What does it mean A cigar is a cigar-Freud?

a cigar is a cigar, means there's no underlying or hidden meaning.

This line is attributed to Freud. He has said this to a colleague or a student shrink.

In psychology, there are a lot of symbols, and shrinks tend to decode and interpret them, in real life or in dreams.
For example, you dream of offering a cigar to someone
Now cigars have a phallic connotation. " a cigar is a transfer for a penis"
So this can be interpreted as wanting to have sex with this person.

But Freud warns about the limits of symbols. If you just feel like smoking a cigar, shrinks should always doubt that there is ALWAYS an underlying, hidden meaning. Your intention is just smoking, not necessarily a phallic activity.
freud: sometimes, a good cigar is just a good cigar.
Don't insist that something is always something else.


First of all, Sigmund Freud was an avid cigar smoker, since he was 24 til he died at age 79. In his studies, he would say things that were in dreams and everything came down to sexual meanings deep inside one's fantasy. He would say things like cigarettes could be marketed to women as a phallic symbol of empowerment. And so he was asked by someone, what was the symbollic intepretation of a cigar? His reply, "Sometimes, a good cigar is just a cigar." In other words, not everything has a deep meaning. Sometimes simplicity is just that, simple.