Quotes About Psychoanalysis

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation. This is a psychological scalpel. It's not always a suitable instrument. It can cut too deeply, or in the wrong places. It is, perhaps, a last-resort option. Nonetheless, there are times when its application proves enlightening.

Psychoanalysis teaches that all myths, including those of our beginnings and first home, have their source in the unconscious wish. Often the same myths are called on to relieve deep anxieties by suggesting that once we lived without fear or despair and may do so again. Sometimes the myth contains a kernel of truth, but out of so distant a past that we can hardly discern, behind the elaborate tales spun around them, what may once have been familiar historical events.

I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

Most growth modalities—from nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to twentieth-century Scientology, and just about everything in between—share a common paradigm. It goes something like this: we store influences from the past in the subconscious, those influences inappropriately affect our behavior and perception in the present, and our job is to somehow remove those distorting influences.

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

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

The new psychoanalytic method [is]… somewhat subtle but irreplaceable, so fruitful has it proved to be in explaining obscure unconscious mental processes.

Science similarly contains within itself the devices for correcting the illusions of science. That is its crowning glory. When we come upon intellectual endeavours that contain no such devices—one might cite psychoanalysis, grand political theories, 'new age' science, creationist science—we need not be interested.

I went to a psychoanalyst. He explained things about my love life that I found very impressive... almost scary.

I've always wanted to be psychoanalyzed in a den of iniquity.

Derrida is convinced: the 'Enlightenment to come' should take the logic of the unconscious into account. This involves, for example, answering a question that in his view is essential and yet rarely asked: 'Why does psychoanalysis never take root in the vast territory of Arabo-Islamic culture?'11 All these questions would seem even more urgent in the wake of 11 September the following year.

Speaking psycho-analytically, it may be laid down that any great ideal which people mention with awe is really an excuse for inflicting pain on their enemies. Good wine needs no bush, and good morals need no bated breath.

Folks are always talking about 40 acres and a mule, but what we need is some psychoanalysis. Forget 40 acres in a mule: sign all of us up for some shrinks so we can get ourselves right by reflecting and truly learning ourselves.

Freud answers by suggesting that the harshness that can be shown by the superego is a result of the channelling of part of the id's destructiveness through the superego.

In classical psychoanalytic theory hysterical symptoms refer to dysfunction when a body part or a sense organ takes on an unconscious symbolic meaning. For example, a patient's eyes or legs might be equated unconsciously with his or her sexual organs; in the case of massive inhibition of adult sexuality, an eye or a leg may appear not to function. There is no physiological damage; the affected organ is only hysterically paralyzed.

el deseo del analista es el deseo del paciente, se juntan en un solo y único punto. Imagino el deseo del analizante como un triángulo, y el deseo del analista como otro triángulo, ambos tocándose por sus vértices, como una corbata de moño.

It wasn't obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself, an individual, without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a "female-female impersonation.

Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application.

También valoro la obra de Joseph Campbell. El héroe de las mil caras: psicoanálisis del mito

Emerson, a shrewder prophet [than Freud], could have told Freud that psychoanalysis was another form of the triumph of literary culture over science, as well as over religion and philosophy.

I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Psychoanalysis is the transformation of hysterical misery into common unhappiness.