Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center

The most intimate expression of subjectivity needs to find an echo in another in order to receive its meaning.

—Andre Green

Psychological Vital Signs:

Just because people ask you for something doesn't mean that's what they really want you to give them.

—Lacan

May I be alive when I die.

—Winnicott

Rather than the common expression, “it is what it is,” psychoanalysis is predicated on the premise that “it is more than it seems to be.”

--Francisco J. González

Language without affect is a dead language: and affect without language is uncommunicable. Language is situated between the cry and the silence.

--André Green

My thesis is that the analyst's emotional response to their patient within the analytic situation represents one of the most important tools of their work. The analyst's countertransference is an instrument of research into the patient's unconscious.

--Paula Heimann, 1950

A massive, passionate thank you to analysands everywhere, without whom psychoanalysis would never have been discovered or continue to evolve.

Unless patients can feel that they have reached their analysts, moved them, changed them, discomfited them, angered them, hurt them, healed them, known them in some profound way, they themselves may not be able to benefit from their analyses.

--Lew Aron

We are all the servants of the patient’s process.

—Masud Khan

What we are suffering from, Freud will reveal, are all the ways we have of avoiding our suffering; and our pleasure, Freud will show us—the pleasure we take in our sexuality, the pleasure we take in our violence—is the suffering we are least able to bear.

--Adam Phillips

Emotional growth is not anything that the therapist can make happen. In fact, it is almost by virtue of the therapist's not needing anything in particular to occur that s/he can allow emotional growth to occur.

--Paul Libbey Russell

From Controversies in Psychoanalytic Method (1989) by Andre Haynal:

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.

--Alice Miller

In approaching the subject of mental disorder, I must emphasize that, in my view, persons showing mental disorder do not manifest anything specifically different in kind from what is manifested by practically all human beings.

--Harry Stack Sullivan, 1953

It's like reading an experimental odyssey of the psyche

. . . for what we want to hear from our patient is not only what he knows and conceals from other people; he is to tell us too what he does not know.

Freud

It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster to not be found.

--Winnicott

Freud:

On the eve of the Second World War, two of the greatest minds on the twentieth century, C.S. LEWIS and SIGMUND FREUD converge for their own personal battle o... FREUD'S LAST SESSION | Teaser Trailer (2023)

Freud and psychoanalysis, especially the early history, is an absolute goldmine for writers and show creators if they want it.

youtu.be/-lM65Dm6Ytc?...

Sandor Ferenczi had a taste for the therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis more then Freud did. Alluding to his therapeutic genius, Helene Deutsch said he was so gifted that “he could cure even a horse.”

“From a global health perspective, poverty, particularly abject poverty, is akin to a weapon of mass destruction. Its formidable effects infiltrate into all contexts, including that of the intimate, sacred, arena of the therapeutic relationship.”

t.co/3V8aSUsarQ

“I believe personally that the survival of this profession depends on making training and therapy a lot less costly, and I am worried we will go extinct if we don’t do something.”

ow.ly/p8TB50PVf4N

Kernberg, O. F. (2012). Suicide prevention for psychoanalytic institutes and societies. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 60(4), 707-719.

Otto Kernberg has a paper called "Suicide Prevention for Psychoanalytic Institutes and Societies"

Many of the most important and longstanding controversies in our field arise and continue unresolved precisely because the antagonists are arguing over the best path to take when they have very different destinations in mind.

Owen Renik

Freud, ‘Wild’ Psycho-analysis, 1910