Karl Kraus Quotes

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

I've never gone into analysis. But Freud opened a door, I know.

I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.

Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious.

I don't want to do anything Freudian.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.

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

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

When I'm saying hysteria, I'm referring to Freud, because all the women were coming to him with symptoms and seeking help, and he just called it hysteria.

Psychoanalysis wants to heal with words and speaking, but sometimes with speaking, you realize nothing.

Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

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

People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.

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

The stereotype of psychotherapy portrayed in popular books and movies is lying on the couch and saying whatever comes into your mind, while a kindly psychoanalyst listens and nods knowingly from time to time. After years and years, something wonderful is supposed to happen.

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

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

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

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.