Psychoanalysis Quotes

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother. (Germaine Greer)
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. View quote
Saul Bellow
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy. View quote
Karl Kraus
So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes - with the exception of their occupation. View quote
Karl Kraus
We see in the 20th Century an unfortunate trench warfare, in which psychoanalysis, in a struggle against the internalized compulsion and superstition of a particular doctrine, has expressed itself atheistically. By contrast, theology is not merely under suspicion of talking soullessly about God. Both theology and psychology, in striving for human health, need one another like the right and the left hand. View quote
Eugen Drewermann
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. View quote
Terry Eagleton
The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis. View quote
Marlon Brando
Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product... View quote
Mircea Eliade
Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor who just wanted to see what it was like in there. View quote
Karl Kraus
Psychoanalysis, which interprets the human being as a socialized being, and the psychic apparatus as essentially developed and determined through the relationship of the individual to society, must consider it a duty to participate in the investigation of sociological problems to the extent the human being or his/her psyche plays any part at all. View quote
Erich Fromm
Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. (Erich Fromm)
Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable. View quote
Stanisław Lem
Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. [...] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development. View quote
Lloyd deMause
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. View quote
Sigmund Freud
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever. View quote
Sigmund Freud
I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience. View quote
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriative choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors. View quote
Norman Doidge
I said I would never go to a psychiatrist, and I spent much of my life in psychoanalysis. View quote
Diane Keaton
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. Then I found that it intensively went into every irrelevancy under the sun - and that it didn't work. People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change. (Albert Ellis)
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. View quote
Albert Ellis
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. View quote
Albert Ellis
Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you. View quote
Andrew Sarris
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. View quote
Norman O. Brown