Quotes from Sigmund Freud

dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires.

The communists think they have found the way to redeem mankind from evil. Man is equivocally good and well disposed to his neighbour, but his nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property ... I can recognize the psychological presumption behind it as a baseless illusion. With the abolition of private property the human love of aggression is robbed of one of its tools, a strong one no doubt, but certainly not the strongest ... Aggression was not created by property.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

the renunciation of aggression is inherent in its constitution.

The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.

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

That others rejected it too, and still do, I find less surprising. 'For the little children do not like it' when there is talk of man's inborn tendency to 'wickedness', to aggression and destruction, and therefore to cruelty.

Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.

we shall be obliged to put forward a set of new assumptions touching speculatively on the structure of the psychical apparatus and the play of forces active in it, though we must take care not to spin them out too far beyond their first logical links, for if we do, their worth will vanish into uncertainty.

The fact is that a survival of all the early stages alongside the final form is only possible in the mind, and that it is impossible for us to represent a phenomenon of this kind in visual terms.

El sueño posee una maravillosa poesía, una exacta facultad alegórica, un humorismo incomparable y una deliciosa ironía.

Uma técnica bem comum de distorção onírica consiste em representar o resultado de um acontecimento ou a conclusão de uma cadeia de pensamento no início de um sonho e em colocar em seu final as premissas nas quais se basearam a conclusão ou as causas que levaram ao acontecimento.

The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.

our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought such as the over-estimation of the magic of words and the belief that real processes in the external world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts.

We will turn, therefore, to the less ambitious problem: what the behaviour of men themselves reveals as the purpose and object of their lives, what they demand of life and wish to attain in it. The answer to this can hardly be in doubt: they seek happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so.

No probability, however seductive, can protect us from error; even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable.

The delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.

Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world.

Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.

The words for much that remains mute in me

At one point in the course of this discussion, the idea took possession of us that culture was a peculiar process passing over human life and we are still under the influence of this idea.

I have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible.