Quotes by Psychoanalysts - Page 2

There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestations. The psyche is the object of psychology, and -fatally enough- also its subject. There is no getting away from this fact."Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.8

C.G. Jung

In recent times, more and more human thinking has come to assume that the idea of a universal natural law and the idea of 'God' are pointing to one and the same reality.

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

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

Sigmund Freud

I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.

Sigmund Freud

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

Anna Freud

The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.

Philippe Grimbert

Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.

Alfred Ernest Jones

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

Jacques Lacan

Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child

Anna Freud

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.

C.G. Jung

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.Carl JungSwiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

C.G. Jung

This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse.

Wilhelm Reich

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

C.G. Jung

Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.

Sigmund Freud

We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

C.G. Jung

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

The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

Julia Kristeva

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.

Sigmund Freud

The creative mind plays with the object it loves.

C.G. Jung

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.

C.G. Jung

The primary cause of unhappiness in the world today is ... lack of faith.

Carl Jung

People should be _very_ careful when choosing the future fathers and mothers of their children. For that reason alone, it is extremely mean to demand a marriage certificate for life, just for one night of embracement.

Wilhelm Reich

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

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

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

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Erik Erikson

Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

Sigmund Freud

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

Erik H. Erikson

The gods have become our diseases.

C.G. Jung

Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.

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

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

C.G. Jung

Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.

Mikita Brottman

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Sigmund Freud

To be a human being means to be lonely.To go on becoming a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness.

Robert Hobson

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

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

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 unconscious always tries to produce an impossible situation in order to force the individual to bring out his very best. Otherwise one stops short of one's best, one is not complete, one does not realize oneself. What is needed is an impossible situation where one has to renounce one's own will and one's own wit and do nothing but wait and trust to the impersonal power of growth and development.

C.G. Jung

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

C.G. 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

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous.

C.G. Jung

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough."This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche.

C.G. Jung

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

Erik Erikson

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

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

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

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