Quotes About Freud

Emerson, a shrewder prophet [than Freud], could have told Freud that psychoanalysis was another form of the triumph of literary culture over science, as well as over religion and philosophy.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

I remain too impressed with Freud's vision of the human animal's compromise with existence--the defense or deflection of our ego in knowledge of ourselves from what there is to know about ourselves--to suppose that a human life can get itself without residue into the clear.

By contrast, the late-modern and post-modern self has in essence no essence. To this fragmented, fluid and compartmentalized self, denial, far from being an aberration, is only to be expected. This, however, is not just a change in world-views. Freud himself was quite clear that the unitary self of even the healthiest, 'integrated' person was permanently under siege. The self could never be fully socialized; denial and self-deception are part of being human.

Freud (1921), without referring to the general systems implications of his assertion, spelled out this mechanism clearly: ". . . the individual gives up his ego ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal embodied in the leader" (page 78, Group Psychology).

Freud believed that because the core of psychopathology was the repression of conflictual, infantile impulses, which sought disguised gratification from the analyst in many different forms, it was essential for the analyst not to give the patient any gratification, because gratification allows the impulse to be discharged rather than be remembered, thought about, and renounced. American

Winnicott's understanding of the way experience can become traumatizing is quite different from Freud's. Trauma for Winnicott is not just the introduction of something dramatically negative, frightening, and noxious (e.g., precocious sexual stimulation); it is most fundamentally the failure to sustain something positive—the necessary conditions for healthy psychic development. Thus

Freud, again using his conclusions about men's moral attitudes and functioning as a baseline, had decided that women lack a strong superego and hence are deficient in moral values. In

In Freud's account, the male superego is established under the threat of castration anxiety, which forces the boy to abandon his oedipal ambitions, but little girls experience themselves as already castrated, and thus have less motivation to keep infantile instinctual impulses in check; consequently they have less energy available for the sublimation that fuels higher-level organization and

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.

In an age where the lowered eyelid is just a sign of fatigue, the delicate game of love is pining away. Freud and flirtation are poor companions.

Much of what Freud believed to be biological, instinctual, and changeless has been shown by modern research to be a result of specific cultural causes.1 Much of what Freud described as characteristic of universal human nature was merely characteristic of certain middle-class European men and women at the end of the nineteenth century.

The concept "penis envy," which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940's as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women.

There was a book by Sigmund Freud, the king of the subconscious, called Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I was thumbing through it once when Ray came in, saw the book and said, "The top guys in that field work for ad agencies. They deal in air." I put the book back and never picked it up again.

I can honestly say that my misery had been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health.

Freud: "Overt homosexuality in women is the result of masturbation. A woman who has discovered her own clitoris is a woman who will seek the clitoris in others.

Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes.

Sigmund Freud punya teori bahwa di dalam diri setiap manusia terdapat 'dorongan bunuh diri

wanting to replace him, but not wanting to because of his love for him. It would also have involved an identification with what Freud imagined it would be like to face death.

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.

Freud found that the most central childhood problems regularly surface not in discussion but in disguised form in the analytic relationship. It

Interpretations, like the sculptor's chisel, would be used to target and then chip away at the imprisoning defenses, exposing the patient's inner psychic reality. This inner psychic reality, essentially driven by pleasure-seeking fantasy, pulled the patient away from facing what Freud had referred to as "the brick wall of reality" that would challenge unacceptable fantasies and free the entangled energy for more realistic projects.