Sigmund Freud Quotes
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There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.
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The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
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The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
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Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
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Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
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Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.
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Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
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One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.
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Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones – his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them – two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.
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Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis...
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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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Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
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He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
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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.
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I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.
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Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
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Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
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A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
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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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An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
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Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
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Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
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Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
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I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador...