30 psychoanalysis phrases to understand aspects of the human psyche

Psychoanalysis is, in essence, a cure through love.

Sigmund Freud

Tell me what you fear and I’ll tell you what happened to you.

Donald Winnicott

He who looks outside dreams. But what looks inside wakes up.

Carl Gustav Jung

The catastrophes of the times have shown us that people taught to be blindly faithful in any system will deprive themselves of their own freedom; he will kill what gives him freedom, and run away with the dictator.

Wilhelm Reich

As you continue to develop, your behavior will be affected.

Erik Erikson

We are a society of people with notorious unhappiness: loneliness, anxiety, depression, destruction, dependence; people who are happy when they kill the time that was so hard to conquer.

Erich Fromm

You may know what he said, but never what another heard.

Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis was given the task of exhuming problems brought about by sexuality that had been molding for centuries in the poison closet of science.

Sándor Ferenczi

The miser keeps his treasure as his own; but he is afraid to use it as if it really belonged to someone else.

Wilfred Bion

Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt to free repressed love.

Sigmund Freud

Both dreams and neurotic dream states have the function of avoiding pain, but dreams also serve to provide extra pleasure.

Karl Abraham

Each one attains the truth that he is able to bear.

Jacques Lacan

Creative minds are known to be able to survive any kind of bad training.

Anna Freud

The ability to bear displeasure and pain without becoming bitter and without taking refuge in rigidity goes hand in hand with the ability to accept happiness and give love.

Wilhelm Reich

Only love acts as a civilizing factor, in the sense of causing the change from selfishness to altruism.

Sigmund Freud

We are responsible for what we do and receive. But we are not responsible for what we feel.

Wilhelm Reich

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Erich Fromm

Psychoanalysis with children! The first mirror of the human creature is the mother’s face: her expression, her look, her voice… It is as if the baby thought: I look and I am seen, therefore, I exist!

Donald Winnicott

If there is an object of your desire, it is none other than yourself.

Jacques Lacan

Alone, each child gives life for the desire to live.

Françoise Dolto

We need concepts. We can hardly fail to take them into account. Without them, we would not be able to call this table a table, this dog a dog (…) We could neither judge nor, without a doubt, perceive shapes, perhaps not even love.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis

What I’ve always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It’s probably nothing more than the affection of the people I’m in contact with and their good opinion of me.

Anna Freud

The only thing we talk about is our own symptom.

Jacques Lacan

To truly love someone is to believe that, by loving them, you will reach a truth about yourself.

Jacques-Alain Miller

The other always plays the role of a model, an object, an associate or an adversary in the life of an individual.

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalytic research has shown that, in mental patients, excessive affection often turns into violent hostility.

Karl Abraham

The big man, at the same time, is also a very small man, but he developed an important skill: he learned to recognize where he was small with his thoughts and actions.

Wilhelm Reich