Quotes about Freud

If often he was wrong and at times absurd
To us he is no more a person
Now but a climate of opinion.
― W. H. Auden, in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1940)


When Freud turned his searing eye to socialism he saw a delusional philosophy […] To Freud, the communists of the twentieth century were engaged in a perfectionist political project […] The central flaw Freud identified in socialist doctrine was the idea that private property is the primary, if not the sole, source of man’s depravity. With this foundational idea, socialists were able to say that man could be redeemed if, and only if, the institution of private property were abolished and replaced by a kinder, more humane system. [To Freud,] Man’s “depravity” is rooted much deeper in his nature and the abolition of private property would do little or nothing to change his basic constitution. [Freud argued that] socialism has its roots not in love and fraternity, as the socialists themselves would have us believe, but rather in revenge and aggression. According to Freud, “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness” (Freud 1961, 72). Freud pointed to nascent Soviet Russia as evidence of this phenomenon: “it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”
― Nicholas Buccola, in "'The Tyranny of the Least and the Dumbest': Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialism” in Quarterly Journal of Ideology Vol 31, no. 3 & 4 (2004), quoting and sumarizing Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents


I have become increasingly convinced that some of the popular methods presumed to discover what is in the unconscious cannot be counted upon as reliable methods of obtaining evidence. They often involve the use of symbolism and analogy in such a way that the interpreter can find virtually anything that he is looking for. Freud, for instance, from a simple dream reported by a man in his middle twenties [i.e., Sergei Pankejeff ] as having occurred at 4 years of age drew remarkable conclusions. The 4-year-old boy dreamed of seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud interpreted the dream in such a way as to convince himself that the patient at 18 months of age had been shocked by seeing his parents have intercourse three times in succession and that this played a major part in the extreme fear of being castrated by his father which Freud ascribed to him at 4 years of age. No objective evidence was ever offered to support this conclusion. Nor was actual fear of castration ever made to emerge into the light of consciousness despite years of analysis.
― Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, 1941, fifth edition 1976, ISBN 0-9621519-0-4


In the early twentieth century the concepts of the preconscious and unconscious were made widely popular, especially in literary circles, by Freud, Jung, and their associates, mainly because of the sexual flavor they gave to them. By modern standards, Freud can hardly be regarded as a scientist but rather as a physician who had many novel ideas and who wrote persuasively and unusually well. He became the main founder of the new cult of psychoanalysis.
― Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)


A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.
― E. L. Doctorow, in Ragtime: A Novel (1976)


He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas.
― Albert Einstein, as quoted in Sigmund Freud (2006) by Kathleen Krull and Boris Kulikov, p. 132


That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent. ...he arrives at the concept of "social neurosis." "If the evolution of civilization," he writes, "has such a far-reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization — or epics of it — possibly even the whole of humanity — have become 'neurotic' under the pressure of the civilizing trends?
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)


Freud was one of the last representatives of Enlightenment philosophy. He genuinely believed in reason as the one strength man has and which alone could save him from confusion and decay.
― Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1977)


While the implications of Darwin’s views were threatening and unsettling, they were not quite so directly abrasive, not quite so unrespectable, as Freud’s views on infantile sexuality, the ubiquity of perversions, and the dynamic power of unconscious urges. 

― Peter Gay (1987). A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 144


While Darwin was satisfied with revising his work after further reflection and absorbing palpable hits by rational critics, while he trusted the passage of time and the weight of his argumentation, Freud orchestrated his wooing of the public mind through a loyal cadre of adherents, founded periodicals and wrote popularizations that would spread the authorized word, dominated international congresses of analysis until he felt too frail to attend them and after that through surrogates like his daughter Anna. 

― Peter Gay (1987). A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 145


I am fascinated by the fact that thousands of people continue to idealize and defend [Freud] without really knowing anything about him as a person.
― Phyllis Grosskurth (1991). The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis. Boston: Addison-Wesley, p. 219


I differ from Freud in that I think that most dreams are neither obscure nor bowdlerized, but rather that they are transparent and unedited. They reveal clearly meaningful undisguised and often highly conflictual themes worthy of note by the dreamer (and any interpretive assistant). My position echoes Jung's notion of dreams as transparently meaningful and does away with any distinction between manifest and latent content.
― J. Allan Hobson, in The Dreaming Brain : How the brain creates both the sense and nonsense of dreams (1988)


Every time I see a photograph of Freud I wonder how a man who spent his whole life tête-à-tête with sex can look that gloomy.
― Raymond Loewy, in Never Leave Well Enough Alone (1951)


Sigmund Freud… Analize [sic] this! Analize this! Analize this-this-this!
― Madonna, as written in Die Another Day


For Freud the ultimate psychological reality is the system of attractions and tensions which attaches the child to parental images, and then through these to all other persons.
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as quoted in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty (1969) edited by A. L. Fisher


There is no longer any risk that Freudian research will shock us by recalling what there is of the "barbarian" in us; the risk is rather that the findings will be too easily accepted in an "idealist" form.
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as quoted in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty (1969) edited by A. L. Fisher


At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop.
― Marvin Minsky, "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious" (1980)


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.
― Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (2006)


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.
― Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (2006)


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.
― Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (2006)


Sigmund Freud's early view of the mind [is] as a system for dealing with conflicts between our instinctive and acquired ideas.
― Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (2006)


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.
― Julian Mitchell, in As Far as You Can Go (1963), Pt. 1, Ch. 1


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.
― Lewis Mumford in Interpretations and Forecasts (1967)


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.
― Albert Jay Nock, in Our Enemy, The State (1935)


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.
― Albert Jay Nock, in Our Enemy, The State (1935)


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.
― Camille Paglia (1991) "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf." First published in Arion, Spring 1991, reprinted in Sex, Art and American Culture: New Essays (1992) ISBN 9780679741015, p. 243


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.
― Camille Paglia (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality" in '"Vamps and Tramps: Essays NY: Vintage, p. 328


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.
― Victor Pelevin, in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: A Novel (2004)


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.
― Jean Piaget, in The First Year of Life of the Child (1927), as quoted in The Essential Piaget (1977), edited by Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche


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.
― Thomas Pynchon, Hilarius to Oedipa in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Ch. 5


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.
― Ayn Rand as quoted in The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2 (November-December 1975)


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.
― Wilhelm Reich, as quoted in Reich Speaks of Freud (1967) edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael


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.
― Bertrand Russell, "On Orthodoxies" (23 August 1933), in Mortals and Others: Bertrand Russell's American Essays, 1931-1935, Vol. II [1998], pp. 57-58


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.
― Allan N. Shore (2009). “Relational Trauma and the Developing Right Brain: An Interface of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and Neuroscience,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04474


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.
― Anthony Storr, in The Integrated Personality (1960)


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.
― Lionel Trilling, Beyond Cutlure (1965), p. 79


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.
― Esther Vilar, in The Manipulated Man (1972), p. 84-85 ISBN 0374202028


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.
― Drew Westen, in "The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science" (1998, Psychological Bulletin 124, p. 333)


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.
― Linda Meyer Williams (1994). “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women's Memories of Child Sexual Abuse,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology Vol. 62, No. 6, 1167-1176


Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation — something prior even to the formation of an hypothesis.
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Lectures and Conversations (1966) edited by Cyril Barnett


Wisdom is something I would never expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom.
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Lectures and Conversations (1966) edited by Cyril Barnett


Freud … has not given an explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth.
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Lectures and Conversations (1966) edited by Cyril Barnett

Sigmund Freud Quotes