Sigmund Freud Quotes
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There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.
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A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
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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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Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
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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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Hatred of Judaism is at bottom hatred of Christianity.
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It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
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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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One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
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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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The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.
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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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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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[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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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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We must love or we grow ill.
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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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Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.
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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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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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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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The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
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An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
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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.