Jacques Derrida Quotes

Under Freud's influence, many ambitious biographers - not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians - have sought answers in their subject's childhood.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.

Freud: If it's not one thing, it's your mother

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

I went to a psychoanalyst. He explained things about my love life that I found very impressive... almost scary.

The idea that a lot of sons marry their mothers subconsciously, which I have done in my own life, was interesting to explore.

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

We are constantly competing with the monsters from the id.

I've read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.

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 always have to brace myself when I visit my parents. My mom often greets me with a slew of nonconstructive criticisms: 'Jimmy, why is your face so fat? Your clothes look homeless and your long hair makes you look like a girl.' After 30 years of this, my self-image is now a fat homeless lesbian.

Don't talk to me about Freud. I'll go up the wall!

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

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.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.

Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

If you see in your children most of your own faults, you have failed as a parent, but succeeded as a neurotic.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

Fear," she says, "is more powerful than pain.

I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.