Sigmund Freud Quotes

“[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Nazism:]

Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime.

Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system?

Again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won't hear said and you shouldn't believe.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
― Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

“عقدة أوديب"
مرحلة في تطور الطفل بين ثلاث سنوات إالى ست سنوات تتميز برغبة الطفل في الاستئثار بأمه، لكنه يصطدم بواقع أنها ملك لأبيه، مما يجعل الطفل في هذه المرحلة من تطوره التي تمتد من السن الثالثة إلى التاسعة يحمل شعورا متناقضا تجاه أبيه: يكرهه ويحبه في آن واحد جراء المشاعر الإيجابية التي يشمل بها الأب ابنه. تجد عقدة أوديب حلها عادة في تماهي الطفل مع أبيه. لان الطفل لا يستطيع ان يقاوم الاب وقوته فانه يمتص قوانين الاب وهنا ياتى تمثل عادات وافكار وقوانين الاب في قالب فكرى لدى الطفل يرى فرويد أن السمات الأساسية لشخصية الطفل تتحدد في هذه الفترة بالذات التي تشكل جسر مرور للصغير من طور الطبيعة إلى الثقافة، لأنه بتعذر امتلاكه الأم يكتشف أحد مكونات القانون متمثلا في قاعدة منع زنا المحارم.

لهذه العقدة رواية أنثوية إن جاز التعبير، يسميها فرويد بعقدة إلكترا تجتاز فيها الطفلة التجربة نفسها، لكن الميل يكون تجاه أبيها. كما للعقدة نفسها عند فرويد رواية جماعية تتمثل في أسطورة اغتيال الأب التي يعتبرها منشأ للعقائد والأديان والفنون والحضارة عموما.”
― سيغموند فرويد

“It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“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

“It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma.
But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information.
Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently.
p9-10”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest

“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."

(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)”
― John Irving

“Every one has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners

“In inconstient, nimic nu ia sfarsit, nu trece, nu se uita”
― sigmund freud

“Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry and an atheist, theorized that one’s attitude toward one’s father largely shaped one’s attitude toward God.”
― Dennis Prager, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code

“The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became extinct before man set eyes on them.”
― Sigmund Freud

“The ego is not master in its own house .”
― Hourly History, Sigmund Freud: A Life From Beginning to End

“Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy...”
― 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, Escape from Freedom

“The degradation of most civilizations, contain a common thread. The 'synagogue of Satan' is behind all weaponized ignorance and hate.”
― Paul Boggs, Freud's Mafia: Sigmund Freud's Crimes Against Christianity

“In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud was getting so many reports of incest from the daughters of respected, middle-class Viennese families that he groundlessly decided they couldn’t all be true. To explain their frequency, he concluded that the events occurred primarily in his patients’ imaginations. The legacy of Freud’s error is that thousands, perhaps millions, of incest victims have been, and in some cases continue to be, denied the validation and support they need, even when they are able to muster the courage to seek professional help.”
― Susan Forward, Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

“We avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our waking life.”
― Sigmund Freud

“When we consider the major role intimidation plays in this ideology, which was still at the peak of its popularity at the turn of the century, it is not surprising that Sigmund Freud had to conceal his surprising discovery of adults' sexual abuse of their children, a discovery he was led to by the testimony of his patients. He disguised his insight with the aid of a theory that nullified this inadmissible knowledge. Children of his day were not allowed, under the severest of threats, to be aware of what adults were doing to them. and if Freud had persisted in his seduction theory, he not only would have had his introjected parents to fear but would no doubt have been discredited, and probably ostracized, by middle-class society. In order to protect himself, he had to devise a theory that would preserve appearances by attributing all “evil”, guilt and wrongdoing to the child's fantasies. in which the parents served only as the objects of projection. We can understand why this theory omitted the fact that it is the parents who not only project their sexual and aggressive fantasies onto the child but also are able to act out these fantasies because they wield the power. It is probably thanks to this omission that many professionals in the psychiatric field, themselves the products of "poisonous pedagogy" have been able to accept the Freudian theory of drives, because it did not force them to question their idealized image of their parents. With the aid of Freud's drive and structural theories, they have been able to continue obeying the commandment they internalized in early childhood: "Thou shalt not be aware of what your parents are doing to you.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word 'happiness' only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man's activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Psychoanalysis is a conspiracy against the tourism industry: it makes travelling to faraway places in order to better understand human beings unnecessary.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“იგი ადამიანს, სულ ცოტა, რეალობის ერთი ნაწილის – საზოგადოების - წევრად მაინც აქცევს. ლიბიდოზური კომპონენტების უდიდესი – ნარცისისტული, აგრესიული და თვით ეროტიკული - ნაწილის შრომად და მასთან დაკავშირებულ ადამიანურ ურთიერთობებად გარდაქმნა მას თავისთავად ძალზე ღირებულს ხდის და, შესაბამისად, საზოგადოებაში მისი ადგილის განმტკიცება და აუცილებლობა აბსოლუტურად გამართლებულია. განსაკუთრებული დაკმაყოფილება საკუთარი ნებით არჩეულ სამუშაოს მოაქვს. ამ დროს სუბლიმაცია არსებულ მიდრეკილებებს და კონსტიტუციურად გაძლიერებულ ლტოლვებს წამყვანად ან სასარგებლოდ აქცევს”
― Sigmund Freud

“Dr. Freud said he would like to see me again,” she said, finally.

“I just bet he would!” Irene laughed. “He collects beetles of all sorts, and you resemble a gray beetle that seems ordinary, but shine a light on it and it begins to shimmer like an opal—blue and green, all cool colors for you, I think. You know, when all of you had just arrived here, I admired your self-control. Here you were in a strange country, determined to rescue a woman you didn’t know from a danger you didn’t understand, all because a friend had asked you to. You were tired from a long journey, yet there you were, coolly making plans. Then later I realized it wasn’t self-control at all—it’s simply the way you are, like Sherlock. He can’t help it either. When there’s a problem to be solved, he sits down and solves it: rationally, efficiently.”

Mary opened her mouth to protest.

“I don’t mean that you’re emotionless, my dear. I just mean that your emotions are, themselves, efficient, rational. Please don’t misunderstand me—I admire you very much and I would like to be your friend. But you remind me of Sherlock more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I think that’s a compliment?” said Mary. “I mean, I find him dreadfully aggravating, sometimes. . . .”

“Don’t we all!”
― Theodora Goss, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman

“The Hiding - A Haiku

In shadows he dwells,
Thinking is tough, he judges,
Light reveals the truth.”
― Amogh Swamy, On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage

“If youth knew; if age could.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Lewis's point is that Feurbach and Freud have cast a spell over Western culture, aiming to convince us that they are right and we are wrong. They present their speculative theories as if they were self-evident truths: Only a fool would think there is a God! Lewis helps us see that, in the first place, their approach is only a theory, and in the second, it is not a particularly plausible theory. It's only one way of looking at things - which is what the word theory really means - and there are other (and better) ways of seeing. Lewis's story gives us another way of looking at this "projection" theory, which makes us see that it is far more vulnerable than we might otherwise have realized.”
― Alister McGrath

“Repression works like the refraction of light as it passes from one lens (or psychic system) to another, thus distorting the image perceived in the mind's eye.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“Freud proposes that the relation of unconscious memories to conscious perception is like that of the negative to the photographic print: "It has long since become common knowledge that the experience of the first five years of childhood exert a decisive influence on our life. ... The process may be compared to a photograph, which can be developed and made into a picture after a short or long interval." The powerful force of early childhood experiences remains latent and inaccessible, just as a negative can remain unprocessed for a long period of time before being made into a positive print.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“[...] this observing self often kills and withers anything that is under its scrutiny. The individual has now a persecuting observer in the very core of his being. It may be that the child becomes possessed by the alien and destructive presence of the observer who has turned bad in his absence, occupying the place of the observing self, of the boy himself outside the mirror. If this happens, he retains his awareness of himself as an object in the eyes of another by observing himself as the other: he lends the other his eyes in order that he may continue to be seen; he then becomes an object in his own eyes. But the part of himself who looks into him and sees him, has developed the persecutory features he has come to feel the real person outside him to have. [Self-consciousness, Freyd]”
― R.D.Laing, The Divided Self( An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness)[DIVIDED SELF REV/E][Paperback]

“jamais viver sem um senhor. Ela [a massa] tem tamanha sede de obediência, que instintivamente se submete a qualquer um que se apresente como seu senhor.” Sigmund Freud

A citação de Sigmund Freud destaca a tendência humana de buscar liderança e subordinação. Freud observa que a massa, ou seja, o coletivo de indivíduos, tem uma inclinação natural para obedecer e se subordinar a qualquer figura que se apresente como líder. Essa necessidade de obediência é tão instintiva que as pessoas frequentemente aceitam a autoridade sem questionamento. Esse comportamento pode ser visto em diversos contextos sociais e históricos, onde líderes carismáticos ou autoritários conseguem mobilizar grandes grupos de pessoas. A reflexão de Freud nos convida a pensar sobre a natureza da autoridade e a importância de uma liderança consciente e ética.”
― Jorge Guerra Pires, Falácias: Aprenda a identificar e rebater argumentações problemáticas, mas comumente usadas (Inteligência Artificial, Democracia, e Pensamento Crítico)