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| Sigmund Freud |
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
- This quote is often attributed to Sigmund Freud to show that even ... a famous psychoanalyst can admit that not everything has a profound meaning; However, no variation of this quote ever appears in his writings. It was probably falsely attributed by a journalist, long after Freud's death.
- Actually, the quote is "Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe." The story goes that Freud was lecturing on oral fixation and one of his cheekier students asked about his ever-present pipe and Freud replied, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. (wikiquote.org)
While
it is silly, even stupid, to find profound meaning in everything, I
nevertheless feel that the more dangerous course is to find profound
meaning in nothing. While everything cannot be a preternatural sign
and wonder, neither should we feel that it is common sense to strip
everything of symbolic value. In fact, I think the common tendency
today is to err on the side of literalism. For example, a current
plague on the health of many Americans is obesity; yet it is surely
an inadequate analysis of the issue to assume that obesity indicates
excessive food consumption and nothing more. To find the source of
every addiction as wiring constructs in the brain does not touch the
full dimensions of what in some sense is a spiritual matter. Rank
materialism when applied to everything results in seriously
incomplete and flawed analysis – as in the circular conclusion
drawn that the current economic crisis is due to economics. Surely
it would behoove us when navigating through life to realize that each
of us takes on symbolic significance. We are vastly more than the sum
of our material parts. To view otherwise and to conclude that "a
cigar is just a cigar – a man is just a man" is itself of
alarming symbolic significance.
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