165 Quotes About Psychoanalysis

Digging, one finds more rocks than gold.

The purported insight achieved by the patient is not the product of a process of veridical self-discovery, but rather reflects the patient’s conversion to the therapist’s interpretation.

Sculptors feel that somebody else is using their hands, that they couldn’t possibly be doing this.

Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Svevo, Schnitzler, Canetti. How is it that the greatest are, in their varying degrees, violently hostile to psychoanalysis? And, ultimately, towards the end of his life, Freud himself ?

In psychoanalysis, when approaching the unconscious—that is, what we do not know—we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.

Deep scientific psychoanalysis reveals that excessive beliefs and dependence on religion is a superstition and fear induced psychiatric disease.

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers.

The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.

For the analyst it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.