The famous psychoanalyst is credited with a phrase urging not to look for sexual connotations in everything. We checked to see if Freud said this.

A portrait of an Austrian scientist with a pipe and the indicated phrase has long become popular on the Internet meme. Quotes are no less often referred to in full-fledged texts - for example, “RIA Novosti", "News", Ksenia Sobchak, Minister of Culture of the Novosibirsk Region Vasily Kuzin, writer Denis Dragunsky, famous comedian George Carlin (18+) and numerous authors books on psychology. Variation in which a banana is mentioned instead of a cigar, heard in a sketch show Saturday Night Live in 1976, and later became a common joke. The phrase also served as a prototype for many similar statements.

According to some collections of quotes, the father of psychoanalysis uttered these now famous words in response to the question of one of his students, “whether there is anything symbolic in the fact that he smokes big cigars.” Freud's passion for these products is beyond doubt - they played an important role in the life of a psychoanalyst and today occupy an important place in museum scientist in London. When Harry, Freud's 17-year-old nephew, one day refused a cigar offered by Sigmund, the latter declared: “My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest pleasures in life. And if you decided in advance to quit smoking, I sincerely feel sorry for you.”

One of the many portraits of Freud with cigars. © Freud Museum London.

As he writes Smokers' Magazine (and this information is confirmed by numerous sources), “Freud saw cigars as the source of his productivity, his mood directly depended on cigars, and in giving up smoking he saw a rejection of everything that his life was. All important events, affairs, processes that fill and make up his life were in one way or another connected with cigars. And not just connected, but built on them, using cigar smoking as the foundation for their existence. Sigmund Freud could not refuse cigars and was sincerely surprised that those around him demanded this from him. But still, he made periodic attempts to quit smoking and later spoke about these short periods as the most unbearable periods of his life.” Even oral cancer, diagnosed when Freud was 67, was not a convincing reason for refusal - the Austrian smoked until his death at 83, having undergone 33 operations. Freud's relationship with cigars figures prominently in the 2018 film "My friend Sigmund Freud".

Did the psychoanalyst's love for cigars fit into his own theories about the nature of oral pleasures? Undoubtedly. This is evidenced by numerous works of Freud and articles on website his museum. It follows from this that the quote attributed to Freud was to some extent self-irony, an anti-Freudian joke.

In 2001, Alan Elms, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, published an article entitled "Apocryphal Freud", dedicated to the three most famous “quotes” of the Viennese doctor. His research showed that the first time a quote about a cigar appeared in print was in a footnote to a 1950 article. "The Place of Action in Personality Change" Allen Willis, published in the American journal Psychiatry. The author of the article dates the phrase to around 1920 (“30 years after Freud’s famous remark that “a cigar is sometimes just a cigar”), and the famous Austrian died in 1939. However, the researcher was unable to find anything similar in Freud’s lifetime works or letters. Moreover, the popularity of the phrase in one form or another, traced after 1950, at first concerned only the English language, but in German the quote did not gain distribution for a long time. In particular, in 1954, the aphorism was cited in one American legal publication, and in 1961 - in work historian and Freud biographer Peter Gay. Last admitted Elms that he could not find the original source of the quote he used, and admitted the possibility of apocrypha.

Finally, an attempt to connect the quote with Freud's visit at Clark University in 1909 (there is a version that it was at those lectures that the famous answer was given) was also unsuccessful. Moreover, during one of the lectures the scientist expressed, in fact, the opposite thought: “You have already noticed that the psychoanalyst is distinguished by a particularly strict confidence in the determination of mental life. For him, there is nothing petty, arbitrary or accidental in mental life; he expects to meet sufficient motivation everywhere, where such demands are usually not made.”

The above facts indicate that Sigmund Freud is most likely not the author of the famous quote about the cigar. At least there is no convincing evidence to the contrary.