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Quotes About Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
~ John Irving
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.
~ Germaine Greer
What seems not yet to have been sufficiently explored is the emancipating potential of the discursive form of psychoanalysis in politics as a counterpoint of marketing.
~ Fernando Haddad
Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn't trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.
~ Eric Kandel
In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be.
~ Mason Cooley
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
~ Norman O. Brown
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
~ Germaine Greer
Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you.
~ Andrew Sarris
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.
~ Tony Campolo
I think when I went to psychoanalysis, I actually believed that people said what they meant. This was my whole problem.
~ John Malkovich
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
~ Eric Kandel
I want to play so many different characters. I want to, like, understand so many different people, and psychoanalysis, everything. I love that about my job: getting into the character and understanding it and doing the psychoanalysis and creating that character.
~ Sylvia Hoeks
After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved - or I proved - that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.
~ Sean Scully
Only that I've never met a psychoanalyst who didn't – at least subconsciously – offer his system as a substitute for religion. Present company included. We set ourselves up as little gods – all-knowing, all-healing. People resent that and rightly. We have polite labels for our failures. We agree among ourselves that anything bearing one of those labels is, of course, incurable.' Dr
~ Frank Herbert
All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.
~ Judith Viorst
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. —EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE
~ Rolf Potts
Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression.
~ Rollo May
The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.
~ Rollo May
It is because they possess this courage, on the other hand, that many psychoanalytic patients, even at the outset of therapy and contrary to their stereotypical image, are people who are basically much stronger and healthier than average.
~ M. Scott Peck
It's a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconscious with the help of a trained therapist until they begin to get a sense of how their mind works. Heylmun and Civille have done the same thing — only they haven't psychoanalyzed their feelings; they've psychoanalyzed their feelings for mayonnaise and Oreo cookies.
~ Malcolm Gladwell
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
~ Anais Nin
Psychoanalysis did save me because it allowed the birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.
~ Anais Nin
That is why I always lie. I can't have a truthful relationship. Gore's idealization of me sets my pattern. I begin truthfully, but then I withhold what hurts him, what would destroy his illusion. I hide my psychoanalysis, my real age, my sexual needs, my past lovers and experience, my negro lover, and I give him his dream, his ideal woman. But where am I in the end?
~ Anais Nin
people are no longer interested in analysis. They all prefer catharsis now. They all prefer to say that they are helpless and can't change other people, i.e. the world. Marxism has been replaced by postmodernism. Psychoanalysis has been replaced by twelve-step programs. It was the end of the content.
~ Sarah Schulman