Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Psychoanalysts

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.

Every session attended by the analyst must have no history and no future. What is 'known' about the patient is of no further consequence: it is either false or irrelevant. If it is 'known' by patient and analyst, it is obsolete....The only point of importance in any session is the unknown. Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that. In any session, evolution takes place. Out of the darkness and formlessness something evolves.

The evolution of culture is ultimately determined by the amount of love, understanding and freedom experienced by its children... Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.

The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.

Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.

Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings whose way out doesn’t exist.

I think a sense of humor is the emotional equivalent of a sense of realism. One should not take everything seriously, and everybody takes some things seriously.

Only when he voluntarily chooses that which he inexorably must do, has man any free will at all.

If we judge others, it is because we are judging something in ourselves of which we are unaware.

The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life.

Leaders create an environment in which everyone has the opportunity to do work which matches his potential capability and for which an equitable differential reward is provided.

The spirit of science is not to prejudge, but to give any honest query a fair shake.

My love for you isn't just my affair, it's yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don't know.

It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.

There is a source within us that always works to bring things into the light.

Creativity consists in maintaining a key aspect of the experience of childhood throughout one's life: the capacity to create and recreate the world. Creativity is the omnipotence of the child's mind.

Those that think they're complete on their own, or want to be, don't know how to love.

Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians - childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on - suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.

A good leader makes a good follower.

Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.

To love, you have to admit your lack, and recognise that you need the other, that you miss him or her.

There is for many a poverty of play.

The fact that grief takes so long to resolve is not a sign of inadequacy, but betokens depth of soul.

To dare to be aware of the facts of the universe in which we are existing calls for courage.

Wealth is the sinews of affairs.

...man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological milieu that does not respond empathetically to him, than he can survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen.

The scientific approach to the phenomenon of human nature enables us to be ignorant without bieng frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of wierd theories to explain away our gaps in knowledge.

The empathic understanding of the experience of other human beings is as basic an endowment of man as his vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell

I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.

The end of a dissolute life is a desperate death.

The road to Hades is easy to travel.

Arrogance is a great obstruction to wisdom.

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.

The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the break up of the self and, through the rearrangement and reassemble of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning.

So briefly do we raise our heads, so quick sink back. For a moment we are lifted by a wave of time, are tossed up into the sunlight of consciousness We cannot see so far as where this wave began, but maybe we have waited some thousand years for it to come, and now it is on us. This is our moment, the wave is breaking. The crest which passes through us now in tumult was shaped by the past, and we in this moment are able to shape the crest which is to come.

Clearly it is not reason that has failed. What has failed-as it has always failed-is the attempt to achieve certainty, to reach an absolute, to find the course of human events to a final end. It is not reason that has promised to eliminate risk in human undertakings; it is the emotional needs of men.

One only really loves from a feminine position.

It is very important to be aware that you may never be satistied with your analytic career if you feel that you are restricted to what is narrowly called a ‘scientific’ approach. You will have to be able to have a chance of feeling that the interpretation you give is a beautiful one, or that you get a beautiful response from the patient. This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable.

Play like dreams serves the function of self realization.

I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).

However, it can't be helped; mothers, if they do their job properly, are the representatives of the hard, demanding world and it is they who gradually introduce reality which is so often the enemy of impulse. There is anger with mother and hatred is somewhere even when there is absolutely no doubt of love that is mixed with adoration.

The precursor of the mirror is the mother's face.

Misers take care of property as if it belonged to them, but derive no more benefit from it than if it belonged to others.

We ought not to heap reproaches on old age, seeing that we all hope to reach it.

To be unable to bear an ill is itself a great ill.

Why would you ever rest from what you love?

The source of most human violence and suffering has been a hidden children's holocaust throughout history, whereby billions of innocent human beings have been routinely murdered, bound, starved, raped, mutilated, battered, and tortured by their parents and other caregivers, so that they grow up as emotionally crippled adults and become vengeful time bombs who periodically restage their early traumas in sacrificial rites called wars.

There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades.

No two men living at the same time live in the same time.

Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.

It is paradoxical but nonetheless true that the nearer man comes to his goal to make his life easy and abundant, the more he undermines the foundations of a meaningful existence.

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.

Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.

I don't mind saying in advance that in my opinion jealousy is normal and healthy. Jealousy arises out of the fact that children love. If they have no capacity to love, then they don't show jealousy.

If any human being is to reach full maturity both the masculine and the feminine sides of the personality must be brought up into consciousness.

We fight to exist. Personally, I am not ashamed of fighting to exist. We are doing no very extraordinary thing to fight simply because we do not wish to be enslaved or exterminated.

The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

Of all evil things the least quantity is to be borne, but of learning and knowledge, the more a man hath, the better he can bear it.

Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.