Psychoanalysis Quotes

Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure

— Karl Kraus

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”

— Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

— Sigmund Freud

Freud: If its not one thing, its your mother.

— Robin Williams

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

— Germaine Greer

The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.

— Nora Ephron

“Indoctrination is the most effective weapon”

— Thabiso Monkoe

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

— Peter De Vries

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.

— Sigmund Freud

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.

— Anonymous

“En ting er fagkyndig analyse, en annen ting kvaksalveranalyse og onaniterapi.”

— Harald Schjelderup

In psychoanalysis, only the fee is exactly what it seems to be.

— Mason Cooley

“Psychoanalysis considers unwarranted issues as accepted as Truth.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

“Most people believe psychoanalysis is a cure for unhappiness. They are sure they could overcome all their problems”

— Dean Koontz

“Philosophy is to religion as psychoanalysis is to pseudoscience”

— Christopher Marshall

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

— D. H. Lawrence

I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.

— Simone de Beauvoir

Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and…

— Joseph Sobran

Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly…

— Anonymous

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

— Erich Fromm

“It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As…

— Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective…

— Eric Kandel

Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using…

— Jacques Lacan

We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in…

— Anais Nin

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill…

— Judith Perelman Rossner

“felicitous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a “scientific sharing of…

— Orhan Pamuk

Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory…

— Peter Medawar

While there are many experts in the psychoanalysis of individuals, there seems to be little active authority or understanding in the matter…

— Michael Leunig

I looked into studying psychoanalysis, wrote to the governing body and was about to start the year where they psychoanalyse you, four…

— Nina Conti

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology,…

— Simone de Beauvoir

As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it…

— Sri Aurobindo

All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is…

— Janet Malcolm

Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research…

— Lloyd deMause

“There’s this idea in psychoanalysis that I’ve always liked.” Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul’s…

— Micah Nemerever

“We speak more freely of our emotional complexes than of our material condition or of our socio-professional milieu; we prefer to ask…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But…

— Terry Eagleton

“The freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though…

— Sigmund Freud

“One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’…

— Terry Eagleton

“There is nothing. Only warm, primordial blackness. Your conscience ferments in it — no larger than a single grain of malt. You…

— Robert Kurvitz

I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and…

— Matthew Fox