Psychoanalysis Quotes

“the Pandora's Box that Breuer opened with Anna O. and fled, Freud steadfastly remained to face. In the Dora paper, freud sets down...the dialectic of fantasy and reality, passion and reason, freedom of feeling and constraint of behavior by which the analytic situation is ruled. Behind the apparent "innocence" of Freud's sexual wishes toward Dora lies a profound and skeptical knowledge of himself and of his motives and of the danger of his creation.”
― Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

“The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form.”
― Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

“Insight isn’t superficial—it isn’t simply learning something mildly interesting about yourself. It is becoming yourself. It’s finding your way to the child in yourself, it is a profound recognition.”
― Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession