Sigmund Freud Quotes

It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need. ~ Sigmund Freud

The world is no nursery. ~ Sigmund Freud

Freud expressed the opinion - not quite in earnest, though, it seemed to me - that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, 'What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?' Whereupon he, visible a bit surprised, answered evasively: 'At least psychology has a social purpose. ~ Ludwig Binswanger

The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours. ~ Sigmund Freud

Everyone of us who can look back over a longer or shorter life experience will probably say that he might have spared himself many disappointments and painful surprises if he had found the courage and decision to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he made in his intercourse with people, and to consider them as indications of the intentions which were still being kept secret. As ~ Sigmund Freud

Not all men are worthy of love. ~ Sigmund Freud

We possess no criterion which enables us to distinguish exactly between a psychical process and a physiological one, between an act occurring in the cerebral cortex and one occurring in the sub-cortical substance; for 'consciousness', whatever that may be, is not attached to every activity of the cerebral cortex, nor is it always attached in an equal degree to any particular one of its activities; it is not a thing which is bound up with any locality in the nervous system. ~ Sigmund Freud

The process of dreaming transfers psychical intensity from what is important, but also objectionable, onto what is insignificant. ~ Sigmund Freud

The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever ... because they already live in a dream world. ~ Sigmund Freud

I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion ~ Sigmund Freud

The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will. ~ Sigmund Freud

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? ~ Sigmund Freud

The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death. ~ Sigmund Freud

The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind. ~ Sigmund Freud

All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it. ~ Sigmund Freud

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart. ~ Sigmund Freud

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? ~ Sigmund Freud

The goal of all life is death. ~ Sigmund Freud

I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me. ~ Sigmund Freud

After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination. ~ Sigmund Freud

A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. ~ Sigmund Freud

Let us consider the polarity of love and hate ... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate. ~ Sigmund Freud

The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego ~ Sigmund Freud

My paper has to be very long and complex," I said. "I shall cite all the great thinkers - Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud." "What about Adolf Hitler?" "Oh, him. He's not a thinker. He's just a ranter and raver." "There may come a time," said Pepi, "when people cannot tell the difference." "Impossible," I solemnly predicted. "I have read Hitler's book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany's troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear." "Just like all your old boyfriends," Pepi said with his sly smile. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation. ~ Sigmund Freud

The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance. ~ Sigmund Freud

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. ~ Sigmund Freud

To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us. ~ Sigmund Freud

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity. ~ Sigmund Freud

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia - that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives - and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. ~ Sigmund Freud

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety. ~ Sigmund Freud

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have , so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism. ~ Sigmund Freud

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. ~ Sigmund Freud

I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness. ~ Sigmund Freud

The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. ~ Sigmund Freud

So he [Sigmund Freud] called this "the uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk. ~ DJ Spooky

Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind. ~ Sigmund Freud

When people criticise me, I know how to defend myself. But I'm powerless in the face of praise. ~ Sigmund Freud

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. ~ Sigmund Freud

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time. ~ Eric Weiner

No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.. ~ Sigmund Freud

The way in which these factors - displacement, condensation, and over-determination - interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries. ~ Sigmund Freud

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

[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. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

Alongside of the physical symptoms of hysteria, a number of psychical disturbances are to be observed, in which at some future time the changes characteristic of hysteria will no doubt be found but the analysis of which has hitherto scarcely been begun. These are changes in the passage and in the association of ideas, inhibitions of the activity of the will, magnification and suppression of feelings, etc.
which may be summarized as "changes in the normal distribution over the nervous system of the stable amounts of excitation". ~ Sigmund Freud

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable. ~ Sigmund Freud

Not that I know so much, but there are so many equally valid possibilities. For the present I do not believe that anyone is justified in saying that sexuality is the mother of all feelings. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

You're quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of it's own. We do miss what we haven't had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent ~ Muriel Spark

Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.
Sigmund Freud wrote to Albert Einstein ~ Sigmund Freud

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call this 'education to reality. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step? ~ Sigmund Freud

But since the downfall of the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it - all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. There is, firstly, the psychical significance of the dream, its position with regard to the psychical processes, as to a possible biological function; secondly, has the dream a meaning - can sense be made of each single dream as of other mental syntheses? ~ Sigmund Freud

It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together - a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object's attractions. ~ Sigmund Freud

...we cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another. ~ Sigmund Freud

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer. ~ Sigmund Freud

With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; ~ Sigmund Freud

Places are often treated like persons. ~ Sigmund Freud

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

Every man is a poet at heart. ~ Sigmund Freud

We are saying much the same thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals. ~ Sigmund Freud

The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge - a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion. ~ Sigmund Freud

We are astonished to hear declarations by married women and girls which bear witness to a quite particular attitude to the therapeutic problem: they had always known, they say, that they could only be cured by love. ~ Sigmund Freud

He who knows how to wait need make no concessions. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free. ~ Sigmund Freud

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror. ~ Sigmund Freud

Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis ~ Sigmund Freud

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification. ~ Sigmund Freud

Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret. ~ Sigmund Freud

One of the reasons that most literary artists are contemptuous of Sigmund Freud - whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths - is that his extreme determinism is felt to be immensely untrue to the rich complexity of life, with its twists and turns and manifold surprises. ~ Joseph Epstein

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites. ~ Sigmund Freud

Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. ~ Sigmund Freud

Love and work ... work and love, that's all there is. ~ Sigmund Freud

The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology. ~ Sigmund Freud

Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, and from which it might be expected that his development into superman will be ensured. But I do not believe in the existence of such an inner impulse, and I see no way of preserving this pleasing illusion. The development of man up to now does not seem to me to need any explanation differing from that of animal development, and the restless striving towards further perfection which may be observed in a minority of human beings is easily explicable as the result of that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built. ~ Sigmund Freud

As these examples show, Freud's theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples. ~ Sigmund Freud

It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. ~ Sigmund Freud

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after
truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence
over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced
by what is untrue as by what is true. They
have an evident tendency not to distinguish between
the two. ~ Sigmund Freud

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength. ~ Sigmund Freud

The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father. ~ Sigmund Freud

We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus. ~ Sigmund Freud

Happiness is the belated fulfilment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness. Money was not a childhood wish. ~ Sigmund Freud

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable. ~ Sigmund Freud

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct ... ~ Sigmund Freud

If I'm not mistaken, Sigmund Freud said that in every idealisation there's an aggression. Depicting the Pope as a sort of Superman, a star, is offensive to me. The pope is a man who laughs, cries, sleeps calmly and has friends like everyone else. A normal person. ~ Pope Francis

We all still show too little respect for nature, which in Leonardo's deep words recalling Hamlet's speech "is full of infinite reasons which never appeared in experience." Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the infinite experiments in which these "reasons of nature" force themselves into experience. ~ Sigmund Freud

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake ~ Sigmund Freud

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death' and, looking backwards, that 'inanimate things existed before living ones'. ~ Sigmund Freud

Dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires. ~ Sigmund Freud

Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction. ~ Sigmund Freud

I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador...with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person. ~ Sigmund Freud

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. ~ Sigmund Freud

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - Frazer's depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung's description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious - as ~ George Pendle

Psychoanalysis is right to be mistrustful. One of its rules runs: whatever disturbs the continuation of the work of analysis is a resistance. ~ Sigmund Freud

Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self. ~ Sigmund Freud