Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Rate it:
Open Preview
Read between October 7 - October 14, 2025
15%
Flag icon
Forgetting proper names and foreign names as well as foreign words can be traced in the same manner to a counter-intention which aims either directly or indirectly at the name in question.
16%
Flag icon
the great Darwin was so struck by it that he made the "golden rule" for himself of writing down with particular care observations which seemed unfavorable to his theory, since he had convinced himself that they were just the ones which would not stick in his memory.
16%
Flag icon
the psychic life is the arena of the struggles and exercises of antagonistic tendencies, or, to express it in non-dynamic terminology, that it consists of contradictions and paired antagonisms.
18%
Flag icon
It seems as if the world did not wholly possess us adults, it has only two-thirds of our life, we are still one-third unborn. Each awakening in the morning is then like a new birth.
22%
Flag icon
I have already taken the liberty of pointing out that in each one of you there is a deep-rooted belief in psychic freedom and volition, a belief which is absolutely unscientific, and which must capitulate before the claims of a determinism that controls even the psychic life.
22%
Flag icon
I beg of you to accept it as a fact that only this one association will
Christian Greer
This is very much like the Meno in Plato, and probably the correct interpretation of it. Jung will posit archetypes and Cormac McCarthy posits Number and language as a virus. Is the subconscious a realm of Pure Forms? And which ones?
22%
Flag icon
In like manner, melodies, which come for no reason, show themselves conditioned by and associated with a train of thought which has a right to occupy one, yet of whose activity one is unconscious.
32%
Flag icon
It treats children, and brothers and sisters, less tenderly; they are symbolized as little animals or vermin.
33%
Flag icon
The satisfaction in one's own genital is suggested by all types of play, in which may be included piano-playing. Exquisite symbolic representations of onanism are sliding and coasting as well as tearing off a branch. A particularly remarkable dream symbol is that of having one's teeth fall out, or having them pulled. Certainly its most immediate interpretation is castration as a punishment for onanism.
55%
Flag icon
Psychiatry gives names to the various forms of compulsion, but says nothing further concerning them. Instead it emphasizes the fact that those who show these symptoms are degenerates. That yields slight satisfaction, it is an ethical judgment, a condemnation rather than an explanation.
61%
Flag icon
But the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the "I" that it is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life.
71%
Flag icon
what amounts to the same thing, became a Hamlet in the reaction to the complex.
77%
Flag icon
The statement is undoubtedly correct that the hold which the infantile experiences have on the libido—with the pathogenic influences this involves—is greatly augmented by the regression;
Christian Greer
If Freud had just said that sexual relationships are particularly sensitive to or tend to reflect or bring out one's inner child, I think I could get behind that, on a materio-atheist point of view. I think(?) most psychologists today would say emotionally deep or vulnerable relationships instead, which I would agree, but that raises some thorny philosophical and evolutionary questions. I guess I can respect the thoroughly anti-religious viewpoint here, even if I don't agree with it. My guess is that I would resonate with William James's approach a lot more. Add it to the list...
79%
Flag icon
The child as a rule covers the autoerotic period of his sexual activity, where there has been no actual seduction, with the seduction-phantasy. He spares himself the shame of onanism by imagining the presence of an object for his desires in that early period.
79%
Flag icon
But renunciation of gratification has always been difficult for man. He cannot accomplish it without something in the nature of compensation.
79%
Flag icon
The creation of the psychic realm of fancy has its complete counterpart in the establishment of "preserves" and "conservation projects" in those places where the demands of husbandry, traffic and industry threaten quickly to change the original face of the earth into something unrecognizable. The national reserves maintain this old condition of things, which otherwise has everywhere been regretfully sacrificed to necessity. Everything may grow and spread there as it will, even that which is useless and harmful. The psychic realm of phantasy is such a reservation withdrawn from the principles ...more
84%
Flag icon
Thus we might say that anxiety protects man from fright.
94%
Flag icon
transform his repetition into a recollection.
96%
Flag icon
but he has influenced only his intelligence, not his disease.