I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.
Analytic experience has taught us that the better is always the enemy of the good and that in every phase of the patient’s recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution.
It has occurred to me that the ultimate basis of man’s need for religion is infantile helplessness, which is so much greater in man than in animals. After infancy he cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for him a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsifications he could have imagined.
The patients cannot themselves bring all their conflicts into the transference; nor is the analyst able to call out all their possible instinctual conflicts from the transference situation.
The reaction to these claims of impulse and these threats of danger, a reaction in which the real activity of the psychic apparatus is manifested, may be guided correctly by the pleasure-principle or by the reality-principle which modifies this.
The details of the process by which repression changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of ‘pain’ are not yet fully understood, or are not yet capable of clear presentation, but it is certain that all neurotic ‘pain’ is of this kind, is pleasure which cannot be experienced as such.
The act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the purpose of the most intimate union.
The only person with whom you have to compare yourself is you in the past.
The profound obscurity of the background of our ignorance is scarcely illuminated by a few glimmers of insight.
But even so, one can just as well hold God responsible for the existence of the devil as for the evil he personifies.
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.
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. And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.
Nevertheless several things might be said in criticism of his disappointment. Strictly speaking it is not justified, for it consists in the destruction of an illusion. 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.
Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world.
The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.
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.
We never lose what we really want.
Children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.
What one forgets once he will often forget again.
Friendship is an art of keeping distance while love is an art of intimacy...