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I Have No Concern With Any Economic Criticisms Of The Communist System; I Cannot Inquire Into Whether The Abolition Of Private Property Is Expedient Or Advantageous. But I Am Able To Recognize That The Psychological Premisses On Which The System Is Based Are An Untenable Illusion. In Abolishing Private Property We Deprive The Human Love Of Aggression Of One Of Its Instruments... But We Have In No Way Altered The Differences In Power And Influence Which Are Misused By Aggressiveness.

-Sigmund Freud

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I Have No Concern

Sigmund Freud

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I Have No Concern With Any Economic Criticisms Of The Communist System; I Cannot Inquire Into Whether The Abolition Of Private Property Is Expedient Or Advantageous. But I Am Able To Recognize That The Psychological Premisses On Which The System Is Based Are An Untenable Illusion. In Abolishing Private Property We Deprive The Human Love Of Aggression Of One Of Its Instruments... But We Have In No Way Altered The Differences In Power And Influence Which Are Misused By Aggressiveness.

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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 Act Of Birth Is The First Experience Of Anxiety, And Thus The Source And Prototype Of The Affect Of Anxiety.

It Is Not Attention That The Child Is Seeking, But Love.

There Is A Powerful Force Within Us, An Un-illuminated Part Of The Mind - Separate From The Conscious Mind That Is Constantly At Work Molding Our Thought, Feelings, And Actions.

Religion (is) A Universal Obsessional Neurosis.

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.

To Endure Life Remains, When All Is Said, The First Duty Of All Living Being Illusion Can Have No Value If It Makes This More Difficult For Us.

There Is Scarcely Room For Doubt That Something In The Psychological Relation Of A Mother-in-law To A Son-in-law Breeds Hostility Between Them And Makes It Hard For Them To Live Together. But The Fact That In Civilized Societies Mothers-in-law Are Such A Favourite Subject For Jokes Seems To Me To Suggest That The Emotional Relation Involved Includes Sharply Contrasted Components. I Believe, That Is, That This Relation Is In Fact An 'ambivalent' One, Composed Of Conflicting Affectionate And Hostile Impulses.

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.

Unexpressed Emotions Will Never Die. They Are Buried Alive And Will Come Forth Later In Uglier Ways.

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

Beauty Has No Obvious Use; Nor Is There Any Clear Cultural Necessity For It. Yet Civilization Could Not Do Without It.

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.

Maturity Is The Ability To Postpone Gratification.

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

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

Collective Unconscious

Towards The Outside, At Any Rate, The Ego Seems To Maintain Clear And Sharp Lines Of Demarcation. There Is Only One State -- Admittedly An Unusual State, But Not One That Can Be Stigmatized As Pathological -- In Which It Does Not Do This. At The Height Of Being In Love The Boundary Between Ego And Object Threatens To Melt Away. Against All The Evidence Of His Senses, A Man Who Is In Love Declares That "i" And "you" Are One, And Is Prepared To Behave As If It Were A Fact.

Out Of Your Vulnerabilities Will Come Your Strength.

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.

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.

Civilized People Have Exchanged Some Part Of Their Chances Of Happiness For A Measure Of Security.

Where Such Men Love They Have No Desire And Where They Desire They Cannot Love

The Religions Of Mankind Must Be Classed Among The Mass-delusions Of This Kind. No One, Needless To Say, Who Shares A Delusion Ever Recognizes It As Such.

Children Are Completely Egoistic; They Feel Their Needs Intensely And Strive Ruthlessly To Satisfy Them.

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.

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

Every Normal Person, In Fact, Is Only Normal On The Average. His Ego Approximates To That Of The Psychotic In Some Part Or Other And To A Greater Or Lesser Extent.

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

Dream Is The Dreamer's Own Psychical Act.

The View Is Often Defended That Sciences Should Be Built Up On Clear And Sharply Defined Basal Concepts. In Actual Fact No Science, Not Even The Most Exact, Begins With Such Definitions. The True Beginning Of Scientific Activity Consists Rather In Describing Phenomena And Then In Proceeding To Group, Classify And Correlate Them.

Sadism Is All Right In Its Place, But It Should Be Directed To Proper Ends.

The Gods Retain Their Threefold Task: They Must Exorcize The Terrors Of Nature, They Must Reconcile Men To The Cruelty Of Fate, Particularly As It Is Shown In Death, And They Must Compensate Them For The Sufferings And Privations Which A Civilized Life In Common Has Imposed On Them.

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.

The Voice Of The Intellect Is A Soft One, But It Does Not Rest Until It Has Gained A Hearing.

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

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.

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.

Opposition Is Not Necessarily Enmity.

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The Price We Pay For Our Advance In Civilization Is A Loss Of Happiness Through The Heightening Of The Sense Of Guilt.

At Bottom God Is Nothing More Than An Exalted Father.

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.

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.

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

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.

Just As No One Can Be Forced Into Belief, So No One Can Be Forced Into Unbelief.

I Take Up The Standpoint That The Tendency To Aggression Is An Innate, Independent, Instinctual Disposition In Man, And I Come Back Now To The Statement That It Constitutes The Most Powerful Obstacle To Culture.

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.

The Different Religions Have Never Overlooked The Part Played By The Sense Of Guilt In Civilization. What Is More, They Come Forward With A Claim...to Save Mankind From This Sense Of Guilt, Which They Call Sin.

We Should Picture The Instrument That Carries Our Mental Functioning As Resembling A Compound Microscope Or Photographic Apparatus.

Do You Not Know How Uncontrolled And Unreliable The Average Human Being Is In All That Concerns Sexual Life?

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

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.

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We Know That The Great Majority Of People Have A Strong Need For Authority Which It Can Admire, To Which It Can Submit, And Which Dominates And Sometimes Even Ill-treats It.

Thus We Arrive At The Singular Conclusion That Of All The Information Passed By Our Cultural Assets It Is Precisely The Elements Which Might Be Of The Greatest Importance To Us And Which Have The Task Of Solving The Riddles Of The Universe And Of Reconciling Us To The Sufferings Of Life -- It Is Precisely Those Elements That Are The Least Well Authenticated Of Any.

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.

We Choose Not Randomly Each Other. We Meet Only Those Who Already Exists In Our Subconscious.

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.

As Regards Intellectual Work It Remains A Fact, Indeed, That Great Decisions In The Realm Of Thought And Momentous Discoveries And Solutions Of Problems Are Only Possible To An Individual, Working In Solitude.

Desire Presses Ever Forward Unsubdued.

In The Important Decisions Of Personal Life, We Should Be Governed By The Deep Inner Needs Of Our Nature.

Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us O'er The World's Tempestuous Sea; Guard Us, Guide Us, Keep Us, Feed Us, For We Have No Help But Thee.

The Psychoanalysis Of Individual Human Beings, However, Teaches Us With Quite Special Insistence That The God Of Each Of Them Is Formed In The Likeness Of His Father, That His Personal Relation To God Depends On His Relation To His Father In The Flesh And Oscillates And Changes Along With That Relation, And That At Bottom God Is Nothing Other Than An Exalted Father.

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

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.

Intelligence Will Be Used In The Service Of The Neurosis.

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

Only A Rebuke That 'has Something In It' Will Sting, Will Have The Power To Stir Our Feelings, Not The Other Sort, As We Know.

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

Religion Is Comparable To A Childhood Neurosis.

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A Father's Death Is The Most Important Event, The More Heartbreaking And Poignant Loss In A Man's Life.

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

Being Entirely Honest With Oneself Is A Good Exercise.

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

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

In Some Place In My Soul, In A Very Hidden Corner, I Am A Fanatical Jew. I Am Very Much Astonished To Discover Myself As Such In Spite Of All Efforts To Be Unprejudiced And Impartial. What Can I Do Against It At My Age?

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.

Intolerance Of Groups Is Often, Strangely Enough, Exhibited More Strongly Against Small Differences Than Against Fundamental Ones.

Love In The Form Of Longing And Deprivation Lowers The Self Regard.

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

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

We Must Love Or We Grow Ill.

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.

This Transmissibility Of Taboo Is A Reflection Of The Tendency, On Which We Have Already Remarked, For The Unconscious Instinct In The Neurosis To Shift Constantly Along Associative Paths On To New Objects.

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

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

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

Poetry By Famous Poets

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.

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

The Price Of Civilization Is Instinctual Renunciation.

In Every Age Immorality Has Found No Less Support In Religion Than Morality Has. If The Achievements Of Religion In Respect To Man's Happiness, Susceptibility To Culture And Moral Control Are No Better Than This, The Question Cannot But Arise Whether We Are Not Overrating Its Necessity For Mankind, And Whether We Do Wisely In Basing Our Cultural Demands Upon It.

The Unconscious Of One Human Being Can React Upon That Of Another Without Passing Through The Conscious.

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.

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.

Men Are Not Gentle, Friendly Creatures Wishing For Love, Who Simply Defend Themselves If They Are Attacked, But ... A Powerful Measure Of Desire For Aggression Had To Be Reckoned As Part Of Their Instinctual Endowment.

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]

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.

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

Religion Originates In The Child's And Young Mankind's Fears And Need For Help. It Cannot Be Otherwise.

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

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 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!

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 ... One Thing Only Do I Know For Certain And That Is That Man's Judgements Of Value Follow Directly From His Wihes For Happiness-that, Accordingly, They Are An Attempt To Support His Illusions With Arguments.

In The Small Matters Trust The Mind, In The Large Ones The Heart.

Only The Real, Rare, True Scientific Minds Can Endure Doubt, Which Is Attached To All Our Knowledge.

The Primitive Stages Can Always Be Re-established; The Primitive Mind Is, In The Fullest Meaning Of The Word, Imperishable.

I Am Actually Not At All A Man Of Science, Not An Observer, Not An Experimenter, Not A Thinker. I Am By Temperament Nothing But A Conquistador

If Youth Knew; If Age Could.

The Ego Is Not Master In Its Own House.

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.

In The Last Analysis The Entire Field Of Psychology May Reduce To Biological Electrochemistry.

Civilization Is A Process In The Service Of Eros, Whose Purpose Is To Combine Single Human Individuals, And After That Families, Then Races, Peoples And Nations, Into One Great Unity, The Unity Of Mankind. Why This Has To Happen, We Do Not Know; The Work Of Eros Is Precisely This.

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

The Intention That Man Should Be Happy Is Not In The Plan Of Creation.

I No Longer Count As One Of My Merits That I Always Tell The Truth As Much As Possible; It Has Become My Metier.

Telling The Truth

The First Requisite Of Civilization, Therefore, Is That Of Justice — That Is, The Assurance That A Law Once Made Will Not Be Broken In Favour Of An Individual. This Implies Nothing As To The Ethical Value Of Such A Law.

If You Can't Do It, Give Up!

Analysis Does Not Set Out To Make Pathological Reactions Impossible, But To Give The Patient's Ego Freedom To Decide One Way Or Another.

One Is Very Crazy When In Love.

The Functional Importance Of The Ego Is Manifested In The Fact That Normally Control Over The Approaches To Motility Devolves Upon It. Thus In Its Relation To The Id It Is Like A Man On Horse Back, Who Has To Hold In Check The Superior Strength Of The Horse; With This Difference, That The Rider Tries To Do So With His Own Strength While The Ego Uses Borrowed Forces.

The World Is No Nursery.

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.

Religion [is] The Universal Obsessional Neurosis Of Humanity

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.

Tobacco Is The Only Excuse For Columbus's Misadventure In Discovering America.

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.

What A Distressing Contrast There Is Between The Radiant Intelligence Of The Child And The Feeble Mentality Of The Average Adult.

Dreams Are Constructed From The Residue Of Yesterday.

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

I No Longer Believe That William Shakespeare The Actor From Stratford Was The Author Of The Works That Have Been Ascribed To Him.

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.

Mans Most Disagreeable Habits And Idiosyncrasies, His Deceit, His Cowardice, His Lack Of Reverence, Are Engendered By His Incomplete Adjustment To A Complicated Civilisation. It Is The Result Of The Conflict Between Our Instincts And Our Culture.

A State Of Consciousness Is Characteristically Very Transitory; An Idea That Is Conscious Now Is No Longer So A Moment Later, Although It Can Become So Again Under Certain Conditions That Are Easily Brought About.

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

Life, As We Find It, Is Too Hard For Us; It Brings Us Too Many Pains, Disappointments And Impossible Tasks. In Order To Bear It We Cannot Dispense With Palliative Measures... There Are Perhaps Three Such Measures: Powerful Deflections, Which Cause Us To Make Light Of Our Misery; Substitutive Satisfactions, Which Diminish It; And Intoxicating Substances, Which Make Us Insensible To It.

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.

Civilization Began The First Time An Angry Person Cast A Word Instead Of A Rock.

A Woman Should Soften But Not Weaken A Man.

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

Experience Teaches That For Most People There Is A Limit Beyond Which Their Constitution Cannot Comply With The Demands Of Civilization. All Who Wish To Reach A Higher Standard Than Their Constitution Will Allow, Fall Victims To Neurosis. It Would Have Been Better For Them If They Could Have Remained Less "perfect".

Crystals Reveal Their Hidden Structures Only When Broken.

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

Long Ago Man Formed An Ideal Conception Of Omnipotence And Omniscience Which He Embodied In His Gods. Whatever Seemed Unattainable To His Desires - Or Forbidden To Him - He Attributed To These Gods... Now He Has Himself Approached Very Near To Realizing This Ideal, He Has Nearly Become A God Himself.

What We Call Happiness In The Strictest Sense Comes From The (preferably Sudden) Satisfaction Of Needs Which Have Been Dammed Up To A High Degree.

Writing Was In Its Origin, The Voice Of An Absent Person.

In This Way The Ego Detaches Itself From The External World. It Is More Correct To Say: Originally The Ego Includes Everything, Later It Detaches From Itself The External World. The Ego-feeling We Are Aware Of Now Is Thus Only A Shrunken Vestige Of A Far More Extensive Feeling - A Feeling Which Embraced The Universe And Expressed An Inseparable Connection Of The Ego With The External World.

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.

The Study Of Dreams May Be Considered The Most Trustworthy Method Of Investigating Deep Mental Processes. Now Dreams Occurring In Traumatic Neuroses Have The Characteristic Of Repeatedly Bringing The Patient Back Into The Situation Of His Accident, A Situation From Which He Wakes Up In Another Fright.

A Strong Egoism Is A Protection Against Disease, But In The Last Resort We Must Begin To Love In Order That We May Not Fall Ill, And Must Fall Ill If, In Consequence Of Frustration, We Cannot Love.

Like The Physical, The Psychical Is Not Necessarily In Reality What It Appears To Us To Be.

Physical Attraction

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.

No Matter How Much Restriction Civilization Imposes On The Individual, He Nevertheless Finds Some Way To Circumvent It. Wit Is The Best Safety Valve Modern Man Has Evolved; The More Civilization, The More Repression, The More Need There Is For Wit.".

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

The Three Major Mother Gods Of The Eastern Populations Seemed To Be Generating And Destroying Entities At The Same Time; Both Goddesses Of Life And Fertility As Well As Goddesses Of Death.

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

The Paranoid Is Never Entirely Mistaken.

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.

An Intimate Friend And A Hated Enemy Have Always Been Indispensable Requirements For My Emotional Life; I Have Always Been Able To Create Them Anew, And Not Infrequently My Childish Ideal Has Been So Closely Approached That Friend And Enemy Coincided In The Same Person.

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.

The Idea Of Life Having A Purpose Stands And Falls With The Religious System.

Perhaps The Gods Are Kind To Us, By Making Life More Disagreeable As We Grow Older. In The End Death Seems Less Intolerable Than The Manifold Burdens We Carry

A Poor Girl May Have An Illusion That A Prince Will Come And Fetch Her Home. It Is Possible, Some Such Cases Have Occurred. That The Messiah Will Come And Found A Golden Age Is Much Less Probable.

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

Love Is A State Of Temporary Psychosis.

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.

Talk Therapy Turns Hysterical Misery To Mundane Unhappiness.

All That Matters Is Love And Work.

Loneliness And Darkness Have Just Robbed Me Of My Valuables.

Love And Work Are The Cornerstones Of Our Humanness.

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

We Have Long Observed That Every Neurosis Has The Result, And Therefore Probably The Purpose, Of Forcing The Patient Out Of Real Life, Of Alienating Him From Actuality.

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

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.

None Believes In His Own Death. In The Unconscious Everyone Is Convinced Of His Own Immortality.

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.

We Must Reckon With The Possibility That Something In The Nature Of The Sexual Instinct Itself Is Unfavorable To The Realization Of Complete Satisfaction.

A Lady Once Expressed Herself In Society - The Very Words Show That They Were Uttered With Fervour And Under The Pressure Of A Great Many Secret Emotions: "yes, A Woman Must Be Pretty If She Is To Please The Men. A Man Is Much Better Off. As Long As He Has Five Straight Limbs, He Needs No More!"

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 Poets And Philosophers Before Me Discovered The Unconscious; What I Discovered Was The Scientific Method By Which The Unconscious Can Be Studied.

Scientific Method

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.

All Family Life Is Organized Around The Most Damaged Person In It.

We Are So Constituted That We Can Gain Intense Pleasure Only From The Contrast, And Only Very Little From The Condition Itself.

Obsessional Prohibitions Are Extremely Liable To Displacement. They Extend From One Object To Another Along Whatever Paths The Context May Provide, And This New Object Then Becomes, To Use The Apt Expression Of One Of My Women Patients, 'impossible' - Till At Last The Whole World Lies Under An Embargo Of 'impossibility'.

Toward The Person Who Has Died We Adopt A Special Attitude: Something Like Admiration For Someone Who Has Accomplished A Very Difficult Task.

History Is Just New People Making Old Mistakes.

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.

Dreams Are Often Most Profound When They Seem The Most Crazy.

Thinking Is An Experimental Dealing With Small Quantities Of Energy, Just As A General Moves Miniature Figures Over A Map Before Setting His Troops In Action.

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.

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.

Cruelty And Intolerance To Those Who Do Not Belong To It Are Natural To Every Religion.

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 Matters Of Sexuality We Are At Present, Every One Of Us, Ill Or Well, Nothing But Hypocrites.

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.

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.

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