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“... resistance to ensure that the something better is real, not merely a fantasy. In our dreams, Anna Freud said, we can have our eggs cooked exactly as we want them, but we can’t eat them. In reality, we can eat our eggs because they are not cooked exactly as we want them. Truant minds need to keep on being reminded that there is nothing more ...”

“... Was Freud a liar?’ Ever since Frank Cioffi had the audacity to ask this question in 1973, it has continued to rock the world of psychoanalysis. Till then, things had been so simple. Children of the ‘Freudian century’, we had all learned to venerate in Sigmund Freud a man of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘flawless integrity’, as his loyal biographer Ernest Jones called him ...”

“... down in psychoanalytic history as the rather priggish servant who also acted as a nurse both to Freud and to the psychoanalytic ‘movement’, as it is often referred to in these revealing letters. (At other times it is a ‘campaign’ or a ‘cause’.) Apparently convinced of the unimportance of being Ernest – he wrote a famous paper, ‘The ...”

“... submerging these issues. The rhetorical structure of his book is an extended ad hominem argument: Freud and later psychoanalysts were liars and hypocrites, lacking in courage, and therefore psychoanalytic theory is useless. It is as if Masson had rehabilitated and adapted the old argument that since Luther had notorious difficulties with his toilet ...”

“... victim to the overwhelming onrush of events’. In 1915 Hug-Hellmuth showed the diary to Freud. He was impressed and enchanted by the girl’s artless account of her feelings in puberty, and in a letter to Hug-Hellmuth he said: ‘It is your duty, I think, to publish the diary. My readers will be grateful to you for it.’ Hug-Hellmuth published it ...”

“... into the background, I have let the patient’s words and feelings enter this part of me.’ Like Freud he invited his favourite patient to his dinner-table. He offered his own family in place of the one she didn’t have. And Marilyn went into her final decline when Greenson went on holiday. Greenson wrote to ...”

“... evidence about Julia, for Lillian Hellman tells us that her heroine was accepted for analysis by Freud. If Freud had Julia for a patient, someone must surely know about it. Freud was unable to accept Muriel as a patient, but wrote to her recommending his pupil and colleague Ruth Mack ...”

“... beginning, about the relationship between justice and love, there is no explicit description in Freud’s work of what constitutes a good life. And this is one of the many things that distinguish him from his followers and critics. It was also, of course, part of Freud’s disingenuous rationalism to assert that ...”

“... The sharpest comment in Freud’s Women – a huge book, but consistently readable – comes at the end. It would be eccentric, say the authors, to conclude after five hundred-odd pages that Freud’s significance for women lies in his having been the first equal-opportunities employer ...”

“... ruled have treated this shift of values as psychologically acceptable. There is no reference to Freud, but a review of the first edition of Civilisation and its Discontents (1930) included the following passage: ‘Civilisation is only made possible by individual renouncements. The instinctive life of man is one of unbridled aggression and egoistic ...”

“... sixties and seventies some of us puzzle over what our parents thought they were doing. My friend Anna’s father had fought in the First World War (as, I suppose, had most of our fathers) and had seen lost children running wild in battle conditions – think of Africa today, or the Balkans. Some mothers feared their daughters would be raped. At the time, it ...”

“... In​ ‘Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis’, Freud’s case history of the Rat Man (real name: Ernst Lanzer), there is an account of Lanzer’s attempts to repay a debt, or rather his attempt to describe his attempts to do so. While a reserve officer on military exercises, he loses his pince-nez and sends a telegram to his optician in Vienna ...”

“... as well as Arnold Schoenberg’s, the Schnitzel’s as well as Arthur Schnitzler’s and Sigmund Freud’s – was bound to result in an attempt to explain it all, or most of it, or that part of it that has a hypnotic effect on the investigator himself. The question then naturally arises how far he has fallen victim to the myth whose reality he is trying to ...”

“... of child analysts, the most famous of whom are British? According to D.W. Winnicott, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, what infants need most is one figure with whom they bond. In the absence of what is often called ‘the primary maternal figure’, the child develops no stable sense of identity, or no identity at all, and in extreme cases can ...”

“... it wasn’t hers. Natasha later tried to throw herself off a train. Her husband consulted with Anna Freud in London and things were miserable for a while. ‘My mother’s feelings were only revealed after her death,’ Matthew Spender writes, hidden away in a diary written during a particularly stressful moment in her life, when my father fell in ...”