Analysis Terminable and Interminable Quotes

“Analytic experience has taught us that the better is always the enemy of the good and that in every phase of the patient's recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“We know that the first step towards attaining intellectual mastery of our environment is to discover generalizations, rules and laws which bring order into chaos. In doing this we simplify the world of phenomena; but we cannot avoid falsifying it, especially if we are dealing with the process of development and change. What we are concerned with is discerning a qualitative alteration, and as a rule in doing so we neglect, at any rate to begin with, a quantitative factor.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“It is a fact that we have always behaved as if we knew all this; but, for the most part, our theoretical concepts have neglected to attach the same importance to the economic line of approach as they have to the dynamic and topographical ones.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic 'normality', nor yet to demand that the person who has been 'thoroughly analysed' shall feel no passions and develop no internal conflicts. The business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego; with that it has discharged its task”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those 'impossible' professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“It is therefore reasonable to expect of an analyst, as a part of his qualifications, a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness. In addition, he must possess some kind of superiority, so that in certain analytic situations he can act as a model for his patient and in others as a teacher. And finally we must not forget that the analytic relationship is based on a love of truth — that is, on a recognition of reality — and that it precludes any kind of sham or deceit.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“[T]he theory of Empedocles which especially deserves our interest is one which approximates so closely to the psychoanalytic theory of the instincts that we should be tempted to maintain that the two are identical, if it were not for the difference that the Greek philosopher's theory is a cosmic phantasy while ours is content to claim biological validity.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“In studying the phenomena which testify to the activity of the destructive instinct, we are not confined to observations on pathological material. Numerous facts of normal mental life call for an explanation of this kind, and the sharper our eye grows, the more copiously they strike us.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“The effect brought about in the ego by the defences can rightly be described as an 'alteration of the ego' if by that we understand a deviation from the fiction of a normal ego which would guarantee unshakable loyalty to the work of analysis.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“During the work on the resistances the ego withdraws — with a greater or less degree of seriousness — from the agreement on which the analytic situation is founded. The ego ceases to support our efforts at uncovering the id; it opposes them, disobeys the fundamental rule of analysis, and allows no further derivatives of the repressed to emerge. [...] The patient now regards the analysts as no more than a stranger who is making disagreeable demands on him, and he behaves towards him exactly like a child who does not like the stranger and does not believe anything he says. If the analyst tries to explain to the patient one of the distortions made by him for the purposes of defence, and to correct it, he finds him uncomprehending and inaccessible to sound arguments.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“During the treatment our therapeutic work is constantly swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a id-analysis and a piece of ego-analysis. In the one case we want to make something from the id conscious, in the other we want to correct something in the ego. The crux of the matter is that the defensive mechanisms directed against former danger recur in the treatment as resistances against recovery. It follows from this that the ego treats recovery itself as a new danger.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“No one individual, of course, makes use of all the possible mechanisms of defence. Each person uses no more than a selection of them. But these become fixated in his ego. They become regular modes of reaction of his character, which are repeated throughout his life whenever a situation occurs that is similar to the original one. This turns them into infantilisms, and they share the fate of so many institutions which attempt to keep themselves in existence after the time of their usefulness has passed. 'Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohltat Plage' as the poet complains.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“[O]ne cannot flee from oneself; flight is no help against internal dangers. And for that reason the defensive mechanisms of the ego are condemned to falsify one's internal perception and to give one only an imperfect and distorted picture of one's id. In its relations to the id, therefore, the ego is paralysed by its restrictions or blinded by its errors; and the result of this in the sphere of psychical events can only be compared to being out walking in a country one does not know and without having a good pair of legs.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“An attempt may be made to raise the objection that the analogy goes wrong in an essential point, for the distortion of a text is the work of a tendentious censorship, no counterpart to which is to be found in the development of the ego. But this is not so; for a tendentious purpose of this kind is to a great extent represented by the compelling force of the pleasure principle. The psychical apparatus is intolerant of unpleasure; it has to fend it off at all costs, and if the perception of reality entails unpleasure, that perception — that is, the truth — must be sacrificed.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“Nevertheless, repression is something quite peculiar and is more sharply differentiated from the other mechanisms than they are from one another. I should like to make this relation to the other mechanisms clear by an analogy [...] Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times were regarded as undesirable [...] At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case they could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in its place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“[T]he ego has to try from the very outset to fulfil its task of mediating between its id and the external world in the service of the pleasure principle, and to protect the id from the dangers of the external world. [...] Thereafter, under the influence of education, the ego grows accustomed to removing the scene of the fight from outside to within and to mastering the internal danger before it has become an external one; and probably it is most often right in doing so.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“We tell the patient about the possibilities of other instinctual conflicts, and we arouse his expectation that such conflicts may occur in him. What we hope is that this information and this warning will have the effect of activating in him one of the conflicts we have indicated, in a modest degree and yet sufficiently for treatment. [...] The expected result does not come about. The patient hears our message, but there is no response. He may think to himself: 'This is very interesting, but I feel no trace of it.' We have increased his knowledge, but altered nothing else in him. The situation is much the same as when people read psycho-analytic writings. The reader is 'stimulated' only by those passages which he feels apply to himself — that is, which concern conflicts that are active in him at the time. Everything else leaves him cold. We can have analogous experiences, I think, when we give children sexual enlightenment. I am far from maintaining that this is a harmful or unnecessary thing to do, but it is clear that the prophylactic effect of this liberal measure has been greatly over-estimated. After such enlightenment, children know something they did not know before, but they make no use of the new knowledge that has been presented to them.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“In states of acute crisis analysis is to all intents and purposes unusable. The ego's whole interest is taken up by the painful reality and it withholds itself from analysis, which is attempting to go below the surface and uncover the influences of the past.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“If, however, what we are aiming at is a prophylactic treatment of instinctual conflicts that are not currently active but merely potential, it will not be enough to regulate sufferings which are already present in the patient and which he cannot avoid. We should have to make up our minds to provoke fresh sufferings in him; and this we have hitherto quite rightly left to fate. We should receive admonitions from all sides against the presumption of vying with fate in subjecting poor human creatures to such cruel experiments.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“Of all the erroneous and superstitious beliefs of mankind that have supposedly been surmounted there is not one whose residues do not live on among us to-day in the lower strata of civilized peoples or even in the highest strata of cultural society. What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence. One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primaeval days are really extinct.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“There are nearly always residual phenomena, a partial hanging-back. When an open-handed Maecenas surprises us by some isolated trait of miserliness, or when a person who is consistently over-kind suddenly indulges in a hostile action, such 'residual phenomena' are invaluable for genetic research. They show us that these praise-worthy and precious qualities are based on compensation and overcompensation which, as was to have been expected, have not been absolutely and fully successful.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“Analysis, however, enables the ego, which has attained greater maturity and strength, to undertake a revision of these old repressions; a few are demolished, while others are recognized but constructed afresh out of more solid material. These new dams are of quite a different degree of firmness from the earlier ones; we may be confident that they will not give way so easily before a rising flood of instinctual strength. Thus the real achievement fo analytic therapy would be the subsequent correction of the original process of repression, a correction which puts an end to the dominance of the quantitative factor.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“Twice in the course of individual development certain instincts are considerably reinforced: at puberty, and, in women, at the menopause. We are not in the least surprised if a person who was not neurotic before becomes so at these times. When his instincts were not so strong, he succeeded in taming them; but when they are reinforced he can no longer do so. The repressions behave like dams against the pressure of water.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“The first of our questions was: 'Is it possible by means of analytic therapy to dispose of a conflict between an instinct and the ego, or a pathogenic instinctual demand upon the ego, permanently and definitely?' To avoid misunderstanding it is not unnecessary, perhaps, to explain more exactly what is meant by 'permanently disposing of an instinctual demand'. [...] we mean something else, something which may be roughly described as a 'taming' of the instinct. That is to say, the instinct is brought completely into the harmony of the ego, becomes accessible to all the influences of the other trends in the ego and no longer seeks to go its independent way to satisfaction. If we are asked by what methods and means this result is achieved, it is not easy to find an answer. We can only say: 'So muss den doch die Hexe dran!' — the Witch Metapsychology.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“The stronger the constitutional factor, the more readily will a trauma lead to a fixation and leave behind a developmental disturbance; the stronger the trauma, the more certainly will its injurious effects become manifest even when the instinctual situation is normal.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“The aetiology of every neurotic disturbance is, after all, a mixed one. It is a question either of the instincts being excessively strong — that is to say, recalcitrant to taming by the ego — or of the effects of early (i.e. premature) traumas which the immature ego was unable to master. As a rule there is a combination of both factors, the constitutional and the accidental.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable

“Rank hoped that if this primal trauma were dealt with by a subsequent analysis the whole neurosis would be got rid of. [...] And a few months should be enough to accomplish this. It cannot be disputed that Rank's argument was bold and ingenious; but it did not stand the test of critical examination. Moreover, it was a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the post-war misery of Europe and the 'prosperity' of America, and designed to adapt the tempo of analytic therapy to the haste of American life.”
― Sigmund Freud, Análisis terminable e interminable