Sigmund Freud Quotes
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The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
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Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
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The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
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Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.
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The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
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Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
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The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
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What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences.
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The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
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If children could, if adults knew.
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I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
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After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
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The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
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Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
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Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
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Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.
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When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
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A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.
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In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.
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The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
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This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
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All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
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The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.
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Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.