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Freud Quotes

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Freud Quotes

“O poder que a dor de perder uma pessoa querida tem de perturbar a mente já foi exaustivamente investigado. O ato de sofrer por essa perda, nos disse Freud em Luto e melancolia, de 1917, “envolve um grande desvio da atitude normal em relação à vida”. No entanto, observou ele, essa dor permanece peculiar entre os transtornos: “Nunca nos ocorre encará-la como uma condição patológica e submetê-la a tratamento médico.” Em vez disso, nos apegamos ao fato de que “ela será superada depois de um lapso de tempo”. Encaramos “qualquer interferência em relação a ela como inútil e até mesmo prejudicial”. Melanie Klein, em seu texto de 1940, “O luto e sua relação com os estados maníaco-depressivos”, fez uma avaliação semelhante: “A pessoa que experimenta o luto está, na verdade, doente, mas como esse estado mental é tão comum e nos parece tão natural, não chamamos o luto de doença [...] Para expressar minha conclusão de maneira mais precisa: devo dizer que, durante o luto, o sujeito passa por um estado maníaco-depressivo modificado e transitório, que vai superar.” Note a ênfase em “superar”.”

FreudLutoMelanie Klein
Book:The Year of Magical Thinking
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“To suggest that we look to the past, to Freud and Lacan, in order to find a new ethical code may seem counterintuitive, but when capital reterritorializes the psyche into systems based on their compatibility with viral market shares of the mental health topographical map, it is hard to argue for an ever-forward, arc of history that always bends toward justice. This is where ethics must come into play.”

EthicsPsychotherapyFreudLacan
Book:Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy
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“Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.”

LanguageDreamsUnconsciousHorsesFreudLacanStructuralismPost Structuralism
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“For Freud, the semiotic trajectory of the dreamwork determines a phantom architectonics: a cartography of nowhere, an architecture of nothing (or the unconscious), and an archaeology of imaginary depth that always takes place on the surface. As a practice and sensibility, psychoanalysis remains attuned to superficiality; it constitutes a search for depth on the surface of things.”

DreamsSurfacePsychoanalysisFreudNowhereDreamwork
Book:Atomic Light
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“Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?”

HealingPsychologyPrideMental HealthMental IllnessDenialTherapyPtsdPsychoanalysisStigmaAbuse SurvivorsPsychotherapyPowerlessnessTraumatic ExperiencesMental DisorderFreudPost Traumatic Stress DisorderHealing From AbusePosttraumatic Stress DisorderSigmund FreudTorturedSelf StigmaTorture SurvivorsMale SurvivorPolitical Refugees
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
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“Sigmund Freud was also frustrated here. In a city that later embraced his ideas with particular zeal, being organically inclined towards neurosis, he himself found only failure. He came to Trieste on the train from Vienna in 1876, commissioned by the Institute of Comparative Anatomy at Vienna University to solve a classically esoteric zoological puzzle: how eels copulated. Specialist as he later became in the human testicle and its influence upon the psyche, Freud diligently set out to discover the elusive reproductive organs whose location had baffled investigators since the time of Aristotle. He did not solve the mystery, but I like to imagine him dissecting his four hundred eels in the institute's zoological station here. Solemn, earnest and bearded I fancy him, rubber-gloved and canvas-aproned, slitting them open one after the other in their slimy multitudes. Night after night I see him peeling off his gloves with a sigh to return to his lonely lodgings, and saying a weary goodnight to the lab assistant left to clear up the mess — "Goodnight, Alfredo", "Goodnight, Herr Doktor. Better luck next time, eh?" But the better luck never came; the young genius returned to Vienna empty-handed, so to speak, but perhaps inspired to think more exactly about the castration complex.”

FreudTrieste
Book:Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere
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“Los dos efectos más importantes que tienen las hazañas y las anti-hazañas es que afectan dos cosas 1) el orgullo 2) el prestigio social. Por ello, por deducción, podemos predecir 2 grandes clases de mentiras relacionadas con hazañas y anti-hazañas: 1) Mentiras para proteger prestigio social o aprobación externa. ¿Esto existe? Sí, se puede comprobar a simple vista. El pescador que vuelve del lago, agranda el tamaño del pescado que dice que pescó (hazaña, agranda su hazaña) para aumentar su prestigio. El nene que vuelve del colegio esconde su boletín con baja nota avergonzado (anti-hazaña) lo esconde, y miente, para proteger su imagen. Son las mentiras “al otro” para que no vea nuestra anti-hazaña, y proteger el prestigio social o la aprobación, o mentiras para exagerar o inventar hazañas. 2) Mentiras para proteger el Orgullo. Esto ya es un poco complicado, pero al ver que es cierto lo anterior, se deduce que también tienen que existir mentiras para proteger nuestro orgullo. Estas mentiras son sobre toda clase de anti-hazañas como anti-hazañas externas. Por ejemplo, el jugador de tenis arrogante “ve” que la pelota pico en el fleje, pero como eso afecta su orgullo ya que no la pudo atajar (anti-hazaña), se engaña y “ve” que picó afuera del fleje y realmente cree que fue mala. Sería el caso de auto-engaño para no ver una circunstancia externa. Sin embargo, a veces la anti-hazaña, puede ser un sentimiento, una emoción, o un deseo, un recuerdo. Es decir: la anti-hazaña es una experiencia interna. Un ejemplo puede ser un deseo homosexual que en nuestro M.A.S. se considera anti-hazaña y tal vez en el M.A.P. de la persona también. Entonces puede esconderse de la mirada de los demás (mentira para proteger el prestigio) o esconderse de la propia mirada (mentira para proteger el orgullo). Este tipo de anti-hazañas internas abarcan deseos, recuerdos de experiencias q y otras sensaciones, y precisamente este territorio es el inconsciente freudiano. En la época de moral victoriana de Freud el deseo sexual fuera de los preceptos morales era gran anti-hazaña según el M.A.S. Por ende, es posible imaginar inicialmente el inconsciente como poblado por deseos prohibidos. Pero en nuestra época otras son las anti-hazañas internas como por ejemplo “el no placer” (las mujeres deben disfrutar el sexo), o por ejemplo el sufrimiento (parece que fuera una vergüenza sufrir), o también algunos recuerdos o experiencias. La técnica del psiconálisis, mediante la asociación libre, puede reconciliar a la persona con esas anti-hazañas internas.”

MoralityUnconsciousPsicologíaUnconscious MindFreudTerapiaInconscienteDeseos ReprimidosPsiconálisisTeoría Psicológica
Book:EL M.A.S. Y EL M.A.P.: una teoría psicológica
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“De Sófocles, que escribiera más de 100 obras, sólo nos quedan menos de una docena. De la mano de Sófocles salió por ejemplo Edipo Rey, ése mito exquisito que terminaría inspirando a Freud más de 2400 años después. Tomémonos un minuto para pensar en la calidad o importancia de todas esas otras obras que nunca llegaron a nosotros. Para entender la relevancia potencial de lo que se perdió. ¿Cuántos miles de 'Ilíadas y Odiseas' habrán quedado por el camino, relamidas por el fuego de la ignorancia, o enterradas por algún terremoto? Lo más probable es que nunca lo sepamos.”

LiteraturaFreudOlvidoPérdidaFragilidadSófocles
Author:Byron Rizzo
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“I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.”

HumansReligionJesusChristianityAtheismIslamMythMosesMuhammadAbrahamMessiahChristiansTheismJewsEinsteinFreudMuslimsAntisemitismMarxProphets
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Άρχισαν τα πηγαδάκια. Η Γκλόρια σέρβιρε το επιδόρπιο. Ο Ντιντιέ ακούμπησε το τσιγάρο του στην άκρη του πιάτου με τα αμυγδαλωτά, σκορπίζοντας στάχτες και τρίμματα από αμυγδαλωτά και επιμένοντας ότι ο Φρόιντ είχε δίκιο όταν διατεινόταν ότι η γλώσσα είναι ο μοναδικός δρόμος προς το ασυνείδητο. Ο Στάνλεϊ αντέτεινε ότι η γλώσσα δόθηκε στον άνθρωπο για να κρύβει τις σκέψεις του και ότι το μόνο που μπορούσες να κάνεις με τις λέξεις ήταν να τις γυρίσεις στο πλάι όπως τα έπιπλα στη διάρκεια ενός βομβαρδισμού.”

ThinkingLanguageWordsSubconsciousFreudLanguage BarrierFreudian
Book:The Flamethrowers
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“I don't agree with Freud's theory about women having penis envy. Don't get me wrong, gentlemen; your penises are great. I'm just not personally interested in possessing one myself. To be honest, the last thing I need is to worry about the size of another one of my body parts.”

HumorWomenFunny QuotesFreudPenis HumorPenis EnvyFreudian Psychoanalytic Theory
Book:Kiss My Asterisk - A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar
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“We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.”

ScienceReligionIllusionFreud
Book:THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
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“It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement.”

ReligionValuesEthicsFreud
Book:THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
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“What is repressed is never, of course, annihilated: it will always strive to return, in disguised forms, in dreams, or as neurotic symptoms. If Freud was correct—and I see no reason to suppose otherwise—we should expect to find the traces of repressed homosexuality in every film, just as we should expect to find them in every person, usually lurking beneath the surface, occasionally rupturing it, informing in various ways the human relationships depicted.”

FilmHomosexualityPsychoanalysisFreudQueer Theory
Book:Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
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“The creator of Bambi was secretly writing pornographic novels on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche.”

IdeasPornographyViennaFreudHuman PsycheTheoriesBambi
Book:The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
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“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.”

HumorSciencePsychoanalysisFreudMental Health Humor
Book:They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life
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“...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.”

FreudKafkaWoolfThomas Mann
Book:A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History
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“I, for example, recently finished writing an article about the latest wave of “home-grown” Islamic suicide-murderers. It was impossible not to notice one thing that their profiles and Web sites had in common. All of them complained about the impossibility of finding a woman, or sometimes a woman of sufficient piety. Meanwhile their public propaganda was hot with disgust and indignation at the phenomenon of female inchastity. The connection between repression and orgasmically violent action appeared woefully evident.”

FanaticismRepressionPietyVirginityFreudTerrorists2010Sigmund FreudSexual Frustration
Book:Civilization and Its Discontents
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“THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: RELIVING DISSOCIATED EXPERIENCES The reexperiencing of previously dissociated traumatic events presents in a variety of complex ways. The central principle is that dissociated experiences often do not remain dormant. Freud's concept of the “repetition compulsion” is enormously helpful in understanding how dissociated events are later reexperienced. In his paper, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud (1920/ 1955) described how repressed (and dissociated) trauma and instinctual conflicts can become superimposed on current reality. He wrote: The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. .. . He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past. (p. 18) If one understands repression as the process in which overwhelming experiences are forgotten, distanced, and dissociated, Freud posited that these experiences are likely to recur in the mind and to be reexperienced. He theorized that this "compulsion to repeat" served a need to rework and achieve mastery over the experience and that it perhaps had an underlying biologic basis as well. The most perceptive tenet of Freud’s theory is that previously dissociated events are actually reexperienced as current reality rather than remembered as occurring in the past. Although Freud was discussing the trauma produced by intense intrapsychic conflict, clinical experience has shown that actual traumatic events that have been dissociated are often repeated and reexperienced.”

RepetitionCompulsionRepressionTraumatizedFreudInner ConflictRepressed MemoriesDissociative AmnesiaComplex PtsdChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorRecovered MemoriesTraumatic MemoriesRepeating The PastReliving The PastDissociated MemoriesReenactmentRepeating Past Mistakes
Book:Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders
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“It is a tragedy of the 20th and 21st centuries that the works of the great explorers of the mind: Freud, Reich, Jung, Lowen, and many others, phase in and out of fashion, and are generally excoriated by the Religious Right, also known as the Christian Conservative Movement. The light and wisdom these men brought to humanity should be part of everyday reading, conversation, schooling, and especially child rearing. It is deplorable and a sign that humans in general are not ready to take the next spiritual leap forward, that most of humanity is still afriad of their own minds.”

HumanityJungFreudReichReligious RightLowenChristian Conservative Movement
Book:666: Connection with Crowley
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“Orgone is the name given by Wilhelm Reich to a vital energy found on the earth. It is also called the Fifth Element. Wilhelm Reich was a psychoanalyst, a protégé of Freud, practicing in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Wilhelm Reich's discovery of orgone began with his research of a physical bio-energy basis for Sigmund Freud's theories of neurosis in humans. Wilhelm Reich believed that traumatic experiences blocked the natural flow of life-energy in the body, leading to physical and mental disease. Wilhelm Reich concluded that the libidinal-energy that Freud discussed was the primordial-energy of life itself, connected to more than just sexuality. Orgone was everywhere and Reich measured this energy-in-motion over the surface of the earth. He even determined that its motion affected weather formation. Reich also studied the effects of the fascist society he lived in on individuals' emotional processing, and worked to promote more freedom. On November 3, 1957, Wilhelm Reich died in his jail cell of a heart failure.”

FreudFifth ElementOrgoneWilhelm ReichLibidinal Energy
Book:666: Connection with Crowley
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“But as the 20th century dawned, Freudian psychology promoted the regressive notion that women suffer an intrinsic deficiency resulting in “penis envy.” Freud wrote that the “depreciation of women, horror of women, and a disposition to homosexuality are derived from the final conviction that women have no penis.” In his view, Medusa's face represents a “vagina dentata”—a hideous toothed vagina—surrounded by the writhing phalluses of castrated men.”

FreudMedusa MythologyPenis EnvyVagina Dentata
Book:Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom
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“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.”

IncestFreudChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorSigmund FreudFreudianSeduction Theory
Book:Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
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“Varoluşçu düşünürler farklı bakış açılarını vurgulasalar da, aynı temel önermeyi paylaşırlar: Biz insanlar, kendi varoluşu bizim için bir sorun olan tek canlı türüyüz. Bu yüzden varoluş, benim anahtar kavramımdır. ….. Varoluşçu yaklaşım, insanın umutsuzluğuna çare olmayı amaçlayan birçok psikoterapi yaklaşımından sadece biridir. Varoluşçu terapötik bakış açısı şunu söyler: Bizi rahatsız eden şeyler yalnızca biyolojik-genetik altyapımızdan kaynaklanmaz (psikofarmakolojik model), yalnızca bastırılmış içgüdüsel dürtülerimizle olan mücadelemizden doğmaz (Freudyen görüş), yalnızca sevgi göstermeyen, umursamaz ya da nevrotik olabilecek önemli yetişkin figürlerinin içselleştirilmesinden kaynaklanmaz (nesne ilişkileri kuramı), yalnızca bozulmuş düşünce kalıplarından doğmaz (bilişsel-davranışçı yaklaşım), yalnızca unutulmuş travmatik anıların parçalarından ya da kariyer ve yakın ilişkiler gibi mevcut yaşam krizlerinden de kaynaklanmaz, aynı zamanda—aynı zamanda—kendi varoluşumuzla yüzleşmekten de kaynaklanır.”

FelsefeFreudVaroluşKaygıBiyolojiPsikoterapiVaroluşçulukI NsanTravmaBilişsel Davranışçı Terapi
Author:Irvin Yalom (Author) Güneşe Bakmak
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“Freud denomina “romance familiar do neurótico” o conjunto das representações ligadas a esse processo de afastamento em relação aos pais. Uma vez ultrapassada essa fase, o “romance familiar do neurótico” quase sempre é esquecido e raramente se constitui numa lembrança consciente, que pode ser revelada pela psicanálise. O romance familiar é produto de uma “atividade imaginativa estranhamente acentuada”, que é uma característica essencial dos neuróticos e de pessoas relativamente inteligentes. A atividade imaginativa que se ocupa das relações familiares aparece, na criança, nas brincadeiras até o período anterior à puberdade. Os devaneios, que são comuns até depois da puberdade, são um exemplo da atividade imaginativa. Esses devaneios correspondem a “realização de desejos e uma retificação da vida real”. Têm dois objetivos principais: um erótico e um ambicioso – embora o objetivo erótico esteja comumente oculto sob o último. Nesse período de grande atividade imaginativa, a criança se dedica a libertar-se dos pais, que já não ocupam mais um lugar de alta estima, e os substituir por outros, “em geral de uma posição social mais elevada”: “Nessa conexão ela lançará mão de quaisquer coincidências oportunas de sua experiência real, tal como quando trava conhecimento com o senhor da Casa Grande ou com o dono de alguma grande propriedade, se mora no campo, ou com algum membro da aristocracia, se mora na cidade.”

FreudNeurose
Book:A cor do inconsciente: Significações do corpo negro
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“Bazıları insanların kuzu, bazıları da kurt olduğuna inanır. Bunların ikisi de kendi görüşlerini destekleyecek uygun kanıtlar bulabilirler, insanların kuzu olduğunu ileri sürenlerin şunları belirtmeleri yeter: Kendileri için zararlı olsa bile, insanlar onlara söylenenlerden kolaylıkla etkilenirler; yıkımdan başka bir şey getirmeyen savaşlarda önderlerini körü körüne izlerler; belli bir inançla söylenen, kaba kuvvetle de desteklenen her şeye —papazların ve kralların sert tehditlerinden gizli ya da açık dolandırıcıların kandırıcı çağrılarına dek her türlü saçmalığa— inanırlar. Bu durumdaki insanların çoğu, kendilerini kandırmak için korkutucu ya da tatlı bir sesle konuşanların karşısında kendi isteklerinden vazgeçmeye hazır, kolaylıkla etkilenebilen, yarı uyanık çocuklara benzerler. Gerçekten de çoğunluğa karşı direnecek ölçüde güçlü inancı olan kişi kural değil, istisnadır; çağdaşlarının alaya aldığı, ama yıllar sonra hayran olunacak bir istisna.”

InsanFreudToplumPsikoloji
Author:Erich Fromm
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“People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. […] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!”

ChristianityArgentinaEinsteinFreudMarxJorge Rafael VidelaDeath SquadsJacobo Timerman
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“[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.”

ScienceUnited StatesEvolutionGermanyCatholicismFascismPopeNaziSeparation Of Church And StateNazismSuperstitiousJewishDarwinismHitlerBarbaricMein KampfEinsteinFreudDarwinAdolf HitlerCharles DarwinAlbert EinsteinVaticanSigmund FreudFuhrerFascistic
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Art is fundamentally serious; it cannot rest content with the gratification of fantasy, nor can it dwell on what fascinates us while avoiding altogether the question of its meaning. As Freud put it in another context, art provides the oath from fantasy back to reality. By creating a representation of something unreal, it persuades us to consider again those aspects of reality which, in the urgency of everyday existence, we have such strong motives for avoiding.”

ArtRealityFantasyFreud
Book:The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture
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“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”

JesusFreedomResponsibilityMarriageChristianityCorruptionSocialismDictatorshipHitlerFrench RevolutionNietzscheCelibacyInquisitionFreudMarxStalinLeninGalileoSubhuman
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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