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Psychoanalysis Quotes

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Psychoanalysis Quotes

“Načež hlas v mém nitru pronesl: Je to umění. Překvapilo mě to. Nikdy mě nenapadlo, že to, co píši, má něco společného s uměním. Pak mě ale napadlo: Mé nevědomí možná utváří osobnost, která není já, která však naléhavě usiluje o vyjádření. Zcela bezpečně jsem věděl, že ten hlas vyšel z ženy. Poznal jsem hlas jedné pacientky, nadané psychopatky se silným přenosem na mne. V mé mysli se stala živou postavou.”

ArtPsychologyPsychoanalysisJungAnimaSpielrein
Book:A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud & Sabina Spielrein
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“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.”

LanguageConsciousnessCommunicationFailureMeaningUnconsciousDiscoursePsychoanalysisLacanFreudian SlipsParapraxis
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“Whilst they are hardly to be seen in real life these days, the most intense passions continue to figure in our dreams. Are these then a reserve of fresh and timeless energy, running beneath the stages of life (and perhaps reaching beyond the mishap that is death)? Or is this freshness not merely the hallucination of a jaded desire? In other words: are there two lines to our lives, the one of a non biological, immemorial youth, which we experience in dreams, and the other an organic line of life and death, of duration and of remembrance, with which we identify our pale and mortal existence? Could there be two fundamental sequences and no relation between them? Or is the first simply the projection of the second, its hallucinatory discourse, as, deep down, psychoanalysis argues? I am for the first hypothesis: we have two existences, each of which is wholly original and independent of the other (it is not a case of a psychological splitting). Neither existence can be used to interpret the other - which is why psychoanalysis is futile.”

PsychoanalysisBifurcation
Book:Cool memories
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“Antigone emerges as a figure of pure desire precisely because, with her words and actions, she incites in others this tenacious question: What does she want? She states what she wants from the outset, yet there is no one in the play who is not baffled at one point or another by this question: OK, she wants to bury Polyneices, but what does she actually want?”

PsychoanalysisAntigoneLacan
Book:Let Them Rot: Antigone's Parallax
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“Although psychoanalysts, including Freud, tended to acknowledge sexual trauma as tragic and harmful (Freud, 1905b, 1917), the subject seems to have been too awful to consider seriously in civilized company. One notable exception, Sandor Ferenczi, presented a paper entitled “Confusion of Tongues between the Adult and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion” (1955), to the Psychoanalytic Congress in 1932. In this presentation he talked about the helplessness of the child when confronted with an adult who uses the child’s vulnerability to gain sexual gratification. Ferenczi talked with more eloquence than any psychiatrist before him about the helplessness and terror experienced by children who were victims of interpersonal violence, and he introduced the critical concept that the predominant defense available to children so traumatized is “identification with aggressor.” The response of the psychoanalytic community seems to have been one of embarrassment, and the paper was not published in English until 1949, 17 years after Ferenczi’s death (Masson, 1984).”

PsychologyChild AbusePtsdPsychoanalysisChild Sexual AbuseSociety DenialFreudPosttraumatic Stress DisorderSigmund Freud
Book:Handbook of PTSD: Science and Practice
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“It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. 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.”

PsychoanalysisMasksPhilosophy Of MindEgo Defences
Book:Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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“[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.”

LanguageSocialUnconsciousPsychoanalysisLacan
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“What we must bear in mind here is the radical ontological status of symptom: symptom, conceived as sinthome, is literally our only substance, the only positive support of our being, the only point that gives consistency to the subject. In other words, symptom is the way we - the subjects - 'avoid madness', the way we 'choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)' through the binding of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation which assures a minimum of consistency to our being-in-the-world. If the symptom in this radical dimension is unbound, it means literally 'the end of the world' - the only alternative to the symptom is nothing: pure autism, a psychic suicide, surrender to the death drive, even to the total destruction of the symbolic universe. That is why the final Lacanian definition of the end of the psychoanalytic process is *identification with the symptom*. The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being. that is how we must read Freud's *wo es war, soll ich werden*: you, the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in its 'pathological' particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being.”

PhilosophyFantasyIdeologyPsychoanalysisLacanZizekSymptom
Book:The Sublime Object of Ideology
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“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. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.”

LanguageConsciousnessIdentityEgoMeaningUnconsciousPsychoanalysisSubjectivityLacanDescartesCogito
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“For Freud, the semiotic trajectory of the dreamwork determines a phantom architectonics: a cartography of nowhere, an architecture of nothing (or the unconscious), and an archaeology of imaginary depth that always takes place on the surface. As a practice and sensibility, psychoanalysis remains attuned to superficiality; it constitutes a search for depth on the surface of things.”

DreamsSurfacePsychoanalysisFreudNowhereDreamwork
Book:Atomic Light
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“Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?”

HealingPsychologyPrideMental HealthMental IllnessDenialTherapyPtsdPsychoanalysisStigmaAbuse SurvivorsPsychotherapyPowerlessnessTraumatic ExperiencesMental DisorderFreudPost Traumatic Stress DisorderHealing From AbusePosttraumatic Stress DisorderSigmund FreudTorturedSelf StigmaTorture SurvivorsMale SurvivorPolitical Refugees
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
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“Invisible walls barricade you and all winds have ceased. You feel encased by padded glass, held by arms you cannot see. You were never claustrophobic, despite all that time spent in bunkers and narrow beds and lifelong closets. But like any reasonable person, living or dead, you'd like to have the option of running away, especially when there is plenty to run from.” Instead you find yourself immobile and optionless, the involuntary detainee of figures in white smocks. Moses to your left and He-Man to your right. They look ahead and they do not smile. Before you is Dr Ranee: white sari, ledger book and schoolyard scowl”

PsychoanalysisDeadbeatIrreverent Verse
Author:Almeida maali
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“We should keep in mind that a woman is not a narcissist juts because she regularly practices self-care in order to stay physically attractive. The problem is when a woman is putting too much emphasis on her physical appearance, neglecting other dimensions of her being and using her image to mask all the complexes and insecurities she may be dealing with inside.”

PsychologyNarcissismNarcissisticPsychoanalysisPhysical BeautyPhysical AppearanceNarcissistic Personality
Author:Tyara Wolf
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“The declining of responsibility for the self can also be hidden behind a pseudo-objectivity. A patient may make astute observations about himself and give a fairly accurate report of what he dislikes in himself. On the surface it seems as though he is perceptive and honest about himself. But "he" may be merely the intelligent observer of a fellow who is inhibited, fearful, or arrogantly demanding. Hence, since he is not responsible for the fellow he observes, the hurt to his pride is cushioned—all the moreso because the flashlight of his pride is focused on his faculty for keen observations.”

ResponsibilityPsychologyPrideIntelligenceNeuroticPsychoanalysisNeurosis
Book:Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization
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“The rub is that any work of nonsense abounds with so many inviting symbols that you can start with any assumption you please about the author and easily build up an impressive case for it. Consider, for example, the scene in which Alice seizes the end of the White King's pencil and begins scribbling for him. In five minutes one can invent six different interpretations.”

PsychoanalysisInterpretation Of Literature
Book:The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition
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“Pretnja religioznom stavu ne leži u nauci, već u pretežnim praksama svakodnevnog života. Tu je čovek prestao da traži u sebi vrhovni smisao života i od sebe je napravio instrument, koji služi ekonomskoj mašini, koju su njegove ruke napravile. Njega brine efikasnost i uspeh, umesto njegove sreće i rasta njegove duše. Naročito, orijentacija koja većinom ugrožava religiozni stav je ono, što sam nazvao „tržišnom orijentacijom” modernog čoveka.”

ReligionPsychoanalysisReligijaPsihoterapijaPsihology
Book:Psychoanalysis and Religion
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“What is repressed is never, of course, annihilated: it will always strive to return, in disguised forms, in dreams, or as neurotic symptoms. If Freud was correct—and I see no reason to suppose otherwise—we should expect to find the traces of repressed homosexuality in every film, just as we should expect to find them in every person, usually lurking beneath the surface, occasionally rupturing it, informing in various ways the human relationships depicted.”

FilmHomosexualityPsychoanalysisFreudQueer Theory
Book:Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
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“This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

HumorSciencePsychoanalysisFreudMental Health Humor
Book:They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life
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“Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).”

TraumaTherapyNeurosciencePsychoanalysisSubjectivityPsychotherapyDisinformationCriticPsychotherapistsMental Health ProfessionalsUnscientificGrandiositySubjective TruthLiterary CriticsPsychoanalysts
Book:Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs
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“..мы имеем дело с шабашем ведьм, который будет повторяться вновь и вновь до тех пор, пока носителям знания и труда не удастся уничтожить в себе и в окружающем мире массовый невроз, называющийся "высокой политикой" и живущий за счёт беспомощности, коренящейся в характере людей”

PoliticsTragedyPsychoanalysisNeurosisMulticulturalReich
Book:The function of the orgasm
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“A mother cannot truly respect her child as long as she does not realize what deep shame she causes him with an ironic remark, intended only to cover her own uncertainty. Indeed, she cannot be aware of how deeply humiliated, despised, and devalued her child feels, if she herself has never consciously suffered these feelings, and if she tries to fend them off with irony.”

MotherParentingEmotional AbusePsychoanalysisChildhood TraumaMother Wound
Book:The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
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“The therapy of psychoanalysis attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting that he lost somewhere along the way. It proposes to undermine the novelistic structures on which he has constructed his existence, and to destroy the web of elaborate, artful patterns in which he is caught.”

PsychoanalysisPsychoanalystThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet Malcolm
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“An important part of Nietzsche's philosophy is thus shaped by this conviction that it is wrong to identify truth with the Symbolic, that truth should be related to the Real. This is precisely why truth can be dangerous to life: the Symbolic is the shelter of life, whereas the Real is its exposure and vulnerability. This is also what places truth in the field of ethics, as is clear in the second of the passages quoted above (where truth is considered not as an epistemological category, but as a matter of courage — "error is not blindness, error is cowardice...")”

PsychoanalysisNietzscheTriad
Author:Alenka Zupančič
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“I dreamt that I took William Burrough’s penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.’ “ “How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?” …”I guess I’m nervous about my birthday.”

DreamsSexismPsychoanalysisWilliam BurroughsJ G BallardBohemianism
Book:Empathy
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“Blaming yourself makes you feel in control of a situation. It makes you feel safe. If it’s Eton’s fault for this, then your brain tells you that he has the power. That’s scary. If he has the power, he could do it again, and it’s out of your control. So your brain twists things so you don’t feel so vulnerable. If you did this, then you could’ve stopped it. You can control whether it happens again. But you know that’s not true.”

WisdomIntelligenceInsightfulEmotional IntelligencePsychoanalysisUnderstanding YourselfTruth Of The MatterCarmichael FamilyAdriana Locke
Book:Fling
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“Domination, I have argued, is a twisting of the bonds of love. Domination does not repress the desire for recognition; rather, it enlists and transforms it. Beginning in the breakdown of the tension between self and other, domination proceeds through the alternate paths of identifying with or submitting to powerful others who personify the fantasy of omnipotence. For the person who takes this route to establishing his own power, there is an absence where the other should be. This void is filled with fantasy material in which the other appears so dangerous or so weak - or both - that he threatens the self and must be controlled. A vicious cycle begins: the more the other is subjugated, the less he is experienced as a human subject and the more distance or violence the self must deploy against him.”

SubmissionPsychoanalysisDomination Psychology
Book:The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination
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