Thomas Szasz Quotes

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.

In the Freudian age, parents say to their children, 'Don't be defensive,' meaning, 'You have no argument,' but I was born in the age of Rommel, when defense was considered an honorable thing.

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

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

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

The books are the books, and a lot of the stuff is some version of your id or your ego.

I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don't always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun.

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.

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.

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.

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

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

I wrote several articles criticizing psychoanalysis, but the analysts weren't listening to my objections. So I finally quit after practicing it for six years.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.

The idea that our mental life is affected by hidden causes is a mainstay of psychology.

From a psychoanalytical point of view, we start discovering the world through our mouths in the very first stage of our lives, when we're just born.

I reveled in political science and history of all kinds, and I felt for a long time that I had discovered all the secrets of life in psychology, although its Freudian variety left me cold. The id never made much sense to me.

Don't talk to me about Freud. I'll go up the wall!

I'd read a lot about the psychology around rejection and insecurity, and I had noticed that when people feel insecure or rejected, they behave aggressively, erratically. Especially when you can hide behind a screen name or a profile picture.

Hitler's unconscious seems to be female.

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

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.