Wit & Attitude Quote by Sigmund Freud

Love, in Freud's hands, isn't a candlelit upgrade to ordinary life; it's a temporary psychosis with good PR. "One is very crazy when in love" lands because it refuses the flattering story we tell ourselves about romance as self-discovery. Freud flips it: love is self-estrangement. You don't become more you; you become less governed by the parts of you that like being coherent.

The line is doing several jobs at once. "Very" is the tell: not a mild irrationality, not a cute impulsiveness, but a full-body reordering of judgment. Freud is pointing at how love recruits the mind's defense mechanisms into service. Idealization turns a person into an emblem; projection turns your own needs into their personality; denial sandpapers away everything that doesn't fit the fantasy. You experience it as destiny. Freud hears it as symptom.

Context matters. Freud wrote in a culture newly obsessed with the hidden motives beneath polite society, and he made a career out of treating civility as camouflage. In psychoanalytic terms, love collapses boundaries between ego and object: the beloved becomes the stage where childhood scripts, unmet cravings, and narcissistic wishes get performed with adult actors. That sounds clinical, but the sting is human: love feels like clarity precisely when it's most compromised.

The quote's intent isn't to sneer at romance so much as to puncture our moral alibi. If you're "crazy", you're not purely choosing; you're being chosen by forces you don't fully command. Freud's provocation is that the most celebrated attachment in modern life is also the most reality-warping one.