Quotes About Freud

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.

There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay's excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: "Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape" (italics added).

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either. (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews , Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

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.

Freud is like God; you make it true.

have maintained a rather personal interest in one specific aspect of the rich heritage that Freud bestowed upon us, namely, his emphasis on the fact that a lifelong, albeit diminishing, emotional dependence on the mother is a universal truth of human existence.

One reason that Freud views creativity as a valuable antidote to symptoms—and let us recall that symptoms are, by definition, indicators of psychic inflexibility—is that he believes it to be an active means of mourning loss.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

Regression Sigmund Freud's theory of humor contended that humor, like sleep, is therapeutic. But even more important, he argued, wit can express—in a relatively appropriate way—urges and feelings that can't otherwise be let loose, such as the desire to act on regressive infantile sexual or aggressive behavior. More to the point, Freud believed that a lack of humor can be a sign of mental illness.

Freud's theoretical differences with Adler and Jung ended in bitterness. The three parted company and each went his own way. At that point, Freud began to use the concept of introversion as a negative, implying a turning inward away from the world, in his writings about narcissism. This shifted the evolution of the concept of introversion away from healthy and toward the unhealthy, a misconception that remains to this day.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

It would be a mistake to believe that psychoanalysis, even for Freud, excludes the description of psychological motives and is opposed to the phenomenological method. Psychoanalysis has, on the contrary (and unwittingly), contributed to developing the phenomenological method by claiming, as Freud puts it, that every human act 'has a sense,' and by seeking everywhere to understand the event rather than to tie it to mechanical conditions.

Freud wrote about it a century ago. How we rummage through the armory of the past to retrieve the weapons needed to repeat, repeat, repeat past traumas. He said it was primitive, instinctual, destructive. Like a demon inside us all.

Freud said there's no such thing as a joke—a joke is an expression of veiled hostility.

Freud debería haber optado al premio Nobel, pero de Literatura

Freud's theory on the topological structure of the psyche, namely the id, ego and superego, provides an answer to my second question, namely the lack of an inhibiting censor, such as a conscience, to prevent the serial killer from acting out his fantasy.

como Freud señaló, los dos tiranos que luchan por el control de la mente son el Inconsciente y el Superyó, el primero es un criado de los genes y el segundo un lacayo de la sociedad (ambos representan el "Otro").

The last great attempt to free consciousness from the domination of impulses and social controls was psychoanalysis; as Freud pointed out, the two tyrants that fought for control over the mind were the id and the superego, the first a servant of the genes, the second a lackey of society—both representing the "Other." Opposed to them was the ego, which stood for the genuine needs of the self connected to its concrete environment.

Freud called the first stage of life "polymorphous perverse." At birth infants are so undifferentiated that they have the capacity to receive erotic stimulation at every aperture of the body and any area of skin: from either or both sexes; from animals, food, objects, colors, currents of air, gradations of temperature. As we grow older, become socialized, and develop identity, the satisfactions we pursue become more specific.

A European war! Millions of lives! Often I had been astonished by my friend's amazing powers, but never had I seen him infer so much on the basis of so little. And, great heavens, what if it should prove true? I do not know how Freud passed that night, but my dreams surpassed my waking fears. The gay and colourful city of Johann Strauss was no longer revolving to the stately strains of his waltzes, but swirling to the shriek of a terrible nightmare.

That night Holmes awoke in a high fever and was delirious. As Freud and I sat by his bedside, each restraining the movement of his hands, he babbled of oysters overrunning the world and similar nonsense.* Freud listened with the greatest attention. "Is he fond of oysters?" he demanded of me during a quiet interval. I shrugged, too confused to answer accurately.

In extreme form, stress can cause symptoms of conversion hysteria—a malaise described by Jean Charcot, Freud's teacher.

Thus Freud's clinical analysis, corrected, points to the conclusion that Eros is fundamentally a desire for union (being one) with objects in the world.