#psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243) ↗

— Norman Doidge

#death #ghosts #grief #healing-the-past #loss

Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater! ↗

— Gilles Deleuze

#psychoanalysis #shit #capitalism

O homem não tem nada melhor para fazer do que tentar estar em perfeito acordo consigo mesmo. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#psychoanalysis #inspirational

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. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#because #beforehand #conscious #definition #investigate

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. ↗

— Norman O. Brown

#becomes #common #common sense #equation #essence

Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution. ↗

— Germaine Greer

#confession #psychoanalysis #without

Why we ask questions: Questions are the basis of human freedom. Our mind, as a part of our  self experience, is curious and always challenging that part of us that can think about the essence of things. We interpret our lives all the time - with unconscious deep conceptualization - and these conceptualization raise questions. Why did I feel the way I felt yesterday when I spoke with X? What is the meaning of my answer? Why I chose to spend time in X's company and not Y's? And how it changed my attitude toward Y? (Interesting paragraph I translated from the Hebrew edition) ↗

— Christopher Bollas

#psychology #change

This brings us to a further complication: if what we experience as ‘reality’ is structured by fantasy and if fantasy serves as a screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real then reality itself can function as an escape from the Real. In the opposition between dream and reality fantasy is at the side of reality and it is in dreams that we encounter the traumatic Real – it is not that dreams are for those who cannot endure reality reality itself is for those who cannot endure the Real that announces itself in their dreams. ↗

— Slavoj Žížek

#dreams

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience. ↗

— Matt Ridley

#psychoanalysis #psychology #sexes #experience

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#fear-of-life #orgasm #pleasure #psychoanalysis #psychology