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Freud Quotes

“First, Freud must be – as it were – turned on his head. It is not that physical ‘sex’ is basic and ‘God’ ephemeral; rather, it is God who is basic, and ‘desire’ the precious clue that ever tugs at the heart, reminding the human soul – however dimly – of its created source. Hence...DESIRE IS MORE FUNDAMENTAL THAN 'SEX'. It is more fundamental, ultimately, because desire is an ontological category belonging primarily to God, and only secondarily to humans as a token of their createdness ‘in the image’. But in God, ‘desire’ of course signifies no LACK – as it manifestly does in humans. Rather, it connotes that plenitude of longing love that God has for God’s own creation and for its full and ecstatic participation in the divine, trinitarian, life.”

GodDesireSexChristianityLongingSexualityFreudThe Trinity
Book:God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity'
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“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.”

PhilosophyPsychologyFreudAntropologiaScince Of Man
Book:Escape from Evil
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“The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.”

ImaginationJungFreud
Author:Herbert Marcuse
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“The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3”

RealFactsFantasyCrazyEventsHealthPatientChild AbuseSexual AbuseRapeProjectionHysteriaFreudPedophileAsylumNational Health ServiceDiscredited
Book:Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony
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“G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.”

ChildrenReasonScienceSufferingPovertyHistoryPsychologySocietyHuman NatureYouthTheoryLogicStressMathematicsImmigrationParentsDataRebellionChildTeensAdolescenceTeenageTeenagersPsychologistTurmoilScientific MethodAnecdotesYouthfulnessFreudYouth CultureData AnalysisPhrenologyYouthful Arrogance
Book:Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence
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“First, the subjects we teach are as large and complex as life so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole and respond to them wisely in the moment requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.”

TeachTeacherTeachingSubjectsResearchFlawedSolomonFreudPartial
Book:The Courage to Teach: A Guide for Reflection and Renewal
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“Freud taught that for any human being kindness or cruelty, having a sense of justice or lacking it, depend on the accidents of childhood. We all know this to be true, but it goes against much of what we say we believe. We cannot give up the pretence that being good is something anyone can achieve. If we did, we would have to admit that, like beauty and intelligence, goodness is a gift of fortune. We would have to accept that, in the parts of our lives where we are most attached to it, free­dom of the will is an illusion. We would have to own up to what we all deny—that being good is good luck. By making us face this awkward truth, Freud wounded the concept of 'morality' more deeply than did Nietzsche.”

GoodnessFreud
Book:Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
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“The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.”

LoveLossGriefSadnessMourningMelancholyFamily LifeFreud
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“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”

LiesMental HealthSexismSexual AbusePsychiatryChild Sexual AbuseNeurosisHysteriaFathersSexistIncestNeuronsSociety DenialFreudFamous PeopleCover UpChildhood Sexual AbuseSigmund FreudFather DaughterHysterical DissociationHistory Of PsychologySeduction TheoryAeitologyFamous PsychiatristsHistory Of HysteriaHistory Of IncestHistory Of PsychiatryStudies On HysteriaThe Aetiology Of Hysteria
Book:Father-Daughter Incest
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“There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.”

PersonalityEgoPsychoanalysisSelf DeceptionPsychotherapyMasksPersonhoodFreudPhilosophy Of MindSelfhoodEgo DefencesEgo Defenses
Book:Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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“Where were Christians before Freud? Up a tree? Were the bereft of all crucial knowledge about man's relationship to God and his neighbor? Was the church's counseling a hopeless, primitive, stone-age activity that should have disappeared with flint knives? Were Christians shut up to sinful, harmful living before the advent of psychotherapy? Did God withhold truth for living until our present age?”

LifeGodChristianChurchPsychologyBibleTherapyPsychotherapyCounselingFreud
Book:Theology of Christian Counseling, A
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“Healing is the way of the heart. This book is an invitation to open our heart. Healing is a love affair with life. Healing is pure love. Love is what creates healing. Spiritual healing is to be one with ourselves. And to be one with ourselves is to be in joy. Healing is to develop our inner being. Healing is to discover that which is already perfect within ourselves. It is to rediscover our inner life source. Spiritual healing is to be one with life. We are never really alone, it is our idea of a separate "I" that creates the feeling of being separate from life, from the Whole. In reality there is only one heart, a pulsating Existential heart. Our own heart pulsates in unity with the Existential heartbeats. We are all notes in the Existential music, and without our unique note the music would not be complete. We are all needed in the Whole; we all have our unique fragrance, quality and gifts to contribute to the Whole. More than 30 years ago, I had an individual consultation with a spiritual teacher. I did not have time to sit down before I got the question: "You are interested in healing, are you not?" It was the first time that I encountered the topic that would become my way and deep source of joy in life. This spiritual teacher finished the consultation saying: "You will be a fine healer." The art of healing is the psychology of being, the science of inner transformation. The psychology of being begins where Western psychology ends. It goes beyond Skinner, Freud, Jung, Rogers, Maslow and humanistic psychology. The psychology of being is the psychology of consciousness, a psychology for inner transformation. It is not basically a question of psychology, it is a question of being. The psychology of being begins where we are, and take us to everything that we can be. The underlying theme the psychology of being is meditation - but not meditation as a static technique - but as the capacity to BE with ourselves and others in a quality of watchful awareness, acceptance and realization. The art of being is a search beyond the personality. It a search beyond the thoughts, the emotions and the learned attitudes of the personality, to the inner being, to the depth within, which is hidden in ourselves. The inner being is a deep acceptance of ourselves as we are; the inner being is to be available to life. The inner being is to be in unity with life. This book is an invitation to meet the inner being, our inner source of love, joy, acceptance, humor, intuition, understanding, wisdom, truth, silence and creativity.”

LoveWisdomTruthJoySpiritualityUnderstandingRelationshipsHealingSilenceCreativityPsychologyMeditationAcceptanceIntuitionTherapyBeingFreudSkinnerMaslowOneness With LifeRogers
Book:Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
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“The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”

LifeFearGuiltSexualityPsychotherapySuppressionFreudBioenergetics
Book:Fear Of Life
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“In Darwin's writing people, as animals, may be unhappy, but they are doing what they cannot help do; in Freud's account people are equally driven, but their unhappiness shows they are divided against themselves. They always seem to want more than, or something other than, their mere existence and the reproduction of their genetic inheritance. As though our nature is to demand of nature more than it can give. There is a fantasy life that is a theatre of excess.”

FantasyHuman NatureFreudDarwin
Book:Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories
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“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. . . .”

MindWisdomTruthHumanityHealingConsciousnessPowerPsychologySocietyCrimeAbuseMurderMemoryTraumaGravesHorribleRecoveryDenialGhostsPtsdRapeRestorationDissociationAtrocitiesUnspeakableSurvivorsVictimsSociety DenialFreudDissociativePosttraumatic Stress DisorderRepressed MemoryPsychological TraumaSigmund FreudTrauma TherapyRecovered MemoryViolations
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
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“But partly it was my own professional background, my training in psychology, that rather than helping me—made it almost impossible for me to face what was happening. Back when I studied psychology in the 1950s, there was only one cause for all mental illnesses, even the most severe: a faulty upbringing. Everything was tied to the way you were raised. There were different schools of thought, of course. Some practitioners followed a Freudian model where understanding the id, the ego and the superego gave the answer to everything. Some followed Jung, with his emphasis on unconscious myths. But everyone believed that it was early life experiences that were behind mental disorders. A patient with serious mental problems had been subject at an early age to unacceptable pressures, to confusing messages, or to some destructive behavior on the part of the parents.”

WisdomPsychologyHuman NatureReflectionMental HealthParentingInsightChildhood TraumaFreudFamily Dynamics
Book:The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
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“Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)”

MindBrainNeuroscienceSimulationFreudPrediction2014
Book:The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
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“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with "everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?”

DeathSufferingExistencePsychologyComfortIllusionMiseryTherapyContentmentFreud
Book:The Waters & The Wild
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“I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap- toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.”

SufferingPsychologyComfortHatredShameHungerLustFreud
Book:The Waters & The Wild
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“...Freud's theory of self-determination...argues that human beings need three things in order to be content: They need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. He considered these three pillars--autonomy, competence, and community--to be intrinsic to human happiness.”

CommunityAuthenticityAutonomyHuman HappinessFreudConnection To OthersPersonal Competences
Book:We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends
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“The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild. But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age.”

ChildhoodNostalgia19th CenturyGolden AgeInfantileFreudPrehistoryVictoriansHesiodSilver Age
Book:The Children's Book
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“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?”

PsychologyExplorationHeroismIntrospectionPsychoanalysisJungFreudAdler
Book:The Manticore
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“One of his [Freud] favourite doctrines was that of 'rationalization', which may be put as follows. We pride ourselves on being reasonable in our beliefs and actions; when we accept a belief, we like to think that we have adopted it on good grounds; when we decide on an action, we like to think that we have done so because it is right; and if challenged, we readily produce reasons. But these reasons turn out, when examined, to be 'rationalizations' merely, that is, attempts to dress up in rational guise beliefs or actions that sprang, not from reasons at all, but from non-rational causes. [...] What fastened the attention of Freud was that man continually goes wrong. His religious beliefs record an attempt, 'patently infantile', to find a father-substitute; his philosophical systems are projections upon nature of his half hidden desires; his scientific and artistic pursuits mark the sublimation of frustrated instincts; his political convictions are apologies for, or protests against his position in society; even his ethics is an uneasy compromise between selfish desire and group pressures. 'I am sure only of one thing,' Freud wrote, 'that the judgments of value made by mankind are immediately determined by their desire for happiness; in other words, that those judgments are attempts to prop up their illusions with arguments.”

PhilosophyPsychologyPhilosophicalRationalityFreud
Book:Reason & Analysis
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“This dynamic, this ‘striving to preserve identity’, however strange the means or effects of such striving, was recognized in psychiatry long ago—and, like so much else, is especially associated with the work of Freud. Thus, the delusions of paranoia were seen by him not as primary but as attempts (however misguided) at restitution, at reconstructing a world reduced by complete chaos.”

ScienceHistoryPsychologyFreud
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
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“The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory. The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round. But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production. Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts). However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality. Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.) The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment. Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.”

RealitySciencePsychologyPossibilityRevolutionDifficultyInfiniteSocialismClarityTreatmentVagueMarxismPsychoanalysisRuleCruelScientific TheoryFreudPointAdlerSigmund FreudFreudianFalsifiableDemarcationAdlerianAlfred AdlerAlfred W AdlerKarl Heinrich MarxKarl Marx Marx Marxism
Author:Karl Popper
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“It’s so easy to lose faith and become lost in all of the politics of the world. That’s why we need the arts. To sublimate our frustration and anger into something beautiful. Freud called sublimation a virtuous defence mechanism because it is in the arts that we can find our humanity.”

WorldLifeArtBeautifulFaithHumanityHopePoliticsLostBeautyCreativityCreativeVirtuePsychologyMediaTheoryNewsEmpathyAngerCorruptionSurrenderFrustrationHopefulHopelessVirtuousCreateDefenceKamandKojouriKamand KojouriCorruptLoseGive UpArtsHumannessHopefulnessFreudCorporationFreudianDefence MechanismSublimationCreative ArtsSublimate
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“The abject impulse is inalienably connected with the feminine, specifically the maternal. As it forms out of the undefined morass of relations, surfaces and currents that existed before the Oedipal or mirror-stage coordinated them, the subject seems built around a primal sense of loss. The developing sense of the limits of the body is focussed on those holes in it's surface through which the outside becomes inside and vice versa: the mouth, anus, genitals, even the invisibly porous surface of the skin. It was the mother's body that was most connected with these crossing-points, as it fed and cleaned the undefined infant body. The sense that boundaries and limits are forming around this permable flesh is interpreted then as the withdrawal or even loss, of intimacy with the body of the mother, firstly in the increasing distance of the practical hygiene operations it performs and secondly, more remotely, beyond that in it's archaic ur-form as the body through which the child entered into the world.”

PhilosophyChildTheoreticalFreudLacanMaternalAbject
Author:Nick Mansfield
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“I gave up hypnotic treatment for this very reason, because I did not want to impose my will on others. I wanted the healing processes to grow out of the patient’s own personality, not from suggestions by me that would have only a passing effect. My aim was to protect and preserve my patient’s dignity and freedom, so that he could live his life according to his own wishes. In this exchange with Freud, it dawned on me for the first time that before we construct general theories about man and his psyche we should learn a lot more about the real human being we have to deal with.”

IndividualTherapyFreudTherapistDream AnalysisHypnotic Therapy
Book:Man and His Symbols: A Popular Presentation of the Essential Ideas of Jungian Psychology with Over 500 Illustrations
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“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people.”

ArtReligionFaithLostNatureFreudDarwinHuxley
Book:The Martian Chronicles
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“Although psychoanalysts, including Freud, tended to acknowledge sexual trauma as tragic and harmful (Freud, 1905b, 1917), the subject seems to have been too awful to consider seriously in civilized company. One notable exception, Sandor Ferenczi, presented a paper entitled “Confusion of Tongues between the Adult and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion” (1955), to the Psychoanalytic Congress in 1932. In this presentation he talked about the helplessness of the child when confronted with an adult who uses the child’s vulnerability to gain sexual gratification. Ferenczi talked with more eloquence than any psychiatrist before him about the helplessness and terror experienced by children who were victims of interpersonal violence, and he introduced the critical concept that the predominant defense available to children so traumatized is “identification with aggressor.” The response of the psychoanalytic community seems to have been one of embarrassment, and the paper was not published in English until 1949, 17 years after Ferenczi’s death (Masson, 1984).”

PsychologyChild AbusePtsdPsychoanalysisChild Sexual AbuseSociety DenialFreudPosttraumatic Stress DisorderSigmund Freud
Book:Handbook of PTSD: Science and Practice
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“Em que consiste o trabalho realizado pelo luto? Não me parece descabido expor esse trabalho da forma seguinte. O exame da realidade mostrou que o objeto amado não mais existe, e então exige que toda a libido seja retirada de suas conexões com esse objeto. Isso desperta uma compreensível oposição - observa-se geralmente que o ser humano não gosta de abandonar uma posição libidinal, mesmo quando um substituto já se anuncia. Essa posição pode ser tão intensa que se produz um afastamento da realidade e um apego ao objeto mediante uma psicose de desejo alucinatório. O normal é que vença o respeito à realidade. Mas a solicitação desta não pode ser atendida imediatamente. É cumprida aos poucos, com grande aplicação de tempo e energia de investimento, e enquanto isso a existência do objeto perdido se prolonga na psique. Cada uma das lembranças e expectativa em que a libido se achava ligada ao objeto é enfocada e superinvestida, e em cada uma sucede o desligamento da libido. Não é fácil fundamentar economicamente porque é tão dolorosa essa operação de compromisso em que o mandamento da realidade pouco a pouco se efetiva. É curioso que esse doloroso desprazer nos pareça natural. Mas o fato é que após a consumação do trabalho do luto, o Eu fica novamente livre e desimpedido" (FREUD, Sigmundo. Luto e Melancolia, In _____. Introdução ao Narcisismo, Ensaios de metapsicologia e outros ensaios [1914-1916]. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010. (vol. 12). p. 173.”

FreudLuto
Author:Sigmund Freud
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