20th-century Psychoanalyst Quotes

Erich Fromm

Jacques Lacan

Wilhelm Reich

Anna Freud

Julia Kristeva

John Bowlby

Wilfred Bion

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating and communicating thought.

We now feel we can cure the patient without his fully understanding what made him sick. We are no longer so interested in peeling the onion as in changing it.

Franz Alexander

Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

Imagination in business is the ability to perceive opportunity.

Abraham Zaleznik

Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself... and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation.

Donald Winnicott

Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.

Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

The text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in the subject what the other introduces into society.

Women will not advance except by joining together in cooperative action.... Unlike other groups, women do not need to set affiliation and strength in opposition one against the other. We can readily integrate the two, search for more and better ways to use affiliation to enhance strength--and strength to enhance affiliation.

Jean Baker Miller

I came to the conclusion then that "continual mindfulness"... must mean, not a sergeantmajor-like drilling of thoughts, but a continual readiness to accept whatever came.

An idea upon which attention is peculiarly concentrated is an idea which tends to realize itself.

Charles Baudouin

Looking at obesity without preconceived ideas, one would assume that the main trend of research should be directed toward an examination of abnormalities of the fat metabolism, since by definition excessive accumulation of fat is the underlying abnormality. It so happens that this is the least work has been done.

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

Behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.

A concern with parenting...must direct attention beyond behavior. This is because parenting is not simply a set of behaviors, but participation in an interpersonal, diffuse, affective relationship. Parenting is an eminently psychological role in a way that many other roles and activities are not.

If your child is going to develop a healthy personality with the capacity to remain intact and grow, she must learn how to test reality, regulate her impulses, stabilize her moods, integrate her feelings and actions, focus her concentration and plan.

Stanley Greenspan

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

The real writer is haunted by a plot which he must write out of inner necessity. He is impervious to suggestions.

Nature is a universal that is shareable by all, males and females, men and women, and can thus be of use in mediating between all. The same does not apply for already constructed worlds and cultures. They are neither universal nor easily shareable.

You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable.