29 quotes found
“The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have ad...”
“We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve i...”
“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”
“While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we...”
“Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?”
“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
“We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”
“what is new in his theories is not true, and what is true in his theories is not new.”
“It takes two to tango isnt even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before Doc was even born. Perhaps it wa...”
“Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We ...”
“This pursuit of unavailable distant people has oedipal roots. fearing the consequences, they make certain that they fail at the attempt.Distancing, Kantor (p.115)”
“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...”
“The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an eroti...”
“The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.”
“The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimis...”
“Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notio...”
“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didnt know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didnt know he was a novelist ei”
“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 cogn...”
“Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own bod...”
“Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of norm...”