Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

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.

Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.

I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.

He [Freud] often said three things were impossible to fulfill completely; healing, education, governing. He limited his goals in analytic treatment to brining the patient to the point where he could work for a living and learn to love.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.

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.

I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

Freud had a gene for inefficiency, and I think I have a gene for efficiency. Had I not been a therapist, I would have been an efficiency expert.

As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.

Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow.

Freud was just a novelist.

When I'm saying hysteria, I'm referring to Freud, because all the women were coming to him with symptoms and seeking help, and he just called it hysteria.

Sigmund Freud was very much a creature of his time. He did not 'invent' the unconscious.

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.

When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

People seem to forget that one reason they are now thinking differently is Freud's legacy itself.

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life.

I don't want to do anything Freudian.