Quotes from Sigmund Freud

It is an honour to have plenty of enemies!

we were able to acknowledge that all these mutually contradictory opinions were right on some point in these complicated interrelationships, and to demonstrate that they had discovered something that was correct.

When it comes to the small matters in life one should think long and hard, but when it comes to the big ones -whether or not to marry, whether to have children- one should just go ahead and do it

Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.

To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against their passions.

It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.

religion succeeds in saving many people from individual neuroses. But little more.

In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.

the process of dreaming transfers psychical intensity from what is important, but also objectionable, onto what is insignificant.

The normal sequence is that energy is prompted at the perceptual system, passes into consciousness, and thence to the motor system, where it is discharged by action. (I feel an unpleasant sensation, realize that I have been bitten by a mosquito, raise my hand, and swat the insect.)

Visul este realizarea mascata a unei dorinte refulate. Este construit ca un simptom nevrotic, este o formatie de compromis intre necesitatea unei aspiratii instinctive refulate si rezistenta unei puteri cenzurate in eu. In virtutea unei origini asemanatoare el este la fel de incomprehensibil ca si simptomul si necesita, ca si acesta, o interpretare.

One can make a compound formation of events and of places in the same way as of people, provided always that the single events and localities have something in common which the latent dream emphasizes. It is a sort of new and fleeting concept of formation, with the common element as its kernel. This jumble of details that has been fused together regularly results in a vague indistinct picture, as though you had taken several pictures on the same film.

Ko postavlja pitanje o smislu zivota,s njegovim libidom nije nesto u redu.

Analytic experience has taught us that the better is always the enemy of the good and that in every phase of the patient's recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.

In this scheme, the 'unconscious' and the 'preconscious' are agencies or authorities (Instanzen) which the wish has to satisfy; the unconscious is more tolerant, and helps the wish to smuggle itself past the censorship of the preconscious. As a result, psychical energy is discharged without disturbing sleep.

Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity] have become the parents of human civilization.

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs.    If

Most importantly, the very inception of the treatment itself necessarily induces a change in the patient's conscious attitude to his illness...that he does not listen carefully enough to what he obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.

We are never so vulnerable as when we love.

What one forgets once he will often forget again.

Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.

The superego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices.