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Psychoanalysis Quotes

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Psychoanalysis Quotes

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”

PhilosophyPsychologyHumanismPsychoanalysis
Book:The art of being
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“Students of human nature and philosophers have long ago taught us that we do wrong to value our intelligence as an independent force and to overlook its dependence upon our emotional life. According to their view our intellect can work reliably only when it is removed from the influence of powerful incitements; otherwise it acts simply as an instrument at the beck and call of our will and delivers the results which the will demands. Logical argumentation is therefore powerless against affective interests; that is why arguing with reasons which, according to Falstaff, are as common as blackberries, are so fruitless where our interests are concerned. Whenever possible psychoanalytic experience has driven home this assertion. It is in a position to prove every day that the cleverest people suddenly behave as unintelligently as defectives as soon as their understanding encounters emotional resistance, but that they regain their intelligence completely as soon as this resistance has been overcome.”

ReasonEmotionHuman NaturePsychoanalysis
Book:Reflections on War and Death
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“عقدة أوديب" مرحلة في تطور الطفل بين ثلاث سنوات إالى ست سنوات تتميز برغبة الطفل في الاستئثار بأمه، لكنه يصطدم بواقع أنها ملك لأبيه، مما يجعل الطفل في هذه المرحلة من تطوره التي تمتد من السن الثالثة إلى التاسعة يحمل شعورا متناقضا تجاه أبيه: يكرهه ويحبه في آن واحد جراء المشاعر الإيجابية التي يشمل بها الأب ابنه. تجد عقدة أوديب حلها عادة في تماهي الطفل مع أبيه. لان الطفل لا يستطيع ان يقاوم الاب وقوته فانه يمتص قوانين الاب وهنا ياتى تمثل عادات وافكار وقوانين الاب في قالب فكرى لدى الطفل يرى فرويد أن السمات الأساسية لشخصية الطفل تتحدد في هذه الفترة بالذات التي تشكل جسر مرور للصغير من طور الطبيعة إلى الثقافة، لأنه بتعذر امتلاكه الأم يكتشف أحد مكونات القانون متمثلا في قاعدة منع زنا المحارم. لهذه العقدة رواية أنثوية إن جاز التعبير، يسميها فرويد بعقدة إلكترا تجتاز فيها الطفلة التجربة نفسها، لكن الميل يكون تجاه أبيها. كما للعقدة نفسها عند فرويد رواية جماعية تتمثل في أسطورة اغتيال الأب التي يعتبرها منشأ للعقائد والأديان والفنون والحضارة عموما.”

PhilosophyRelationshipsPsychoanalysisSigmund Freudأوديبالجنسالطفولةسيغموندعقدةعلم النفس
Author:سيغموند فرويد
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“Although the association between women and cats who are standoffish and wrapped up in themselves is a longstanding one, there are, as we saw in Chapter 3, plenty of women who feel a need to love and not simply to be loved. (Does Freud restrict women to loving either themselves or children as extensions of themselves, but not men?) In any case, Freud introduces here a curious facet of love, which would seem to apply not only to men, which is that we human beings are attracted to people (women and children, for example) and animals (cats, for example) that show little or no interest in us. Are we then interested in anything that seems narcissistically wrapped up in itself (its interest in itself pointing the way for our own interest or desire?) or are we interested in these things precisely because they seem inaccessible? Do we pursue them because they shun us and wound our own narcissism? Do we pursue them because they seem the most valuable – valuable precisely because they are so difficult to win – because we suspect that we will never win them? Or do we pursue them because we identify with something about them or want to be like them?”

LoveWomenCatsPsychoanalysis
Book:Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference
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“Goodsit (1997), for example argued that patients with anorexia nervosa manifest a facade of pseudo- self-sufficiency when confronted with parents who are themselves self-absorbed, anxious, or otherwise unavailable. In this process, the maturation of the anorexic's self-object and self-regulatory capacities are unable to fully develop, leaving them painfully dependent upon others for their well-being. Bulimic patients, in contrast, are seen as more tension-ridden impulsive, and conflicted about whether to pursue their own lives or to remain available to a parent who utilizes them to maintain his or her own psychic equilibrium. In this context, symptoms - whether self-starvation, bingeing, and/or purging - emerge as last-ditch efforts at self-soothing and tension regulation. Over time, eating disorders become chronic conditions that provide patients with a compensatory identity and sense of self.”

WomenPsychoanalysisAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBinge Eating
Book:Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
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“With an eye toward the striking difference in prevalence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa between males and females, Sands (1989) suggested that young girls are presented with culturally shaped barriers to obtaining developmentally necessary mirroring and idealization. Whereas boys' needs for mirroring may be gratified through "showing off, being cocky, acting smart or aggressive”, girls are expected to be "lady-like." It is only in the realm of physical appearance that girls are encouraged to seek mirroring and, thus, in later life women are more predisposed than men to manifest psychopathology through bodily symptoms such as eating disorders.”

WomenPsychoanalysisAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBinge Eating
Book:Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
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“Indeed, just as possession depends on the discontinuity of the series (real or virtual), and on the choice of a privileged term within it, so sexual perversion is founded on the inability, to apprehend the other qua, object of desire in his, or her unique totality, as a person, to grasp the other in any, but a discontinuous way: the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticized parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification. A particular woman is no longer a woman, but merely a sex, breasts, belly, thighs, voice, and face – and preferably just one of them. She thus becomes a constituent 'object' in a series whose different terms are gazetted by desire, and whose real referent is by no means the loved person but, rather, the subject himself, collecting and eroticizing himself, and turning the relationship of love into a discourse directed towards him alone.”

WomenTheoryPsychoanalysisObjectification
Book:The System of Objects
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“We speak more freely of our emotional complexes than of our material condition or of our socio-professional milieu; we prefer to ask ourselves about the homosexual component of our characters than about the history which has made us and which we have made. We too are victims and accomplices of alienation, reification, mystification. We too stagger beneath 'the weight of things said and done', of lies accepted and transmitted without belief. But we have no wish to know it. We are like sleepwalkers treading in a gutter, dreaming of our genitals rather than looking at our feet.”

LiesAlienationMarxismPsychoanalysisWestern World
Book:Between Existentialism and Marxism
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“Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.”

ReasonPhilosophyEmotionsEthicsExistentialismEmotional IntelligencePsychoanalysisSelf DeceptionCognition
Book:Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
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“There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.”

PersonalityEgoPsychoanalysisSelf DeceptionPsychotherapyMasksPersonhoodFreudPhilosophy Of MindSelfhoodEgo DefencesEgo Defenses
Book:Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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“Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the very real social barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment, argues Frayne, can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities constraining us. In a world where problems like disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual.”

WorkEmpowermentWorkersHealthcarePsychoanalysisPsychotherapySocial Care
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“Gemini is the most intellectual of the common signs, being the throne of the nervous, mental planet Mercury. The Gemini native is naturally fitted for walks of life requiring precision and exactness of the mental processes. It does not necessarily follow that the intellectual person is the deepest thinker or possesses the most capable reasoning powers. We must, therefore, in the case of the Gemini person, separate the intellect from the reason. The Mercurial thinker does not necessarily understand what he thinks about”

DestinyPsychologyFatePersonalityIntellectAstrologyPsychoanalysisGemini
Book:Psychoanalyzing the Twelve Zodiacal Types
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“The common signs are collectively generous, unselfish, and self-sacrificing, often with the worst implication of the self-sacrifice quality. The generosity of the common sign people is not always wisely administered, but the hardships of their own lives make them peculiarly sympathetic to the misfortunes of others.”

DestinyPsychologyFatePersonalityAstrologyPsychoanalysis
Book:Psychoanalyzing the Twelve Zodiacal Types
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“Unless subjected to constant discipline the mental processes of the common sign types are apt to be scattered or non-eventuating. There is a distinct tendency to carry along unfinished business and to procrastinate in decision. If left to its own disorder, the mind may deteriorate into a tumbling ground for whimsies.”

DestinyPsychologyFatePersonalityAstrologyPsychoanalysis
Book:Psychoanalyzing the Twelve Zodiacal Types
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“Two unusual examples of the Gemini type in the field of letters are Dante and Bernard Shaw. Dante wrote his Inferno so that he could show in luminous verbiage all his enemies roasting in the pits of perdition. The Shavian humor has about it the bite of shallowness. It is not the deep laughter of the gods who understand all, but the shallow titillating laughter of mortals who understand not even themselves.”

DestinyPsychologyFatePersonalityAstrologyPsychoanalysisBernard ShawDante AlighieriGemini
Author:Manly P. Hall
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“Of multiple unfathomable coincidences or complicities, we say: 'It's too good to be true.' And we invoke the Unconscious. But the Unconscious itself is too good to be true. Behind all that might there not be some cruel divinity or some external fate? But we prefer the id and the drives that are the psychical reappropriation of these things. We prefer our perverse desires, our masochism and our death drive to the ill-will of the gods. If it isn't I, ego, then it's the id. If it isn't the id, it's its brother. That is always better than an external demon.”

FatePsychoanalysis
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“In psychoanalysis, when approaching the unconscious—that is, what we do not know—we, patient and analyst alike, are certain to be disturbed. In every consulting-room, there ought to be two rather frightened people: the patient and the psychoanalyst. If they are not both frightened, one wonders why they are bothering to find out what everyone knows.”

RelationshipUnconsciousPsychiatryPsychoanalysisTherapeutic Relationship
Book:The Tavistock Seminars
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“But if I hope to understand in order to accept things - the act of surrender will never happen. I must take the plunge all at once, a plunge that includes comprehension and especially incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is surrender. How is it done? I know however that only by walking do you know how to walk and - miracle - find yourself walking.”

ThinkingUnderstandingActingAcceptanceCommitmentMiracleValueSurrenderMoving OnBehaviourBeingComprehensionPsychoanalysisFallingLearning By Doing
Author:Clarice Lispector
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“What the adult says, the rest of us understands. With children and schizophrenics on the other hand or psychedelic users, sometimes their responses are so unique to their own experiences that others just don't get it because that person is still in the process of solidifying the congealing brain organization that language bestows. In a great leap (over fifty thousand years or so) the ego took a 180-degree turn from the caveman's primitive organization, hurtling our cognitive development forward in ways that were unachievable before we spoke.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“I once asked a schizophrenic man, "Why does the sun come up in the morning?" His reply was "Tomorrow." I looked at him blankly. When I requested explanation, he said, "Didn't you ever see Annie? The sun'll come up, tomorrow," and he burst into song. Instead of addressing the question from a factual point of view, he simply referred to an idiosyncratic association he had to my question. Adult thinking is universal and understandable by all who speak-a da language. It is a core symptom of schizophrenia, this regressive type of autistic thinking typical of children-or at least we evolutionists think so and most psychiatrists do as well.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“Our bodies, for instance have a need to move and were designed to do so. You don't take a tank, for example, that is designed for war, and use it to run errands downtown or to approach the takeout window at McDonald's. A sedentary lifestyle is anathema to what humans evolved to be.”

MindLanguageMovementEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisAncient MindSedentarism
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“We need to sweat more. Humans moved around in warm climates generally, which led us to lose our fur, and although there was some migration northward, activity in warm air makes one sweat. (Incidentally, the farther one goes from the equator, the greater the suicide rate. We evolved near the equator. There may be a connection there.) Sweating may have been a much greater excretion paradigm than we're now used to. Go toa sauna or a steam room. There are studies that show that using them reduces sudden death and cardiac mortality. Sorne toxins are stored in the fatty tissue of the skin only to be eliminated as we sweat. Along with sweating we need to replace fluids with good old water. Drink from the stream. Dietarily, ancient humans no doubt ate occasional meats but usually foraged around for edible plants and fruits. Not on a time schedule like a modern office dude, cave guy ate anytime he found something edible.”

MindLanguageMovementEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisAncient MindSedentarism
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“Sitting eight hours a day may take more of a toll than we realize. We were not designed for that. On the other hand, evolution helps us adapt to these modern demands. Those whose bodies are more tolerant of sitting have no doubt already been favored by natural selection.”

MindLanguageMovementEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisAncient MindSedentarism
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“It makes sense to pay heed to our past even though the demands we place on our bodies (and minds) are now vastly different. We are still in the midst of the course correction that's happening all around us, but we don't see it. We do notice it when things screw up the process. Illnesses can be considered evolutionary misfires if they do not meet the criteria of Darwin's rules regarding genetic principles that usually lead to extinction.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“Out of chaos comes order. And order is supplied by the ego with the help of dopamine suppression in the context of our spiffy new operating system. When order is lost, the chaos of entropy -which lurks behind this process, seeking disorganization and lower energy states - again reigns. All of this goes along with dopamine de-suppression as the fulcrum of organized thinking painfully reverses.”

MindLanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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