Quotes from Sigmund Freud

The first is the Credo quia absurdum of the early Father. It would imply that religious doctrines are outside reason's jurisdiction; they stand above reason. Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.

Freud revelled in linguistic play, but, despite his appreciation of painting and especially sculpture, he did not know what to make of visual imagery in dreams.

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.

The story is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place, because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age unmarried

every individual is virtually an enemy of culture, which is nevertheless ostensibly an object of universal human concern. It is remarkable that little as men are able to exist in isolation they should yet feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices that culture expects of them in order that a communal existence may be possible. Thus culture must be defended against the individual

What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one.

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

The uneducated relatives of our patients—persons who are impressed only by the visible and tangible, preferably by such procedure as one sees in the moving picture theatres—never miss an opportunity of voicing their scepticism as to how one can do anything for the malady through mere talk. Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients merely imagine their symptoms. Words

psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modeled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.

the principle which controls magic, and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is "Omnipotence of Thought.

So far we have mainly been concerned with probing after the hidden meaning of dreams, the route we should take to discover it, and the means the dream-work has employed to hide it.

May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become 'neurotic'?

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.

Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.

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

They love their delusions as they love themselves.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.

It is plainly the case that children repeat everything in their play that has made a powerful impression on them, and that in so doing they abreact the intensity of the ecperience and make themselves so to speak master of the situation.

Alternatives are difficult to represent, and in some cases they are expressed by the division of the dream into two halves of equal length.

It is the relation of similarity, congruence, or convergence, the just like, which dreams have the most various means of expressing better than anything else.

But even so, one can just as well hold God responsible for the existence of the devil as for the evil he personifies.

Uno es dueño de lo que calla y esclavo de lo que habla

Nuestra alma no es una unidad pacífica, autorregulada. Ella es, antes bien, comparable a un Estado moderno, en el que una chusma ansiosa de placer y de destrucción tiene que ser sojuzgada por una clase superior y más juiciosa

It is a fact that we have always behaved as if we knew all this; but, for the most part, our theoretical concepts have neglected to attach the same importance to the economic line of approach as they have to the dynamic and topographical ones.