David A. Rapaport Quotes

“From the beginning one of the outstanding characteristics of psychoanalytic theory has been its distinction between, on the one hand, the primary processes which are motivated by basic drives and which in their operation display the so-called Freudian mechanisms (condensation, displacement, symbolization, etc.) and, on the other hand, the secondary processes which follow the rules of logic and reality-testing. In the course of the development of psychoanalytic theory this distinction developed into the distinction between the ego and the id.”

“Much can be learned about learning from patients; patients may oblige us where normals do not have the motivation to let us learn from them. ”

“While we are all eager to reach a state where our theories will be borne out not only by clinical experience but verified also by experiment, we have to acknowledge the fact that the reason that our theories are no better than they are is not simply because we are not clever enough to develop rigorous operational concepts, but because our subject matter is complex and we are yet at the beginning of its exploration.”