Quotes & Sayings About Psychology By Freud

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida. — Hanif Kureishi

This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other scientific field would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind's constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.
Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it. — Sigmund Freud

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. — Sigmund Freud

There is only one state- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. — Sigmund Freud

The field of human relations in Freud's sense is similar to the market - it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself. — Erich Fromm

Freud was the man who seeded a progeny of doctors interested in abnormal psychology. With the intellectual force of a battering ram, Freud penetrated deeply into the untouched and delicate flower that was psychosis. His strong, trunk-like stature as an analyst led to the cherry popping of many previously unthought theories on the mind. He also proved that people constantly think about sex even while not penis reading about it. — Dan Wilbur

He who knows how to wait need make no concessions. — Sigmund Freud

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 ... — Stanislaw Lem

What indeed is madness but the orgasm between consciousness and unconsciousness; yet today psychology has passed this chaotic union between mind and soul: it is taking form, and one day it will be brought to the bed of a new priesthood. Already have the heralds of the last illusion blazoned forth the coming of the magicians. Freud and Jung and a host of followers have invented psycho-analysis, which today is still pure black magic, the anatomization of the mind by thought potientized by theories in place of panticles, mantras and spells. — J. F. C. Fuller

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology. — Sigmund Freud

It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. — Sigmund Freud

Unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that a dream is a mask for a meaning already known but deceitfully withheld from the consciousmind. In his view, dreams were communication, ideas expressed not always straightforwardly, but in the best way possible within the limits of the medium. Dreaming, in Jung's psychology, is a constructive process. — Jeremy Campbell

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead. — Jeanette Winterson

It takes two to tango isn't even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before Doc was even born. Perhaps it was a takeoff on Freud's seduction theory or the more generic practice of blaming victims for being alive. Its origins were unclear, but no one had ever had to take full responsibility for their own actions since. — Sarah Schulman

Early theorists of group psychology had tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideal like "mental contagion" and "herd instinct," which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal. — Ernest Becker

Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology. — James Hillman

It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously — Tony Benn

When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves — Sigmund Freud

Know what Freud wrote in his diary when he was 77? "What do women want? My God, what do they want?" Fifty years this giant brain spends analyzing women. And he still can't find out what they want. So this makes him the world's greatest expert on female psychology? — Clare Boothe Luce

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. — Sigmund Freud

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world. — Sigmund Freud

Freud was so imbued with the spirit of his culture that he could not go beyond certain limits which were set by it. These very limits became limitations for his understanding even of the sick individual; they handicapped his understanding of the normal individual and of the irrational phenomena operating in social life. — Erich Fromm

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. — Betty Friedan

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. — Sigmund Freud

The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian
an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own ... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization. — Sigmund Freud

Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning
of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained
material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive
evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even
eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" people
whom we can hold responsible for this. — Ernest Becker

If it's not one thing, it's your mother. — Sigmund Freud

Freud: If it's not one thing, it's your mother — Robin Williams

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Freud expressed the opinion - not quite in earnest, though, it seemed to me - that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, 'What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?' Whereupon he, visible a bit surprised, answered evasively: 'At least psychology has a social purpose. — Ludwig Binswanger

The novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung. — Ellen Glasgow

What is new in his theories is not true, and what is true in his theories is not new. — Hans Jurgen Eysenck

This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. — Oliver James

Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost. — Sigmund Freud

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. — Jonathan Haidt

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay ... , from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men ... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77) — Sigmund Freud

He smashed his lips together, and I knew what he was thinking. He always made that face before he brought up my mother. "Did it have anything to do with - "

"Not everything is about my mom," I snapped before he could get the words out. "Geez, you took one psychology class, and you think you're frickin' Freud. — K.J. McPike

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. — Sigmund Freud

The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology. — Sigmund Freud

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state. — Umberto Eco

If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness. — Sigmund Freud

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. — Sigmund Freud

In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. — Sigmund Freud

I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that ... Freud was always saying he was a scientist. — Marina Warner