Did Sigmund Freud say: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”?

The famous psychoanalyst is attributed to a phrase urging not to look for sexual subtext in everything. We checked whether Freud said that.

A portrait of an Austrian scientist with a pipe and a specified phrase has long been popular on the Internet meme. No less often turn to quote and in full -fledged texts - for example, “RIA Novosti" "News", Ksenia Sobchak, Minister of Culture of the Novosibirsk Region Vasily Kuzin, writer Denis Dragunsky, a famous comedian George Karlin (18+) and numerous authors books on psychology. An option in which instead of a cigar mentioned a banana that sounded in a sketch show Saturday Night Live In 1976, later it turned into a common joke. The phrase also served as a prototype for the set Similar statements.

If you believe some collections of quotes, the father of psychoanalysis pronounced these words that became winged in response to the question of one of his students, "is there anything symbolic in the fact that he smokes big cigars." Freud's passion for these products cannot be doubted - they played an important role in the life of a psychoanalyst and today occupy an important place in Museum scientist in London. When Harry, the 17-year-old nephew of Freud, once refused the cigar proposed by Zigmund, the latter stated: “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and at the same time the cheapest pleasures in life. And if you decided to refuse smoking in advance, I am sincerely sorry. ”

As he writes Smokers ’Magazine (and this information is confirmed by numerous sources), “Freud saw in the cigars the source of his performance, his mood depended directly on the cigars, and in the rejection of smoking he saw a rejection of everything that his life was. All important events, deeds, processes that fill and make up his life were somehow connected with the cigars. And not just connected, but built on them, using cigar smoking as a foundation for their existence. Sigmund Freud could not abandon cigars and sincerely surprised that others demand this from him. But still, he made periodic attempts to quit smoking and then spoke about these short periods as the most unbearable segments of his life. ” Even Cancer of the oral cavity, diagnosed when Freud was 67, did not become a convincing reason for refusal - the Austrian smoked until his death at 83, transferring 33 operations. Freud's relationship with cigars occupies an important place in the 2018 film "My friend Sigmund Freud".

Whether the love of a psychoanalyst for cigars in his own Theories About the nature of oral pleasures? Undoubtedly. The numerous works of Freud and articles on site His museum. From this it follows that the quote attributed to Freud was to some extent by self-irony, an antifreidian joke.

In 2001, Alan Elms, a professor of psychology at the University of California in Davis, published an article under the name "Apocryphic Freud"dedicated to the three most famous "quotes" of the Vienna doctor. The study conducted by him showed that for the first time in the press, the quote about cigar appears in a footnote by the article 1950 "Place of action in personality change" Allen Wilis, published in the American magazine Psychiatry. The author of the article dates the phrase around 1920 (“30 years after Freud’s famous remark that“ cigar is sometimes just a cigar ””), and the famous Austrian died in 1939. At the same time, the researcher failed to find anything like in lifetime works or letters of Freud. Moreover, the popularity of the phrase in one form or another, traced after 1950, first concerned only English, but in German the quote for a long time was not widespread. In particular, in 1954, aphorism was brought in one American legal publication, and in 1961 - in work Historian and biographer Freud Peter Gay. Last admitted Elms, which cannot find the source of the quote he used, and made the probability of an apocryph.

Finally, an attempt to establish a connection between a quote with Freud's visit At the University of Clark in 1909 (there is a version that it was in those lectures that the famous answer sounded) was also unsuccessful. Moreover, during one of lectures The scientist expressed, in fact, the opposite thought: “You have already noticed that the psychoanalyst is particularly strict confident in the determination of mental life. For him in mental life, there is nothing small, arbitrary and random, he expects to meet sufficient motivation everywhere, where such requirements are usually not presented. ”

The above facts suggest that Sigmund Freud with a high degree of probability is not the author of the famous quote about cigar. At least there is no convincing evidence of the opposite.

Most likely not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Toometimes a cigar is just a cigar

2. Apocryphal Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Most Famous “Quotations” and Their Actual Sources