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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.

-Sigmund Freud

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In This Way The

Sigmund Freud

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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.

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The Liberty Of The Individual Is No Gift Of Civilization. It Was Greatest Before There Was Any Civilization, Though Then, It Is True, It Had For The Most Part No Value, Since The Individual Was Scarcely In A Position To Defend It. The Development Of Civilization Imposes Restrictions On It, And Justice Demands That No One Shall Escape Those Restrictions.

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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.

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

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

If A Man Has Been His Mother's Undisputed Darling He Retains Throughout Life The Triumphant Feeling, The Confidence In Success, Which Not Seldom Brings Actual Success Along With It.

The Price Of Civilization Is Instinctual Renunciation.

Illusions Commend Themselves To Us Because They Save Us Pain And Allow Us To Enjoy Pleasure Instead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It Is Unavoidable That If We Learn More About A Great Man's Life, We Shall Also Hear Of Occasions On Which He Has Done No Better Than We, And Has In Fact Come Nearer To Us As A Human Being.

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.

That Which We Can't Remember, We Will Repeat.

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

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?

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

Love And Work Are The Cornerstones Of Our Humanness.

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.

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

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

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.

Being Entirely Honest With Oneself Is A Good Exercise.

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.

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

So In Every Individual The Two Trends, One Towards Personal Happiness And The Other Unity With The Rest Of Humanity, Must Contend With Each Other.

By Abolishing Private Property One Deprives The Human Love Of Aggression.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Man Has, As It Were, Become A Kind Of Prosthetic God.

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Innately, Children Seem To Have Little True Realistic Anxiety. They Will Run Along The Brink Of Water, Climb On The Window Sill, Play With Sharp Objects And With Fire, In Short, Do Everything That Is Bound To Damage Them And To Worry Those In Charge Of Them, That Is Wholly The Result Of Education; For They Cannot Be Allowed To Make The Instructive Experiences Themselves.

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Perception Is Less Of A Recording System And More Of A Protection System Against External Stimuli.

Neither In My Private Life Nor In My Writings, Have I Ever Made A Secret Of Being An Out-and-out Unbeliever.

Human Life In Common Is Only Made Possible When A Majority Comes Together Which Is Stronger Than Any Separate Individual And Which Remains United Against All Separate Individuals. The Power Of This Community Is Then Set Up As Right In Opposition To The Power Of The Individual, Which Is Condemned As Brute Force.

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

I Have An Infamously Low Capacity For Visualizing Relationships, Which Made The Study Of Geometry And All Subjects Derived From It Impossible For Me.

Opposition Is Not Necessarily Enmity.

What Psycho-analysis Reveals In The Transference Phenomena Of Neurotics Can Also Be Observed In The Lives Of Some Normal People. The Impression They Give Is Of Being Pursued By A Malignant Fate Or Possessed By Some 'daemonic' Power; But Psycho-analysis Has Always Taken The View That Their Fate Is For The Most Part Arranged By Themselves And Determined By Early Infantile Influences.

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.

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

The Liberty Of The Individual Is No Gift Of Civilization. It Was Greatest Before There Was Any Civilization.

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.

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

...perhaps The Hopes I Have Confessed To Are Of An Illusory Nature, Too. But I Hold Fast To One Distinction. Apart From The Fact That No Penalty Is Imposed For Not Sharing Them, My Illusions Are Not, Like Religious Ones, Incapable Of Correction.

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.

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

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

But The Less A Man Knows About The Past And The Present The More Insecure Must Prove To Be His Judgment Of The Future.

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.".

Religion: Something Comparable To Childhood Neurosis

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

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

There Is No Likelihood Of Our Being Able To Suppress Humanity's Aggressive Tendencies... Complete Suppression Of Man's Aggressive Tendencies Is Not An Issue; What We May Try Is To Direct It Into A Channel Other Than That Of Warfare.

The Devil Would Be The Best Way Out As An Excuse For God; In That Way He Would Be Playing The Same Part As An Agent Of Economic Discharge As The Jew Does In The World Of The Aryan Ideal. But Even So, One Can Hold God Responsible For The Existence Of The Devil Just As Well As For The Existence Of The Wickedness Which The Devil Embodies.

A Man Who Has Been The Indisputable Favorite Of His Mother Keeps For Life The Feeling Of A Conqueror.

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.

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.

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.

I Cannot Think Of Any Need In Childhood As Strong As The Need For A Father's Protection.

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.

Man Has, As It Were, Become A Kind Of Prosthetic God. When He Puts On All His Auxiliary Organs, He Is Truly Magnificent; But Those Organs Have Not Grown On Him And They Still Give Him Much Trouble At Times.

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

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

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

It Is Not So Much That Man Is A Herd Animal, But That He Is A Horde Animal Led By A Chief.

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.

It Is Unreasonable To Expect Science To Produce A System Of Ethics-ethics Are A Kind Of Highway Code For Traffic Among Mankind-and The Fact That In Physics Atoms Which Were Yesterday Assumed To Be Square Are Now Assumed To Be Round Is Exploited With Unjustified Tendentiousness By All Who Are Hungry For Faith; So Long As Physics Extends Our Dominion Over Nature, These Changes Ought To Be A Matter Of Complete Indifference To You.

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

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

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

I Have Found Little That Is 'good' About Human Beings On The Whole. In My Experience Most Of Them Are Trash, No Matter Whether They Publicly Subscribe To This Or That Ethical Doctrine Or To None At All. That Is Something That You Cannot Say Aloud, Or Perhaps Even Think.

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

If Children Could, If Adults Knew.

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

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.

Religion [is] The Universal Obsessional Neurosis Of Humanity

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

Love And Work, Work And Love...that's All There Is.

In The Development Of Mankind As A Whole, Just As In Individuals, Love Alone Acts As The Civilizing Factor In The Sense That It Brings A Change From Egoism To Altruism.

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.

A Child In Its Greed For Love Does Not Enjoy Having To Share The Affection Of Its Parents With Its Brothers And Sisters; And It Notices That The Whole Of Their Affection Is Lavished Upon It Once More Whenever It Arouses Their Anxiety By Falling Ill. It Has Now Discovered A Means Of Enticing Out Its Parents' Love And Will Make Use Of That Means As Soon As It Has The Necessary Psychical Material At Its Disposal For Producing An Illness.

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