We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.
Woman... what does she want?
An inability to meet the real demands of love is one of the essential characteristics of neurosis; the patients are dominated by the opposition of reality and fantasy. They will flee from what they long for most intensely in their fantasies if they encounter it in real life, and they are most likely to abandon themselves to fantasies when they no longer need to fear their realization.
The hypermnesia of dreams and their command of childhood material have become the two pillars on which our theory rests; our theory of dreams has ascribed to wishes deriving from childhood the part of indispensable moving-force in the formation of dreams.
All that is to live in endless song Must in life-time first be drown’d.
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.
We are alone in confronting a different state of affairs; as we see it, there is a new kind of psychical material intervening between the content of the dream and the results of our reflections: the latent dream-content reached by our procedure, or the dream-thoughts. It is from this latent content, not the manifest, that we worked out the solution to the dream.
This is why a new task faces us which did not exist before, the task of investigating the relationship of the manifest dream-content to the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing the processes by which the latter turned into the former.
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.
Most of the ‘pain’ we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself or may arouse painful anticipations in the psychic apparatus and is recognised by it as ’danger.
Everyone of us who can look back over a longer or shorter life experience will probably say that he might have spared himself many disappointments and painful surprises if he had found the courage and decision to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he made in his intercourse with people, and to consider them as indications of the intentions which were still being kept secret. As.
I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over.
Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two foremen in charge of the dream-work, and we may put the shaping of our dreams down mainly to their activity.
One must be humble, one must keep personal preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to discover the realities of the world.
Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid atmosphere of dream investigation.
We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love.
I was convinced, I added, that she would be better at once if her father said that he was sacrificing Frau K. to her health. I hoped that he would not be persuaded to do so, because then she would have seen what a strong weapon she had in her hands, and would certainly not shrink from exploiting all the possibilities of illness on every future occasion. However, if her father did not give in to her, I felt sure that she would not abandon her invalid status so easily.
The demons of animism were usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had more confidence in himself in those days than later on.
Another assumption is labelled ‘regression’, and here the reader encounters strange diagrams purporting to represent the direction of psychical energy within the mind.
Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.