Top 174 Psychoanalysis Quotes & Sayings

I said I would never go to a psychiatrist, and I spent much of my life in psychoanalysis.

miracles occur in psychoanalysis as seldom as anywhere else.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

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.

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

If psychoanalysis was late 19th century secular Judaism’s way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, and retail is the late 20th century’s way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world, what does it mean that I’m impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday?

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.

Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.

Freudian therapists do a lot of listening and very little persuading, and that was one of the reasons I eventually gave up being an analyst. You had to be too passive and not speak up, and you couldn't give homework to clients. While I was still an analyst, I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit psychoanalysis after practicing it for six years.

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.

Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.

Psychoanalysis - and any good therapy - is a method of increasing one's awareness of destiny in order to increase one's experience of freedom.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.

Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be.

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.

Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth.

All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.

I want to play so many different characters. I want to, like, understand so many different people, and psychoanalysis, everything. I love that about my job: getting into the character and understanding it and doing the psychoanalysis and creating that character.

The poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis. The uneducated need knowledge and skills, not psychoanalysis.

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

One day fascism will be treated with psychoanalysis.

Ever since the introduction of psychoanalysis there have been too many terms to excuse behavior and phrases that can be [used] to explain everything.

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience.

The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you'll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.

My films are a form of psychoanalysis, except that it is I who am paid, which changes everything.

I think when I went to psychoanalysis, I actually believed that people said what they meant. This was my whole problem.

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

An actor shouldn't undergo psychoanalysis, because there are a lot of things you're better off not knowing.

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.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.

My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it.

I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that... Freud was always saying he was a scientist.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.

I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged.

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

Psychoanalysis teaches one thing, he thought: Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. A single bad act can have all sorts of repercussions.

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

What seems not yet to have been sufficiently explored is the emancipating potential of the discursive form of psychoanalysis in politics as a counterpoint of marketing.