Psychoanalysts Quotes & Sayings

< ... > the persons who get to the consulting rooms of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not a cross-section of the population. By and large they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of the society no longer work. Very often they are the more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the "well-adjusted" citizen who is able for the time being to cover up his underlying conflicts. — Rollo May

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his very junkhood an accomplishment beyond a million dollars — Allen Ginsberg

A lot of people, especially psychoanalysts, assume that happiness can only be found in a couple - but not all of us are made for a relationship. — Stephen Grosz

The psychoanalysts pick our dreams as if they were our pockets. — Karl Kraus

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression — Gilles Deleuze

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. — Nathalie Sarraute

Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else. — A.J.P. Taylor

I believe-and human psychologists, particularly psychoanalysts should test this-that present-day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive. It is more than probable that the evil effects of the human aggressive drives, explained by Sigmund Freud as the results of a special death wish, simply derive from the fact that in prehistoric times intra-specific selection bred into man a measure of aggression drive for which in the social order today he finds no adequate outlet. — Konrad Lorenz

Philosophy can help laymen spot and reject the numerous pseudoscientific beliefs that survive in the media, such as the fantasies of psychoanalysts, evolutionary psychologists, and economic equilibrium theorists. — Mario Bunge

Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response. — Bell Hooks

In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation. — James Thurber

Gradually it became clear that it is a fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation, to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality, on the other hand, can only increase vegetative tensions. One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts. — Wilhelm Reich

Psychoanalysts have been occupied for a long time with the difficult question of what the psychological conditions are which determine the form of the neurotic disease to which the individual will succumb. It is as though he had a choice between different illnesses and led by unknown impulses selected one or other of them. — Karl Abraham

It is undeniable that the source of all our miseries comes from our obstinacy in maintaining that Paradise is a garden. The psychoanalysts have added to the confusion by interpreting the floating dreams as a flight into space. The mystic is the only one who knows that all states of ecstasy are a state of floating in an ambiance more heavy than air. Paradise is at the bottom of the sea, and I can also prove to you that angels are ships. They have no wings but large sails which they unfold noiselessly at night to cross eternity. — Anais Nin

Many psychiatrists, including psychoanalysts, have painted the picture of a "normal" personality which is never too sad, too angry, or too excited. They use words like "infantile" or "neurotic" to denounce traits of types of personalities that do not conform with the conventional pattern of a "normal" individual. This kind of influence is in a way more dangerous than the older and franker forms of name-calling. Then the individual knew at least that there was some person or some doctrine which criticized him and he could fight back. But who can fight back at "science"? — Erich Fromm

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

Peptic ulcers became more common in the 20th century at the same time that these theories of Freud and other psychoanalysts became popular. And somehow those meshed, and this tradition emerged that ulcers were caused by stress or turmoil in one's life. — Barry Marshall

Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts. — Karl Kraus

Psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being and woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. — Simone De Beauvoir

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict. — Jennifer Senior

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget. — Arthur Laurents

Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want? — Alexander McCall Smith

[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church. — Abraham Maslow

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. — Erica Jong

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. — Virginia Woolf

Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do. — Terry Eagleton

Psychoanalysts believe that the only 'normal' people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anyone else. — A.J.P. Taylor

It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not. — Rollo May

Of all the doctors I have known, psychoanalysts, a congregation of lay priests with bible, rites, and the faithful, constitute the most sinister, the most ridiculous, the most unwholesome of the species. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship. — David Herbert Donald

Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement "Those who can, do science, others do methodology." If you knew math, you could "do science." This is reminiscent of psychoanalysts who silence their critics by accusing them of having trouble with their fathers. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine. — Bernard Berenson

We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change. — Larry Kramer

It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic. — Benjamin Cardozo

Many psychoanalysts refused to let me speak at their meetings. They were exceptionally vigorous because I had previously been an analyst and they were very angry at my flying the coop. — Albert Ellis

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. — Siri Hustvedt

Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application. — Gene Fowler