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But One Thing About Human Beings Puzzles Me The Most Is Their Conscious Effort To Be Connected With The Object Of Their Affection Even If It Kills Them Slowly Within.

-Sigmund Freud

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Sigmund Freud

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But One Thing About Human Beings Puzzles Me The Most Is Their Conscious Effort To Be Connected With The Object Of Their Affection Even If It Kills Them Slowly Within.

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Loneliness And Darkness Have Just Robbed Me Of My Valuables.

Psycho-analysis Has Taught Us That A Boy's Earliest Choice Of Objects For His Love Is Incestuous And That Those Objects Are Forbidden Ones - His Mother And His Sister. We Have Learnt, Too, The Manner In Which, As He Grows Up, He Liberates Himself From This Incestuous Attraction. A Neurotic, On The Other Hand, Invariably Exhibits Some Degree Of Psychical Infantilism. He Has Either Failed To Get Free From The Psychosexual Conditions That Prevailed In His Childhood Or He Has Returned To Them - Two Possibilities Which May Be Summed Up As Developmental Inhibition And Regression.

The Whole Thing [religion] Is So Patently Infantile, So Foreign To Reality, That To Anyone With A Friendly Attitude To Humanity It Is Painful To Think That The Great Majority Of Mortals Will Never Be Able To Rise Above This View Of Life.

A Layman Will No Doubt Find It Hard To Understand How Pathological Disorders Of The Body And Mind Can Be Eliminated By 'mere' Words. He Will Feel That He Is Being Asked To Believe In Magic. And He Will Not Be So Very Wrong, For The Words Which We Use In Our Everyday Speech Are Nothing Other Than Watered-down Magic. But We Shall Have To Follow A Roundabout Path In Order To Explain How Science Sets About Restoring To Words A Part At Least Of Their Former Magical Power.

One Must Not Be Mean With The Affections; What Is Spent Of The Fund Is Renewed In The Spending Itself.

In General People Experience Their Present Naively, As It Were, Without Being Able To Form An Estimate Of Its Contents; They Have First To Put Themselves At A Distance From It - The Present, That Is To Say, Must Have Become The Past - Before It Can Yield Points Of Vantage From Which To Judge The Future.

There Is To My Mind No Doubt That The Concept Of Beautiful Had Its Roots In Sexual Excitation And That Its Original Meaning Was Sexually Stimulating.

It Is No Wonder If, Under The Pressure Of These Possibilities Of Suffering, Men Are Accustomed To Moderate Their Claims To Happiness - Just As The Pleasure Principle Itself, Indeed, Under The Influence Of The External World, Changed Into The More Modest Reality Principle -, If A Man Thinks Himself Happy Merely To Have Escaped Unhappiness Or To Have Survived His Suffering, And If In General The Task Of Avoiding Suffering Pushes That Of Obtaining Pleasure Into The Background.

Where Questions Of Religion Are Concerned, People Are Guilty Of Every Possible Sort Of Dishonesty And Intellectual Misdemeanor.

The News That Reaches Your Consciousness Is Incomplete And Often Not To Be Relied On.... Turn Your Eyes Inward, Look Into Your Own Depths, Learn First To Know Yourself!

Men Are More Moral Than They Think And Far More Immoral Than They Can Imagine.

No Other Technique For The Conduct Of Life Attaches The Individual So Firmly To Reality As Laying Emphasis On Work; For His Work At Least Gives Him A Secure Place In A Portion Of Reality, In The Human Community. The Possibility It Offers Of Displacing A Large Amount Of Libidinal Components, Whether Narcissistic, Aggressive Or Even Erotic, On To Professional Work And On To The Human Relations Connected With It Lends It A Value By No Means Second To What It Enjoys As Something Indispensable To The Preservation And Justification Of Existence In Society.

Humor Is A Means Of Obtaining Pleasure In Spite Of The Distressing Effects That Interface With It.

I Have Found Little 'good' About Human Beings. In My Experience, Most Of Them Are Trash.

To Be Sure, The Ancient Belief That The Dream Reveals The Future Is Not Entirely Devoid Of Truth. By Representing To Us A Wish As Fulfilled The Dream Certainly Leads Us Into The Future; But This Future, Taken By The Dreamer As Present, Has Been Formed Into The Likeness Of That Past By The Indestructible Wish.

My Boy! Smoking Is One Of The Greatest And Cheapest Enjoyments In Life, And If You Decide In Advance Not To Smoke, I Can Only Feel Sorry For You.

One Thing Only Do I Know For Certain And That Is That Man's Judgments Of Value Follow Directly His Wishes For Happiness-that, Accordingly, They Are An Attempt To Support His Illusions With Arguments. [p.111]

Conservatism, However, Is Too Often A Welcome Excuse For Lazy Minds, Loath To Adapt Themselves To Fast Changing Conditions.

Neurotics Complain Of Their Illness, But They Make The Most Of It, And When It Comes To Taking It Away From Them They Will Defend It Like A Lioness Her Young.

I Had The Greatest Respect For The Authorities Of My Day--until I Studied Things For Myself, And Came To My Own Conclusions.

If Youth Knew; If Age Could.

Dreams Are The Royal Road To The Unconscious.

Life As We Find It Is Too Hard For Us; It Entails Too Much Pain, Too Many Disappointments, Impossible Tasks. We Cannot Do Without Palliative Remedies.

Creativity Is An Attempt To Resolve A Conflict Generated By Unexpressed Biological Impulses, Such That Unfulfilled Desires Are The Driving Force Of The Imagination, And They Fuel Our Dreams And Daydreams.

"he Sido Un Hombre Afortunado En La Vida, Nada Me Ha Sido Facil." "i've Been A Fortunate Man In Life, Nothing Has Come Easy"

The Pleasure Of Satisfying A Savage Instinct, Undomesticated By The Ego, Is Uncomparably Much More Intense Than The One Of Satisfying A Tamed Instinct. The Reason Is Becoming The Enemy That Prevents Us From A Lot Of Possibilities Of Pleasure.

Religion Restricts The Play Of Choice And Adaptation, Since It Imposes Equally On Everyone Its Own Path To The Acquisition Of Happiness And Protection From Suffering. Its Technique Consists In Depressing The Value Of Life And Distorting The Picture Of The Real World In A Delusional Manner - Which Presupposes An Intimidation Of The Intelligence. At This Price, By Forcibly Fixing Them In A State Of Psychical Infantilism And By Drawing Them Into A Mass-delusion, Religion Succeeds In Sparing Many People An Individual Neurosis. But Hardly Anything More.

When A Man Has Once Brought Himself To Accept Uncritically All The Absurdities That Religious Doctrines Put Before Him And Even To Overlook The Contradictions Between Them, We Need Not Be Greatly Suprised At The Weakness Of His Intellect.

Psychiatry Is The Art Of Teaching People How To Stand On Their Own Feet While Reclining On Couches.

I Do Not In The Least Underestimate Bisexuality... I Expect It To Provide All Further Enlightenment.

The Ego Is First And Foremost A Bodily Ego; It Is Not Merely A Surface Entity, But Is Itself The Projection Of A Surface. If We Wish To Find An Anatomical Analogy For It We Can Best Identify It With The 'cortical Homunculus' Of The Anatomists, Which Stands On Its Head In The Cortex, Sticks Up Its Heels, Faces

The Behavior Of A Human Being In Sexual Matters Is Often A Prototype For The Whole Of His Other Modes Of Reaction In Life.

There Is No Doubt That The Resistance Of The Conscious And Unconscious Ego Operates Under The Sway Of The Pleasure Principle: It Seeks To Avoid The Unpleasure Which Would Be Produced By The Liberation Of The Repressed.

One Day, In Retrospect, The Years Of Struggle Will Strike You As The Most Beautiful.

Where Id Was, There Ego Shall Be.

Adolescent Stage In The Development Of The Human Race From Which Humanity Should Free Itself.

Obviously One Must Hold Oneself Responsible For The Evil Impulses Of One's Dreams. In What Other Way Can One Deal With Them? Unless The Content Of The Dream Rightly Understood Is Inspired By Alien Spirits, It Is Part Of My Own Being.

We Have Become Convinced That It Is Better To Avoid Such Symbolic Disguisings Of The Truth In What We Tell Children And Not To Withhold From Them A Knowledge Of The True State Of Affairs Commensurate With Their Intellectual Level.

Only A Good-for-nothing Is Not Interested In His Past.

Where They Love They Do Not Desire And Where They Desire They Do Not Love.

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.

In So Doing, The Idea Forces Itself Upon Him That Religion Is Comparable To A Childhood Neurosis, And He Is Optimistic Enough To Suppose That Mankind Will Surmount This Neurotic Phase, Just As So Many Children Grow Out Of Their Similar Neurosis.

Our Knowledge Of The Historical Worth Of Certain Religious Doctrines Increases Our Respect For Them, But Does Not Invalidate Our Proposal That They Should Cease To Be Put Forward As The Reasons For The Precepts Of Civilization. On The Contrary! Those Historical Residues Have Helped Us To View Religious Teachings, As It Were, As Neurotic Relics, And We May Now Argue That The Time Has Probably Come, As It Does In An Analytic Treatment, For Replacing The Effects Of Repression By The Results Of The Rational Operation Of The Intellect.

Pathology Has Made Us Acquainted With A Great Number Of States In Which The Boundary Lines Between The Ego And The External World Become Uncertain Or In Which They Are Actually Drawn Incorrectly. There Are Cases In Which Parts Of A Person's Own Body, Even Portions Of His Own Mental Life - His Perceptions, Thoughts And Feelings -, Appear Alien To Him And As Not Belonging To His Ego; There Are Other Cases In Which He Ascribes To The External World Things That Clearly Originate In His Own Ego And That Ought To Be Acknowledged By It.

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.

Poets Are Masters Of Us Ordinary Men, In Knowledge Of The Mind, Because They Drink At Streams Which We Have Not Yet Made Accessible To Science.

In The Long Run, Nothing Can Withstand Reason And Experience, And The Contradiction Religion Offers To Both Is Palpable.

Being Entirely Honest With Oneself Is A Good Exercise.

In The Theory Of Psycho-analysis We Have No Hesitation In Assuming That The Course Taken By Mental Events Is Automatically Regulated By The Pleasure Principle. We Believe, That Is To Say, That The Course Of Those Events Is Invariably Set In Motion By An Unpleasurable Tension, And That It Takes A Direction Such That Its Final Outcome Coincides With A Lowering Of That Tension That Is, With An Avoidance Of Unpleasure Or A Production Of Pleasure.

Civilization Runs A Greater Risk If We Maintain Our Present Attitude To Religion Than If We Give It Up.

The Poor Ego Has A Still Harder Time Of It; It Has To Serve Three Harsh Masters, And It Has To Do Its Best To Reconcile The Claims And Demands Of All Three...the Three Tyrants Are The External World, The Superego, And The Id.

But One Thing About Human Beings Puzzles Me The Most Is Their Conscious Effort To Be Connected With The Object Of Their Affection Even If It Kills Them Slowly Within.

The Wish To Be Able To Fly Is To Be Understood As Nothing Else Than A Longing To Be Capable Of Sexual Performance.

It Must Be Pointed Out, However, That Strictly Speaking It Is Incorrect To Talk Of The Dominance Of The Pleasure Principle Over The Course Of Mental Processes. If Such A Dominance Existed, The Immense Majority Of Our Mental Processes Would Have To Be Accompanied By Pleasure Or To Lead To Pleasure, Whereas Universal Experience Completely Contradicts Any Such Conclusion.

Taboo Restrictions Are Distinct From Religious Or Moral Prohibitions. They Are Not Based Upon Any Divine Ordinance, But May Be Said To Impose Themselves On Their Own Account. They Differ From Moral Prohibitions In That They Fall Into No System That Declares Quite Generally That Certain Abstinences Must Be Observed And Gives Reasons For That Necessity.

Men Have Gained Control Over The Forces Of Nature To Such An Extent That With Their Help They Would Have No Difficulty Exterminating One Another To The Last Man. They Know This, And Hence Comes A Large Part Of Their Current Unrest, Their Unhappiness And Their Mood Of Anxiety.

Yes, America Is Gigantic, But A Gigantic Mistake.

Properly Speaking, The Unconscious Is The Real Psychic; Its Inner Nature Is Just As Unknown To Us As The Reality Of The External World, And It Is Just As Imperfectly Reported To Us Through The Data Of Consciousness As Is The External World Through The Indications Of Our Sensory Organs.

Desire Presses Ever Forward Unsubdued.

The Whole Life Of Instinct Serves The One End Of Bringing About Death.

Not To Know The Past Is To Be In Bondage To It, While To Remember, To Know, Is To Be Set Free.

Religion Is The Process Of Unconscious Wish Fulfillment, Where, For Certain People, If The Process Did Not Take Place It Would Put Them In Self-danger Of Coming To Mental Harm, Being Unable To Cope With The Idea Of A Godless, Purposeless Life.

After All, We Did Not Invent Symbolism; It Is A Universal Age-old Activity Of The Human Imagination.

Religion [is] The Universal Obsessional Neurosis Of Humanity

Words Have A Magical Power. They Can Bring Either The Greatest Happiness Or Deepest Despair; They Can Transfer Knowledge From Teacher To Student; Words Enable The Orator To Sway His Audience And Dictate Its Decisions. Words Are Capable Of Arousing The Strongest Emotions And Prompting All Men's Actions.

Sexuality Is The Key To The Problem Of The Psychoneuroses And Of The Neuroses In General. No One Who Disdains The Key Will Ever Be Able To Unlock The Door.

The Virtuous Man Contents Himself With Dreaming That Which The Wicked Man Does In Actual Life.

Religion Is An Illusion And It Derives Its Strength From The Fact That It Falls In With Our Instinctual Desires.

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.

The Madman Is A Dreamer Awake

You Can Always Make A Lot Of People Love One Another So Long As There Are A Smaller Number Outside The Group For Them To Kick.

America Is The Most Grandiose Experiment The World Has Seen, But, I Am Afraid, It Is Not Going To Be A Success.

What Good To Us Is A Long Life If It Is Difficult And Barren Of Joys, And If It Is So Full Of Misery That We Can Only Welcome Death As A Deliverer?

Neurosis Is The Result Of A Conflict Between The Ego And Its Id, Whereas Psychosis Is The Analogous Outcome Of A Similar Disturbance In The Relation Between The Ego And The External World.

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.

A Piece Of Creative Writing, Like A Day-dream, Is A Continuation Of, And A Substitute For, What Was Once The Play Of Childhood.

The Dream Acts As A Safety-valve For The Over-burdened Brain.

Most People Do Not Really Want Freedom, Because Freedom Involves Responsibility, And Most People Are Frightened Of Responsibility.

The Dream Is The Liberation Of The Spirit From The Pressure Of External Nature, A Detachment Of The Soul From The Fetters Of Matter.

The Pleasure Principle Long Persists, However, As The Method Of Working Employed By The Sexual Instincts, Which Are So Hard To 'educate', And, Starting From Those Instincts, Or In The Ego Itself, It Often Succeeds In Overcoming The Reality Principle, To The Detriment Of The Organism As A Whole.

The Interpretation Of Dreams Is The Royal Road To A Knowledge Of The Unconscious Activities Of The Mind.

Collective Unconscious

Against The Suffering Which May Come Upon One From Human Relationships The Readiest Safeguard Is Voluntary Isolation, Keeping Oneself Aloof From Other People. The Happiness Which Can Be Achieved Along This Path Is, As We See, The Happiness Of Quietness. Against The Dreaded External World One Can Only Defend Oneself By Some Kind Of Turning Away From It, If One Intends To Solve The Task By Oneself.

We Must Not Allow Ourselves To Be Deflected By The Feminists Who Are Anxious To Force Us To Regard The Two Sexes As Completely Equal In Position And Worth.

The Effect Of The Consolations Of Religion May Be Compared To That Of A Narcotic.

The Goal Of All Life Is Death

Dogs Love Their Friends And Bite Their Enemies, Quite Unlike People, Who Are Incapable Of Pure Love And Always Have To Mix Love And Hate.

The Paranoid Is Never Entirely Mistaken.

At Bottom God Is Nothing More Than An Exalted Father.

Once Again, Only Religion Can Answer The Question Of The Purpose Of Life. One Can Hardly Be Wrong In Concluding That The Idea Of Life Having A Purpose Stands And Falls With The Religious System.

When A Love-relationship Is At Its Height There Is No Room Left For Any Interest In The Environment; A Pair Of Lovers Are Sufficient To Themselves

Love Relationship

At First The Analysing Physician Could Do No More Than Discover The Unconscious Material That Was Concealed From The Patient, Put It Together, And, At The Right Moment, Communicate It To Him. Psychoanalysis Was Then First And Foremost An Art Of Interpreting. Since This Did Not Solve The Therapeutic Problem, A Further Aim Quickly Came In View: To Oblige The Patient To Confirm The Analyst's Construction From His Own Memory.

Words Have A Magical Power. They Can Either Bring The Greatest Happiness Or The Deepest Despair.

Dream Is The Dreamer's Own Psychical Act.

Our Fascination With Gold Is Related To The Fantasies Of Early Childhood.

The First Human Who Hurled An Insult Instead Of A Stone Was The Founder Of Civilization.

If Children Could, If Adults Knew.

Even If All Parts Of A Problem Seem To Fit Together Like The Pieces Of A Jigsaw Puzzle, One Has To Remember That The Probable Need Not Necessarily Be The Truth And The Truth Not Always Probable.

But The Repressed Merges Into The Id As Well, And Is Merely A Part Of It. The Repressed Is Only Cut Off Sharply From The Ego By The Resistances Of Repression; It Can Communicate With The Ego Through The Id.

What Progress We Are Making. In The Middle Ages They Would Have Burned Me. Now They Are Content With Burning My Books.

Flowers Are Restful To Look At. They Have Neither Emotions Nor Conflicts.

Inspirational Life

It Is Always Possible To Bind Together A Considerable Number Of People In Love, So Long As There Are Other People Left Over To Receive The Manifestations Of Their Aggressiveness.

The Irish Are The One Race For Which Psychoanalysis Is Of No Use Whatsoever... Because They Already Live In A Dream World.

The Individual Does Actually Carry On A Double Existence: One Designed To Serve His Own Purposes And Another As A Link In A Chain, In Which He Serves Against, Or At Any Rate Without, Any Volition Of His Own.

In Almost Every Place Where We Find Totems We Also Find A Law Against Persons Of The Same Totem Having Sexual Relations With One Another And Consequently Against Their Marrying. This, Then, Is 'exogamy', An Institution Related To Totemism.

A Hero Is A Man Who Stands Up Manfully Against His Father And In The End Victoriously Overcomes Him.

No, Our Science Is No Illusion. But An Illusion It Would Be To Suppose That What Science Cannot Give Us We Can Get Elsewhere.

Homosexuality Is Assuredly No Advantage, But It Is Nothing To Be Ashamed Of, No Vice, No Degradation, It Cannot Be Classified As An Illness.

It Might Be Said Of Psychoanalysis That If You Give It Your Little Finger It Will Soon Have Your Whole Hand.

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.

Out Of Your Vulnerabilities Will Come Your Strength.

The Assumption That Everything Past Is Preserved Holds Good Even In Mental Life Only On Condition That The Organ Of The Mind Has Remained Intact And That Its Tissues Have Not Been Damaged By Trauma Or Inflammation. But Destructive Influences Which Can Be Compared To Causes Of Illness Like These Are Never Lacking In The History Of A City, Even If It Has Had A Less Chequered Past Than Rome, And Even If, Like London, It Has Hardly Ever Suffered From The Visitations Of An Enemy.

It Almost Looks Like Analysis Were The Third Of Those 'impossible' Professions In Which One Can Be Quite Sure Of Unsatisfying Results. The Other Two, Much Older-established, Are The Bringing Up Of Children And The Government Of Nations.

I Think That In General It Is A Good Plan Occasionally To Bear In Mind The Fact That People Were In The Habit Of Dreaming Before There Was Such A Thing As Psychoanalysis.

The Price Of Civilization Is Instinctual Renunciation.

We Are Never So Defensless Against Suffering As When We Love.

The Division Of The Psychical Into What Is Conscious And What Is Unconscious Is The Fundamental Premise Of Psycho-analysis; And It Alone Makes It Possible For Psycho-analysis To Understand The Pathological Processes In Mental Life, Which Are As Common As They Are Important, And To Find A Place For Them In The Framework Of Science.

The Meager Satisfaction That Man Can Extract From Reality Leaves Him Starving.

Crystals Reveal Their Hidden Structures Only When Broken.

Love Is A State Of Temporary Psychosis.

As Everyone Knows, The Ancients Before Aristotle Did Not Consider The Dream A Product Of The Dreaming Mind, But A Divine Inspiration, And In Ancient Times The Two Antagonistic Streams, Which One Finds Throughout In The Estimates Of Dream Life, Were Already Noticeable. They Distinguished Between True And Valuable Dreams, Sent To The Dreamer To Warn Him Or To Foretell The Future, And Vain, Fraudulent, And Empty Dreams, The Object Of Which Was To Misguide Or Lead Him To Destruction.

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.

I Do Not Think Our Successes Can Compete With Those Of Lourdes. There Are So Many More People Who Believe In The Miracles Of The Blessed Virgin Than In The Existence Of The Unconscious.

Writers Write For Fame, Wealth, Power And The Love Of Women.

Men Are Strong So Long As They Represent A Strong Idea They Become Powerless When They Oppose It.

Civilized Society Is Perpetually Menaced With Disintegration Through This Primary Hostility Of Men Towards One Another.

The Ego Represents What We Call Reason And Sanity, In Contrast To The Id Which Contains The Passions.

A Woman Should Soften But Not Weaken A Man.

I Cannot Face The Idea Of Life Without Work. What Would One Do When Ideas Failed Or Words Refused To Come? It Is Impossible Not To Shudder At The Thought.

The Most Complicated Achievements Of Thought Are Possible Without The Assistance Of Consciousness.

If You Want Your Wife To Listen To You, Then Talk To Another Woman; She Will Be All Ears.

The Analytic Psychotherapist Thus Has A Threefold Battle To Wage -- In His Own Mind Against The Forces Which Seek To Drag Him Down From The Analytic Level; Outside The Analysis, Against Opponents Who Dispute The Importance He Attaches To The Sexual Instinctual Forces And Hinder Him From Making Use Of Them In His Scientific Technique; And Inside The Analysis, Against His Patients, Who At First Behave Like Opponents But Later On Reveal The Overvaluation Of Sexual Life Which Dominates Them, And Who Try To Make Him Captive To Their Socially Untamed Passion.

The Reproaches Against Science For Not Having Yet Solved The Problems Of The Universe Are Exaggerated In An Unjust And Malicious Manner; It Has Truly Not Had Time Enough Yet For These Great Achievements. Science Is Very Young--a Human Activity Which Developed Late.

No Neurotic Harbors Thoughts Of Suicide Which Are Not Murderous Impulses Against Others Redirected Upon Himself.

I've Been A Fortunate Man In Life, Nothing Has Come Easily.

Inspirational Life

When We Attempt To Imagine Death, We Perceive Ourselves As Spectators.

When The Wayfarer Whistles In The Dark, He May Be Disavowing His Timidity, But He Does Not See Any The More Clearly For Doing So.

Smoking Is Indispensable If One Has Nothing To Kiss.

Everywhere I Go I Find That A Poet Has Been There Before Me.

Poetry By Famous Poets

We Find A Place For What We Lose. Although We Know That After Such A Loss The Acute Stage Of Mourning Will Subside, We Also Know That We Shall Remain Inconsolable And Will Never Find A Substitute. No Matter What May Fill The Gap, Even If It Be Filled Completely, It Nevertheless Remains Something Else.

The Dream Unites The Grossest Contradictions, Permits Impossibilities, Sets Aside The Knowledge That Influences Us By Day, And Exposes Us As Ethically And Morally Obtuse.

I Regard Myself As One Of The Most Dangerous Enemies Of Religion

I Have Never Doubted That Religious Phenomena Are Only To Be Understood On The Pattern Of The Individual Neurotic Symptoms Familiar To Us.

I Cannot Face With Comfort The Idea Of Life Without Work; Work And The Free Play Of The Imagination Are For Me The Same Thing, I Take No Pleasure In Anything Else.

One Might Compare The Relation Of The Ego To The Id With That Between A Rider And His Horse. The Horse Provides The Locomotor Energy, And The Rider Has The Prerogative Of Determining The Goal And Of Guiding The Movements Of His Powerful Mount Towards It. But All Too Often In The Relations Between The Ego And The Id We Find A Picture Of The Less Ideal Situation In Which The Rider Is Obliged To Guide His Horse In The Direction In Which It Itself Wants To Go.

It Could Be Ventured To Understand Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis As The Pathological Counterpart Of Religious Development, To Define Neurosis As An Individual Religiosity; To Define Religion As A Universal Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis.

Obsessive Compulsive

A Belligerent State Permits Itself Every Such Misdeed, Every Such Act Of Violence, As Would Disgrace The Individual.

Religious Illusion Must Bow To Scientific Truth. It Is In Total Error About The Nature Of The True World. Only Science Is Not An Illusion.

Religious Ideas Have Sprung From The Same Need As All The Other Achievements Of Culture: From The Necessity For Defending Itself Against The Crushing Supremacy Of Nature.

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.

We Know Less About The Sexual Life Of Little Girls Than Of Boys. But We Need Not Feel Ashamed Of This Distinction; After All, The Sexual Life Of Adult Women Is A 'dark Continent' For Psychology.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother.

These [religious Ideas] Are Given Out As Teachings, Are Not Precipitates Of Experience Or End-results Of Thinking: They Are Illusions, Fullfilments Of The Oldest, Strongest And Most Urgent Wishes Of Mankind.

There Is An Intellectual Function In Us Which Demands Unity, Connection And Intelligibility From Any Material, Whether Of Perception Or Thought, That Comes Within Its Grasp; And If, As A Result Of Special Circumstances, It Is Unable To Establish A True Connection, It Does Not Hesitate To Fabricate A False One.

The Expectation That Every Neurotic Phenomenon Can Be Cured May, I Suspect, Be Derived From The Layman's Belief That The Neuroses Are Something Quite Unnecessary Which Have No Right Whatever To Exist. Whereas In Fact They Are Severe, Constitutionally Fixed Illnesses, Which Rarely Restrict Themselves To Only A Few Attacks But Persist As A Rule Over Long Periods Throughout Life.

All Giving Is Asking, And All Asking Is An Asking For Love.

The Psychic Development Of The Individual Is A Short Repetition Of The Course Of Development Of The Race.

The Game Replaces Sexual Enjoyment By Pleasure In Movement.

One Feels Inclined To Say That The Intention That Man Should Be 'happy' Is Not Included In The Plan Of Creation.' . . . We Are So Made That We Can Derive Intense Enjoyment Only From A Contrast And Very Little From A State Of Things.

The Transformation Of Object-libido Into Narcissistic Libido Which Thus Takes Place Obviously Implies An Abandonment Of Sexual Aims, A Desexualization - A Kind Of Sublimation, Therefore.

Whatever Fosters The Growth Of Civilization Works At The Same Time Against War.

I Had Thought About Cocaine In A Kind Of Day-dream.

If All The Evidence Put Forward For The Authenticity Of Religious Teachings Originates In The Past, It Is Natural To Look Round And See Whether The Present, About Which It Is Easier To Form Judgements, May Not Also Be Able To Furnish Evidence Of The Sort. If By This Means We Could Succeed In Clearing Even A Single Portion Of The Religious System From Doubt, The Whole Of It Would Gain Enormously In Credibility.

I Consider It A Good Rule For Letter-writing To Leave Unmentioned What The Recipient Already Knows, And Instead Tell Him Something New.

The Very Emphasis Of The Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill, Makes It Certain That We Are Descended From An Endlessly Long Chain Of Generations Of Murderers, Whose Love Of Murder Was In Their Blood As It Is Perhaps Also In Ours.

Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar.

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.

Just As A Satisfaction Of Instinct Spells Happiness For Us, So Severe Suffering Is Caused Us If The External World Lets Us Starve, If It Refuses To Sate Our Needs. One May Therefore Hope To Be Freed From A Part Of One's Sufferings By Influencing The Instinctual Impulses.

The Great Question That Has Never Been Answered, And Which I Have Not Yet Been Able To Answer, Despite My Thirty Years Of Research Into The Feminine Soul, Is 'what Does A Woman Want?'

The Genitals Themselves Have Not Undergone The Development Of The Rest Of The Human Form In The Direction Of Beauty.

Indeed, The Great Leonardo (da Vinci) Remained Like A Child For The Whole Of His Life In More Than One Way. It Is Said That All Great Men Are Bound To Retain Some Infantile Part. Even As An Adult He Continued To Play, And This Was Another Reason Why He Often Appeared Uncanny And Incomprehensible To His Contemporaries.

We Must Love Or We Grow Ill.

The Facts Which Have Caused Us To Believe In The Dominance Of The Pleasure Principle In Mental Life Also Find Expression In The Hypothesis That The Mental Apparatus Endeavours To Keep The Quantity Of Excitation Present In It As Low As Possible Or At Least To Keep It Constant.

Religion Is An Attempt To Get Control Over The Sensory World, In Which We Are Placed, By Means Of The Wish-world Which We Have Developed Inside Us As A Result Of Biological And Psychological Necessites.

When We Share - That Is Poetry In The Prose Of Life.

We Are So Made That We Can Derive Intense Enjoyment Only From A Contrast.

All That Matters Is Love And Work.

The Ego Refuses To Be Distressed By The Provocations Of Reality, To Let Itself Be Compelled To Suffer. It Insists That It Cannot Be Affected By The Traumas Of The External World; It Shows, In Fact, That Such Traumas Are No More Than Occasions For It To Gain Pleasure.

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.

The Only Shame In Masturbation Is The Shame Of Not Doing It Well.

Much Of Our Highly Valued Cultural Heritage Has Been Acquired At The Cost Of Sexuality.

A Love That Does Not Discriminate Seems To Me To Forfeit A Part Of Its Own Value, By Doing An Injustice To Its Object; And Secondly, Not All Men Are Worthy Of Love.

A Strong Experience In The Present Awakens In The Creative Writer A Memory Of An Earlier Experience (usually Belonging To His Childhood) From Which There Now Proceeds A Wish Which Finds Its Fulfilment In The Creative Work.

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.

My Love Is Something Valuable To Me Which I Ought Not To Throw Away Without Reflection.

Concerning The Factors Of Silence, Solitude And Darkness, We Can Only Say That They Are Actually Elements In The Production Of The Infantile Anxiety From Which The Majority Of Human Beings Have Never Become Quite Free.

We Believe That Civilization Has Been Created Under The Pressure Of The Exigencies Of Life At The Cost Of Satisfaction Of The Instincts.

In Human Beings Pure Masculinity Or Femininity Is Not To Be Found Either In A Psychological Or Biological Sense.

Demons Do Not Exist Any More Than Gods Do, Being Only The Products Of The Psychic Activity Of Man.

What Is Characteristic Of Illusions Is That They Are Derived From Human Wishes.

Characteristics

If You Can't Do It, Give Up!

Philosophers Stretch The Meaning Of Words Until They Retain Scarcely Anything Of Their Original Sense. They Give The Name Of "god" To Some Vague Abstraction Which They Have Created For Themselves; Having Done So They Can Pose Before All The World As Deists, As Believers Of God, And They Can Even Boast That They Have Recognized A Higher, Purer Concept Of God, Notwithstanding That Their God Is Not Nothing More Than An Insubstantial Shadow And No Longer The Mighty Personality Of Religious Doctrines.

The Mosaic Religion Had Been A Father Religion; Christianity Became A Son Religion. The Old God, The Father, Took Second Place; Christ, The Son, Stood In His Stead, Just As In Those Dark Times Every Son Had Longed To Do.

The Only Person With Whom You Have To Compare Ourselves, Is That You In The Past. And The Only Per-son Better You Should Be, This Is Who You Are Now.

There Are No Mistakes.

Immorality, No Less Than Morality, Has At All Times Found Support In Religion.

A Religion, Even If It Calls Itself A Religion Of Love, Must Be Hard And Unloving To Those Who Do Not Belong To It.

No One Who, Like Me, Conjures Up The Most Evil Of Those Half-tamed Demons That Inhabit The Human Breast, And Seeks To Wrestle With Them, Can Expect To Come Through The Struggle Unscathed.

Whoever Loves Becomes Humble. Those Who Love Have, So To Speak, Pawned A Part Of Their Narcissism.

Love And Work Are The Cornerstones Of Our Humanness.

The Sexual Life Of Adult Women Is A "dark Continent" For Psychology.

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