Quotes About Freud

But Freud, perhaps because he himself denies ever having had such an experience, treats it as illusory; whilst those who describe ecstatic feelings of unity usually portray them as more intensely real than any other feelings which they can recall.

Freud reminds them that children do not conceptualize or fear death as do adults. He then lists what he thinks adults fear about death: "the horrors of corruption . . . freezing in the ice-cold grave . . . the terrors of eternal nothingness." He then adds that adults cannot tolerate these fears, "as is proved by all the myths of a future life." Freud believed that people accepted the religious worldview because of their fear of death and their wish for permanence.

Why did Freud write a book about which he had such doubts? We can only conjecture. Peter Gay wrote that "it is highly plausible that some of the impulses guiding Freud's arguments in Totem and Taboo emerged from his hidden life; in some respects the book represents a round in his never finished wrestling bout with Jacob Freud." Gay also mentions that Freud realized he was "publishing scientific fantasies.

Freud asserts that "when a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and, even so, overlook the contradictions before them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.

Freud, however, asserts that ethics and morals come from human need and experience. The idea of a universal moral law as proposed by philosophers is "in conflict with reason." He writes that "ethics are not based on a moral world order but on the inescapable exigencies of human cohabitation." In other words, our moral code comes from what humans find to be useful and expedient.

There is a big scholarly literature on the high correlation between creative genius and mental suffering, which Sigmund Freud termed "the problem of the creative artist."[12]

I'd love to go back to Europe in the '20s and '30s, for the beginning of the Psychoanalytic Movement, and Freud and Jung, and all that was going on with discoveries in quantum physics. The whole nature of reality was changing and being challenged.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces.

I know it's fashionable to blame your childhood for everything nowadays - thank you, Freud. The thing is, though, I really don't feel scarred by mine. But perhaps if I'd been in therapy for 10 years, and you were able to read the records, you'd disagree.

I have therapy. Every day. I read a bit of Freud; I try to be a better person. Every day.

I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous -- but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and suck on it you'll go to heaven.

Incidentally, one should make a distinction, as Freud did a long time ago, between mental items that are not conscious but that can be brought to consciousness with effort, like the things in our memories—Freud called that mental domain the preconscious—and things in the unconscious that are unavailable and cannot be recalled. We simply don't know they are there.

It is appropriate to designate Freud as the grandfather of psychosomatic medicine since his genius introduced us to the world of the unconscious mind, a contribution to medical science of inestimable importance. Psychosomatic processes begin in the unconscious and, though it has yet to be widely appreciated by either physical or psychiatric medicine, unconscious emotions are a potent factor in virtually all physical ills.

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.

The Surrealism movement, our professor explained, was inspired by Freud's concept of the uncanny, the dreadful double. According to Freud, doubling creates meaning. Doubling turns sounds into words; a baby first speaks by turning ma into mama, pa into papa. But when a double appears uninvited—the buried object returns—it brings us into the realm of the uncanny. We watch dead things wake up. And we are afraid.

he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course

he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course—what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors!

I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.

A note: succubi are notorious amateur psychologists and have been since well before Freud. In fact I have it on good authority that Freud stole his whole gig from a particularly talkative succubus he used to know. And if you don't believe Freud knew a succubus, you haven't read Freud.)

What Darwin did to nature, Sigmund Freud did to the self.

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

I was going to talk about Nicholas Parsons' ignorance, but 18 seconds would be a wholly insufficient time.