Sigmund Freud Quotes
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Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
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Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
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We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
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When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.
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The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore.
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What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?
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In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
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There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.
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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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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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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.
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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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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...
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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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You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.
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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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[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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There is scarcely room for doubt that something in the psychological relation of a mother-in-law to a son-in-law breeds hostility between them and makes it hard for them to live together. But the fact that in civilized societies mothers-in-law are such a favourite subject for jokes seems to me to suggest that the emotional relation involved includes sharply contrasted components. I believe, that is, that this relation is in fact an 'ambivalent' one, composed of conflicting affectionate and hostile impulses.
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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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Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
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Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.
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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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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.