Sigmund Freud Quotes

The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is to attribute art to mental weakness, and then to trace the weakness back to the point where, according to analytic dogma, it originated namely, the lavatory.

I don't like to do too much psychological research because it might turn a character into a patchwork.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.

Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you.

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.

I do think people do pick movies that reveal something about them that they aren't always aware of. If you ask them what kind of an actor they think they are, they'll probably tell you something different than what they've actually done.

Apparently, as a kid, I used to eat spiders. Maybe there's some Freudian significance behind that.

I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.

I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that.

The sponsors of this bill obviously have an unresolved Oedipal complex.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

It is an essential part of the interpretive work that it should keep in step with fluctuations between love and hatred, between happiness and satisfaction on the one hand and persecutory anxiety and depression on the other.

No civilisation can grow unless fanatics, bloodshed, and brutality stop. No civilisation can begin to lift up its head until we look charitably upon one another; and the first step towards that much-needed charity is to look charitably and kindly upon the religious convictions of others. Nay more, to understand that not only should we be charitable, but positively helpful to each other, however different our religious ideas and convictions may be.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist.

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith

Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

One of the greatest difficulties the left faces in reaching out to masses of people in America is its profound disrespect of spirituality and religious life…people on the left need to acknowledge – we need to grapple with – the question of religion.

Science intensifies religious truth by cleansing it of ignorance and superstition.

Religious tolerance. No! Zero tolerance for any type of religion.