Quotes About Analysis

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 first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.

The way in which these factors—displacement, condensation, and over-determination—interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.

As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.

dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one.

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

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

At first this gives the impression that the psychical intensity7 of the particular ideas was not taken into consideration at all in their selection for the dream, but only the varying nature and degree of their determination.

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

most people report dreaming principally in visual images. Freud, however, assumes that dreams start from a dream-thought that is best expressed in words and translate it into a picture-language which is intellectually inferior because it cannot convey logical connections; the analyst restores to the dream its verbal character.

Sigmund Freud

What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one.

So far we have mainly been concerned with probing after the hidden meaning of dreams, the route we should take to discover it, and the means the dream-work has employed to hide it.

Alternatives are difficult to represent, and in some cases they are expressed by the division of the dream into two halves of equal length.

Certain inadequacies in our psychic performance and certain actions performed apparently unintentionally prove, when methods of psychoanalytical investigation are applied to them, to be well motivated and determined by factors of which the conscious mind is unaware.

The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation.

No podemos sino atenernos a la conclusión de que en la vida psíquica la conservación de lo pretérito es la regla más bien que una curiosa excepción.

So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.

An analytic treatment demands from both doctor and patient the accomplishment of serious work, which is employed in lifting internal resistances. Through the overcoming of these resistances the patient's mental life is permanently changed, is raised to a higher level of development and remains protected against fresh possibilities of falling ill.

The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.

The ideas so far produced are insufficient for the interpretation of the dream.

The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

Pfaff, citado por Spitta, altera a redação de um ditado familiar: 'diga-me alguns dos teus sonhos, e eu te direi sobre o teu eu interior'.