165 Quotes About Psychoanalysis

There are no human gods here, just hoods who think they are.

The classic psychoanalytical interpretation of la belle indifférence is that it is evidence that an intrapsychic conflict has been converted and kept from its unacceptable conscious expression by the production of a physical symptom – so-called primary gain. Freud was the first to admit that this process of conversion was not always complete.

Pyschoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we're going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we're creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.

Should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?

This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

...the sexual activity of girls is "particularly subject to the watchful guardianship of their mothers," which may contribute an element of hostility toward their own sex. But all of these remarks simply confirm that the wave of repression in puberty is not biological but is rather a matter of social organization and conventions.

Psychoanalysis is the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our epoch . . . with its facile explanation of adult behavior by reference to unobservable and arbitrarily posited childhood fantasy

Freud expressed the opinion—not quite in earnest, though, it seemed to me—that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, 'What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?' Whereupon he, visible a bit surprised, answered evasively: 'At least psychology has a social purpose.

Unconscious motivating forces play a central role in shaping our behavior, but they are also the primary cause of mental illness.