How to Use Freudian in a Sentence

Freudian

adjective
  • And here’s where things get tricky, and more than a little Freudian.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 12 Aug. 2023
  • The word juts out of Drake’s brooding chorus like a Freudian slip.
    — Jeff Ihaza, Rolling Stone, 7 Apr. 2023
  • In a Freudian way, there’s also a weird obsession with your friend’s hot mom.
    — Joel Khalili, WIRED, 6 Jan. 2025
  • In fact, the South Africa native made something of a Freudian slip.
    — Jp Mangalindan, Peoplemag, 25 July 2023
  • To get even more Freudian, Pinocchio runs off and goes to pleasure island.
    — Jim Ryan, Forbes.com, 3 Apr. 2025
  • Bradley gave the epic a feminist-pagan spin, White a Freudian one.
    — Elizabeth Hand, Washington Post, 16 July 2024
  • Yet there are no easy explanations or Freudian shortcuts on display.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 9 Jan. 2025
  • While that Freudian analysis is certainly up for debate, there could be something to it.
    — Danielle Sinay, Glamour, 31 Jan. 2024
  • Heavy cannons are Freudian winks at the opera’s libidinous energies.
    — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Jacqueline Rose is a semi-lapsed Freudian and very sharp literary critic.
    — Lisa Levy, Washington Post, 17 Aug. 2023
  • But conjuring up the Freudian unconscious in conversations with my kids keeps him close.
    — Gillian Silverman, The New Yorker, 15 July 2023
  • The anecdote, with its heavy Freudian implications, provoked peals of laughter.
    — Elizabeth Winkler, The New Yorker, 23 June 2023
  • This Freudian excess is meant to explain Riley’s troubled Sense of Self. To show Riley’s attempt to fit in with more confident girls on a hockey team, Inside Out 2 turns into yet another imitation of the atrocious, snarky Mean Girls.
    — Armond White, National Review, 14 June 2024
  • There’s a Freudian idea in which an individual projects their thoughts and feelings to another person.
    — Yeo Boon Ping, CNBC, 12 Aug. 2025
  • Along the way, Joe’s father shows up, triggering 15 minutes of mild Freudian trauma.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 15 Dec. 2023
  • Is the entire country suffering from a Freudian desire to relive the consummation of high-school prom?
    — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker, 31 Jan. 2024
  • Which is an act of, by nature, reduction — reducing someone to a simple epiphany, a plot-point Freudian history of their life.
    — Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone, 24 July 2024
  • But there’s another path that’s more complex, more Freudian, about how work in America has warped our senses of time and even our own bodies.
    — Emma Goldberg, New York Times, 28 Apr. 2023
  • But, without getting too Freudian, Thomas also reminds us that none of these suffering creatures are—or are only—types.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 3 Feb. 2024
  • But, without getting too Freudian, Thomas also reminds us that none of these suffering creatures are — or are only — types.
    — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 3 Feb. 2024
  • The sense of descending into the Freudian subconscious, a place of repressed emotions and desires, is relayed just as keenly here as in the original.
    — Lewis Gordon, Vulture, 9 Oct. 2024
  • Rose recently had a row with Edith and her Freudian nightmare of a father (Timothy Spall), so there’s motive.
    — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 27 Mar. 2024
  • The show and the movie both portray her at a distance, from a viewpoint of Freudian comic horror and pity, compared with the more complete portraits of Marty and his father.
    — Theater Review Aug. 3, Vulture, 3 Aug. 2023
  • That’s a very sensible meeting of Freudian psychology and dramatic structure.
    — Chris Willman, Variety, 28 Dec. 2024
  • To Didion’s Freudian analyst, the mother-daughter dynamic was everything, and the book suggests that the mother fell short.
    — Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr. 2025
  • These are Gothic sci-fi slashers built on a chassis sturdy enough that, when combined with the Freudian nightmare of its central monster, are able to support all manner of ideas and wild tonal shifts.
    — Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 12 Aug. 2025
  • Classic Freudian psychoanalysis had its heyday in America in the fifties and early sixties, but by the seventies a shift was under way.
    — Gillian Silverman, The New Yorker, 15 July 2023
  • Because Deborah hadn’t updated her emergency contact yet — a Freudian mistake?
    — Jessica M. Goldstein, Vulture, 25 Apr. 2025
  • If that Freudian slip was our cold civil war's Fort Sumter, then Obama's presidency that followed was the extended opening campaign.
    — Gordon G. Chang, Newsweek, 24 Jan. 2025
  • Because of all the things Barbie has done in her 32 years, from disco dancing to running a dude ranch, that little doll has never submitted herself to Freudian analysis.
    — Merrie Monteagudo, San Diego Union-Tribune, 28 July 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'Freudian.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: