Quotes About Freud

Freud understood that the human personality was not unitary. Instead, it consists of a loose, fragmented cacophony of spirits, who do not always agree or even communicate.

Freud catalogued an extensive list of phenomena akin to repression—the active rejection of potentially conscious psychological material from awareness—which he termed "defense mechanisms.

First error: Freud failed to notice that sins of omission contributed to mental illness as much as, or more than, the sins of commission, listed above, that constitute repression. In doing so, he merely thought in the typical manner. People generally believe that actively doing something bad (that is the sin of commission) is, on average, worse than passively not doing something good (that is the sin of omission).

If anything, Freud showed that we are both more immoral and more moral than we are aware of. This kind of "non-judgmentalism," in therapy, is a powerful and liberating technique or tactic—an ideal attitude when you want to better understand yourself.

The sexual abuse of children is distressingly common.156 However, it's not as common as poorly trained psychotherapists think, and it also does not always produce terribly damaged adults.157 People vary in their resilience. An event that will wipe one person out can be shrugged off by another. But therapists with a little second-hand knowledge of Freud often axiomatically assume that a distressed adult in their practice must have been subject to childhood sexual abuse.

Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him. But there are disadvantages to the detached and somewhat distant approach recommended by Freud. Many of those who seek therapy desire and need a closer, more personal relationship (although that also has its dangers). This is in part why I have opted in my practice for the conversation, instead of the Freudian method—as have most clinical psychologists.

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth - or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives - they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don't believe that they deserve any better. Freud called this a "repetition compulsion." He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past - sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, because no alternatives beckon.

So, I'm communicating, as Freud so rightly stressed, even when silent.

Fear is, as Freud would say, nothing but a signal--the more effective the more acute and unpleasant it is.

The Unconscious, lately discovered by Professor Freud and used by others to store their joys, fears and frustrations, was for Nerine a gigantic subterranean wardrobe

Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow.

The people who had the most impact on me when I was young were Freud and Darwin, but growing up I also had my film idols.

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

The new psychoanalytic method [is]… somewhat subtle but irreplaceable, so fruitful has it proved to be in explaining obscure unconscious mental processes.

Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come.

I did invent the idea of using lucid dreaming to treat sleep disorders, but I was influenced by many real-life researchers - from forefathers like Freud and Jung to Stephen Laberge and Rosalind Cartwright, who explore lucid dreaming and parasomnias.

Love is simply short-lived, disguised sexual infatuation, Freud's basic instinct dressed up.

Freud answers by suggesting that the harshness that can be shown by the superego is a result of the channelling of part of the id's destructiveness through the superego.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency.

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!