Freud Quotes

“From the mid-twentieth century until today, physiological and neurocognitive research has yielded a number of well-corroborated findings about dreams and the dreaming state. Although the brain scientists and the analysts of dream reports operate on different sets of assumptions, they are almost unanimous in putting aside the Freudian model, which turns out to have been erroneous on every point.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“In the judgment of contemporary dream investigators, only a minority of dreams appear to express wishes of any kind, let alone infantile sexual ones.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“No, says the modern research: these were just Freud’s guesses, and he guessed wrong every time.25”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“In developing a new science,” Freud would tell his American pupil Smiley Blanton, “one has to make its theories vague. You cannot make things clear-cut.”58 Mixing quanta with qualia and energetics with exegetics, he had forged in psychoanalysis the clever absurdity of an ambiguous science.59 Its oxymoronic character was—and remains, for science-envying humanists—the principal source of its appeal. Where else could we turn for an interpretive free-for-all that is sanctioned by a tale of exploratory and therapeutic heroism yet also by a sober idiom of mechanical cause and effect? The real significance of the Project is that it equipped the psychoanalytic Freud with that idiom, safely detached from testable propositions.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“From Freud’s account we could never suspect either that he retained a lifetime grudge against gentiles or that—as we will find—one strain of anti-Semitism affected his own apprehension of fellow Jews.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated–-with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”39 It was a foregone conclusion that Ernst Kris and Anna Freud would omit that definitive self-assessment—the most revealing confession Freud ever made—from The Origins of Psycho-Analysis.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“The near absence of charts and tables from Freud’s scientific papers might be regarded as a peripheral matter if it weren’t symptomatic of a basic weakness of temperament: a lazy reluctance to collect sufficient evidence to ensure that a given finding wasn’t an anomaly or an artifact of careless procedures. This flaw could go unnoticed so long as Freud was microscopically analyzing dead tissues, any one of which could stand for countless identical others. For the purpose of establishing laws in most fields, though, large samples are indispensable. As a psychologist, Freud would consistently ignore that requirement. Instead, he would rest comprehensive generalizations on untested insights from a few cases or even from just one, his own.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“Numbers and equations left him cold, and he often got details wrong or contradicted himself about them in the course of a paper. “To be tied down to exactitude and precise measurement,” Ernest Jones observed, “was not in his nature.” As Freud himself would “tell his close friend Wilhelm Fliess, “You know that I lack any mathematical talent whatsoever and have no memory for numbers and measurements.” Thus he felt compelled to exclude statistics from almost all of his technical as well as his anecdotal writings.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“Although Gordon Shepherd devotes a chapter to him in his treatise on neuron theory, for example, Shepherd concludes that Freud’s papers deserve to be ranked with a large number of others. And in Joseph D. Robinson’s definitive study of how synaptic transmission came to be recognized, Freud’s name goes altogether unmentioned. His early record, furthermore, is notably discontinuous, showing little follow-through. He skipped from one self-contained task to another, augmenting the sum of generally accepted knowledge and deftly criticizing premature conclusions reached by others but never crucially testing any of his own hypotheses.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“By most objective accounts, however, none of Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic writings were pivotal for the modern development of any discipline. Although Gordon Shepherd devotes a chapter.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“Between 1877 and 1900, Freud published six extensive monographs, forty articles, and an enormous number of reviews. In books such as On Aphasia (1891), the collaborative Clinical Study on the Unilateral Cerebral Paralyses of Children (1891), and Infantile Cerebral Paralysis (1897)”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“A Visit to the Salpêtrière (1886)”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion

“At the turn of the twentieth century,” wrote the philosopher of science Clark Glymour with distaste in 1983, “Freud once and for all made his decision as to whether or not to think critically, honestly, and publicly about the reliability of his methods. The Interpretation of Dreams was his answer to the public, and perhaps to himself.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion