Subconscious Motivations Quotes

The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.

We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want.

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

Winners know what makes people tick by effectively tapping into our fears and aspirations. By listening very carefully and then repeating almost word-for-word exactly what they've heard, winners know how to articulate compelling needs—and products to satisfy those needs—that people didn't even know they wanted.

For a psychoanalyst to be any good... he'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place.

I always see that there's a - from a philosophical point of view - there's the appearance of things that everybody wants you to think is happening, then there's the reality underneath it.

The reasons for public sentiment are often more unconscious than conscious.

I'm interested in getting deep into a person's consciousness and doing so in ways in which the narrator is secondary to the character's own thoughts.

So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes--with the exception of their occupation.

We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act - and in all of these endeavors, we are influenced by factors that we aren't aware of.

What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences.

An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.

You can never really tell what your influences are.

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

I do think people do pick movies that reveal something about them that they aren't always aware of. If you ask them what kind of an actor they think they are, they'll probably tell you something different than what they've actually done.

That animal part of us, it's the most interesting part. It's everything that has to do with drives, with things we can't stop ourselves from doing, with all the spaces where we're unable to reason with ourselves. It has its dark side, but there's a luminous side, too, which is the fact that we're just another species of animal.

I don't analyze what I'm doing. I've read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I've noticed something that I wasn't aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I'm just very, very smart.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

As you interact with others, remember this: anytime a person's response is larger than the issue at hand, the response is almost always about something else.

Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you.