An Outline Of Psychoanalysis Quotes

There’s this idea in psychoanalysis that I’ve always liked.” Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul’s arm. “It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.

Even the simple act which we describe as 'seeing someone we know' is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

According to the prevailing view human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavor to bring one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.

The profound obscurity of the background of our ignorance is scarcely illuminated by a few glimmers of insight.

The act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the purpose of the most intimate union.

It seems to me that it is in the interval between our sense of lack and the possibilities that the world presents that we are able to engage in the all-important task of interrogating the outlines of our being— that we are able to participate in the process of becoming a person. This means that if it is in effect the case that, as I have begun to propose, happiness is a matter of knowing how to make the most of our status as beings of lack and uncertainty, then it is also in this same interval between the self ’s lack and the world’s possibilities that happiness becomes an issue worth contemplating. One might even say that it is only insofar as we gain a better understanding of what it entails to live in this space between the self and the world, between lack and possibility, that we can begin to reorient the fundamentals of our existence—that we can begin to work toward a new kind of philosophy of happiness. This philosophy may not be terribly palatable to those who equate happiness with notions of ease, comfortableness, and not having to make an effort, but it has the advantage of sidestepping false solutions. As Nietzsche might have said, it asks us to peer into the abyss and to proceed with our lives despite the frightfulness that peers back from its depths.

Habermas (1971–1973) described ideology as motivated false consciousness of social classes. He outlined the potential resolution of this false consciousness by means of a “critical theory” that would provide self-reflective enlightenment together with social emancipation. Ideology, within this conception, and also related ones of Marxist writers, implies, according to Althusser (1976), an unconsciously determined system of illusory representations of reality. This system, said Althusser, derived from the internalization of the dominant illusion a social class harbored about the conditions of its own existence, is achieved by means of the internalization of the “Paternal law” as part of the internalization of the oedipal superego. Habermas drew a parallel between the philosophical analysis of ideologies by means of critical theory, on the one hand, and the psychoanalytic situation, on the other. In psychoanalytic treatment, the patient also starts out with a “false consciousness,” and is helped by the analyst to gain enlightenment by means of self-reflection, an enlightenment geared to emancipation of the patient. If psychoanalysis frees the individual from an ideology as a false consciousness, one effect of psychoanalysis would be to eliminate the proneness to embrace ideologies. But Marxist thinkers, as Kolakowski (1978) points out, are caught in the dilemma that Marxism itself represents an ideology (notwithstanding the traditional Marxist efforts to solve the paradox by declaring Marxism to be a science rather than an ideology).