Quotes About Freud

Dr. W. believes, as Freud did, that anxiety could be an adaptation meant to shield the psyche from some other source of sadness or pain. I ask him why, if that's the case, the anxiety often feels much more intense than the sadness.

In addition to calling each other standard names like bitch and whore, the Finches incorporated Freud's stages of psychosexual development into their arsenal of invectives.

Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles...

The deciphering of these experiences requires knowledge of the basic principles of the unconscious dynamics as described by Freud, especially the mechanisms of dreamwork, and also familiarity with certain specific characteristics of the LSD state and its symbolic language.

As Freud observed, our relationship with science must be paradoxical because we are forced to pay an almost intolerable price for each major gain in knowledge and power—the psychological cost of progressive dethronement from the center of things, and increasing marginality in an uncaring universe.

There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.

Perhaps it wasn't all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men's minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire's heart—and less messily, too.

When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, "Love and work.

Durkheim frequently criticized his contemporaries, such as Freud, who tried to explain morality and religion using only the psychology of individuals and their pairwise relationships. (God is just a father figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society.

The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong.

In Freud's theory, the wish-producing, fear-generating power of these body parts lies within them, not, with their strategic position within a historically specific, male-dominant, phallus-favoring, social organization of powers, bodies, and symbols.

Freud knew the answers. If you don't understand something about sex, don't say it's awful or mysterious. Look it up in Freud.

Freud's discussions of "psychic energy" and "cathexis" (Besetzungsenergie) are among his most obscure. Some of the difficulties may reside with his translators.{18} Colby{19} has attempted to resolve some of these problems. The simplest course is to accept gratefully the concept of cathexis and attempt to correlate it with one's own observations.

The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

Sigmund Freud said that the conscience is primarily a product of our early life and culture.

The fields of psychology and psychiatry have also inadvertently contributed to the problem. Ideas that are not evidence-based proliferate, such as Freud's Oedipus complex (you are sexually attracted to your parents, which creates a hidden conflict, giving rise to anxiety), while evidence-based ones lie dormant.

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud...

or (this one is particularly evil) "to ensure that it is always my unloved child's fault." These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud's compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called "life-lies."149

Sometimes this is even helpful, as such activity may shed light on how a motivation heretofore taboo to discuss or consider might play a larger role in affecting human behavior and perception than was previously deemed acceptable (this is what happened, for example, with Freud, and his emphasis on sex).

Freud, as we noted, attempted to reduce motivation to sexuality, to libido. The same can be done quite effectively by anyone sufficiently literate, intelligent, and verbally fluent. This is because "sexuality" (like any multifaceted single term) can be defined as tightly or as loosely as necessary by those who use it for comprehensively explanatory purposes.

Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health.

Freud believed that much of mental illness was due to repression, which is arguably and reasonably considered a form of self-deception. For him, memories of traumatically troubling events were unconsciously banished to perdition in the unconscious, where they rattled around and caused trouble, like poltergeists in a dungeon.