Freud Verbatim: Quotations and Aphorisms

by Sigmund Freud, Hannes Etzlstorfer (Editor), Peter Nömaier (Editor)

Overview

The founder of psychoanalysis and one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers, in his own words.
 
Sigmund Freud is on the very short list of historical figures who have profoundly influenced—perhaps even revolutionized—the way we think and the way we see the world and ourselves. This book compiles quotes, maxims, observations, and witticisms from the founder of psychoanalysis and the popularizer of such terms as ego, superego, and id.
 
Covering subjects ranging from politics and religion to love and sex, this collection assembles passages from Freud’s major works, as well as making use of personal letters to his friends and family. Organized into ten thematic chapters, this thought-provoking compilation provides a representative look into all of Freud’s work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468311952
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Publication date:	11/12/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Hannes Etzlstorferis an art and cultural historian. He co-curated the recent exhibition Eros and Thanatos at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Man in Private Life

A neatly trimmed beard, well dressed, upright posture. His glowering eyes analytically focused on the beholder, the ever-present cigar in hand. Sigmund Freud is known throughout the world in countless reproductions of such images. The most famous of these photos was shot by his son-in-law Max Halberstadt, which gives rise to an interesting subtext: the person so pierced by Freud's scrutinizing gaze is the husband of his beloved daughter Sophie.

Freud's relationship to Halberstadt was better than the photograph would lead one to expect, as is demonstrated by a touching letter written on the occasion of the couple's engagement. In the letter, Freud ceremoniously puts Sophie in Halberstadt's hands, expressing his affection for his daughter and his trust in his newly won son-in-law. The marriage began well in 1913, but it was abruptly ended by Sophie's tragic death seven years later at the age of twenty-seven. Freud, who had been hit hard by his father's death in 1896, had great difficulty in overcoming this loss. In the letters surrounding these tragic blows of fate, an emotional side of Freud's personality emerges that to this day has remained little known. According to his biographers, Freud was distanced in his personal relationships. In his letters, however, he could be loving, confiding and supportive, and some written in his younger years even reveal impassioned outbreaks of feeling. The letters to his fiancée Martha Bernays, written during their engagement when she was living in Hamburg, are replete with passages poetically expressing his love and yearning. An intensive correspondence evolved with Martha over the years, and with her sister Minna Bernays as well, who after the death of her fiancé moved into the family apartment at Berggasse 19, living there until the end of her life as the unwed "Aunt Minna".

Alongside his intensive work life, which was characterized by a daily schedule filled with analysis sessions followed by work at his desk until late into the night, Freud found little time for other pursuits. Nonetheless, his enthusiasm for travelling is well documented, and weekly meetings to play tarok (a card game) as well as occasional cafe visits were his most frequent recreation. His brother Alexander Freud was an important partner in these leisure activities. Ten years younger than Sigmund and also academically distinguished – as a professor at the forerunner of the Vienna Economic University – he was a confidant, travel companion and tarok partner. According to the biographical literature, life alongside young Sigmund was often difficult for the Freud siblings: precocious and intellectually gifted, he soon developed the ambition that remained characteristic throughout his life. Many of his letters to Martha and to the friend of his youth Eduard Silberstein provide insight into his education. Called "Golden Sigi" by his mother, Freud was at the head of his class for many years, and he made no secret of his feelings of superiority.

Freud's development from a young physician into a recognized theoretician is well documented in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess. Beginning in 1887, Freud exchanged opinions on theoretical, medical and private issues with the Berlin doctor, and a close friendship soon developed between them. In these letters Freud is astonishingly candid and approachable, often showing a great sense of humour. Freud openly wrote of his cocaine consumption, as he did in his letters to Martha – at the time no laws prohibited the narcotic, and thus he saw no reason to keep his use of it a secret. The friendship between the two doctors was primarily based in the lack of recognition their revolutionary theories received in the world of established medicine. Born in 1858, Fliess was an ear, nose and throat specialist in Berlin, where he also engaged in studies of cyclical processes of illness and health. Although he served as president of the German Academy of Sciences, he was never able to achieve any significant scientific success. Freud not only entrusted Fliess with reading his manuscripts: he also shared intimate aspects of his life and emotions with him. Thus his letters relate his sorrow at the death of his father and his joy at the birth of his children. With time Freud and Fliess came into conflict over scientific issues, which strained their friendship and eventually led them to break off contact. In 1904, after years without any exchange of letters, Fliess accused Freud of having communicated his theories to the controversial young Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, who attracted great attention in presenting them as his own. The former friends' alienation became a spiteful break.

From 1923 onward, Freud's life was overshadowed by his affliction with cancer. Left for weeks in a state of uncertainty by his doctors, Freud himself knew quite well what the tumour on his jaw would mean. Having until then paid little heed to his health, he was forced to adhere to a strict regimen, whereby quitting smoking (up to twenty cigars per day) became a drawn-out struggle. Freud underwent a total of thirty-three operations on his jaw and palate. Undaunted, he continued work on his writings, although in public his daughter Anna increasingly became his mouthpiece: the operations and the oral prosthesis he was forced to wear made it difficult for him to speak, and thus she read his papers at international conferences, becoming what he would later refer to as his "Antigone". It was also her arrest by the Gestapo following the National Socialist take-over in 1938 that finally convinced Freud to leave Vienna, at the age of eighty-two, and face the ordeal of fleeing to England. Marie Bonaparte, Princess of Denmark and Greece, played a key role in facilitating the move. Passages from Freud's correspondence with her bear witness to the close relationship that she had developed with the family over the years. On 23 September 1939, marked by age and his struggle with cancer, Freud voluntarily ended his life with the aid of his trusted physician Max Schur.

* * *

1 "Friends are after all the most precious acquisitions ..."

2 "I don't deny that I like to be right."

3 "Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hide his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it."

4 "... Not all men are worthy of love."

5 "It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life."

6 "With the help of the necessary boldness and lack of conscience, it is not difficult to amass a large fortune, and for such services a title will of course be a suitable reward."

7 "I cannot imagine who invented the tale about women's dresses being so expensive that a man simply dare not marry!"

8 "If it had been a son, I would have sent you the news by telegram, because he would have carried your name. Since it turned out to be a little daughter by the name of Anna, she is being introduced to you belatedly."

9 "Annerl (Anna Freud) is dully voracious and has six unobserved teeth, thanks to her unscientific mother."

10 "It cannot have remained concealed from you that fate has granted me as compensation for much that has been denied me the possession of a daughter (Anna Freud) who, in tragic circumstances, would not have fallen short of Antigone."

11 "How beautifully Nature has arranged it that as soon as a child comes into the world it finds a mother ready to take care of it!"

12 "The necessities of life and the 'the unvaried, still returning hour of duty' – they are a source of comfort in this time of sadness."

13 "We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other."

14 "Happiness, however, is something essentially subjective."

15 "We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution."

16 "In the last fifteen years I have never willingly sat for a photographer, because I am too vain to countenance my physical deterioration."

17 "Two cigars a day – thereby one recognizes the nonsmoker!"

18 "I need a lot of cocaine. Also, I have started smoking again, moderately, in the last two to three weeks, since the nasal conviction has become evident to me. I have not observed any ensuing disadvantage."

19 "White tie and white gloves, even a fresh shirt, a careful brushing of my last remaining hair, and so on. A little cocaine, to untie my tongue."

20 "My father seems to be on his deathbed; he is at times confused and is steadily shrivelling up, moving towards pneumonia and a fateful date."

21 "I myself still have a mother, and she bars my way to the longed-for rest, to eternal nothingness; I somehow could not forgive myself if I were to die before her."

22 "It is hard, after all, to succeed in satisfying each other completely; one misses, and is critical of, something in everyone."

23 "In my life, as you know, woman has never replaced the comrade, the friend."

24 "I am gradually becoming accustomed to the wine; it seems like an old friend."

25 "On Saturday evenings I look forward to an orgy of tarok, and every second Tuesday I spend among my Jewish brethren, to whom I recently gave another lecture."

26 "I know I am someone, without needing continual recognition."

27 "I can scarcely detail for you all the things that resolve themselves into excrement for me (a new Midas!). It fits in completely with the theory of internal stinking. Above all, money itself."

28 "To be healthy is wonderful if one isn't condemned to be alone."

29 "I consider it a great misfortune that nature has not granted me that indefinite something which attracts people."

30 "I believe people see something alien in me, and the real reason for this is that in my youth I was never young, and now that I am entering the age of maturity, I cannot mature properly."

31 "I am not even very gifted; my whole capacity for work probably springs from my character and from the absence of outstanding intellectual weaknesses."

32 "I have examined myself thoroughly and come to the conclusion that I don't need to change much."

33 "Not long ago I saw Schnitzler's Paracelsus; I was amazed at how much a poet knows."

34 "Now you too have reached your sixtieth birthday, while I, six years older, am approaching the limit of life and may soon expect to see the end of the fifth act of this rather incomprehensible and not always amusing comedy."

35 "I think I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double."

36 "Indeed, I believe that fundamentally your nature is that of an explorer of psychological depths, as honestly impartial and undaunted as anyone has ever been, and that if you had not been so constituted, your artistic abilities, your gift for language and your creative power would have had free rein and made you into a writer of greater appeal to the taste of the masses."

37 "In my old age I seem to be developing a lot of talent for the enjoyment of life."

38 "Four weeks ago I had one of my normal operations, followed by unusually violent pain, so that I had to cancel my work for twelve days, and I lay with pain and hot-water bottles on the couch which is meant for others."

39 "A human being is so miserable when all he wants is to stay alive."

40 "After all, one does not want to die immediately or completely."

41 "How often do I not envy Einstein the youth and energy which enable him to support so many causes with such vigour. I am not only old, feeble and tired, but I am also burdened with heavy financial obligations."

42 "Of course I am still not very enthusiastic about celebrations, especially when they are there to remind one how old one has become."

43 "The idea of peaceful old age seems as much of a legend as that of happy youth."

44 "A crust of indifference is slowly creeping up around me; a fact I state without complaining. It is a natural development, a way of beginning to be inorganic. The 'detachment of old age', I think it is called."

45 "Does it make any sense for a man of my age to try and fill his library? At best in the interest of his heirs."

46 "I am relieved of material worries, surrounded by popularity which is distasteful to me, and involved in enterprises which rob me of the time and leisure for calm scientific work."

47 "I do not want to be eighty-nine years old. That is cruel."

48 "The times are gloomy; fortunately it is not my job to brighten them."

49 "I am not even allowed to climb a few stairs; in other words, I'm not up to the strains of an extended journey. Furthermore, I am tied down to my surgeon, who has been keeping me alive for the last fourteen years. Thus I will have to hold out here, even if the clouds on the horizon continue to darken. In the rather unlikely worst case that life and liberty become threatened, a short car ride via Pressburg (now Bratislava, just over the Slovakian border) will have carry me to safety."

50 "All of our things have arrived undamaged. The objects of my collection have much more space, and they make more of an impression than they did in Vienna. Of course the collection is dead now – nothing more will be added to it – and its owner is more or less just as dead."

51 "The rest – you will know what I mean – is silence."

52 "The costs of my funeral should be kept as low as possible: simplest category, no eulogies, announcement ex post facto. I promise not to be hurt at the absence of any and every 'piety'. If it is convenient and cheap: cremation. Should I be famous at the time of my death – one never knows – that should not make any difference."

53 "I see a cloud of disaster passing over the world, even over my own little world."

CHAPTER 2

Vienna and the World

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg (Czech: P?íbor), which at the time was part of the Hapsburg Empire. In 1859 his father decided to move, and after a short stay in Leipzig the family settled in Vienna, where Sigmund attended the Gymnasium. Freud characterized his childhood in Freiberg as a happy one, but his relationship to Vienna was ambivalent from early on.

At the latest during Freud's student years, his wonder at the beauty of Vienna's landscape and its buildings was offset by his aversion toward its society, a sentiment typical of many of the Viennese. Most of all, his attitude was a product of the anti-Semitism he had confronted since his youth. For Freud, Austrian politics was a source of continual indignation; it provided the inspiration for numerous quips, directed at both the overtly anti-Semitic Mayor Karl Lueger and the Hapsburgs. From his standpoint, the monarchy's court ceremonial and opulently staged public events were ridiculous and anachronistic. Even in his sleep he could not avoid the omnipresent aristocracy – as can be read in The Interpretation of Dreams in his dream of Count Thun.

He considered the sexual morality in Vienna freer than in many other cities, which led him to reject the thought expressed by many contemporaries that psychoanalysis could only have developed in Vienna. Actually, he often stressed that Vienna had done nothing to promote the growth of psychoanalysis, chafing at the lack of support it received from the university and the medical world.

Hence, from the very beginning, Freud was internationally oriented in the development of psychoanalysis. This corresponded with his personal predisposition: his life was characterized by several protracted stays abroad and by frequent travelling. In his younger years, it was an amorous interest that often occasioned his travels: Martha Bernays, later Martha Freud, lived in the North German town of Wandsbek, now part of Hamburg, and Freud visited her as often as he could. As a student he was often forced to borrow money for the trip, particularly from his mentor Josef Breuer. Two research grants enabled the young doctor to leave Vienna for longer periods of time: in Trieste he studied the sexual organs of eels, and in Paris he spent a semester at the Salpêtrière under the famed neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Although his admiration for Charcot was immense, the French in general made a rather poor impression. Nonetheless, he would visit the country on numerous occasions.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Freud Verbatim: Quotes and Aphorisms"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Vienna.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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Table of Contents

Copyright,
Foreword,
Freud Verbatim – An Introduction,
I The Man in Private Life,
II Vienna and the World,
III Society and Culture,
IV Conflict and Strife,
V Dream and Illusion,
VI Eros and Sexuality,
VII Science and Analysis,
VIII Wit and Humour,
IX Et Cetera,
X Cult and Religion,
Appendix,
Sigmund Freud – Timeline,
Bibliography,
List of Illustrations,
Copyright Permissions,
The Authors,
About the Authors,