Stanislav Grof Quotes

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.

Sigmund Freud was the apostle of disbelief. He was the one who made psychoanalysis a part of our culture, and in so doing he kicked out a flying buttress that had been essential for holding up our cathedral of faith.

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. It introduced the notion that there existed certain predictable and identifiable processes by which dreams were formed.

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.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

I've never gone into analysis. But Freud opened a door, I know.

I first wanted to be a psychiatrist. I decided against that in medical school when I discovered that psychiatrists didn't, in reality, do what they did on TV.

I remember the first time I read Freud, I was 25 or 30, and I was expecting it to be about the Oedipus complex. But what I actually discovered confirmed my own common experience, that you also had little boys who loved their fathers and little girls who loved their mothers.

In London, it's quite a rarefied activity to be on an analyst's couch.

I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.

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

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.

My wife was a licensed psychologist by profession and a college professor of psychology.

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

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

I've never studied psychology.

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

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.

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.

I deal with the human psychology and evil. They are my twin issues.

Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.