Natasha Khan 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.

Every representation, even of an orgy, is a sublimation.

Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.

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.

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

Modeling is exciting, but I certainly felt frustrated that I couldn't speak out or express myself. I always wanted to express my desires in some other medium.

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.

Video is freeing, but also lazier. You have to recreate the love of the moment.

In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

With photography, you've captured a moment time - it's that moment only - and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It's about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.

Why not do something strange and different for once? Artists can do whatever they want!

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

Those who say only artists and architects can create are the ones who are elitist.

Being an artist is celebrating life.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

you don't need talent to be an artist. 'Artist' is just a frame of mind. Anybody can be an artist, anybody can communicate if they are desperate enough.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

It wasn't just like, "I want to make a record that sounds like classic rock" at all. It was more like, "I want to make a record that is a little more unsettling and maybe isn't as easily understood now." That just seemed more important, like, for me to make as an artist, than it was to make something to make people feel safe right away.

The unconscious - that is to say, the 'repressed' - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.

I never worked at painting as if it were a job; it was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.

I think kids need to be allowed to be more creative and learn more about artists these days, so I'm all about that.