But since Freud still conceives the mind as a closed system, desires are not expelled but only hidden away.
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.
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.
As a scientific rationalist, Freud distrusts the manifest content of dreams.
Then, when the entire mass of these dream-thoughts is subject to the pressure of the dream-work, and the pieces are whirled about, broken up, and pushed up against one another, rather like ice-floes surging down a river, the question arises: what has become of the bonds of logic which had previously given the structure its form?
This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that.
One should not belittle the advantage that is enjoyed by a fairly small cultural circle, which is that it allows the aggressive drive an outlet in the form of hostility to outsiders. It is always possible to bind quite large numbers of people together in love, provided that others are left out as targets for aggression.
The communists think they have found the way to redeem mankind from evil. Man is equivocally good and well disposed to his neighbour, but his nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property... I can recognize the psychological presumption behind it as a baseless illusion. With the abolition of private property the human love of aggression is robbed of one of its tools, a strong one no doubt, but certainly not the strongest... Aggression was not created by property.
May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become ‘neurotic’?
The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.
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.
Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.
When people criticise me, I know how to defend myself. But I’m powerless in the face of praise.
They love their delusions as they love themselves.
Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.
It is plainly the case that children repeat everything in their play that has made a powerful impression on them, and that in so doing they abreact the intensity of the ecperience and make themselves so to speak master of the situation.
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.
In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual’s own intellectual operations, from the belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.
I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador... with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.
The state demands the utmost obedience and sacrifice of its citizens, but at the same time, it treats them as children through an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expression of opinion, which render the minds of those who are, thus, intellectually repressed, defenseless against every unfavorable situation, and every wild rumor.