Sigmund Freud Quotes

The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.

Sexual activity, for women, has a history of vulnerability, in a way it simply does not have for men. The mother has to teach thishidden text to her daughter. The mother's warnings, her attempts to halt sexual development in her daughter, are not so much signs of disapproval or envy, but of fear.

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.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

An actor shouldn't undergo psychoanalysis, because there are a lot of things you're better off not knowing.

You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing.

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.

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!

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

Hitler's unconscious seems to be female.

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.

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

Not only Freud but artists and writers were also interested in the unconscious. It was medicine that made the first steps toward modernity.

Know what Freud wrote in his diary when he was 77? "What do women want? My God, what do they want?" Fifty years this giant brain spends analyzing women. And he still can't find out what they want. So this makes him the world's greatest expert on female psychology?

Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well.

Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. If they touch at the wrong time, you can make a baby or die.

It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys.

The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

That whole thing about masturbating. Most girls, I guess nobody has to tell them, they just figure it out. I had to be told. Some girl actually had to show me a hairbrush and demonstrate exactly what to do. I just never figured that stuff out naturally.