Psychoanalysis Quotes

“Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“عقدة أوديب"
مرحلة في تطور الطفل بين ثلاث سنوات إالى ست سنوات تتميز برغبة الطفل في الاستئثار بأمه، لكنه يصطدم بواقع أنها ملك لأبيه، مما يجعل الطفل في هذه المرحلة من تطوره التي تمتد من السن الثالثة إلى التاسعة يحمل شعورا متناقضا تجاه أبيه: يكرهه ويحبه في آن واحد جراء المشاعر الإيجابية التي يشمل بها الأب ابنه. تجد عقدة أوديب حلها عادة في تماهي الطفل مع أبيه. لان الطفل لا يستطيع ان يقاوم الاب وقوته فانه يمتص قوانين الاب وهنا ياتى تمثل عادات وافكار وقوانين الاب في قالب فكرى لدى الطفل يرى فرويد أن السمات الأساسية لشخصية الطفل تتحدد في هذه الفترة بالذات التي تشكل جسر مرور للصغير من طور الطبيعة إلى الثقافة، لأنه بتعذر امتلاكه الأم يكتشف أحد مكونات القانون متمثلا في قاعدة منع زنا المحارم.

لهذه العقدة رواية أنثوية إن جاز التعبير، يسميها فرويد بعقدة إلكترا تجتاز فيها الطفلة التجربة نفسها، لكن الميل يكون تجاه أبيها. كما للعقدة نفسها عند فرويد رواية جماعية تتمثل في أسطورة اغتيال الأب التي يعتبرها منشأ للعقائد والأديان والفنون والحضارة عموما.”
― سيغموند فرويد

“In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?”
― Erich Fromm

“The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.”
― Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud

“As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice

“Cine n-ar dori să moară visând că moare?”
― Saşa Pană, Prozopoeme

“My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960

“In psychoanalytical theory there is a phenomenon called transference. The therapist becomes a blank screen, onto which the patient projects some incident or feeling that began in childhood... it would not be a far reach for someone to look at my feelings for Jess and assume that, in the context of our relationship as tutor and pupil, I am not in love. I'm just in transference.”
― Jodi Picoult, House Rules

“Writers are fortunate in that they are able to treat their neurosis every day by writing and as soon as the writer is blocked—this is catastrophic because the writer will start to go to pieces.”
― Edmund Bergler, The Writer and Psychoanalysis

“And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir

“Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology

“On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde.

"Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis—that's what it means to me."

"Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
― Oliver James, They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life

“In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.”
― Jacques Lacan

“As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: "I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.”
― Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama

“‎"...θα πρέπει να αντιληφθείς, αγαπητή Τερέζα, ότι τα αντικείμενα δεν έχουν, κατά την άποψη μας, άλλη αξία από εκείνη που τους δίνει η φαντασία μας”
― Marques de Sade, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue

“Fui acusado de ser um utópico, de querer eliminar o desprazer do mundo e defender apenas o prazer. Contudo, tenho declarado claramente que a educação tradicional torna as pessoas incapazes para o prazer encouraçando-as contra o desprazer. Prazer e alegria de viver são inconcebíveis sem luta, experiências dolorosas e embates desagradáveis consigo mesmo. A saúde psíquica não se caracteriza pela teoria do nirvana dos iogues e dos budistas, nem pela hedonismo dos epicuristas, nem pela renúncia monástica; caracteriza-se, isso sim, pela alternância entre a luta desprazerosa e a felicidade, o erro e a verdade, o desvio e a correção da rota, a raiva racional e o amor racional; em suma, estar plenamente vivo em todas as situações da vida. A capacidade de suportar o desprazer e a dor sem se tornar amargurado e sem se refugiar na rigidez, anda de mãos dadas com a capacidade de aceitar a felicidade e dar amor.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm

“O homem não tem nada melhor para fazer do que tentar estar em perfeito acordo consigo mesmo.”
― Sigmund Freud

“A new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane.”
― Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

“La raison découle du mélange de la pensée rationnelle et des sentiments. Si les deux fonctions se dissocient, la pensée se détériore en activité intellectuelle schizoïde et les sentiments en passions névrotiques autodestructrices. ”
― Erich Fromm

“Обывательский вариант подхода к соотношению между мыслями и чувствами с одной стороны и стремлением к достижению целей с другой — не только отсталый, но и неправильный. Мы склонны полагать, что наши решения начинаются с выработки суждений, в согласии с которыми и осуществляются наши поступки: «мы» решаем, кто приятен и поэтому оказываем ему дружескую поддержку, «мы» решаем, кто откровенен, и приветствуем его, «мы» вычисляем, кто неправ, и противимся ему, «мы» вычисляем, что есть истина, и следуем ей. К этой картине Фрейд добавил бы, что у нас часто есть цели, которых мы не осознаём, цели, которые могут преследоваться косвенным, даже контрпродуктивным способом, и что наше восприятие мира может деформироваться в ходе этого процесса.
Но насколько эволюционной психологии можно верить, настолько эта картина должна быть вывернута наизнанку. Мы доверяем чему-либо — ценности персональной этики и даже объективной правде — лишь потому, что это возбуждает поведение, передающее наши гены в следующее поколение (или, по крайней мере, передававшее наши гены в древней обстановке). Эти поведенческие цели — статус, секс, эффективная коалиция, родительские инвестиции и так далее — остаются неизменными, в то время, как наше восприятие действительности настраивается, чтобы приспособиться к этому постоянству. Всё, что отвечает нашим генетическим интересам, кажется нам «правом», нравственным правом, объективным правом, какой бы напряжённости это ни потребовало. Короче говоря, если Фрейд подчеркивал трудности людей в наблюдении правды о себе, новые дарвинисты подчёркивают трудности и наблюдения, и понимания правды. Дарвинизм вплотную подходит к тому, чтобы подвергнуть сомнению само значение слова «правда». Над светскими беседами, которые возможно могут открыть правду, — беседами о морали, политическими беседами и даже иногда академическими беседами — дарвинизм включает свет элементарной борьбы за власть. Кто-то в этих дискуссиях победит, но часто нет оснований ожидать, что этим победителем будет правда. Возможно, что цинизм глубже фрейдовского трудно вообразить, но он существует.”
― Robert Wright, Моральное животное

“I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous -- but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and suck on it you'll go to heaven.”
― Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

“A vida brota a partir de milhares de fontes vibrantes, entrega-se à todos que a agarram, recusa-se a ser expressa em frases tediosas, aceita apenas ações transparentes, palavras verdadeiras e o prazer do amor”
― Wilhelm Reich, Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals 1934-1939

“Ljubav se stalno menja zato što se mi stalno menjamo. Stoga romantična ljubav, sama po sebi, donosi nestabilnost. Čini nas nezadovoljnim onim što imamo time što nas uvek usmerava ka nečemu što ne posedujemo u potpunosti, ili posedujemo u nedovoljnoj meri, ili pak u čije smo posedovanje suviše sigurni.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“Η έννοια του "υπερβολικού" μας θέτει τις παραμέτρους του φάσματος το κανονικού και των ορίων της κανονικότητας”
― Αθανάσιος Αλεξανδρίδης, Η βία

“[Man] has transformed himself into a thing.”
― Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

“If narrativity brings to cinema the capacity for organizing meaning, which is its primary function since the time of the classical myths, the inheritance of Renaissance per­ spective, that comes to cinema with the camera, could perhaps be understood as Schaulust (scopophilia), Freud's word for visual plea­sure. The scopic drive that maps desire into representation, and is so essential to the work of the film and the productive relations of imag­ing in general, could be itself a function of social memory, recalling a time when the unity of the subject with the world was achieved and represented as vision. Together, narrativity and scopophilia perform the "miracles" of cinema, the modern equivalent of linear perspective for early Renaissance audiences. If psychoanalysis was dubbed by its inventor "the royal road" to the unconscious, surely cinema must be our way of "looking into the soul.”
― Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema

“The end of life, its goal and its end point, is this return to the inorganic, so that life and the evolution of life are but a detour…of the inorganic, a race to death…death (the end toward which life tends) is inscribed as an internal law and not as an accident of life. … It is life that is an accident, inasmuch as life dies “for internal reasons.”
― Jacques Derrida, Life Death