Quotes About Freud

Freud, in effect, had declared that all spiritual things were merely symbols of the flesh. In the delivery room, for the first time, it had seemed to me that he had gotten it exactly the wrong way round. Our flesh was the symbol. It was the love that was real. Why,

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

Tim Keller writes, "When the church as a whole is no longer seen as speaking to questions that transcend politics, and when it is no longer united by a common faith that transcends politics, then the world sees strong evidence that Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx were right, that religion is really just a cover for people wanting to get their way in the world."13

I've read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.

People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.

Warren is stuck in Sunday School-level, pretheological fundamentalism. It is religious infantilism of the kind that Freud to conclude that religion is nothing more than neurotic wishful thinking and the refusal to grow up. I believe there is a good bit more to religion than that, but I'm afraid Freud was right about Warrenism. It is a pinata, made of brightly colored paper, filled with sweet candy, and too easily knocked apart.

But Einstein had always admired Freud as a philosopher more than as a scientist, and had found his essays more thought-provoking than they were definitive.

The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the "new unconscious," to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned-clinician named Sigmund Freud.

Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by Freud but by other poets.

Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control of intent from which, perhaps it might be said, logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence.

As early as 1948, the Kinsey Report had reinforced the bluff-your-way-into-Freud theory of human sexuality, placing everyone on a bisexual continuum. So good citizens learned there might be something queer in everybody – and everybody meant even themselves !

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art.

And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

You must understand, that for a daughter to protect her father's image is natural; Freud built a whole career around it.

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

What is best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings—having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

Previously, Woolf attributed her depressive states to her terrible, humiliating experiences of sexual molestation. But if she followed Freud's theories, then there had to be other explanations. Perhaps her memories were distorted, not to say false; perhaps they were a reflection not of actual experience but of the projection of her own desires. Perhaps, in short, the whole business had been a product of her imagination.2 I

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.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.