Quotes from Sigmund Freud

It has occurred to me that the ultimate basis of man's need for religion is infantile helplessness, which is so much greater in man than in animals. After infancy he cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for him a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.

The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation.

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929.

On découvrit alors que l'homme devient névrosé parce qu'il ne peut supporter le degré de renoncement exigé par la société au nom de son idéal culturel, et l'on en conclut qu'abolir ou diminuer notablement ces exigences signifierait un retour à des possibilités de bonheur.   Il est encore une autre cause de désillusion.

To love one's neighbour as oneself — a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs as strongly counter to the original nature of man.

It was found that men become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in virtue of its cultural ideals, and it was supposed that a return to greater possibilities of happiness would ensue if these standards were abolished or greatly relaxed.

Les mots provoquent des émotions et constituent pour les hommes le moyen général de s'influencer réciproquement.

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

La société transforme le désagréable en injuste.

Jeg tror at den hellighet vi tilkjennegir de ti bud, sløver vår sans for erkjennelse av virkeligheten.

This struggle (...between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction) is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.

Les souvenirs pénibles s'effacent difficilement, reviennent sans cesse, quoi qu'on fasse pour les étouffer, et vous torturent sans répit.

Nonostante tutte le approssimazioni e anticipazioni nel mondo circostante, fu nello spirito di un uomo ebreo, Saulo di Tarso, che per la prima volta si affacciò l'idea: «Siamo così infelici perché abbiamo ucciso Dio Padre».

La vie psychique est un champ de bataille et une arène où luttent des tendances opposées

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.

We avoid the familiar reproach that we base our constructions of mental life on pathological findings; for dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our waking life.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings. Therefore

no serious book can now be sure of surviving.

In tal modo era taciuta l'uccisione di Dio, ma un crimine la cui espiazione richiedeva che una vittima fosse immolata non poteva esser stato che un omicidio.

We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions.

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.

The reaction to these claims of impulse and these threats of danger, a reaction in which the real activity of the psychic apparatus is manifested, may be guided correctly by the pleasure-principle or by the reality-principle which modifies this.

The liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it.

Crawley, in language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation... a narcissism of minor differences.