Quotes from Sigmund Freud

We once more find here an illustration of the truth that every exaggeration contains the seed of its own undoing.

It shows that the idea of being devoured by the father gives expression, in a form that has undergone regressive degradation, to a passive, tender impulse to be loved by him in a genital-erotic sense.

Is it, moreover, a question merely of the replacement of the [psychical] representative by a regressive form of expression or is it a question of a genuine regressive degradation of the genitally-directed impulse in the id? It is not at all easy to make certain. The case history of the Russian 'Wolf Man' gives very definite support to the second, more serious, view ...

We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and only very little from a state of things.

At any rate, we can see that repression is not the only means which the ego can employ for the purpose of defence against an unwelcome instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress, it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by repressing it. Sometimes, indeed, after forcing an instinct to regress in this way, it goes on to repress it.

Schuldgefühle, ... sind die fundamentalen Kräfte, die Großzügigkeit und Altruismus zugrundeliegen.

The process of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus complex—both his hostile and his tender impulses towards his father and his tender impulses towards his mother.

But the affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration.

It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.

Castration anxiety develops into moral anxiety — social anxiety — and it is not so easy now to know what the anxiety is about. The formula, 'separation and expulsion from the horde', only applies to that later portion of the super-ego which has been formed on the basis of social prototypes, not to the nucleus of the super-ego, which corresponds to the introjected parental agency.

el antiguo principio de minima non curat praetor, que entre lo bueno y lo malo existe todo un amplio grupo de cosas pequeñas e indiferentes, de las que nadie debe hacerse un reproche.

As far as can be seen at present, the majority of phobias go back to an anxiety of this kind felt by the ego in regard to the demands of the libido. It is always the ego's attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed libido.

Lo mejor es siempre enemigo de lo bueno

In extreme cases the patient manages to make most of his symptoms acquire, in addition to their original meaning, a directly contrary one. This is a tribute to the power of ambivalence, which, for some unknown reason, plays such a large part in obsessional neuroses.

Sur] l'antisémitisme, je n'ai guère envie de chercher des explications, je ressens une forte inclination à m'abandonner à mes affects, et [suis] renforcé dans ma position [peu] scientifique par le fait que les hommes sont (...), en grande part, une misérable canaille.

I]t is very possible that what finds discharge in the generating of anxiety is precisely the surplus of unutilized libido. [...] This looks as though the ego were attempting to save itself from anxiety, which it has learned to keep in suspension for a while, and to bind it by the formation of symptoms.

This action undertaken to protect repression is observable in analytic treatment as resistance . Resistance presupposes the existence of what I have called anticathexis .

Love and work, work and love… that's all there is

Kita tidak bisa menghindari kesan bahwa manusia umumnya menggunakan standar yang keliru. Mereka mencari kekuatan, sukses, dan kekayaan untuk diri mereka sendiri, memuji diri mereka sendiri di hadapan orang lain dan mereka memandang rendah pada apa yang sebenarnya berharga dalam hidup.

All we need to do is to make a slight modification in our description of their determinant of anxiety, in the sense that it is no longer a matter of feeling the want of, or actually losing the object itself, but of losing the object's love. [...] it appears probable that, as a determinant of anxiety, loss of love plays much the same part in hysteria as the threat of castration does in phobias and fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

pues no soy ni esto ni lo otro, ni soy, en realidad, nada muy a fondo.

Con sólo temer a la mediocridad, ya se está a salvo: he aquí el consuelo que usted me ofrece. Mas yo le pregunto: ¿A salvo de qué? ¿No se estará a salvo en la certeza de no ser un mediocre? ¿Qué importa lo que uno teme o deja de temer? ¿Acaso lo más importante no es que las cosas sean efectivamente como tememos que sean?

Lo maravilloso del mundo reposa precisamente en esta multiplicidad de las posibilidades: lástima que sea un terreno tan poco sólido para conocernos a nosotros mismos.

The fact that anticathexis has an opposite direction in hysteria and the phobias from what it has in obsessional neurosis—though the distinction is not an absolute one—seems to be significant. It suggests that there is an intimate connection between repression and external anticathexis on the one hand and between regression and internal anticathexis (i.e. alteration of the ego through reaction-formation) on the other.