Featured image: Max Halberstadt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Attributed to, but not likely, Sigmund Freud.
Somebody1 cautioned us all that everything isn’t a phallic symbol just because it happens to be shaped like a penis, probably in the context of critiques of Freud’s actual tendency to over-sexualize every damn thing.
( I love these things. They’re so great to jump-start your writing day when you don’t have a full article ready, and I love seeing everybody’s responses — except, of course, the AI slop. We block them.)
I first used the featured image of Sigmund Freud with the ubiquitous cigar a million years ago, it seems, in a practice newsletter back in the day when you printed and mailed the things, and businesses and practices had bulk mailing accounts with the United States Post Office. Because, whoever said it, I love the quote.
I was writing at the time about the tendency to overanalyze everything.
Today, the quote speaks to me more about our tendency to over-pathologize everything. Sometimes we do it to discredit someone we disagree with. Other times we do it to excuse execrable behavior. My Dad thinks all Democrats have “a peculiar mental illness” that makes us compassionate and concerned for the welfare of others. On Nextdoor, I keep seeing the worst racist acts excused as expressions of mental illness. (Spiritual illness I’ll buy, but racism is not a psychiatric disorder.)
Speaking of which, I’m old enough to remember when the American Psychiatric Association was seriously considering making rape a mental illness for heaven’s sake… but I digress.
Gun violence is not mental illness. Domestic violence is not mental illness. Nor is every selfish, self-centered person a “malignant” (whatever that is) narcissist. Everybody shy or odd isn’t on the autism spectrum, and every scatter-brained person does not have ADHD.
No, sometimes an asshole is just an asshole. And a shy kid is nothing more than… a shy kid.
And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
- And then I found this, on mis-attributed quotes LOL ↩︎
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