“... 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 ...”

“... conceptuality to which belonged names like … Gaston Bachelard, Spinoza, Hegel, Montesquieu and Freud’. As Flaubert’s dictionary is alphabetically ordered, so Roudinesco proceeds from one argument to the next on the basis of puns or metaphors. Take her treatment of ‘revisionism’, which she identifies as one of our chief contemporary ...”

“... But, as one of my supervisors said to me, ‘No one can ever really forgive their mother.’ Freud, however, had been more preoccupied by fathers, differing in this respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the ...”

“... room during the Controversial Discussions to sort out the institutional rivalry between Klein and Anna Freud. But her writing reaches much further back, to an Edwardian version of English romanticism. Her taste in art and poetry was stamped by her upbringing, so that in reading her we are absorbing the (suitably housetrained) Protestant romantic ...”

“... Anna G. presents herself to Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1919 suffering from severe breast and ovary pains, diagnosed as hysterical in origin. We are to suppose that her case not only helped Freud with Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his theory of the death instinct, but that he intended his paper on the case, along with the patient’s pornographic writings, to be published in honour of the Goethe centenary in 1932 ...”

“... In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their honorary fellows, Mr Woolf and Mr Cookson. Wives, of either sex, are what keep the universe orderly and quiet enough for the great to think their thoughts, complete their travels, write their books and change the world ...”

“... her younger brother’s life-threatening head injury, Dahl’s daughter Tessa was taken to see Anna Freud, who suggested family therapy. According to Tessa, Dahl refused (and medicated her instead) on the grounds that he had seen too many writers who could never write ‘after they had had all their nooks and crannies flattened like pancakes’. He ...”

“... attempt to give an accurate picture of mid-20th-century England, much as Le Rouge et le Noir and Anna Karenina had set out to do for the France and the Russia of their time. This is Doris Lessing’s explicit intention. In a confused and defensive preface, written for the edition of 1972, she states her dissatisfaction with the English tradition and asserts ...”

“... whose parents have been murdered by a farm hand. His wife dies giving birth to their daughter, Anna. He leaves the hospital with two girls: the second, Claire, is the daughter of another mother who has died in childbirth. He raises all three children as his own and now and then, Anna later remembers, embraces them ‘as ...”

“... Mark Micale’s book opens with a scene from John Huston’s film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), which re-creates one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s legendary demonstrations of hypnosis before an audience of doctors at the Salpêtrière. With magical ease, Charcot makes two patients’ hysterical symptoms disappear ...”

“... Freud believed that psychoanalysis was so deeply subversive of people’s most cherished beliefs that only resistance to psychoanalytic ideas would reveal where they were being taken seriously. In 1914 he wrote that ‘the final decisive battle’ for psychoanalysis would be played out ‘where the greatest resistance has been displayed ...”

“... she could go on.’ These two girls, Lara and Angel, are first cousins. Angel’s grandparents, Anna and Siegfried Manarr, arrived from Germany in the Twenties to run the New York branch of the family business. ‘Every day Siegfried left for an office and Anna saw him off, helping him into his coat.’ There is an exact ...”

“... the teeming brain inside that huge foetal skull’. In the epilogue to Hackenfeller’s Ape, Freud, Darwin and space travel are condensed into one ape embryo – ‘a snug, smug, self-sufficient little incubus, in the middle of warm, wet darkness’. We watch Percy and Edwina’s baby launch itself out of the womb to issue its ‘first roar of ...”

“... mattresses we lay on, groping our way to that potent formula of pleasure, shame and repression Freud had construed long before as the jet-fuel of civilisation – the energy-flight from Eros to monuments, railways, war; and that listless, indoor golf course of a landscape’s gravel drives and laurel hedges, its buffed-to-a-gloss silver birches, its ...”

“... One of the arguments most commonly used by advocates of psychoanalysis during the recent ‘Freud wars’ has been to reproach their adversaries for holding fast to an outmoded version of their discipline. Psychoanalysis, they say, no longer bears much resemblance to what its founder had envisaged, so that criticism focusing on the historical ...”