Top 45 Psychoanalysis Quotes

I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

An actor shouldn’t undergo psychoanalysis, because there are a lot of things you’re better off not knowing.

I’m not an academic philosopher, and don’t agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I’m a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I’m as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times – almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I’ve seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.

Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you’ve found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don’t know.

Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn’t trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

I want to play so many different characters. I want to, like, understand so many different people, and psychoanalysis, everything. I love that about my job: getting into the character and understanding it and doing the psychoanalysis and creating that character.

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

I started in ’69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that’s I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue.

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it – they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

Psychoanalysis wants to heal with words and speaking, but sometimes with speaking, you realize nothing.

Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.

Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

Psychoanalysis – and any good therapy – is a method of increasing one’s awareness of destiny in order to increase one’s experience of freedom.

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

Sometimes those big bloated superhero movies take themselves too seriously compared to the material they were based on. Am I going to listen to psychoanalysis from someone with a mask?

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.

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

What seems not yet to have been sufficiently explored is the emancipating potential of the discursive form of psychoanalysis in politics as a counterpoint of marketing.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people, working really hard and pleasing people, which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland, I’d do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.

All along, I’ve been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

I had always thought my fantasy career would be making indie films and doing my own thing. But then ‘Superbad’ came along, and it totally changed everything. It was so hilarious and smart and extreme; you could probably do a psychoanalysis term paper on the male sexual psyche going on there.

I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren’t listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.

Roja Dove believes that by test and experimentation – by a sort of psychoanalysis via fragrance – you can find the flavors and smells that connect you both to the here and now and to memories of the past.

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known – that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you’re doing – and connect your unconscious to your conscious.

I read Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it – how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.

I think when I went to psychoanalysis, I actually believed that people said what they meant. This was my whole problem.

Folks are always talking about 40 acres and a mule, but what we need is some psychoanalysis. Forget 40 acres in a mule: sign all of us up for some shrinks so we can get ourselves right by reflecting and truly learning ourselves.

I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved – or I proved – that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.