Quotes About Freud

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It introduced the notion that there existed certain predictable and identifiable processes by which dreams were formed.

But if you wanted to replicate the working of the human brain, you had to intimately understand your model. AI, in other words, required psychology. The engineers read Freud, just like the literary critics—and reinterpreted him for their own purposes. They debated Chomsky about the nature of the mind.

The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.

Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.

El sociólogo Philip Rieff, el gran intérprete de Freud, describió así el cambio de dirección en la consciencia occidental: «El hombre religioso nació para su salvación. El hombre psicológico nació para su satisfacción»20.

Thus it may be said that the symptoms are often ways of containing the anxiety; they are the anxiety in structuralized form. Freud rightly remarks about psychological symptoms: "The symptom is bound anxiety," or, in other words, anxiety which has been crystallized into an ulcer or heart palpitations or some other symptom.

The dominant strain of the twentieth century, whether emanating from Marx or Freud, has been self-awareness; we have lost the art of forgetting ourselves. Which means we have little chance of being happy, since so much of happiness consists of inner peace; of playing ostrich, in fact. To say nothing of the fact that all this psychological self-consciousness is rather vulgar...

Under the Volcano" embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.

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.

If energy is delight and exuberance is beauty, the manic depressive knows more about life than anyone else. Didn't Freud say happiness was nothing more than the remission of pain? So, the more pain, the intenser the happiness.

Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences.

Whoever may still be sceptical whether knowledge of animal behaviour can help our understanding of man can find no support from Freud.

Freud only rarely draws on the data of direct observation, one or two of the occasions when he does so are key ones. Instances are the cotton-reel incident on which he bases much of his argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (S.E., 18, pp. 14–16), and the agonising reappraisal of the theory of anxiety that he undertakes in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).

A model of the psychical apparatus that pictures behaviour as a resultant of a hypothetical psychical energy that is seeking discharge was adopted by Freud almost at the beginning of his psychoanalytical work.

Although from time to time details of the psychical energy model underwent change, Freud never considered abandoning it for any other kind of model. Nor have more than a handful of other analysts. What, then, are the reasons that have led me to do so?

First, it is important to remember that the origin of Freud's model lay, not in his clinical work with patients, but in ideas he had learned previously from his teachers—the physiologist Brücke, the psychiatrist Meynert, and the physician Breuer.

Now there is nothing unscientific in utilising, for the interpretation of data, any model that seems promising; and there is therefore nothing unscientific either in Freud's introduction of his model or in his own or others' employment of it. Nevertheless, the question arises whether there may by now be an alternative better suited for the purpose in hand.

The psychical energy model is, therefore, a theoretical model brought by Freud to psychoanalysis: it is in no way a model derived by him from the practice of psychoanalysis. Secondly...

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

He despised music and considered it solely as an intrusion! For that matter the whole Freud family was very unmusical.

The oddest consequence of Freud's theory is its implication that, if total sexual fulfilment were possible by means of complete adaptation to reality, the arts, including music, would become otiose. I have discussed the unsatisfactory nature of this conclusion elsewhere.

Psychoanalysis is based on Freud's theories of infantile development: it includes the idea that no one, however mature, entirely outgrows his or her infantile past.

One of Freud's cardinal errors was to suppose that what human beings most wanted was a state of tranquillity following the discharge of all tensions. He treated powerful emotions as an intrusion, whether they were instigated by stimuli from without or caused by instinctual impulses from within. For Freud, the main function of the central nervous system was to see that the tensions caused by such emotions were discharged, either

Freud's somewhat puritanical vision was that proper, mature adaptation to the world was governed by deliberate thought and rational planning. He would not have countenanced our present proposition: that an inner world of phantasy is part of man's biological endowment, and that it is the inevitable discrepancy between this inner world and the outer world that compels men to become inventive and imaginative.