It would be nice if Sigmund Freud really said “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me,” and the ailurophilic observation “Time spent with cats is never wasted.” However, according to researchers at the Freud Museum in London, the father of psychoanalysis never said them. Any time you’re uncertain about the provenance of a quotation, Garson O’Toole’s Quote Investigator is a good place to start. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Freudian Misquotes”
Here’s a lovely quotation that’s attributed to Sigmund Freud.
Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.
What was the context of that? Do you know?
Well, actually, I started doing some digging, and as lovely as that quote is, is not from Sigmund Freud.
It was some influencer last year on Instagram.
Well, yeah, and it’s on a lot of posters now.
Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.
I mean, it’s sort of lovely to think about Sigmund Freud thinking about human consciousness and admitting that poets have been there long before he ever got there.
Or you could say it of yourself, but the Freud Museum in the U.K. has done some digging on this, and they say that he’s not on record as having said this, and it’s probably a corruption of another quote from him, which is, the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious.
What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
Yeah, that happens, right?
Inevitably, that quote will end up in the mouth of Shakespeare, Lincoln, or Einstein.
Right. I know there’s another one that’s attributed to Freud.
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
Did he say that one?
No, he didn’t. As a matter of fact, he wrote to a friend, and I, as is well known, do not like cats.
He was much more of a dog person.
Oh, interesting.
But I still like the quotations.
Right.
Yeah, that’s a hard thing.
Just always fall in love with the quotation, but don’t pay attention to the attribution because they’re so often wrong.
Yeah, yeah.
Visit Quote Investigator.
Oh, yeah.
Quote Investigator.
Great stuff.
