A Quote by Norman O. Brown

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

Norman O. Brown

Quote Topics

History Neurosis Only Progress Provide Psychoanalysis Theory Viewing

Quote Author

Norman O. Brown
American - Philosopher
September 25, 1913 - October 2, 2002

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

Oswald Spengler

If you're deeply engaged in an event, you're part of it. But if you're outside of it, disinterested, you are the regard that registers history. And that disinterestedness is different from objectivity. The objective view sees only the event, while the disinterested one participates as well as views by creating that link to history. It's a type of viewing that's both inside and out of the event, that brings to the viewing the capacity for human emotion, for compassion, but holds it openly. And objectivity excludes the human element, and is therefore not a point of view open to humans.

Cole Swensen

Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

Peter Medawar

It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

Erich Fromm

Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

Martin Amis

A hypothetical theory is necessary, as a preliminary step, to reduce the expression of the phenomena to simplicity and order before it is possible to make any progress in framing an abstractive theory.

William John Macquorn Rankine

There are cases where psychoanalysis works worse than anything else. But who said that psychoanalysis was to be applied always and everywhere.

Carl Jung

Superstring theories provide a framework in which the force of gravity may be united with the other three forces in nature: the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. Recent progress has shown that the most promising superstring theories follow from a single theory. For the last generation, physicists have studied five string theories and one close cousin. Recently it has become clear that these five or six theories are different limiting cases of one theory which, though still scarcely understood, is the candidate for superunification of the forces of nature.

Edward Witten

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities-perhaps the only one-in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there. In most other fields of human endeavour there is change, but rarely progress ... And in most fields we do not even know how to evaluate change.

Karl Popper

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.

Vivian Gornick

A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.

Maurice Allais

I think, with most writers, their neurosis is finishing things. I have a different neurosis. I'm terribly anxious when it's not finished. Then I become really difficult to live with.

Theresa Rebeck

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.

Eric Kandel

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

I'm finally having my TV removed and replaced by a tropical fish tank, which I hope will provide more interesting viewing.