Quotes by Psychoanalysts - Page 3

Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.
Wilhelm Reich
Questers of the truth, that’s who dogs are; seekers after the invisible scent of another being’s authentic core.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?
Julia Kristeva
In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
C.G. Jung
There is no place where those striving after consciousness could find absolutely safety. Doubt and insecurity are indispensable components of a complete life. Only those who can lose this life really can gain it. A complete life does not consist in a theoretical completeness, but in the fact that one accepts, without reservation, the particular fatal issue in which one finds oneself embedded, and that one tries to make sense of it or to create a cosmos from the chaotic mess into which one is born. If one lives properly and completely, time and again one will be confronted with a situation of which one will say, ‘This is too much. I cannot bear it any more.’ Then the question must be answered, ‘Can one really not bear it?
C.G. Jung
When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.
C.G. Jung
The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb.
Wilhelm Reich
We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.
C.G. Jung
...the mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection.
C.G. Jung
A man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Sigmund Freud
Protection and security are only valuable if they do not cramp life excessively.
Carl Jung
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.
Sigmund Freud
Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.
C.G. Jung
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
Adam Phillips
Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.
Sudhir Kakar
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
Adam Phillips
Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.
Wilhelm Reich
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
Sigmund Freud
I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any resistance to this force.
C.G. Jung
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
C.G. Jung
The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.
C.G. Jung
I have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible.
Sigmund Freud
As Spinoza or someone very much like him once said . . .
Judith Viorst
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
Sigmund Freud
Anxiety is fear of one's self.
Wilhelm Stekel
(about cats) They also resist our calls to come, to move, to obey, to present themselves, to do all the things that dogs do so easily. This drives some people crazy. Cats do not even care what drives us crazy!
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
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
Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.
C.G. Jung
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
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
The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it.
C.G. Jung
Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident a tight girdle a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
Judith Viorst
The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.
Wilhelm Reich
Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
Sigmund Freud
Because I'm a man who works, who knows what a human being is like inside, who knows that every human being has his worth, and who wants the world to be governed by work and not by opinions about work.
Wilhelm Reich
The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.
Sigmund Freud
Work and love - these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
Theodor Reik
The fact that compulsive drives for success will arise only in a competitive culture does not make them any less neurotic.
Karen Horney
Concern should drive us into action not into a depression.
Karen Horney
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
Wilhelm Reich
I am not my opinion of myself, I am not anything I can describe to me. I am only a part of a large system that cannot describe itself fully; therefore, I relax and I am in the point source of consciousness, of delight, of mobility, in the inner spaces. My tasks do not include describing me nor having an opinion about the system in which I live, biological or social or dyadic. I hereby drop that "responsibility".I am much more than I can conceive or judge me to be. Any negative or positive opinions I have of me are false fronts, headlines, limited and unnecessary programmes written on a thin paper blowing about and floating around in the vastness of inner spaces.
John C. Lilly
The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.
John Bowlby
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
C.G. Jung
But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shallow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really "final" truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.
C.G. Jung
Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?
Sigmund Freud
Love is the same as like except you feel sexier.
Judith Viorst
Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.
Adam Phillips
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud
Love for a dog during childhood is one of the deepest and purest emotions we are ever likely to have and it remains with us for the rest of our lives. For some people their first experience with love is with a dog. The fact that the dog returns the love so fiercely so openly so unambivalently is for many children a unique and lasting experience.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.
Stephen Grosz
What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
Otto Rank
Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.
Wilhelm Reich
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.Carl JungSwiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)
C.G. Jung
Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.
Luce Irigaray
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.
Sigmund Freud
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
Sigmund Freud
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
Sigmund Freud
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
Adam Phillips
The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance onOur SOULS.
C.G. Jung
I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.
C.G. Jung