Sigmund Freud Quotes & Sayings

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood. — Sigmund Freud

Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world). — Sigmund Freud

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken. — Sigmund Freud

Our first answer must be that the dream has no means at its disposal among the dream-thoughts of representing these logical relations. Mostly it disregards all these terms and takes over only the factual substance of the dream-thoughts to work upon. It is left to the interpretation of the dream to re-establish the connections which the dream-work has destroyed. This inability to express such relations must be due to the nature of the psychical material which goes to make the dream. After all, the fine arts, painting and sculpture, are subject to a similar limitation in comparison with literature, which can make use of speech. Here too the cause of the incapacity lies in the material which both arts use as their medium of expression. — Sigmund Freud

The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on ... Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! — Sigmund Freud

The process of dreaming transfers psychical intensity from what is important, but also objectionable, onto what is insignificant. — Sigmund Freud

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it. — Sigmund Freud

Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people's envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. — 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. — Sigmund Freud

The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression. — Sigmund Freud

In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. Unheimlich is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of heimlich, and not of the second. [...] On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. — Sigmund Freud

There is only one state- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact. — Sigmund Freud

I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us. — Sigmund Freud

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. — Sigmund Freud

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. — Sigmund Freud

At first this gives the impression that the psychical intensity7 of the particular ideas was not taken into consideration at all in their selection for the dream, but only the varying nature and degree of their determination. — Sigmund Freud

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. — Sigmund Freud

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion. — Sigmund Freud

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously. — Sigmund Freud

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister. — Sigmund Freud

It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement. — Sigmund Freud

History is just new people making old mistakes. — Sigmund Freud

Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams. — Sigmund Freud

Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis — Sigmund Freud

And, finally, groups have never thirsted after
truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence
over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced
by what is untrue as by what is true. They
have an evident tendency not to distinguish between
the two. — Sigmund Freud

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life. — Sigmund Freud

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life. — Sigmund Freud

The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. — Sigmund Freud

And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: We are what we are because we have been what we have been. — Sigmund Freud

The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. — Sigmund Freud

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter. — Sigmund Freud

Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know. — Sigmund Freud

If we thus recognise
that the aim is to equip the group with the
attributes of the individual, we shall be reminded
of a valuable remark of Trotter's, to the effect that
the tendency towards the formation of groups is biologically
a continuation of the multicellular character
of all the higher organisms. — Sigmund Freud

It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being. — Sigmund Freud

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. — Sigmund Freud

A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. — Sigmund Freud

Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war. — Sigmund Freud

The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now. — Sigmund Freud

"He sido un hombre afortunado en la vida, nada me ha sido facil." "I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easy" — Sigmund Freud

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life. — Sigmund Freud

Public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self. — Sigmund Freud

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other. — Sigmund Freud

Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature. — Sigmund Freud

The idea of men's receiving an intimation of their connection with the world around them through an immediate feeling which is from the outset directed to that purpose sounds so strange and fits in so badly with the fabric of our psychology that one is justified in attempting to discover a psycho-analytic - that is, a genetic - explanation of such a feeling. — Sigmund Freud

Now it is nothing but torture. — Sigmund Freud

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization. — Sigmund Freud

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. — Sigmund Freud

His understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential- - popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism - while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature (Kafka), film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. Source: Wikipedia — Sigmund Freud

Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it. — Sigmund Freud

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content lie before us like two versions of the same content in two different languages, or rather, the dream-content looks to us like a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, and we are supposed to get to know its signs and laws of grammatical construction by comparing the original and the translation. — Sigmund Freud

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within. — Sigmund Freud

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality ... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment. — Sigmund Freud

The same diversity in their ways of formation and the same rules for its solution hold good also for the innumerable medley of dream contents, examples of which I need scarcely adduce. Their strangeness quite disappears when we resolve not to place them on a level with the objects of perception as known to us when awake, but to remember that they represent the art of dream condensation by an exclusion of unnecessary detail. — Sigmund Freud

None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality. — Sigmund Freud

The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young
a human activity which developed late. — Sigmund Freud

All that matters is love and work. — Sigmund Freud

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. — Sigmund Freud

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure. — Sigmund Freud

Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism. — Sigmund Freud

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new. — Sigmund Freud

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces — Sigmund Freud

At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory. — Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love. — Sigmund Freud

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future. — Sigmund Freud

The words for much that remains mute in me — Sigmund Freud

Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves. — Sigmund Freud

The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own. — Sigmund Freud

A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world. — Sigmund Freud

dream is the dreamer's own psychical act. — Sigmund Freud

We must love or we grow ill. — Sigmund Freud

A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead! — Sigmund Freud

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends. — Sigmund Freud

Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person. — Sigmund Freud

Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken. — Sigmund Freud

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. — Sigmund Freud

A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love. — Sigmund Freud

What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm. — Sigmund Freud

When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it. — Sigmund Freud

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious. — Sigmund Freud

Not all men are worthy of love. — Sigmund Freud

Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression. — Sigmund Freud

I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness. — Sigmund Freud

I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. — Sigmund Freud

Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge. — Sigmund Freud

Where id is, there shall ego be — Sigmund Freud

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. — Sigmund Freud

If this is what happens, then a transference and displacement of the psychical intensity of the individual elements has taken place; as a consequence, the difference between the texts of the dream-content and the dream-thoughts makes its appearance. — Sigmund Freud

Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. — Sigmund Freud

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. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts. — Sigmund Freud

The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex. — Sigmund Freud

In such a case a person would hear of something new which, on the ground of certain evidence, he is asked to accept as true; yet it contradicts many of his wishes and offends some of his highly treasured convictions. He will then hesitate, look for arguments to cast doubt on the new material, and so will struggle for a while until at last he admits it himself: " all this is true after all, although I find it hard to accept and it is painful to have to believe in it." All we learn from this process is that it needs time for the intellectual work of the Ego to overcome objections that are invested by strong feelings. — Sigmund Freud

Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says. — Sigmund Freud

Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. — Sigmund Freud

The way in which these factors - displacement, condensation, and over-determination - interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries. — Sigmund Freud

They love their delusions as they love themselves. — Sigmund Freud

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

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock. — Sigmund Freud

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 — Sigmund Freud

Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity. — Sigmund Freud

For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future. — Sigmund Freud