Sigmund Freud Quotes

Just so you know, "compression" and "condensation" are being used as synonyms here. In order to understand dreams, one must try to unravel the compression/condensation process: how various associations from waking life are combined into the stuff you see when you're asleep.

Your dream about buying flowers, say, might arise because you simply forgot to buy some flowers for the house on your way home from work the other day. But the flowers in the dream might also represent your sister or your friend Iris. Or they may be about that girl Lily who teased you mercilessly in middle school. Or they may represent all of the above.

Freud's main point in the passage above is that no one of these possibilities necessarily excludes any other. There's no way to know, "strictly speaking," that all the possible meanings of a dream have been discovered. The possibilities are, in theory, endless.

Sweet. And you want to know what's even more awesome? This way of thinking about has obvious implications for literary criticism.

Some texts—old epic poems, say, as opposed to later, elliptical and elusive lyrics—might not seem to share much with dreams. But Freudian theory drew heavily on strategies for literary analysis. And it legitimized critical readings of all "texts," including dreams, as a totally cool thing to do.

Literary criticism was heartened, in other words, by Freud's insistence on the open-endedness of all interpretation. Just as we could theoretically go on interpreting our dreams forever, literary texts are also open to potentially endless reading and rereading.

This makes reading less a matter of right and wrong, and more a matter of ongoing (analytic) fun, fun, fun.

Eyes forward, you dismissive eye-roller, you. And wake up, yawner in the back. These claims are bolder than they seem to be.

In this quote, Freud is not simply refuting the idea that children are asexual until puberty. He's holding this idea responsible for his contemporaries' "ignorance of the fundamental conditions of sexual life." To be blunt: he's blaming the stuffiness of those good old Victorians for messing up people's understandings of human sexuality.

In addition to pointing the finger at the prudish, Victorian view of child sexuality, he's framing his own undertaking as something far, far better than that. He thinks it's a "thorough study" capable of revealing "the essential characters of the sexual instinct." (If he does say so himself.)

If Freud were a less cautious writer, this passage might say: "Watch out, world. The time for prudery is over, now that I'm on the scene to rearrange all your ideas about sex. People start getting in touch with their sexiness in infancy. Take that, you prim and proper types."

Psychoanalytic criticism is, as we've said, often ridiculed for being sex-obsessed (remember that serpent in Genesis that was also a penis?). What's not a phallic symbol, psychoanalysis is thought to say, must represent a breast. Any cave or other enclosed space is a womb, and even the bluntest butter knife poses a serious castration threat.

Yikes. To be fair, Freud really did think sex was everywhere.

But the insights of psychoanalysis go far beyond sexuality. Freud understood the omnipresence of sex as a given—and that was the beginning, not the end, of his theories. What he was really interested in was how people's sexual desires shaped their adult characters and relationships.

This is exactly the kind of statement that makes people run screaming from Freud's theories.

It seems so absurd to reduce "every relation of love" to the model of the "child sucking at his mother's breast." It's as if Freud were inviting people to criticize his work. But the often-cited sentences above, read carefully, get at something crucial about psychoanalytic theory.

(The second sentence is one many theorists as well as practicing psychoanalysts know by heart.)

Here's the essential kernel of truth in this quote: the first intimate relationship—the one between an infant and his mother—models all subsequent intimate relationships. So the search for love as adults is essentially a quest to regain what was lost when we had to separate from our mothers.

So love, really, is about a primal kind of communion that we once had but will never have again. How tragic: even "true love" can't replace the truest love that we had as infants. That thought is sad enough to make a grown man cry, no?

Take it or leave it, that's Freud for you.

And what's literature got to do with all of this mother-loving, you might ask? Pfft. To ask what literature has to do with love is like asking whether or not the Pope is a catholic.

So let's just agree to learn from whatever has the potential to help us better understand love and its mysterious ways… even if we have to suspend disbelief about some of Freud's loopy ideas regarding infancy.

That dash is dramatic, huh? Well, Freud means for it to be, because that dash marks the end of an era.

Up until World War I, it was common for many Europeans—especially those living in the "great nations"—to believe that great wars were things of the past. But people couldn't go walking around with their heads in the clouds after the outbreak of total war in 1914.

Freud's "disillusionment" was therefore literal: the Great War spelled the end of people's faith in inevitable historical progress. On an upward trend? Nope, there's a war happening.

The First World War made people rethink what it meant to be a "modern citizen." The most advanced nations of the day were putting their citizens to death by the tens of thousands.

And for what, Freud wondered?

Well, certainly the war was a time of great horror. But Freud argued that good could come from the fact that, as a result of this war, people were finally facing the realities of death. And Freud thought this opportunity for reflection on the preciousness of life might lead to better futures.

Freud gave readers some reason for hope even in the face of disaster. War is terrible, no doubt; but even "disillusionment" can open up possibilities not previously foreseen.

Here, we get a sense of the starring role that Freud assigned to literature in psychoanalysis.

Far from merely decorative, literature was, for Freud, therapeutic—in the strongest, least touchy-feely sense of the word.

(Freudian psychoanalysis is anything but a feel-good kind of therapy, as you've noticed. It requires hard work by both the analyst and the patient, and it regards cure as the product of this work rather than what automatically follows from warm and fuzzy talk about feelings.)

Recall that the sentences quoted above appear in a book that reminds us why we need to be able to imagine death (in order to value life). So when Freud says, "We die in the person of a given hero," he's not just talking about the thrills and chills we get from a great book.

He's arguing that that we really experience death—we really confront it, just in a safe environment—when we read about it. So, for Freud, we become real people in part through our relationships to fictional characters. Literature lends shape to life.

See that, Shmoopers? Books really can transform us. We tried to tell you.

And since the characters created by authors are modeled on real people's personalities, literary critics actually have crucial roles to play in a society. They're not just archivists or librarians or schoolmasters. They're key interpreters of the human condition.

And given that job description, who could resist becoming a lit critic? Huh? Huh?

What a counter-intuitive claim, right? But after you read this line a few times, it starts to make a lot more sense. Allow us to explain.

Freud uses the language of chemistry and biology throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But he does so in ways that counter scientific common sense. Here, he upends the notion that life strives to preserve itself.

I mean, every living thing cares about its own survival, right? Not so fast, says Freud.

Freud claims, instead, that what organisms really want is to revert to the inanimate state from which they first arose. Like, you started as nothing more than a twinkle in your parents' eyes, so all you want to do is go back to being nothing. Crazy, we know.

But here's the hitch: "the organism" wants to do this "in its own fashion." As in, on its own terms, according to its own desires and needs.

Let's set aside our skepticism about whether single-celled organisms can really be said to have "desires and needs" for a moment. Reading Freud generously—like reading lots of great literature—requires, as we've said, a willingness to suspend disbelief. Here's a good example of when and why this is the case.

The claim quoted above had major implications for subsequent thinkers in a range of disciplines. If people wish to die, then death can no longer be seen as the thing that "comes after" life. It's actually a crucial part of life, propelling us forward like a motor.

Sure, there's a lot to make fun of in Freud's claim that living things are out to stop living. Critics have had a field day with the vivid passages in this book where he imagines single-celled organisms merging and striving to die.

But this "death drive" idea has had a huge effect on lit crit. Novels often present us with characters who want to die on their own terms. Think of Antigone, or Flaubert's unforgettable Madame Bovary. So for all his faults, Freud was probably onto something here.

Aha: Freud is interested in whole groups of people—societies, even—not just the individual.

"Civilization… obtains mastery" over the measly individual psyche through a punishing agency that Freud calls the super-ego. A super-ego is a kind of societally imposed guilt that's installed in every ego; in this way, our own little minds are lorded over by collective pressures.

So, as Freud's most astute commentators have noted, the interpretation of psychic life becomes an interpretation of civilization as well. In Civilization and its Discontents, the ego is framed as needing punishment for crimes it would commit, were it not for fear of looming penalties.

Kind of like how proponents of capital punishment hope it will dissuade future crime-committers from doing their deeds.

Now, if it looks like there is very little that's literary here, look again. The point of Freud's argument here is that societal norms live inside of our heads—the power of the masses lives inside the individual.

This means that psychoanalytic critics also attempt to think through problems that plague real-world individuals, whether or not those individuals would be likely to end up on an analyst's couch. Like this whole issue of guilt/the super-ego. Lit critics analyze characters in texts in part to loosen the grip that the super-ego has on all of us.