The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists – and I don’t mean that in a pejorative...

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we...

I shake my head at his largesse, and I frown as a scene from Tess crosses my mind: the strawberry scene. It evokes my dream. To hell with Dr. Flynn—Freud would have a field day—and...

Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notions of others...

The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of...

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

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...

The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse...

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

I could say it all began with my mother.

The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague....

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and...

It takes two to tango” isn’t even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before...

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise”.

Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don’t look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact,...

Mum, mum,He that keeps nor crust nor crumb,Weary of all, shall want some.

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...

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

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced...

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud’s work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently...

if psychoanalysis was late-19th-century secular Judaism’s way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world and retail is the late 20th century’s way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that...

There’s a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.What our contempts doth often hurl from us,We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,By revolution lowering, does becomeThe opposite of itself. She’s good, being gone.The...

Women never bought Freud’s idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave,...

…We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith...

The purported insight achieved by the patient is not the product of a process of veridical self-discovery, but rather reflects the patient’s conversion to the therapist’s interpretation.

Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one...

Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the...

The abject impulse is inalienably connected with the feminine, specifically the maternal. As it forms out of the undefined morass of relations, surfaces and currents that existed before the Oedipal or mirror-stage coordinated them, the...

Healing is the way of the heart. This book is an invitation to open our heart. Healing is a love affair with life.Healing is pure love. Love is what creates healing. Spiritual healing is to...

I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come...

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can...

Well anything thats interesting in a film, or in a character (all your passion, your sex, your anger, your rage, all that) comes from that part of you that you want to hide and push...

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will...

The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love...

Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant...

Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions...

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.Atrocities, however, refuse to be...

Freud was just a novelist.

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which...

Freud expressed the opinion—not quite in earnest, though, it seemed to me—that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, ‘What then is science,...

It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these...

It was Freud’s ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to...

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact...

I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based...

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to...

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity,...

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture...