Quotes About Freud

Freud was right in positing a death instinct, and the development of weapons of destruction makes our present dilemma plain: we either come to terms with our unconscious instincts and drives—with life and with death—or else we surely die.

The function of art—Freud says "wit"—is to help us find our way back to sources of pleasure that have been rendered inaccessible by the capitulation to the reality-principle which we call education or maturity—in other words, to regain the lost laughter of infancy

With the reference to the indispensable third person (an audience), Freud relates the demand for intelligibility to the demand for communication. The implication is that art has the function of making public the contents of the unconscious.

Words, says Freud, are a halfway house to lost things; and words are only one class of the sets of symbols that make up human culture. "If we could not have schizophrenics we also could not have cultures," says LaBarre.21 Freud's analysis of word-consciousness deepens our understanding not only of language as neurosis, but also of culture as neurosis and of culture as a "substitute-gratification," a provisional arrangement in the quest for real enjoyment.

But if the instinctual duality is Life and Death, our modification of Freud's ontology entails the hypothesis that Life and Death coexist in some undifferentiated unity at the animal level and that they could be reunified into some higher harmony in man

This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The first published discussion of it of any length was by Breuer (in semi-physiological terms) in his theoretical part of the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895). He there defines it as 'the tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant.

Like it or not, after Freud, no one had to read Sophocles to know something about Oedipus.

Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.

Stress! You been listening to them shrinks again? You didn't hear anything about stress when I was a girl." "When you were a girl, Freud wasn't old enough to masturbate.

Freud was not a scientist, although that's the way he thought of himself.

Balzac, very much like Freud in his most speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discovers that the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive.

Everywhere in Balzac desire is an urge to find out, to know (Freud's epistemophilia), which is to say that the drive to know is itself sexualized.

Facino's vision of vast riches and the novelist's vision of the motives of human behavior are both attuned to the hidden, the dramatic, that, like Freud's analyses, suggest an erotic charge that animates the world. They may speak also of a power beyond what is permitted to humankind

Freud could never be certain, he said, in view of his wide and early reading, whether what seemed like a new creation might not be the work instead of hidden channels of memory leading back to the notions of others absorbed, coming now anew into form he'd almost known within him was growing. He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia. So we own and owe what we know.

parted from Freud, aware how much Freud disliked emotional displays, he spoke lightly about travel plans. Freud, Sachs records, understood

commented on Freud's unvarying courtesy: he inquired after others, and never showed signs of impatience or irritability. He would not be infantilized by his disease. On August 13, his nephew Harry

Says Freud: We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do that without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally, from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other. Morality