Sigmund Freud Quotes
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No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
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There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.
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Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity...
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This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
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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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My psychoanalysis has equipped you with the equivalent of a train ticket to recovery. It is now your decision whether or not you choose to make full use of it.
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Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
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What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
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A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
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A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
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In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.
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All the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied tothese latent states.
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The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.
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No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.
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When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.
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Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
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Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.
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The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.
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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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The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
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We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology.
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The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
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Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
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Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities... If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.