Freud Quotes

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother. (Germaine Greer)
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism. View quote
Wallace Stevens
Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct. View quote
Dean Koontz
The voice of the intelligence is soft and weak, said Freud. It is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is hissed away by hate, and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance. View quote
Karl Menninger
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. View quote
John Irving
Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen - or better still, talk - that their parents were just as bad. View quote
John Ralston Saul
Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level - man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology. View quote
Rollo May
Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance. View quote
William Carlos Williams
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. View quote
Lionel Trilling
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)
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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. View quote
Camille Paglia
Freud says, "Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant. View quote
Camille Paglia
Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work. View quote
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
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. View quote
Lewis Mumford
It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there. View quote
André Gide
The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's. View quote
Erich Fromm
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered. View quote
Hans Frank
The "brightness” of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions. (Paul Goodman)
Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M. D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him. View quote
Paul Goodman
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud. View quote
Tony Kushner
Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. View quote
Albert Ellis
I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13. View quote
Megan Abbott