Best Psychoanalysis Quotes

"The classic psychoanalyst would have a field day with that."

"Freud says the sexual self is the essential self; who you are when you're [expletive] is who you are in your soul."

"Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if attacked … A powerful desire for aggression has to be reckoned was part of their … endowment." —Sigmund Freud

"Freud built the whole of psychoanalysis on the basis that dreams reveal desires and inclinations we wouldn't want to admit to during waking life."

"Freud's suggestion that dreams protect sleep has found support in contemporary neuroscience, indicating a biological function for dreaming."

"The central idea of psychoanalysis, as developed by Sigmund Freud, is that the conscious mind, the part of our minds in which we engage in intentional thought, is only one of three coexisting aspects of the human psyche."

"Psychoanalysis makes its most important discoveries through the analysis of dreams, and to this day the cinema remains a dream factory, a form of public dreaming."

"Love and work, the two pillars of our life as Freud said."

"The Rorschach test remained relatively unknown outside of a small circle of psychoanalysts."

"Therapists who try to tell clients what their unconscious motives are violate that alliance by venturing into unsubstantiated speculation."

"It was this iteration of the empire that would give the world the grandeur of Imperial Vienna; the secession movement of architecture; and the founding of psychoanalysis."

"Psychoanalysis is about speech. It's the talking cure. It's listening to what we say."

"Freud argued civilization was an expression of human progress."

"Movies don't create psychos, they just make them more creative."

"Psychoanalysis belongs to that unmasking trend, the search for hidden unconscious motivations."

"Depression, Bernard, and ADHD indicate an excess of positivity, the inability to say no. They point to being able to do everything, therefore psychoanalysis offers no way of approaching this phenomenon."

"I try to get a feel for their temperament. I always ask them their earliest memory because, like a good psychoanalyst, I do believe that's very organizing to how they experience the world."

"Freud gave a general theoretical structure to all these findings about the influence of unconscious issues from childhood in adult life."

"Psycho mode, because why make things easy when you could make them overly complicated and fun?"

"Through internalization, the relationship between mother and child is reproduced in the relationship between super ego and ego."

"She's got brain damage, you psycho."

"My hobbies were psychiatry and history … I'd psychoanalyse my friends."

"So, again, this statement and others like it show the unfalsifiablity in principle of psychoanalysis. You just, you can't argue against it."

"Psychoanalysis may be a useful clinical tool that looks towards neuroscience for validation, but neuroscience does not need psychoanalysis to validate it or give context to its findings."

"Psychoanalysis shows you the submerged part of the iceberg."

"The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems."

"The ultimate function of analysis is to awaken or so up the patient to the other and the inevitable responsibilities that this involves."

"That just feels like it should be like a court case psycho [__]."

"I once read this little tiny book from years and years and years ago somebody old called 'Psychoanalysis for Normal People' and it opened with a statement that said words to the effect of the purpose of psychoanalysis is to make you ready for anything."

"Racism mirrors one of the central problems in psychoanalysis: if the unacceptable in ourselves is that which we repress, project, displace, delegate, and deny, how can we be sure that acknowledging the unacceptable will get us the lives we claim to want?"

"The point of an interpretation is what the patient can make of it, not the intention of the analyst."

"Both writers focus on the question of what it is like to have a life and this specific life now, and the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis all respond to this question."

"Psychoanalysis is much more interested in where people fail and where they succeed, and it's much more interested in helplessness than in effectiveness."

"Freud's dislike of biography is because it isn't psychoanalysis. It's a very interesting difference."

"How can I guarantee the memory of Gradiva? How can I bear witness? Freud unconsciously thus asks to the trace of psychoanalysis, that is to the very possibility of finding traces, to the very possibility of memory."

"Psychoanalyzing characters based on what we know is risky business."

"Analysis is a dialogue demanding two partners."

"...this is ultimately another climb back into the womb type of story, it is a Freudian tale where it's all about shame and guilt and masculinity, sex, that's all kind of twisting into this terrible, terrible nightmare about um mommy being overbearing..."

"The most important assistance a psychoanalyst can get is from the patient."

"Not getting anywhere is itself analytic material to explore."

"Resistance actually reveals more than it conceals. It tells you who the patient is."

"Psychoanalysis is looking at false beliefs, irrational assumptions, trying to help the patient become aware of these and change them."

"The real parents are crucially important and for Klein the real parenting should be good parenting because only taking in the good parent and the good analyst only that can counteract the bad."

"The fundamental significance of object relations theory is that it brings psychoanalysis back in line with the operatic religions. Man is not fundamentally about narcissistic pleasure; healthy people are looking to love and be loved."

"As soon as I see that for a good deal of my life I've been captured by a particular delusion, I'm already a little bit outside it, and that's a good way of defining how analysis works."

"There's definitely room there for like psychoanalysis and for like reflecting on like what are the conditions that can lead people to do this kind of thing and so that we can prevent it from happening in the future."

"Freud's engagement with dreams his engagement with jokes lips all of those easy manifestations of the unconscious I think it's I think Winnicott is is taking that very essence."

"The struggle between Eros and death, between the life drive and the drive for destruction, is the essential content of all life."

"Psychoanalysis itself is an archival science, one unceasingly concerned with questions of memory and forgetting."

"I feel as though I learned how to think in psychoanalysis."

"Psychoanalysis gave people the tools to do something that wasn't psychoanalysis."

"The philosophical and psychoanalytical distinction between seeing and the look."

"The work of Sigmund Freud is one of the most important intellectual projects of the early 20th century."

"Bullies are psychos, so don't bully."

"The unconscious mind was structured like a language."

"Transference is arguably the most important of all the psychodynamics."

"All psychologies begin from a recognition and an appreciation of the unconscious."

"The mind in conflict is a hugely important and true contribution."

"Freud's vision of man in conflict is that we will be forever in conflict with ourselves."

"The intellectual understanding just doesn't cut it; it's when it gets replayed with the analyst."

"We all first of all fall in love with our mothers."

"The paternal function is the function of a third who interferes and says no."

"Human desire is the desire of the other."

"For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence."

"A friend of mine handed me a introductory lectures to psychoanalysis by Freud and I started reading it... within two days I decided it's not going to be animated movies, I'm going to be a psychoanalyst."

"The strong connection between psychoanalysis and literary theory has continued well beyond Freud."

"The dream is always a self-contained Psycho Drama, a revelation about one's own mind."

"Psychoanalysis seen through Bion's eyes as a radical departure from all conceptualizations which preceded him."

"We have not the slightest hesitation in saying that he is the deepest thinker within psychoanalysis."

"Freud for many years defined the goal of psychoanalysis as making the unconscious conscious."

"Psychoanalytic literary theory has been one of the most dominant schools of literary theories throughout the 20th and 21st century."

"The historic patients were the tellers of the story and Freud's role as a doctor was much like that of a literary critic."

"The great myth about artists having their creativity crushed by psychoanalysis is, of course, completely false."

"Sigmund Freud is really developing his ideas about a lot of things including sex and about our libidos, and how that drives everything in humanity."

"Psychoanalysis can help us gain a new perspective on literature."

"Freud's work on unconscious guilt, especially that paper where he talks about the three character types, those who fear success, those who are wrecked by success, and the criminal from a sense of guilt."

"Freud taught us how to listen with the third ear, listening for the subtext, listening for the latent message behind the manifest."

"The death drive is a Freudian term that describes an individual's drive toward death or self-destruction."

"Freud considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious."

"The Arnold Pfeffer prize is being awarded for a body of work that has done the most to bridge the divide between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences."