Living list of favorite quotes

We all know that the work of analysis consists very largely in helping the patient to rid himself of the tensions, patterned attitudes, and expectations which have arisen in the vicissitudes of the past and are impinging unhelpfully upon current situations, so much so that they actually distort his appreciation of and his reactive possibilities to the present problems of his life...

Greenacre, P. (1954). The role of transference: practical considerations in relation to psychoanalytic therapy. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2, 683. https://doi.org/10.1177/000306515400200406

Emotion can can be drained out of the old patterns by new experience, but water can always flow again in the old dried up water courses'. You cannot give anyone a different history.

Guntrip, H. (1975) My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott — (How Complete a Result Does Psycho-Analytic Therapy Achieve?

Theory does not seem to me to be the major concern. It is a useful servant but a bad master, liable to produce orthodox defenders of every variety of the faith... If our theory is too rigid, it is likely to conceptualize our ego defences

Ibid.

When such a situation arises, the central ego, so to speak, sits back in the dress-circle and describes the dramas enacted upon the stage of inner reality without any effective participation in them. At the same time it derives considerable narcissistic satisfaction from being the recorder of remarkable events and identifying itself with the analyst as observer while asserting a superiority over the analyst as mere observer by reason of the fact that it is not merely observing, but also furnishing the material for observation. This procedure is really a masterpiece of defensive technique—one to which schizoid individuals are only too ready to resort at the best of times,

Fairbairn, W. R. D. Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (p. 85). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.