#freud

#freud

Freud was an avid cocaine user early in his career - a quite exuberant one, indulging a gram-a-day habit. In the late 1800s, cocaine was not a street drug, and Freud wrote glowingly about its beneficial uses - which he believed could be experienced without any risk of addiction. He prescribed cocaine to patients and recommended it enthusiastically to friends, his future wife, Martha, even Martha's hostile mother; with the help of cocaine, he succeeded in briefly winning over his future mother-in-law.

Sigmund Freud believed that every crush has a strand of disgust, that people are attracted to what repulses them. The enchantment of an infatuation always counterbalances the reality that our lovers - irksome, confusing, and unflaggingly human - depart from whatever ideal archetype we have stored in our heads.

Who was Nietzsche? Philosopher, psychologist, poet, madman, provocateur-these names orbit around him but never settle. He is the "strange German," dismissed by some as the father of nihilism and amorality, revered by others as the prophet of self-becoming. No thinker has hovered so closely to the abyss or beckoned so many to peer into its depths. Fewer still have so haunted the origins of the psychoanalytic revolution, both as inspiration and as fateful warning.

The first insult by science was Copernicus's discovery that we are not at the center of the universe, followed by Darwin's evolution theory and Freud's insights into the unconscious.

Sigmund Freud, as an early 20th-century Viennese Lamarckian, should take human nature to be highly malleable, leading to a paradox in his views against this idea.

In psychology, anyone who gets involved in or tries to talk in an analytic, careful way about religion is immediately branded a meathead; a mystic; an intuitive, touchy-feely sort of moron.” - Robert Hogan (1979)

Pursuing an authentic life is the most meaningful path; perfectionism often leads to insecurity and feelings of unworthiness. Coping mechanisms may stem from false beliefs.