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Freudian Quotes

Browse 15 quotes about Freudian.

Freudian Quotes

“As a Freudian, I'm not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I've been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I've been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient's life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is essentially harmless phenomenon, a point where the dream's meaning is sufficiently understood, and further interpretation would be pointless, evil is a mystery with power. It reaches up into the world and makes everything mysterious.”

“The exploration and construction of a personal history with another person is a powerful, transformative intrapersonal experience. Without memory, there is no self. Meaning is personal experience composed into narratives. However, the narratives brought forth by the patient are generally stereotypes and closed. A central part of what the analyst adds is imagination, a facility with reorganizing and reframing, a capacity to envision different endings, and different futures. If the storylines suggested by the analyst himself are rigid and stereotypes, the analytic process degenerates into sterility and conversion.”

“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.”

“...very soon he went to sleep. He dreamed that the priest whom they had shot that morning was back in the house dressed in the clothes his father had lent him and laid out stiffly for burial. The boy sat beside the bed and his mother read out of a very long book all about how the priest had acted in front of the bishop the part of Julius Caesar: there was a fish basket at her feet, and the fish were bleeding, wrapped in her handkerchief. He was very tired and very bored and somebody was hammering nails into a coffin in the passage. Suddenly the dead priest winked at him - an unmistakable flicker of the eyelid, just like that.”

“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.”

“Membayangkan Surga Apa yang kau lihat di layar yang berpendar ini, Kay? Serupa senja yang tumbuh dari sebatang pohon di sebuah tempat yang kau bayangkan seperti surga. Cahaya lampu itu menyapu wajahmu dengan warna lembayung dan berkilau seperti pelangi. Tapi tak ada apa pun kutemukan pada seri wajahmu selain nafsu yang tertahan dan seulas senyum kemesuman. Tepat di puncak penantian dari segala perhatian yang tertuju pada dirimu. Mata yang tak pernah menyadari tersesat dalam raga belia yang entah milik siapa. Aura kemudaan yang berasa sia-sia. Telah kau reguk semua kebahagiaan dari ekspresi wajah tolol yang ditunggangi oleh nafsu alter egonya. Atau barangkali, telah habis kau hirup wangi kelopak mawar hitam yang tumbuh di ranjangmu setiap pagi. Sudah lama sekali rasanya waktu berlalu. Seperti ketika, kau masih suka nongkrong di cafe sambil meneguk cappucino dari cangkir porselen yang perlahan mulai retak. Sementara laju usia mengalir di tenggorakanmu yang bening bagai pualam. Waktu meninggalkan jejak buta di dalam handphonemu. Menyisakan tatap mata orang yang tak lagi mampu menafsirkan apa yang telah engkau lakukan. Bukankah, mereka tak lagi melihatmu sebagaimana adanya dirimu saat ini atau sepuluh tahun dari sekarang? Tak satu pun dari mereka percaya bahwa usiamu belum lewat dua puluh tahun. Siapa mendamba merah muda anggur kirmizi yang tumbuh di dadamu? Tak satu pun telinga sanggup melawan sihir dari gelak tawamu yang getir. Mata bodoh yang tak sanggup melupakan bayangan pisang matang kau kunyah dengan brutal sebagai kudapan di tengah jeda pertunjukan. Hidup tak seperti kecipak ikan di dalam aquarium transparan tertanam di dinding. Air kolam di pekarangan menjelma jadi bayangan jemari tak henti menggapai. Gelembung kekhawatiran yang tak sanggup memahami makna puisi yang sengaja ditulis untuk mengabadikan namamu. Taman yang kau bayangkan itu, Kay bukanlah surga yang sesungguhnya. Di sana tak ada sungai keabadian atau pangeran tampan yang menunggu kehadiranmu dengan kerinduan. Yang ada cuma kelebat kilat dan hujan airmata hitam. Mengucur seperti lendir laknat yang mengalir dari hidungmu saat kau meradang karena influensa. Tak ada satu hal pun yang menyenangkan, Kay. Hanya sedikit tersisa cerita yang busuk dan menjijikkan sebagai satu-satunya obrolan untuk perintang waktu. 2024 - 2025”

“It was then that Brown took his revenge upon the world which, after twenty years of contemptuous and reckless bullying, refused him the tribute of a common robber’s success. It was an act of cold-blooded ferocity, and it consoled him on his deathbed like a memory of an indomitable defiance. . . . Thus Brown balanced his account with the evil fortune. Notice that even in this awful outbreak there is a superiority as of a man who carries right—the abstract thing—within the envelope of his common desires. It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution—a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.”

“The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)”

“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.”

“Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history.”

“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.”