Psychoanalyst Quotes

Erich Fromm

Jacques Lacan

Wilhelm Reich

Anna Freud

Julia Kristeva

Lou Andreas-Salomé

Karen Horney

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

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

Charles Baudouin

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.

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.

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

Imagination in business is the ability to perceive opportunity.

Abraham Zaleznik

The only people who are truly happy are the people we do not know very well...

Susan Sutherland Isaacs

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.

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

Should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?

Lou Andreas-Salomé

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.

A person who suffers from severe locomotor anxiety finds himself in an almost permanent state of mental tension. He wakes in the morning with the anxious expectation of having to go out somewhere in the course of the day.

It would not be going too far to assert that... conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and who is... unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity.

The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself.

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.

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

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.

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

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

It is interesting to note that in every phase of life feminine masochism finds some form of expression.

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

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.