Psychoanalytic Theory Quotes

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

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

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling.

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

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.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.

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.

I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that.

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

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.

Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother

I fantasized about being a psychology major when I first started school, and I took a handful of Psych 101 classes.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

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

I like people like Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Erik Erikson, and Francis Steegmuller.

One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.

Apparently, as a kid, I used to eat spiders. Maybe there's some Freudian significance behind that.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.

After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved - or I proved - that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.