Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

Cioran’s remark treats psychoanalysis less as a cure than as a spiritual and aesthetic impoverishment. What it “costs” us is not merely time or money but a certain intensity of self-experience: the sense of danger, mystery, and depth that comes from living with unresolved contradictions. By “stripping” away “impurities,” analysis is portrayed as sanitizing the psyche—turning the self into an explainable case history and replacing existential drama with clinical causality. The sting of the line is that our flaws and obscurities are not only burdens; they can also be sources of curiosity, creativity, and metaphysical seriousness. In Cioran’s pessimistic sensibility, lucidity can be a loss as much as a gain.