Psychoanalyst Quotes

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. (Billy Wilder)

I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst.

Vladimir Nabokov

Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M. D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.

Paul Goodman

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

Italo Calvino

I entered Harvard to become a historian and left to become a psychoanalyst, only to abandon both... to follow my intuition that the road to a real understanding of mind must pass through the cellular pathways of the brain.

Eric Kandel

While autism is a developmental disorder, sometimes a devastating one, there is always within the autism a unique and sometimes strangely gifted individual. The great psychoanalyst Winicott used to feel that there was something like a tulip in every person and this was their essence and that this internal part of them was inaccessible to the person themselves and should not be meddled with or touched by psychoanalysis or anything else and one wonders if there is not some autistic essence like this tulip which needs to be respected and not meddled with.

Oliver Sacks

...an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a "microsurgeon of the mind" who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.

Norman Doidge

When a psychoanalyst takes on the role of a blank screen, all he really learns is how the patient responds to people who try to act like they're a blank screen.

David H. Levy

A wise psychoanalyst once told me, "Stop looking at what you're saying, look at what you're doing.”.

Corey Robin

Every time I give a straight answer and read it in a magazine, I say, 'Ouch.' One day I'd like to talk to a psychoanalyst about why celebrities reveal so much of themselves in interviews.

Gilbert Gottfried

Being a good psychoanalyst, in short, has the same disadvantage as being a good parent: The children desert one as they grow up. (Morton Hunt)

I went to a psychoanalyst. He explained things about my love life that I found very impressive... almost scary.

Britney Spears

I'm going to give my psychoanalyst one more year, then I'm going to Lourdes.

Woody Allen

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

Will Self

The stereotype of psychotherapy portrayed in popular books and movies is lying on the couch and saying whatever comes into your mind, while a kindly psychoanalyst listens and nods knowingly from time to time. After years and years, something wonderful is supposed to happen.

David D. Burns

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.

Al Alvarez

The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.

Erich Fromm

He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home.... [H]e was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them permanent.

Elia Kazan

When a psychoanalyst takes on the role of a blank screen, all he really learns is how the patient responds to people who try to act like they're a blank screen.

David Levy

As Hegel called the place at the end of philosophy the "place of truth," so Marx thought that the proletariat occupies this favored position, and the psychoanalyst attributes it to the completely analyzed personality, and the philosopher of vitalism to the strongest life, to the process of growth, to an élite or a race. There are, according to these ideas, favored moments and positions in history when truth appears and reason is united with the irrational. There are moments, as I myself have emphasized on different occasions, in which "kairos," the right time, is united with "logos," the "eternal truth," and in which the fate of philosophy is decided for a special period.

Paul Tillich