Psychoanalysts

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."

"A woman is to soften but not weaken a man."

"In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state. I shall furthermore endeavor to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the psychic forces, which operate whether in combination or opposition, to produce the dream. This accomplished by investigation will terminate as it will reach the point where the problem of the dream meets broader problems, the solution of which must be attempted through other material."

"I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment."

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

"I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

"A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer."

"Princess, my little Princess, Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today.""

"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."

"(Speech of Freud before the B'nai B'rith) I soon convinced myself that I owed to my nature as a Jew alone the two qualities that had become indispensable to me in the course of my difficult life. As a Jew, I found myself free of many of those prejudices that limit other men in the use of their intellect and, as a Jew, I found myself ready to go over to the opposition and to renounce agreement with the 'silent majority'. So I became one of yours; I took part in your humanitarian and national interests, made friends among you and later convinced the few friends I had left (Dr Hitschmarm and Dr Rie) to join you. It is not that I wanted to win you over to my teachings, but at a time when no one in Europe listened to you accorded me benevolent attention. You were my first audience."

"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."

"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."

"Freud is an interesting case in the history of psychology. To many he is the embodiment of cultural relativism, with the great emphasis he placed on the role of the parents and family in the shaping of an individual’s personality. However, Freud deserves mention for two reasons. First, unlike many subsequent psychologists Freud was interested in ultimate questions; he was preoccupied by finding out why people behaved as they did, not simply how. Second, although many of these accounts were distinctly non-Darwinian (e.g. the Oedipus complex in which a male child desires to kill his father), some of his ideas are much more in line with recent Darwinian psychology."

"Freud … has not given an explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth."

"Wisdom is something I would never expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom."

"Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation — something prior even to the formation of an hypothesis."

"The scientific debate on reports and recollections of child sexual abuse goes back to at least 1896, when Freud argued that repression of early childhood seduction (sexual molestation) had etiological significance for adult hysteria […]. He later recanted, saying that he was wrong about the repression of actual experiences of child sexual abuse and that it was fantasies (of sexual contact with parents or other adults) that drove the hysteria [..]. The research [in peer-reviewed publications in the 1980s and ‘90s] revisited the issue of repression of child sexual abuse and suggest that a large proportion of women sexually abused in childhood have no recall of the abuse. These studies support Freud's originally hypothesized connection between child sexual abuse, no recall of the abuse, and high levels of psychological symptoms in adulthood, at least in clinical samples."

"Many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out of date, and they should be: Freud died in 1939, and he has been slow to undertake further revisions. His critics, however, are equally behind the times, attacking Freudian views of the 1920s as if they continue to have some currency in their original form."

"Probably no theory evolved by man is as absurd as Sigmund Freud's theory of penis envy. To a woman, the penis and scrotum seem superfluous to man's otherwise neatly constructed body. They are almost untidy. She cannot understand that after use the penis is not retractable like an aerial on a portable radio. And as for envy — it would never occur, even to a little girl. Not in her deepest unconscious would she wish to possess a penis; and as to being at a disadvantage compared to a little boy, that is nonsense, for she gets preferential treatment anyway. Freud was merely the victim of training by woman's self-abasement techniques — thanks to his mother, wife, and probably his daughters as well. He confused cause and effect; a woman only says she is worth less than a man. She doesn't really think it. If anyone ought to feel a sense of envy, it is men. They should be jealous of women's power. But, of course, they never are, for they glory in their powerlessness."

"Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty."

"as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons."

"The two most original and creative figures in modern psychiatry, Freud and Jung were both proscribed by the Nazis … for both, though holding widely divergent views, upheld the value of the individual personality."

"Freud seems most accurate when describing people most like the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie he lived among"

"It is now clear that Freud was correct in positing the unconscious mind develops before the conscious and that the early development of the unconscious is equivalent to the genesis of a self-system that operates beneath conscious verbal levels for the rest of the life span."

"Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."... The view here is that we start out with a sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient... There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. ...one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. ...according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions."

"We all grow up in a land of giants when we are very small... within us, surely, is some part of our childhood that hasn't disappeared and hasn't grown up. ...In your formative years, you learn from direct experience, absolutely incontrovertible, that there are much larger, much wiser, and much more powerful creatures in the universe than you. And your strongest emotional bonds are to them. ...and you must propitiate them. ...Isn't it... likely that there remains a part of us that is still in the practice of this...? Could that have something to do with prayer specifically and with religious beliefs in general? Well, this is in fact the scandalous view of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion and other famous books of the first few decades of the twentieth century."

"When I came to read Freud himself, I was amazed to discover how sensible his writings are and how much milder than what passes for Freudianism among the pseudo-intelligent."

"Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs."

"I think he, Christ and Marx are responsible for the world being the way it is—and I confer my thanks upon all of them, as I withhold it."

"What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature."

"Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life."

"Freud … agreed in principle to the importance of sexual health. But he did not want what sexual health entailed, the attack on certain institutions which opposed it."

"Perhaps the last cultural fad one could still argue against was Karl Marx. But Freud — or Rawls? To argue against such persons is to grant them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories."

"Yes, you hate me. But didn't I try to atone? If I'd been a real Nazi I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud's vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms."

"Babies are … obviously narcissistic, but not in the way adults are, not even Spinoza's God, and I am a little afraid that Freud sometimes forgets that the narcissistic baby has no sense of self."

"Freud was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him."

"Doctor Freud not only used cocaine himself, but he also prescribed it to his patients. And then he drew his generalizations. Cocaine is a strong sexual arouser. That's why everything Freud invented — all those oedipuses, sphinxes and sphincters — is relevant only to a mental dimension of a patient, whose brain is turned to fried-eggs by cocaine. In such a state, one really has only one problem left — what to do first, to screw his mother or to do away with his father. Of course, until his cocaine runs out. And in those times, there were no problems with supplies. But so long as your daily dose is less than three grams, you don't have to fear either the Oedipus complex, nor other things discovered by Freud."

"The two deepest thinkers on sex in the twentieth century are Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence. Their reputations as radical liberators were so universally acknowledged that brooding images of Freud and Lawrence in poster form adorned the walls of students in the Sixties."

"American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."

"J. Robert Oppenheimer: [[wikipedia:Ernest_Lawrence|[Ernest] Lawrence]], you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx..."

"When Freud comments on the shocking disparity between State-ethics and private ethics – and his observations on this point are most profound and searching – the historical method at once supplies the best of reasons why that disparity should be looked for."

"As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime."

"... I think he's crude. I think he's medieval. And I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna ... with an umbrella ... inflicting his dreams upon me."

"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."

"Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes."

"Sigmund Freud's early view of the mind [is] as a system for dealing with conflicts between our instinctive and acquired ideas."

"How much of a person's competence is based on knowing which actions not to take? We usually think of a person's abilities in positive terms... But one could take the opposite view that "An expert is someone who rarely slips up—because of knowing what not to do." However, this subject was rarely discussed in the twentieth-century—except, perhaps most notably, in Sigmund Freud's analysis."

"Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which each individual person thinks... too statistical. I find this disappointing because, in my view of the history of psychology, far more was learned, for example, when Jean Piaget spent several years observing the ways that three children developed, or when Sigmund Freud took several years to examine the thinking of a rather small number of patients."

"Each child makes "internal models" that help them predict their Imprimers' reactions... as an "internalized" system of values—and this could be how people develop what we call ethics, conscience, or moral sense. Perhaps Sigmund Freud had such a process in mind when he suggested that children can "introject" some of their parents' attitudes."