Human beings err in clinging on the handed down essences as sacrosanct.

However, unlike the traditional conception, essences are not immutable.  They are certain salient features of things that stand out in a particular historical epoch in a particular culture.  Essences are historical and thus changeable…Truth is the freedom to let be...

[The human being is] the shepherd of being.

Yes indeed,’ he cried, ‘there not a blade of grass grows up unless it has its own germ of life within! how much the more in me! and therefore, my dear friend! because I feel myself free in the highest...

No praxis can correspond to indications contained in a lexis.

One cannot merely analyse the conditions of possibility, even the potentiality, of what occurs ‘once’, and then believe – this would be so naive – that one can say something pertinent about it.  That which occurs, and thereby occurs only...

“Authentic” insight is a combination of the intellectual and emotional understanding of deeper sources of one’s psychic experience, accompanied by concern for and an urge to change the pathological aspects of that experience.    

Faith arises not because God sends “signs” – as Paul would say- or because his presence and his severe gaze instill fear, but precisely because he is absent and doesn’t respond.

[T]he lesson of Gesthemene meets the lesson of psychoanalysis: we coincide with our destiny, decide to give ourselves to our own story, since only in that giving can we uniquely rewrite it, and welcome the otherness of the Law that...

[T]he analytic relationship is built upon both analyst and patient being able to remain true to their separate selves and their primitive responses.  It is a relationship that is built on this “relatedness”, and as such it engenders the deepest...

As for the analytic relationship itself, it is not built upon the pleasure principle, it is not about being liked, being nice, kind, or good, for either analyst or patient.  It is built on the deeper bedrock of being able...

      I would suggest that the primary, overriding value of the analytic relationship is in being able to stay with and bear the patient’s experience as it is, allowing the person thereby to connect up with and integrate...

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totslly non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral...

Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is  in the habit of transforming the id’s will into...

This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradiction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. Mourning & Melancholia

To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelesness, and replacement of external by psychical reality-these are the charactheristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system Ucs (unconscious).  Freud – The...

We may sum up by saying that the essential feature  in the vicissitudes undergone by the instincts lies in the subjection of the instinctual impulses to the influences of the three great polarities that dominate mental life.  Of these three...

In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of.  To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly...

The hell of the living isn’t something that will come to pass; if there is one, it is already present: the hell we inhabit on a daily basis, that we create by being together. There are two ways to tolerate...

“The question [says Baldwin] is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road – and the road has a trick of being most dark, most...

A traumatic complex brings about dissociation of the psyche.  The complex is not under the control of the will and for this reason it posesses the quality of psychic autonomy.[…]Abreaction then is an attempt to reintegrate the autonomous complex, to...

Neurosis is the celebration of the The Absolute. One has to penetrate to this point if one wants to understand neurosis.  But not only if one wants to understand it, also if one wants to cure it. […]. Whenever a...

Deadness refers to the father’s unconscious and unknown wounds, emotional disconnections and psychological lack, disturbing paternal care and relatedness.  The father’s preoccupations, his withdrawal, lack of presence and depression are transferred to the daughter. When she internalizes the deadened father,...

Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free […]to replace the lost objects...

Through fantasies of introjection and identification, the “lost object” is taken into the psyche, where it takes up a new intrapsychic life. This is the irony of human development: The ‘acceptance of loss’ in the external world is met with...

Mediocre spirits demand of science a kind of certainty which it cannot give, a sort of religious satisfaction. Only the real, rare, true scientific minds, can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge. I always envy the physicists...

Solitude is the sense of space as nourishing. What usually happens with solitude is that people equate it with loneliness, which frightens them.

Freud’s advice to Pfister on the latter’s analysis of the Graf von Zinzendorf: “Your anaysis suffers from the hereditary weakness of virtue. It is the work of an over-descent man who feels himself obliged to be discreet.”