Quotes About Freud

Instead of Freud's famous Interpretation of Dreams it is a book of dreams that interprets us.

Freud is the least confused of modern minds because he has no message; he accepts contradiction, and builds his psychology on it.

Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma….Freud thought the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings. In

Michael had gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system. The wall dividing many things—including the asylum and the street—had come down while we were growing up. So had the distinction between severe mental illness and what Freud called "the psychopathology of everyday life.

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.

Freud siempre pensó que lo que él descubría en el inconsciente anticipaba lo que sucedía a los hombres en la realidad. Por mi parte he decidido invertir esa proposición y mostrar que lo que Freud creyó descubrir no era, en el fondo, sino el fruto de una sociedad, de un entorno familiar y de una situación política cuya significación él interpretaba magistralmente para presentarla como una producción del inconsciente.

Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived for virtually his entire life, was the eye of the storm of this modernism; and was the birthplace of the linguistic philosophy that came to dominate the twentieth century.

A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of this three-hour consultation Adler apparently said to the man, 'What would you do if you were cured?' The man answered him, and Adler said, 'Well, go and do it then.' That was the treatment.

The first psychoanalytic patients were people who, by definition, did not fit in, people speaking the wrong language, a language of bizarre physical symptoms, a language very unlike the language of science, and for which science suggested itself as the great explainer. These people were suffering, in Freud's view...from the ordeals of intimacy.

In Freud's story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can't let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can't get a sense of what it is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

One of the reasons that most literary artists are contemptuous of Sigmund Freud—whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths—is that his extreme determinism is felt to be immensely untrue to the rich complexity of life, with its twists and turns and manifold surprises.

I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams' was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

In developmental psychology there is a general understanding that an individual must master the twin areas of sexuality and aggression (Freud's Eros and Thanatos) in order to have truly achieved adulthood. In the same way, the maturation of the human race necessitates our collective mastery of these two areas.

To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized as losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations.

For Freud, the semiotic trajectory of the dreamwork determines a phantom architectonics: a cartography of nowhere, an architecture of nothing (or the unconscious), and an archaeology of imaginary depth that always takes place on the surface. As a practice and sensibility, psychoanalysis remains attuned to superficiality; it constitutes a search for depth on the surface of things.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. —Sigmund Freud

As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: "His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients." If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.

I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.

Freud is usually viewed as the person who linked psychoanalysis to some issues in the environment, usually man-made. So I thought it would be fun to throw that in the mix.

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.