Psychoanalysis is unlikely to be repealed; people are not going to go — Psychoanalysis

"Only a few years ago one could observe, at least among German psychologists, a quite pessimistic mood. After the initial successes of experimental psychology in its early stages, it seemed to become clearer and clearer that it would remain impossible for experimental method to press on beyond the psychology of perception and memory to such vital problems as those with which psychoanalysis was concerned. Weighty philosophical and methodological considerations seemed to make such an undertaking a priori impossible."

"Or look at it this way. Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. A vogue here to stay because it tells an old story in a new way. I mean the traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isnt likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id. Its the same keg of nails any way you open it. "Id" isnt just another big word, either. Far from it."

"It (the dream) is essentially a structure which is, in the terminology of the psycho-analyst, unconscious. The dreamer himself is unaware of it until, in collaboration with his psycho-analyst, he brings it to light. The mythological way of stating this fact is to say that the structure was "in the unconscious." This is frankly non-sense . . . because the structure is not in the unconscious but precisely in the dream, for it is the structure of the dream; and the dream is con? scious enough . . . the revelation made by psycho-analysis is not the bringing into consciousness of what was unconscious, but the bring? ing into explicitness of what was implicit, the noticing of something already actually experienced in a light in which it had not been noticed before . . . the new light in question is nothing but the hitherto overlooked structure of the experience in question ...."

"The stable middle-class values so prerequisite to sublimation have been virtually destroyed in our time, at least as nourishing values free of confusion or doubt. In such a crisis of accelerated historical tempo and deteriorated values, neurosis tends to be replaced by psychopathy, and the success of psychoanalysis (which even ten years ago gave promise of becoming a direct major force) diminishes because of its inbuilt and characteristic incapacity to handle patients more complex, more experienced, or more adventurous than the analyst himself. In practice, psychoanalysis has by now become all too often no more than a psychic blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analyst’s non-responsive reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution, a “tranquilizing” of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out—less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative. He is thus able to conform to that contradictory and unbearable society which first created his neurosis. He can conform to what he loathes because he no longer has the passion to feel loathing so intensely."

"You have got to be realistic. It is absurd to worry about universal truths; the only universals are these mechanical forces in your brain and in your pants. And, each person comes up with his or her own, more or less successful way of reconciling these forces with the experiences that you receive in the course of growing up. Why, the whole history of social science—from Freud and almost every psychologist, plus almost all of sociology, and almost all of anthropology—is one great effort to prove that you cant judge a truth in terms of all mankind; truth is all relative to the individual. And what is more, you have to accept that your mind is not truly free: Biology means that you can never completely control those erotic little demons inside you. So, dont set your sights unrealistically high: The only thing you can hope to discover—with the help of professionals like me—is how to be well-adjusted."

"How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness... – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain."