114 Quotes About Freud

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

What do dreams mean anyway? They’re just a lot of silly nonsense.’‘Or wish fulfilment. The subconscious representation of our true desires.

For Marx, the only thing that motivates humans is money. For Freud, it’s libido. And for Schopenhauer, it is the blind metaphysical will. All are horribly wrong. More than anything, man seeks meaning in his life. And in that meaning, he seeks superiority over others.

It’s so easy to lose faith and become lost in all of the politics of the world. That’s why we need the arts. To sublimate our frustration and anger into something beautiful. Freud called sublimation a virtuous defence mechanism because it is in the arts that we can find our humanity.

Freud and Jung were wrong about dreams. They have no hidden meanings; they are simply incoherent.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim

Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.

Where were Christians before Freud? Up a tree? Were the bereft of all crucial knowledge about man's relationship to God and his neighbor? Was the church's counseling a hopeless, primitive, stone-age activity that should have disappeared with flint knives? Were Christians shut up to sinful, harmful living before the advent of psychotherapy? Did God withhold truth for living until our present age?