Anna Freud Quotes

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.

In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.

Many of the early explorers in my field—Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, John Bowlby—concluded that early trauma, even dating back to preverbal eras, takes its toll, often an indelible toll, on the comfort, the ease, the self-esteem, of the adult, even into late stages of life.

Create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all of the time.

There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child

While an adolescent remains inconsistent and unpredictable in her behavior, she may suffer, but she does not seem to me to be in need of treatment. I think that she should be given time and scope to work out her own solution. Rather, it may be her parents who need help and guidance so as to be able to bear with her. There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves. —ANNA FREUD (1958), “Adolescence

Само существование невротических симптомов указывает на то, что Я потерпело поражение

I am no longer afraid to say anything.

I've always thought that Freud's theory of penis envy was fairly ridiculous -- but I'm absolutely certain that if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and suck on it you'll go to heaven.

The term “defense” in relation to psychology was first used by Sigmund Freud in 1894. He meant it to describe, as Anna Freud said, “the ego’s struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or effects,” which may lead to neurosis. The

Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses.

Freud struck a philosophical note on January 25 when he wrote to Max of the “senseless, brutal act of fate, which has robbed us of our Sophie . . . One must bow one’s head under the blow, as a helpless, poor human being with whom higher powers are playing.

Anna Freud took up where her father left off in focusing on the psychology of the ego, noting that humans do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in the creation of psychological defenses. Neo-Freudian

The end of the war brought the closing of the borders cutting off Austria’s coal supply from Czechoslovakia, leaving the Austrians at peace but hungry, cold, and vulnerable to tuberculosis and a virulent form of influenza (Grosskurth, 1991, p. 82). Writer Stefan Zweig described postwar Vienna as “an uncertain, gray, and lifeless shadow of the former imperial monarchy” (qtd. in Gay, 1988, p. 380).

I am sort of over Freud, who just feels like this secret language old white men use to make whatever they are talking about seem inaccessible. Freud just gives cloaked terms to universal aspects of the human experience, kind of like astrology. Freud is just astrology for men.

Даже при нормальном состоянии влюбленности интеллектуальные возможности человека снижаются и его рассудок становится менее надежным, чем обычно. Чем более страстно его желание удовлетворить свои инстинктивные импульсы, тем меньше, как правило, он склонен использовать интеллект для их рассудочного исследования и подавления.

Vivimos atrapados entre el pasado agitado y examinado, y un futuro que espera nuestro trabajo

нетерпимость по отношению к другим людям опережает строгость по отношению к себе. Я узнает, что достойно порицания, но защищается от неприятной самокритики при помощи этого защитного механизма. Сильное негодование по поводу чужих неправильных поступков - предшествование и замещение чувства вины по отношению к самому себе. Негодование Я возрастает автоматически, когда близится восприятие его собственной вины.

It was particularly moving to see, as the story unfolds, how such a badly traumatized, conflicted, and tormented human being as Ernest was could finally, later on in his life, soar high, accomplishing and contributing much to the field of his choice. Thus, he earned his rightful place among many other distinguished psychoanalysts.

Long-past ages have a great and often puzzling attraction for men’s imagination. Whenever they are dissatisfied with their present surroundings—and this happens often enough—they turn back to the past and hope that they will now be able to prove the truth of the inextinguishable dream of a golden age. They are probably still under the spell of their childhood, which is presented to them by their not impartial memory as a time of uninterrupted bliss. —Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism

Freud wrote: “The evidence of psychoanalysis shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time–marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children–contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression.” Freud believed that the one exception to this was the love of a mother for her son, which was “based on narcissism,” proving only that he was, among many other things, an Old World Patriarch.

In the 1930s one of Jung’s students, Joseph Wheelwright, asked him about the split from Freud, and in 1991 Wheelwright recounted Jung’s reply: He [Jung] sent his book. You know, they give you freebies when you publish a book, and you send them off to your buddies with a little note saying, “I love ya, honey.” So this was in 1913, and Jung sent one of these copies to Freud, and he got it back by return post, and scrawled across the flyleaf was “Resistance to the father. S. Freud.” It was unread . . . And I said, “Well, what did you do?” And he [Jung] said, “I turned to my wife, Emma, who was in the room and said, ‘I feel as though I have been thrown out of my father’s house.

Why he took Anna into analysis instead of sending her to Lou Andreas-Salomé or some other analyst is difficult to say. Some have said Freud would have compromised his authority if she had been on one of his students’ couches speaking of Freud not as the founder of psychoanalysis but as a father. They say, “Who could he have sent her to?” But the argument does not hold up well, as Freud sent his son Oliver into analysis with Franz Alexander in 1921. So why not Anna? When Anna’s analysis commenced in 1918, she also began writing poetry—that is, she was sublimating her conflicts and transforming her enthusiastic, self-absorbed daydreams into a literary art through which she could see herself from another perspective and also share her feelings with others

Winnicott’s key word was “mothering,” Lacan’s was “desire.” For Lacan, desire is what simultaneously defines us as human subjects and what prevents us from ever being whole or complete. To desire something, after all, is to lack something. Whereas Winnicott’s tropes tended toward the organic–he spoke of “growth,” “development,” and “maturity”–Lacan’s imagery was more somber. (“The cipher of his mortal destiny” is characteristically Lacanian.) For Win-nicott, only in illness was the self divided, while for Lacan human subjectivity was necessarily divided, because of the existence of the unconscious. No matter how successful we become, no matter how much we are loved, we will always be vulnerable to irrational fears and capable of the most self-defeating acts. As Freud said, we can never be “master of our own house.

Two entirely distinct state of consciousness were present which alternated very frequently and without warning and which became more and more differentiated in the course of the illness. In one of these states she recognized her normal surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal. In the other state she hallucinated and was "naughty" —that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bedclothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on. At this stage of her illness if something had been moved in the room or someone had entered or left it (during her other state of consciousness) she would complain of having "lost" some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock. –Anna Freud

Anna Freud’s book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (1936) was a partial response to this problem. It became a psychoanalytic field marshal’s handbook, documenting and illustrating various unconscious defensive strategies of the ego, alerting the clinician to telltale signs of their operation in the patient’s psyche. Reorienting

UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS Associative binding of experiences in memory to create an internal chronology would also help explain why most precognitive dreams are only identified as such in hindsight. Even if premory is just an aspect of memory and obeys most of the same principles, the stand-out exception is that only with memory for things past can we engage in what psychologists call source monitoring. We can often tell more or less how we know things from past experience because we can situate them, at least roughly, in relation to other biographical details. We can’t do this with experiences refluxing from our future, because they lack any context. We don’t know yet where or how they fit into our lives, so it may be natural for the conscious mind to assume that they don’t fit at all.12 Again, it is natural and inviting to think of precognition as a kind of radar or sonar scanning for perils in the water ahead. A metaphor that Dunne used for precognitive dreaming is a flashlight we point ahead of us on a dark path. But it makes more sense that our brains are constantly receiving messages sent back in time from our future self and are continually sifting and scanning those messages for possible associations to present concerns and longstanding priorities without knowing where that information comes from, let alone how far away it is in time. Items that match our current concerns or preoccupations will be taken and elaborated as dreams or premonitions or other conscious “psi” experiences, but we are likely only to recognize their precognitive character after the future event transpires and we recognize its source. And even then, we will only notice it, by and large, if we are paying close attention. That matching or resonance with current concerns may be important in determining the timing of a dream in relation to its future referent. For instance, it is possible Freud dreamed about the oral symptoms in the mouth of his patient Anna Hammerschlag when he did because of a confluence of events in his life in 1895 that pre-minded him of his situation all those years later, in 1923—including his relapse to smoking his cigars after his friend Wilhelm Fliess had told him to quit. Again, his thoughts about his smoking may have been the short circuit or thematic resonance between these two distant points in his life, precipitating the dream. Incidentally, there is no reason to assume that that single dream of Freud’s was the only one in his life about his cancer and surgeries. Multiple dreams may point to the same experience via multiple symbolic or associative avenues, so it would be expected that some of Freud’s later dreams, especially closer to 1923, may have also related to the same experiences. We’ll never know, of course. But dreamers frequently report multiple precognitive dreams targeting the same later upheaval in their lives, especially major experiences like health crises and life milestones.

He commented to me,” Schur remembers, “how fortunate he was, that he has found so many valuable friends.” Anna had just left the room, which

After childhood, Anna Freud intimates, there is absolutely no perspective at all (in actuality the parents are no basis, no guide for what will follow or replace them). In their existential bewilderment - outside the orbit of the parents' love and its vagaries - adults, post-children, lose their ability to position themselves within this new space and are cognitively unable to map it.

To get to the point of recovery, we must survive. Survivors are by necessity co-dependent. We use many coping skills and “ego defenses” to do this. Children of alcoholics and from other troubled or dysfunctional families survive by dodging, hiding, negotiating, taking care of others, pretending, denying and learning and adapting to stay alive using any method that works. They learn other, often unhealthy, ego defense mechanisms, as described by Anna Freud (1936) and summarized by Vaillant (1977). These include: intellectualization, repression, disassociation, displacement and reaction formation (all of which if over-used can be considered to be neurotic) and projection, passive-aggressive behavior, acting out, hypochondriasis, grandiosity and denial (all of which if over-used can be considered immature and at times psychotic).

It is also quite likely that the following observation took place in Berggasse 19 as well, since Sophie and Ernst arrived there in November 1916, just a little more than one year after Freud’s initial fort da observation: “A year later [after Freud’s first observation of the fort da game], the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: ‘Go to the fwont!’ He had heard at that time that his absent father was ‘at the front,’ and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother

I ONCE ASKED W. ERNEST FREUD WHEN IT WAS THAT HE BEGAN HIS psychoanalytic training, and without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “In my mother’s belly.” He was Sigmund Freud’s oldest grandson.

Ernst, on the other hand, was a problem child. He enjoyed a blissful relationship with his mother early in life, only to have that bliss shattered by the return of his father from the war front, the birth of his brother, and finally the death of his mother. Stunned by the succession of losses at such a tender age, Ernst was desperate for love and largely incapable of returning it. He became unpleasant to be with and difficult to love.

It was W. Ernest Freud who at eighteen months of age captured his grandfather’s interest while playing with a wooden reel on the end of a string. Throwing the reel while holding onto the string, Ernst—as he was known then—would say “fort,” which in German means “gone.” Pulling it back, he would say “da,” meaning “there.” Freud interpreted this game as Ernst’s effort to come to terms with the distressing absences of his mother when she left the apartment. With the wooden reel symbolizing his mother, he sent her away and brought her back at will. Instead of being a passive victim of loss—being left by his mother—he turned his passive role into an active

On January 25, 1920, Sophie Halberstadt, mother of Ernst and Heinerle and pregnant with her third child, died just one day before her seventh wedding anniversary. The cause of death was fulminant influenza pneumonia (E. Freud et al., 1976, p. 26; Gay, 1988, p. 391; Schur, 1972, p. 318). Max took Ernst into the living room, sat him on his knee, and told him the one thing that no father wants to tell his child—that his mother was dead. Ernst shut down. Freud later wrote, “When this child was five and three-quarters, his mother died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (‘o-o-o’), the little boy showed no signs of grief” (S. Freud, 1920/1955, SE 18, p. 16). Max set up, on the crossbeam of the door frame, a small swing on which Ernst anxiously swung for hours on end in a desperate attempt to soothe himself.

In October Sigmund Freud received an offer of one thousand dollars for a single article from New York–based Cosmopolitan magazine. Pleased with the offer, he suggested the title “Don’t Use Psychoanalysis in Polemics.” They wrote back saying they were thinking of something more like “The Wife’s Mental Place in the Home” followed by “The Husband’s Mental Place in the Home.” Freud responded with a stinging letter and indicated that the deal was

Ambivalence exists in all human relationships, including parent-child. Anna Freud maintained that a mother could never satisfy her infant's needs because those are infinite, but that eventually child and mother outgrow that dependence...In Torn in Tow, the British psycho analyst Rozsika Parker complains that in our open, modern society, the extent of maternal ambivalence is a dark secret. Most mothers treat their occasional wish to be rid of their children as if it were the equivalent of murder itself. Parker proposes that mothering requires two impulses - the impulse to hold on, and the impulse to push away. To be a successful mother you must nurture and love your child, but cannot smother and cling to your child. Mothering involves sailing between what Parker calls 'the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.' She proposes that the sentimental idea of perfect synchrony between mother and child 'can cast a sort of sadness over motherhood - a constant state of mild regret that a delightful oneness seems always out of reach.' Perfection is a horizon virtue, and our very approach to it reveals its immutable distance. The dark portion of maternal ambivalence toward typical children is posited as crucial to the child's individuation. But severely disabled children who will never become independent will not benefit from their parents' negative feelings, and so their situation demands an impossible state of emotional purity. Asking the parents of severely disabled children to feel less negative emotion than parents of healthy children is ludicrous. My experience of these parents was that they all felt both love and despair. You cannot decide whether to be ambivalent/ All you can decide is what to do with your ambivalence. Most of these parents have chosen to act on one side of the ambivalence they feel, and Julia Hollander chose to act on another side, but I am not persuaded that the ambivalence itself was so different from one of these families to the next. I am enough of a creature of my times to admire most the parents who kept their children and made brave sacrifices for them. I nonetheless esteem Julia Hollander for being honest with herself, and for making what all those other families did look like a choice.

While an adolescent remains inconsistent and unpredictable in her behavior, she may suffer, but she does not seem to me to be in need of treatment. I think that she should be given time and scope to work out her own solution. Rather, it may be her parents who need help and guidance so as to be able to bear with her. There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.—ANNA FREUD (1958), “Adolescence”*

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.

Books that were pillars of our parents’ culture, the Chilean little bourgeoisie of the 30s-40s-50s: The Revolt of the Masses (Ortega), Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno), The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck), The Importance of Living (Lin Yutang), Grand Hotel (Vicki Baum), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin), Gog (Papini), Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell), The Mediocre Man (Ingenieros), Broad and Alien is the World (Ciro Alegría), The World of Yesterday (S. Zweig), The Life of Jesus (Renan), Napoléon (Emil Ludwig), The Goose Man (Wassermann), The Prophet (Gibran), The inferiority complex (Adler), Civilization and its Discontents (Freud), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), The Human Beast (Zola), The Lily of the Valley (Balzac), Representative Men (Emerson), Modern Medical Counselor (?), How Green Was my Valley (Llewellyn), The Foxes of Harrow (Yerby), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Amiel’s Journal (Amiel), The Story of San Michele (Munthe), Maxims and Morals from Dr. Franklin (Franklin), The Kon-Tiki Expedition (Heyerdahl), My Life (many), Desolation (Mistral), The Old Man and the Sea, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Zweig), The City and the Mountains (Eça de Queirós), All Quiet on the Western Front (E. M. Remarque), Encyclopedia Britannica, Enciclopedia Espasa, The Treasure Book of Youth, La tournée de Dios (Jardiel Poncela), Don Juan (Zorrilla), La Tía Pepa (cook book), Almanaque 18, The Magic Mountain (Mann), The Unloved Woman (Benavente). To be continued.

MORTE DO VIZINHO Meu vizinho acaba de se jogar do 15.º andar e seu corpo caiu no playground nesta ensolarada manhã de verão. Estava com depressão, dizem. Vi-o algumas vezes de bermuda no corredor. Sei que escrevia sobre Freud. Seu corpo ainda está lá em baixo. Se eu tivesse ido à janela há pouco o teria surpreendido em pleno voo e lhe estendido a mão. Estendo-lhe, tardio, o poema que não interrompe a queda mas é o gesto possível que antecede o baque.