Freud : A Very Short Introduction : Anthony Storr

"Freud remained a determinist throughout his life, believing that all vital phenomena, including psychological phenomena like thoughts, feelings, and phantasies, are rigidly determined by the principle of cause and effect." 

"Obsessional personalities usually exhibit self-control to the point of appearing inhibited and lacking in spontaneity and Freud was no exception." 

"In his clinical work, Freud was kind and tolerant, as psychoanalysts have to be. However, his kindness was not based upon any great expectations of the human race, whom he regarded with distaste or with detachment rather then with love." 

"Freud always believed that a dominating principle of mental life was the need of the organism to reach a state of tranquillity by completely discharging all tensions (this was later named the Nirvana principle)." 

"Bliss, in the Freudian scheme, is attained when needs have been satisfied and passions spent." 

"Freud now suggested that neurotic symptoms were the consequence of the repression of perverse sexual impulses dating from the earliest years. Because of this early repression, the neurotic's sexuality remained partly undeveloped. When one or other component instinct had become exaggerated, but had no been repressed, the person concerned became a sexual pervert: that is, he acted out his perverse tendency in real life." 

"Many common human problems can justifiably be related to the prolongation of immaturity and dependence on parents. (...) A man or woman who has not broken free of emotional ties with parents is likely to perceive potential sexual partners partly as if they were parents." 

"Freud affirmed that, with very few exceptions, dreams were disguised, hallucinatory fulfilments of repressed wishes." 

"Transference was originally defined as the process by which a patient attributes to his analyst attitudes and ideas that derive from previous figures in his life, especially from his parents." 

"Historians also try to reconstruct the past, but no one supposes that a totally objective vision of the past can ever be achieved, or that a history attempted this would be anything but unreadable. A historian's understanding of the past and of the motives of the people who make history is bound to be influenced by his own experience and by his capacity for understanding human beings. This is why neither history nor psychoanalysis can be assigned to the exact sciences." 

"Love and hate are opposites which can be clearly discerned in any intense relationship between people; and when such a relationship is ruptured, love often appears to be transmuted into hatred." 

"(...) one of Freud's fundamental ideas was that the organism is always seeking to rid itself of disturbing stimuli, whether these impinge upon it from the external world, or originate as instinctual tensions from within." 

"People who react to loss of an object by loss of self-esteem are people who base their choice of objects on identification with the object, that is, upon a narcissist choice of an object that in some way resembles themselves. Losing an object, therefore, is equivalent to losing part of the ego." 

"The search for order, for explanatory principles, for common features that link disparate things together is an inescapable human endeavour." 

"Freud believed that sublimation of unsatisfied libido was responsable for producing all art and literature." 

"In an ideal world in which everyone had matured sufficiently to replace the pleasure principe by the realily principle, there would be no need for art." 

"This sombre picture derives from the fact that psychoanalytic theory is an 'instinct' theory. That is, it is primarily concerned with how the isolated individual finds or fails to find ways of discharging his or her instinctive impulses. The impression gained from reading Freud is that relationships with other human beings are of value only in so far as they facilitate instinctual satisfaction. There is no conception of friendship or other types of relationship as being valutable in themselves."

"Freud referred to the state of being in love as a kind of madness, as 'the normal prototype of the psychoses'." 

"Modern analysts are more concerned with the patient's personality as a whole, and with the kind of relationships that he has made throughout his life, than with repressed infantile sexual phantasy." 

"Greater understanding of their own strenghts and limitations can often be extremely helpful, even if their personality is not fundamentally modified." 

"In other words, the 'Wolf Man' attributes his improvement wholly to his relationship with Freud; to his having discovered a new 'father' who was more tolerant and accepting than his own; one who was more tolerant and accepting than his own; one who was prepared to listen to his intimate and sometimes shocking revelations for four years without criticism, revulsion, or repudiation of him as a person." 

"Since we all have some neurotic symptoms, the difference between neurotic and normal is one of degree, not of kind." 

"Tomas Szasz, admittedly an unorthodox psychoanalyst, has defined the aim of psychoanalysis as being 'to increase the patient's knowledge of himself and others and hence his freedom of choice in the conduct of his life'. 

"A number of writers, including Thomas Mann, Philip Rieff, and Henri Ellenberger, have claimed that Freud must been more influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than he acknowledged or perhaps realized. Mann claimed that psychoanalytic concepts were Schopenhauer's ideas translated from metaphysics into psychology." 

"At the very least, psychoanalysis deserves informed critical examination rather than simple dismissal." 

(Freud: A Very Short Introduction, Anthony Storr. Oxford University Press)