All Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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 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."

"Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?...Like a marriage from which love has gone...And patience, patience everywhere like a fog."

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved."

"It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"There is not so much virginity in the world that one can afford not to love when one finds it."

"[Re Hale] He only felt his loneliness after his third gin."

"[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken.""

"… it was the little things which tripped you up."

"[Priest at Hale's cremation] "...our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit.""

"[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives..."

"[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"[About Pinkie's inability to empathise] The imagination hadn't awoken. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy."

"[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation."

"You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God."

"...the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned: life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks."

"...he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust – except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody."

"Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises ..."

"He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice... He knew the moves, he'd never played the game."