PSYCHOANALYSIS QUOTES III
quotations about psychoanalysis
The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.
ERICH FROMM
"Psychoanalyse und Soziologie"
In reality, psychoanalysis can only have the effect of bringing to the surface, by making it clearly conscious, all the content of these "bottoms" of being which form what is called the "subconscious"; This being, moreover, is already psychically weak by hypothesis, since, if it were otherwise, he would have no need to resort to a treatment of this kind; It is therefore the less capable of resisting this "submersion", and it is very likely to sink irretrievably into this chaos of dark forces imprudently unleashed; If, nevertheless, he succeeds in escaping it, he will at least retain, throughout his life, an imprint which will be in him an ineffaceable "defilement".
RENE GUENON
Articles Et Comptes Rendus
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.
CATHY CARUTH
Unclaimed Experience
As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis).
SRI AUROBINDO
Integral Yoga
Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.
STANISLAW LEM
His Master's Voice