Arnaud Desplechin Quotes

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 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.

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.

Freud was just a novelist.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

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

I've read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.

The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.

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.

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 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 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.

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

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.

And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.