Sigmund Freud Quotes
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We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
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Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
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Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.
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Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
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In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
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Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
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The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
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A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.
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A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.
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The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice — that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law.
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Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.
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It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.
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Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
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Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.
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A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
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The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
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I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
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Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.
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The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.
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I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.
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Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
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What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
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Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
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Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.