Quotes by Psychoanalysts - Page 2

Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
Judith Viorst
It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.
Sigmund Freud
The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense to be emotionally sincere to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings one's work one's beliefs.
Karen Horney
Genius as such can neither be explained nor treated away only at times its delay and inhibition and its perversion to destructive or self-destructive ends.
Erik Erikson
The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man.
Carl Jung
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud
The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is ... lack of faith.
Carl Jung
The psychotherapist learns little or nothing from his successes. They mainly confirm him in his mistakes while his failures on the other hand are priceless experiences in that they not only open up the way to a deeper truth but force him to change his views and methods.
Carl Jung
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
Sigmund Freud
Concern should drive us into action not into a depression.
Karen Horney
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material but warmth is a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Jung
To be ambitious for wealth and yet always expecting to be poor to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for is like trying to reach east by traveling west. There is no philosophy which will help a man to succeed when he is always doubting his ability to do so and thus attracting failure. No matter how hard you work for success if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure it will kill your efforts neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.
Charles Baudouin
One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Sigmund Freud
When making a decision of minor importance I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters however such as the choice of a mate or a profession the decision should come from the unconscious from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life we should be governed I think by the deep inner needs of our nature.
Sigmund Freud
Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
Sigmund Freud
Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford as smart as Henry Kissinger as noble as Ralph Nader as funny as Woody Allen and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen as smart as Jimmy Connors as funny as Ralph Nader as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.
Judith Viorst
One advantage of marriage it seems to me is that when you fall out of love with him or he falls out of love with you it keeps you together until you maybe fall in love again.
Judith Viorst
Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
Sigmund Freud
Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Erik Erikson
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived lives of the parents.
Carl Jung
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
Erik Erikson
Anxiety is fear of one's self.
Wilhelm Stekel
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
Erik H. Erikson
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Jung
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate it oppresses.
Carl Jung
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Jung
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
C.G. Jung
Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.
C.G. Jung
In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
Sigmund Freud
Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness -- the feeling that someone is trying to think about us -- something we want more than praise?
Stephen Grosz
There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.
C.G. Jung
Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.[…]I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.
C.G. Jung
Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.
C.G. Jung
We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.
C.G. Jung
It's in giving yourself that you possess yourself
Lou Andeas-Salome
The capacity of sex offenders for denial, rationalization, and minimization of their deviant behavior is confirmed by Salter's (1995) finding that the population she has interviewed seemed rather proud of their ability to manuipulate their victims into remaining attached and loyal to them. Salter notes that frequently child abusers target their victims by calculating their probably vulnerability relative to other children, recognizing that those already being abused by others are better prey than the never-molested children.
Harvey L. Schwartz
I hope the next time you get a double-decker strawberry ice-cream cone the ice cream part falls off the cone and lands in Australia.
Judith Viorst
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
Adam Phillips
For the analyst it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.
Karen Horney
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
C.G. Jung
Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.
Wilhelm Reich
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Sigmund Freud
All love stories are frustration stories. As are all stories about parents and children, which are also love stories, in Freud's view, the formative love stories. To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn't know you had (of one's formative frustrations, and of one's attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn't know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing - nothing comes of nothing - but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them, and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. But one things is very noticeable in this basic story; that however much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt.
Adam Phillips
It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.
C.G. Jung
Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
Sigmund Freud
Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.
C.G. Jung
Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].
Dori Laub
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.
Sigmund Freud
One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.
Sigmund Freud
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....
Sigmund Freud
It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.
Sigmund Freud
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud
The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.
Sigmund Freud
Shame is a soul eating emotion.
C.G. Jung
In terms of "quiet" bourgeois democracy two fundamental possibilities are open to the industrial worker: identification with the bourgeoisie, which holds a higher position in the social scale, or identification with his own social class, which produces its own anti-reactionary way of life. To pursue the first possibility means to envy the reactionary man, to imitate him, and, if the opportunity arises, to assimilate his habits of life. To pursue the second of these possibilities means to reject the reactionary man's ideologies and habits of life. Due to the simultaneous influence exercised by both social and class habits, these two possibilities are equally strong. The revolutionary movement also failed to appreciate the importance of the seemingly irrelevant everyday habits, indeed, very often turned them to bad account. The lower middle-class bedroom suite, which the "rabble" buys as soon as he has the means, even if he is otherwise revolutionary minded; the consequent suppression of the wife, even if he is a Communist; the "decent" suit of clothes for Sunday; "proper" dance steps and a thousand other "banalities," have an incomparably greater reactionary influence when repeated day after day than thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever hope to counterbalance. Narrow conservative life exercises a continuous influence, penetrates every facet of everyday life; whereas factory work and revolutionary leaflets have only a brief effect.
Wilhelm Reich
A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.
Jacques Lacan
When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim.
C.G. Jung