Top 100 Quotes About Psychoanalysis
#1. The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.
Eric Kandel
#2. Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.
Joseph Sobran
#3. In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Jane Smiley
#4. Journalism, like history, has no therapeutic value; it is better able to diagnose than to cure, and it provides society with a primitive means of psychoanalysis that allows the patient to judge the distance between fantasy and reality.
Bill Vaughan
#5. As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.
George Bernard Shaw
#6. Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.
Peter Medawar
#7. 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.
Albert Ellis
#8. Psychoanalysis and dianetics are, on the face of it, both absurd. People are what they are because of causes that go infinitely farther back than infancy of the mother's womb
Clark Ashton Smith
#9. So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It's cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting.
Nora Ephron
#10. Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.
Vivian Gornick
#11. All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.
Janet Malcolm
#12. Ever since the introduction of psychoanalysis there have been too many terms to excuse behavior and phrases that can be [used] to explain everything.
Sean Connery
#13. Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...
Iris Murdoch
#14. I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.
Albert Ellis
#15. This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.
Sheila Jeffreys
#16. The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.
Sherry Turkle
#17. 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.
Stephen King
#18. Psychoanalysis is a new version of the ancient theme shared by all the great religions. The loss of illusion, the giving up of attachment to a false reality, the inevitability of suffering and expiation are all present in psychoanalysis. Every person who seeks analysis is on a personal pilgrimage.
Margaret Arden
#19. She saw why teachers get very old and stay very young. For there is no closer probing of the mind--not even in psychoanalysis.
John Horne Burns
#20. This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. [speaking about the Irish]
Sigmund Freud
#21. Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
Vivian Gornick
#22. I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.
Orson Welles
#24. Freud is usually viewed as the person who linked psychoanalysis to some issues in the environment, usually man-made. So I thought it would be fun to throw that in the mix.
DJ Spooky
#25. The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.
Thomas Szasz
#26. This'll be a hootload of fun," coming from a taxidermist's assistant translates to: "This will cost thousands in psychoanalysis and will probably ruin your dress.
Jenny Lawson
#27. 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
#28. Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are
G.K. Chesterton
#29. This is a source of much embarrassment and puzzlement to me about myself. (It) probably requires psychoanalysis of why there is this aberration in my life. The rest of my conduct, I think you will agree, is not reflective of my driving record, and I apologized for it.
Zulima Farber
#30. My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it.
Sigmund Freud
#32. But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.
Shulamith Firestone
#33. Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.
Karl A. Menninger
#34. For a psychoanalyst to be any good ... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.
J.D. Salinger
#35. We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
Ernest Becker
#36. 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
#37. 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.
LaTanya Richardson
#38. I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I'm not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.
Kevin Gates
#39. Sometimes those big bloated superhero movies take themselves too seriously compared to the material they were based on. Am I going to listen to psychoanalysis from someone with a mask?
Baltasar Kormakur
#40. Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.
Thomas Szasz
#41. As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.
Muriel Barbery
#42. The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you're doing - and connect your unconscious to your conscious.
Tucker Max
#43. Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Robert Hughes
#44. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.
Karl Kraus
#45. Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people, working really hard and pleasing people, which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland, I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.
Steve Martin
#46. Like the deepest secrets in a psychoanalysis, our lives stay hidden, harboring our precious information like a piece of decaying food behind a major molar in our country's maw,
Larry Kramer
#47. Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow.
Sebastian Horsley
#48. Psychoanalysis wants to heal with words and speaking, but sometimes with speaking, you realize nothing.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#49. It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
Sigmund Freud
#50. A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#51. Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.
D.M. Thomas
#52. Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.
Bette Davis
#53. psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What
Adam Phillips
#54. Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.
Norman Mailer
#55. To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.
Frederick Salomon Perls
#56. Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
Michel Foucault
#57. My films are a form of psychoanalysis, except that it is I who am paid, which changes everything.
Woody Allen
#58. Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.
Salvador Dali
#59. The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
John Updike
#60. If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
Jacques Lacan
#61. Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
Germaine Greer
#62. 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
#63. Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don't know.
Eric Kandel
#64. I said I would never go to a psychiatrist, and I spent much of my life in psychoanalysis.
Diane Keaton
#65. Deep scientific psychoanalysis reveals that excessive beliefs and dependence on religion is a superstition and fear induced psychiatric disease.
Debasish Mridha
#66. A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.
S. N. Behrman
#67. In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.
Eric Kandel
#68. One day fascism will be treated with psychoanalysis.
Ennio Flaiano
#69. Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
#70. I think when I went to psychoanalysis, I actually believed that people said what they meant. This was my whole problem.
John Malkovich
#71. The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.
Mignon McLaughlin
#72. Psychoanalysis will fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason - its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits
Frederick Crews
#73. Psychoanalysis is not a science: it is at best a medical process, and perhaps even more like witch-doctoring.
Richard Feynman
#74. 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
#75. Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.
Karl Kraus
#76. I don't know much about psychoanalysis, but I don't believe that we can blame our actions on our upbringings. If we could, then nobody would be responsible for anything they do.
Anne Blankman
#77. Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#78. Psychoanalysis teaches one thing, he thought: Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. A single bad act can have all sorts of repercussions.
John Katzenbach
#79. Freud put it beautifully: the aim of psychoanalysis is to help the patient let go of the delusional suffering of his neuroses and experience the misery of actual reality.
Tim Farrington
#80. The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
Sigmund Freud
#81. My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#82. An actor shouldn't undergo psychoanalysis, because there are a lot of things you're better off not knowing.
Paul Lynde
#83. I think that it is a good plan to bear in mind that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud
#84. Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
Saul Bellow
#85. I've had a very productive life. I've worked very hard, I've never fallen prey to depression. I'm not sure I could have done all of that without being in psychoanalysis.
Woody Allen
#86. Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance.
Sigmund Freud
#87. Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
Sigmund Freud
#88. Psychoanalysis has at bottom no other goal than to create a space within oneself in which God's voice can be heard
Hermann Hesse
#89. I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?
Noam Chomsky
#90. I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis.
Nora Ephron
#91. In psychoanalysis there is never repetition, neither of the same images nor
Italo Svevo
#92. I started in '69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that's I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#93. Scripture does what psychoanalysis can't do-it pierces the heart, penetrates deep into the soul and judges the motives. To see yourself in the light of Scripture, is to see yourself as you really are.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#94. Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.
Erich Fromm
#95. While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her
Tom Butler-Bowdon
#96. Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.
Malcolm Morley
#97. The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.
Donald Barthelme
#98. People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you.
Woody Allen
#99. Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
Edmund White
#100. The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal
Allen Frances
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