Sigmund Freud Quotes
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My way of working was different years ago. I used to wait until an idea came to me. Now I go half-way to meet it, though I don't know whether I find it any the quicker.
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Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
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[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
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Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
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The world is no nursery.
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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.
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I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.
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The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.
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Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry.
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Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
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The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
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We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
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Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
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It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
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The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.
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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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In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
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The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling.
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Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.
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The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
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Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.
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The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.
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Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
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These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.