“... White Hotel is this. There are six sections, prefaced by a fictional exchange of letters between Freud and colleagues about a confessional ‘poem’ written by a female patient of his, called Lisa Erdman, during a period of sexual hysteria which Freud wishes to write up as a case-history. The first section consists of ...”

“... of his theoretical papers that had been published in 1966. With the Ecrits, the claim was that Freud had finally been brought to France, and that France would have now, as Lacan himself might have franglicised it, to faire bye-bye to a smug and superannuated Cartesianism for which the idea of an unconscious mind was a contradiction in terms. But whether ...”

“... explanation is one possible variant, made available. The essay can be thought of as telling what Freud might have called a ‘Just-So Story’, since an issue of theory is engagingly disguised as a historical narrative. In the beginning, our ancestors made figurative images of the animals they hunted. In doing so, they paid no attention to the surface on ...”

“... got when she gave a paper about one of her characters to fellow clinicians at a conference at the Freud Museum. ‘Participants inquired why “I” had followed one route and not another, suggested significances “I” had not seen in her symptoms and talked as though she were a real person, the therapist a real therapist and the case a real case.’ One ...”

“... us who we are? Barely six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones to lament that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war). ‘I do not delude myself,’ he wrote. ‘The springtime of our science has abruptly broken ...”

“... me reluctant to go to bed. The nightmares often feature bones and the excrement of animals ... Freud no doubt would explain the persistent symbols, but I have sometimes dreamt of Freud performing such an explication, not very satisfactorily ... ’ Burgess’s second new book, The End of the World News, is a novel built ...”

“... the pasages unexpurgated, was right to point out, not only his letters to his cousin Maria Anna Theckla Mozart). The psychoanalytic significance of the passages only begins with money, about which so many of Leopold Mozart’s cautions and precepts circle. They serve also the social purpose of the letters by reconstituting the intimacy and, which is ...”

“... by stating that I think it more likely that their index’s misidentification of ‘the adolescent Freud’ who, on page 156, climbs up a tree screaming, after being bitten by a sow, as ‘Freud, Sigmund’ rather than as ‘Freud, chimp’, is an innocent error rather than a Freudian ...”

“... Zion and the Order of the Golden Dawn, turns out to have a higher or perhaps a subterranean unity. Freud of course was a Mason or a Templar too. The author and his reader, in a cheerful conspiracy of two, are the only people outside all this kind of thing. And since outside it, all the more able to participate in it with readerly and writerly zest. Umberto Eco ...”

“... exact species of Kafka’s cockroach, the importance of the Moscow-Leningrad train timetable to Anna Karenina, the history of duelling, whether Tolstoy would have beaten Pushkin at chess – but no explanation, no interpretation, and in a sense (a strong sense) no meaning. We can perhaps get some purchase on this absence by examining the case of Nabokov and ...”

“... which, along with memories of Musil and Kraus, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, Klimt and above all Freud, has formed whatever imprecise notions we may have of that time and place. Wolff is mainly interested in two cases involving children abused till they died. These were reported in the press, especially the middle-class Neue Frei Presse, in a tone suggesting ...”

“... chose to expose the truth, let it fall where it might. They ranged from Bertha Pappenheim (the ‘Anna O’ of the Freud-Breuer casebook, whose multiple life surely deserves a comprehensive biography) to less celebrated inquirers, social workers and publicists. But they were too close to the traffic to pull its roots up and ...”

“... his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand ...”

“... and ‘to win the energies of intoxification for the revolution’. In relating the discoveries of Freud to the demands of Marx, they insisted that subjective transformation was part and parcel of political transformation. However, truly to bind ‘revolt to revolution’, Benjamin continued, the group had to weld ‘this experience of freedom’ to the ...”

“... the markets in the cities they visited. To please Sarah, Briony had said, she had tried to read Anna Karenina, but it had made her cry. These two amiable barbarians scared Sarah, for she knew they were representative. Worse, an hour in their company had her thinking, Oh well, why should anyone know anything? Obviously they do perfectly well knowing only ...”