In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.
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.
We are what we are because we have been what we have been.
The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.
Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
Love is a state of temporary psychosis.
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.
The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
History is just new people making old mistakes.
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.
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.
The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.
Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.
I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.
When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.
The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans. Certainly, a wild animal is cruel. But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.
When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.
Without love we fall ill.
Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.
Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
Not all men are worthy of love.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.
It is not attention that the child is seeking, but love.
The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.
That which we can't remember, we will repeat.
Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.
A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
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.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.
A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.
If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves
Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.
None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
The madman is a dreamer awake
Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.
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.
All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.
In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.
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!
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
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.
Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
All that matters is love and work.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
The goal of all life is death
We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
A strong egoism is a protection.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.
Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.
Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
Love and work, work and love...that's all there is.
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
If you can't do it, give up!
Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
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.
Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.
Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.
One is very crazy when in love.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
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.
Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.
A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
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.
We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.
A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador
Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.
I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.
Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.
What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?
We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.
There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind - separate from the conscious mind that is constantly at work molding our thought, feelings, and actions.
A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.
I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
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.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.
Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.
We must love or we grow ill.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
The ego is not master in its own house.
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.
A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.
Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.
The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
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.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.
Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
If youth knew; if age could.
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
Where id was, there ego shall be.
The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.
The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude.
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.
The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.
A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.
The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".
But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.
It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.
It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore.
When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.
The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]
As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.
When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.
Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
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.
One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.
The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
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.
The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.
I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity.
The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three...The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.
Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.
We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.
The world is no nursery.
Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.
In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.
The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.
When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.
At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.
Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself.
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.
It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.
Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too
Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.
Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
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 the external world.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.
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. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.
Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.
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.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. -- A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.
The unconscious - that is to say, the 'repressed' - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.
The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.
Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.
Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology.
It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.
If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?
No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.".
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
One... gets an impression that 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. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.
Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus's misadventure in discovering America.
[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.
I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
There are no mistakes.
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.
The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.
"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"
In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.
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.
America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
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.
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.
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.
The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.
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.
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.
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.
The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.
The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.
Now it is nothing but torture.
After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.
The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice — that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law.
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas(the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ...Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus...Rooms in dreams are usually women...Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing breidges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals.
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.
dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.
The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.
In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.
The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.
Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' . . . We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.
The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science.
The communal life of human beings had . . . a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.
These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.
As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.
We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.
The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.
I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.
In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of 'happiness': one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.
Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.
A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.
It almost looks like analysis were the third of those 'impossible' professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations.
We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.
Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively. . . .
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
A lady once expressed herself in society - the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!"
Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.
[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
Christmas is the alcoholidays
Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us O'er the world's tempestuous sea; Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us, For we have no help but Thee.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions.
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. 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.
Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.