Daily Inspiration Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line lands like a small blade: it takes the cozy promise of therapy-as-salvation and flips it into something colder, even disciplinary. “Confession” drags psychoanalysis out of the clinic and into the church, where speech is never neutral. You speak to an authority, you disclose your failures and desires, and you’re trained to believe the telling itself is a moral act. The sting is in the second half. “Without absolution” denies the payoff that makes confession psychologically livable: release, forgiveness, the sense that the ledger can be cleared. In Greer’s framing, psychoanalysis becomes an endless extraction of self, a ritual of exposure that produces insight but withholds pardon.

The intent is feminist and political as much as personal. Greer is suspicious of institutions that turn private anguish into a managed narrative, especially when those narratives have historically pathologized women’s anger, sexuality, and ambition. She’s pointing at how psychoanalytic culture can encourage subjects to locate oppression inside their own psyche - as trauma, neurosis, maladjustment - rather than in the social order that benefits from their self-doubt. Confess enough and you may become legible, even compliant, but not necessarily freer.

The subtext: confession is power’s favorite genre. It manufactures truth by demanding it. If there’s no absolution, there’s also no endpoint - only interpretation, revision, more talking. Greer’s cynicism isn’t anti-introspection; it’s anti-priesthood. She’s warning that a practice sold as liberation can quietly become a lifelong apprenticeship in self-surveillance.