Psychoanalytic Quotes

• Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.

  Anna Freud

  Papa, Fixed, Unexplained

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• The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.

  Jacques Lacan

  Mirrors, Stage, Function

  Jacques Lacan, Alan Sheridan (1980). “Écrits: a selection”

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• Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.

  Thomas Szasz

  Love, Successful, Conceited

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• Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Essence, Cures

  "Freud and Man's Soul". Book by Bruno Bettelheim, Letter to Carl Jung (1906), 1984.

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• Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.

  Thomas Szasz

  Hurt, Vanity, Self

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• The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

  Erich Fromm

  Errors, People, Facts

  Erich Fromm (2014). “The Erich Fromm Reader: Readings Selected and Edited by Rainer Funk”, p.74, Open Road Media

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• What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Healing, Generations, Future Generation

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• Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

  Carl Jung

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  Carl Gustav Jung (1973). “Letters”

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  Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

  Carl Jung

  Relationship, Leadership, Spiritual

  Carl Gustav Jung (1973). “Memories, dreams, reflections”, Random House Inc

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• If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true - that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.

  Heinz Kohut

  Truth, Believe, Profound

  Heinz Kohut (2009). “How Does Analysis Cure?”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

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• The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

  Carl Jung

  Friendship, Relationship, Positive

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.49, Psychology Press

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• Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

  Carl Jung

  Love, Happiness, Sad

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• We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.

  Anna Freud

  Ocean, Sailor, Tiny

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• People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

  Adam Phillips

  Children, Long, People

  Adam Phillips (2017). “In Writing”, p.220, Penguin UK

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• Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

  Roland Barthes

  Mourning, Suffering

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• Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death.

  Otto Rank

  Life, Death, Debt

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• 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

  Mother, New York, Men

  Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (pp. 145-146), 1956.

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• How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love, Life, Relationship

  Sigmund Freud (1960). “Letters”

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• As I say at the beginning of my workshops, 'Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation.

  John C. Lilly

  Lying, Bullshit, Experience

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• Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

  Sigmund Freud

  Leadership, Freedom, Philosophical

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.

  Amy Bloom

  Writing, Practice, Differences

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• The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.

  Carl Jung

  Leadership, Mean, Men

  Carl Gustav Jung (1968). “The collected works”

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• If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

  Erich Fromm

  Love, Life, Attachment

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.51, Open Road Media

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• Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Fashion, Cutting, Clothes

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• 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

  Real, Mistake, Hands

  "Psychoanalyse und Soziologie". "Critical Theory and Society : A Reader" by S. E. Bronner, 1989.

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