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.
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
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.
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
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.
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.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
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.
If children could, if adults knew.
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.
In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.