Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person’s self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient’s cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.
—Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian-American Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
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 (1915–2005) Canadian-American Novelist
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents shortcomings.
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–90) Canadian-born American Educator, Author
Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients—as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts—as are all forms pandering to people’s vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient’s life.
—Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian-American Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
Half a psychiatrist’s patients see him because they are married—the other half because they’re not.
—Arnold Glasow (1905–98) American Businessman
I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
—J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it.
—Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian-American Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
—William James (1842–1910) American Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician
The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.
—Oscar Levant (1906–72) American Musician, Composer, Author, Comedian, Actor
If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.
—Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian-American Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
You go to psychiatrist when your slightly cracked and keep going until you’re completely broke.
—Unknown
Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
—Michel Foucault (1926–84) French Philosopher, Critic, Historian
The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage—in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.
—Peter Medawar (1915–87) British Zoologist, Immunologist
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.
—Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) Polish-born American Film Producer, Businessperson
Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
—Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) Swiss Psychologist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher
The difference between a neurotic, a psychotic, and a psychiatrist. The neurotic builds castles in the sky, the psychotic lives in them and the psychiatrist collects the rent.
—Unknown
One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.
—Muriel Spark (1918–2006) Scottish Novelist, Short-story Writer, Poet
The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
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