Quotes from Sigmund Freud

Human's intrinsic nature manifest in it's misunderstandings

Most of the 'pain' we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus and is recognised by it as 'danger.

we can never give up; we only exchange one thing for another

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.

Dreaming, in short, is one of the devices we employ to circumvent repression, one of the main methods of what may be called indirect representation in the mind.

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

The medical profession is justly conservative.

If one of us should die, then I shall move to Paris.

We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of narcissistic psychoneuroses for these disorders.

thanks to the discrepancies between people's thoughts and their actions, and to the diversity of their wishful impulses.

Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating in us.

The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams.

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers.

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.

This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that

No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

The dream has no way at all of expressing the alternative 'either … or'. It usually takes up the two options into one context as if they had equal rights.

at least one of the meanings of a symptom corresponds to the presentation of a sexual fantasy, while there is no such limit to the content of its other meanings.

The substitute gratifications, such as art offers, are illusions in contrast to reality, but none the less satisfying to the mind on that account, thanks to the place which phantasy has reserved for herself in mental life.

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.

but the state of sleep, we found, is not characterized by the disintegration of psychical interconnections, but by the focus on the wish to sleep by the psychical system in control of the day.

Cilv?ku lielais vairums str?d? tikai nepieciešam?bas spiesti, un no š? cilv?ka dabisk? riebuma pret darbu izriet pašas smag?k?s soci?l?s probl?mas.