizes classical givens.

Psychoanalysis: either the last conquest of scientific and techinitionist ontology or the rediscovery of another contact with being: being that is neither for itself, nor being object, but the contradictory being of human desire.

The psychoanalysis of objective knowledge is interminable, or rather...like every psychoanalysis, it is destined not to suppress the past, the phantasms, but to transform them from powers of death into poetic productivity, and...the very idea of objective knowledge and the idea of algorithm as a spiritual automaton and finally the idea of an object that informs itself and knows itself are, as much as any other ideas, and more than any other, supported by our reveries.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

It would be a mistake to believe that psychoanalysis, even for Freud, excludes the description of psychological motives and is opposed to the phenomenological method. Psychoanalysis has, on the contrary (and unwittingly), contributed to developing the phenomenological method by claiming, as Freud puts it, that every human act 'has a sense,' and by seeking everywhere to understand the event rather than to tie it to mechanical conditions.

For the psychoanalyst, what is original is the structure of the body as an emblem of life.

With psychoanalysis mind passes into body, as inversely, body passes into mind.

Psychoanalysis does not reveal an ego that operates behind my back; it links the unconscious to the conscious. We do not want to take responsibility for the unconscious...The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience...If it is not thematically known, is not inevitably unknown to us who live it.