Quotes about Sigmund Freud

143 Sourced Quotes

Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone.... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: all psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically scientific or modern thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them. (Or deplore them.)

Randall Jarrell

Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.

William Carlos Williams

One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream. And what is a dream but a series of images that tell a story?

Freud says, Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling. Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man's birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.

What was Freud's Galapagos, what species fluttered what kinds of wings before his searching eyes? It has often been pointed out derisively: his creative laboratory was the neurologist's office, the dominant species hysterical ladies.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

Michael Ondaatje

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.
Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,
Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog.

Delmore Schwartz

We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.

Margaret Atwood

For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.

Peter Sloterdijk

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

Herbert Marcuse

Whatever is true about the nature of the unconscious itself, it might be said that since the time of Freud it has been shrinking. Less is buried there.

He wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.

Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.

Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice.
(Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

Alfred North Whitehead

Feminists had an astoundingly naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which, Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called unbridled lust, like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint, seems to be beyond the feminist ken.

In the final analysis, each of us is responsible for what we are. We cannot blame it on our mothers, who, thanks to Freud, have replaced money as the root of all evil.

Helen Lawrenson

What new meaning might Freud's concept of 'penis envy' take on, if we consider the fact that in his lifetime the words 'clitoris,' 'vulva,' and 'labia' were not included in the dictionary and, in this country, the only word in Webster's dictionary for female genitalia was 'vagina'? Who decides what words are included in the dictionary and who decides what is real?

In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.

[Bankers] seem specially conscious of time, always aware that time is money. There is always a sense of restraint and tension. (Is it part of the connection which Freud observed between compulsive neatness, anal eroticism and interest in money?)

Anthony Sampson

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

Marshall McLuhan

In an age where the lowered eyelid is just a sign of fatigue, the delicate game of love is pining away. Freud and flirtation are poor companions.

The seventeenth-century Iroquois... practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols.... And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association...

We developed a shorthand language of our own which we fell into for the rest of our lives whenever we met, no holds barred — all a matter of past reference, a common language, but basically affection, along with humor, and appreciation of each other's minds, and of Krazy Kat. Faced with England, and the New World, and Freud and all, we always managed to relax, and go back to the kidding, and bad punning, and drinking, to the end. It really was marvelous.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a narcissist, but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?