Here is an archive of quotes from various sources of pschoanalysis. Feel free to suggest any additions!
Pychoanalysis in this version can’t help people, because there is nothing wrong with anybody; it can only engage them in useful and interesting conversations. So one could then say that as a form of treatment psychoanalysis is a conversation that enables people to understand what stops them from having the kinds of conversation they want, and how they come to believe that these particular conversations are worth wanting. Rather than: psychoanalysis is a conversation that helps people get back on track. Psychoanalysis, in other words, would be a curiosity profession instead of a helping profession. It is of course one of the tacit assumptions of psychoanalysis that there can be no good life, and no curiosity, without talking.
What does analysis uncover–if it isn’t the fundamental, radical discordance of forms of conduct essential to man in relation to everything which he experiences? The dimension discovered by analysis is the opposite of anything which progresses through adaptation, through approximation, through being perfected….In man, it is the wrong form which prevails. In so far as a task is not completed the subject returns to it. The more abject the failure, the better the subject remembers it.
It is perhaps relevant here to cite the case of the child of the broken home, or the child without parents. Such a child spends his time unconsciously looking for his parents. It is notoriously inadequate to take such a child into one's home and to love him. What happens is that after a while the child gains home, and then he starts to test out the environment he has found, and to seek proof of his guardians' ability to hate objectively. It seems that he can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated.
Out of all the complexity of the problem of hate and ts roots I want to rescue one thing, because I believe it has an importance for the analyst of psychotic patients. I suggest that the mother hates the baby before the baby hates the mother, and before the baby can know his mother hates him.
The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity---and in particular to make it more peaceable---have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual. Such efforts do not seek to do more than encourage the positive, well-wishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his aggressive ones. And so they have been doomed to failure from the beginning.
Further, it is easy to observe that libidinal object-cathexis does not raise self-regard. The effect of dependence upon the loved object is to lower that feeling: a person in love is humble. A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved. In all these respects self-regard seems to remain related to the narcissistic element in love.
The analytic experience is a complex of many experiences, which individually are familiar both to the analyst and analysand (patient) and therefore tend to give a deceptively simple appearance to a situation that has, by bringing these familiar experiences together, become unique. Everything that happens in a consulting room has happened quite commonly to both participants before, but never in quite the same way.
A mother has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it. She cannot express it to him. If, for fear of what she may do, she cannot hate appropriately when hurt by her child she must fall back on masochism, and I think it is this that gives rise to the false theory of a natural masochism in women. The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date. Perhaps she is helped by some of the nursery rhymes she sings, which her baby enjoys but fortunately does not understand?
Take the child away from the fire, deny it a second piece of cake, but avoid being angry or hurt or disapproving if a scream of rage or a kick on the shins is the immediate consequence of thwarting a child's will to happiness. To permit children to express their feelings of aggression, whilst preventing acts of irremediable destruction is, we suggest, one of the greatest gifts of parenting.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.
Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it---much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the 'masquerade'. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. The capacity for womanliness was there in this woman---and one might even say it exists in the most completely homosexual woman---but owning to her conflicts it did not represent her main development, and was used far more as a device for avoiding anxiety than as a primary mode of sexual enjoyment.
A psychoanalysis, consists in speaking freely, in not hushing the ideas that go through your head. Little by little, from within your own words, another meaning forms and surprises you, then falls apart, taking the pain with it. Usually, you discover just how conditioned you had been by apparently minute elements encountered in hazardous circumstances: things from childhood, meetings, certain words said to you, and we keep coming back to them until the malevolent charge of these elements softens.
As often happens in a psychoanalysis, people aren't cured, they just lose interest in their symptoms. Their preoccupations fade, and evolve.
Meaning is always ambiguous, polyvalent, betraying something one wanted to remain hidden, hiding something one intended to express.