Quotes by Psychoanalysts - Page 4

Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Luce Irigaray
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
Jacques Lacan
In our civilization men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.
Theodor Reik
Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
Sigmund Freud
I feel that I am merely an agent, giving you some keys that have been given to me to pass on to you. These keys are to unlock doors out of your present prison. Doors opening onto new vistas. Doors beyond where you are now.
John C. Lilly
The bigger the front, the bigger the back.
Stephen Grosz
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
When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Sigmund Freud
It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).
Marie Darrieussecq
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
C.G. Jung
For once desire is articulated in words it does not sit still, but displaces, drifting metonymically from one thing to the next. Desire is a product of language and cannot be satisfied with an object.
Bruce Fink
He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
Sigmund Freud
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
C.G. Jung
Work and love-these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
Theodor Reik
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
Sigmund Freud
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
C.G. Jung
Personality too is destiny.
Erik H. Erikson
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
Sigmund Freud
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 that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.
Adam Phillips
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Jung
I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight.
Wilhelm Reich
Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world.
Sigmund Freud
Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.
Julia Kristeva
Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering.
Melanie Klein
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
C.G. Jung
You have no sense of your true duty, which is to be a man and preserve humanity. You imitate wise men so badly and bandits so well. Your movies and radio programs are full of murder.
Wilhelm Reich
There are people, of course, who think it unscientific to take anything seriously; they do not want their intellectual playground disturbed by graver considerations. But the doctor who fails to take account of man's feelings for values commits a serious blunder, and if he tries to correct the mysterious and well-nigh inscrutable workings of nature with his so-called scientific attitude, he is merely putting his shallow sophistry in place of nature's healing processes.
C.G. Jung
We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man's activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.
Sigmund Freud
A free man is not a slave who has escaped his master; such a man is but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A free man, though he may be overpowered, may be killed, cannot be reduced to servitude; something in him asserts freedom as an inviolable right.It is not negotiable.He does not *ask* that others respect his right, he *requires* it; and it is ultimately his willingness to die for this freedom which forms the basis of his demand that others respect it.
Allen Wheelis
If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.
C.G. Jung
Life as we find it is too hard for us it entails too much pain too many disappointments impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
Sigmund Freud
The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.
C.G. Jung
The tenacity with which the neurotic adheres to any attitude is a sure indication that the attitude fulfills functions which seem indispensable in the framework of his neurosis.
Karen Horney
In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough and women are afraid they might be considered only women.
Theodor Reik
Why we ask questions: Questions are the basis of human freedom. Our mind, as a part of our  self experience, is curious and always challenging that part of us that can think about the essence of things. We interpret our lives all the time - with unconscious deep conceptualization - and these conceptualization raise questions.Why did I feel the way I felt yesterday when I spoke with X? What is the meaning of my answer? Why I chose to spend time in X's company and not Y's? And how it changed my attitude toward Y?(Interesting paragraph I translated from the Hebrew edition)
Christopher Bollas
It was strange to find that love does not spring from abundance and richness of the ego, but is a way out of inner distress and poverty. We were surprised to discover that our first love is not directed either to another person or to ourselves, but to an imaginary ideal ego, to an image of ourselves as we would like to be. There are stranger discoveries awaiting us the more deeply we grope in the dark and the further we intrude into the secret places of the human heart.
Theodor Reik
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
Anna Freud
The declining of responsibility for the self can also be hidden behind a pseudo-objectivity. A patient may make astute observations about himself and give a fairly accurate report of what he dislikes in himself. On the surface it seems as though he is perceptive and honest about himself. But "he" may be merely the intelligent observer of a fellow who is inhibited, fearful, or arrogantly demanding. Hence, since he is not responsible for the fellow he observes, the hurt to his pride is cushioned—all the moreso because the flashlight of his pride is focused on his faculty for keen observations.
Karen Horney
Relate to a life situation in the deepest sense: not from the standpoint of the ego that bemoans its fate and rebels against it, but from... the greater inner law that has left behind its small birth, the narrow realm of personal outlook, for the sake of renewal and rebirth.
Max Zeller
There is, however, a strong empirical reasonwhy we should cultivate thoughts that cannever be proved. It is that they are known tobe useful. Man positively needs general ideasand convictions that will give a meaning tohis life an d enable him to find a place forhimself in the universe. He can stand the mostincredible hardships when he is convinced thatthey make sense; he is crushed when, on topof all his misfortunes, he has to admit that heis taking part in a "tale told by an idiot.
C.G. Jung
The ideas of the moral order and of God belong to the ineradicable substrate of the human soul.
C.G. Jung
Over the following days and weeks I would come to see, with mounting weariness, that this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: marginal and grim; my habitual daydreams and memories of our life as a couple reduced to nothing, to stuttering salvoes, by the gunpowder of the simple physical truth of my husband's absence.
Marie Darrieussecq
Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. "Migratory cancer cells" are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political.It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!
Wilhelm Reich
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
Examine the personality of the mother who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms herself into a socialized human being.
Beata Rank
The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are."―from_Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious_
Carl G. Jung
Whatever piece of unconscious we take and work through brings light to humanity.
Carl Jung
The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.
Sigmund Freud
The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being.
Luce Irigaray
In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.
Jean Baker Miller
Where love rules there is no will to power and where power predominates love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl G. Jung
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
Sigmund Freud
...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.
Jacques Lacan
Couldn't I for once have you and the work at the same time?
Sigmund Freud
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies quite unlike people who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their . . . relations.
Sigmund Freud
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
Then in a great crash they threw themselves to the floor, ears flopped down, the whites of their eyes showing, looking the way only a dog can look who is totally disappointed. Indeed, they were the very pictures of disappointment.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
We are poor indeed if we are only sane.
D.W. Winnicott
It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.
Erik Erikson