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A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing
-Joey Adams
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It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.
-Antonin Artaud
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I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
-Antonin Artaud
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Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it -- they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
-Saul Bellow
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A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
-William S. Burroughs
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A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
-William S. Burroughs
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The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
-Michel Foucault
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Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application.
-Gene Fowler
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Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.
-Janet Frame
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It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
-Sigmund Freud
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The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage -- in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.
-Sigmund Freud
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Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
-Sigmund Freud
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Half a psychiatrist's patients see him because they are married -- the other half because they're not.
-Arnold Glasgow
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Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.
-Samuel Goldwyn
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
-William James
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Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize most the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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The difference between psychiatrists and other mentally disturbed people is something like the relationship between concave and convex madness.
-Karl Kraus
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Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.
-Oscar Levant
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
-Marshall McLuhan
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Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It's an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.
-Sir Peter Medawar
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If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.
-Henry Miller
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Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
-Henry Miller
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Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents shortcomings.
-Laurence J. Peter
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Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.
-Theodor Reik
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