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”.
Love and work, work and love... that’s all there is.
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.
That which we can’t remember, we will repeat.
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.
Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man’s turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.
Our fascination with gold is related to the fantasies of early childhood.
I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.
The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
It often seems that the poet’s derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.
Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.
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.
Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
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.
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.
Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
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.
Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.