Quotes About Psychoanalysis

The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. [speaking about the Irish]

Sigmund Freud

The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams.

Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity.

If we subject the content of the dream to analysis, we become aware that the dream fear is no more justified by the dream content than the fear in a phobia is justified by the idea upon which the phobia depends.

The superego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.

A normal dream stands, as it were, on two feet, one of which derives from the actual nature of the occasion for it, the other on a childhood event with serious consequences.

Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance.

This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.

But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation.

As these examples show, Freud's theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.

psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modeled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929.

Crawley, in language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation... a narcissism of minor differences.

In language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation... a narcissism of minor differences.

Pues allí donde el amor despierta, muere el yo, déspota, sombrío. (Observaciones psicoanalíticas sobre un caso de paranoia (Caso "Schreber")

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist best known for developing the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.

y si no estuviese habituado a designar a tales personas con el nombre de neuróticos obsesivos hallaría muy adecuado el nombre de enfermedad del tabú para caracterizar sus estados.

What else does psychoanalysis do here but confirm the old saying of Plato, that the good people are those who content themselves with dreaming what the others, the bad people, really do?

Psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modelled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.

Sigmund Freud

We have all found by experience that it is especially difficult for an obsessional neurotic to carry out the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. [...] While he is engaged in thinking, his ego has to keep off too much—the intrusion of unconscious phantasies and the manifestation of ambivalent trends. It must not relax, but is constantly prepared for a struggle.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.