Quotes About Symbolism

The way in which these factors—displacement, condensation, and over-determination—interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.

As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one.

El sueño posee una maravillosa poesía, una exacta facultad alegórica, un humorismo incomparable y una deliciosa ironía.

A normal dream stands, as it were, on two feet, one of which derives from the actual nature of the occasion for it, the other on a childhood event with serious consequences.

the dream is not a somatic but a psychic phenomenon. You appreciate the significance

the dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

This reliance on puns gives Freud an interpretative freedom which might often be considered licence.

Freud revelled in linguistic play, but, despite his appreciation of painting and especially sculpture, he did not know what to make of visual imagery in dreams.

What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.

Alternatives are difficult to represent, and in some cases they are expressed by the division of the dream into two halves of equal length.

It is the relation of similarity, congruence, or convergence, the just like, which dreams have the most various means of expressing better than anything else.

The female genital is symbolically represented by all those objects which share its peculiarity of enclosing a space capable of being filled by something—viz., by pits, caves, and hollows, by pitchers and bottles, by boxes and trunks, jars, cases, pockets, etc. Theship, too, belongs in this category.

The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.

The desires which are realized in dreams are left over from the day or, as a rule, the day previous, and the feeling has become intently emphasized and fixed during the day thoughts. Accidental and indifferent matters, or what must appear so to the child, find no acceptance in the contents of the dream.

Did he know already that he would get a sunflower when he was buried? The murderer would own something even when he was dead…And I?

symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality…

Le sens de la toilette féminine est manifest: il s'agit de se 'parer' et se parer c'est s'offrir; les feministes hétérosexuelles se sont montrées naguère sur ce point aussi intransiseantes que les lesbiennes: elles refusaient de faire d'elles-même une marchandise qu'on exhibem elles adoptaient des tailleurs et des feutres secs; les robes ornées, décolletées leurs semblaient le symbole de l'ordre social qu'elles combattaient.

And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bed chamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot.

Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have one only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.

Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.

Certains psychanalystes ont voulu donner des bases scientifiques à ces imaginations: tout le plaisir que la femme tire du coït viendrait de ce qu'elle châtre symboliquement le mâle et s'approprie son sexe. Mais il semble que ces théories elles-mêmes demandent à être psychanalysées et que les médecins qui les inventèrent y aient projeté des terreurs ancestrales.