90 quotes
I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
The great question ... which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the mother; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.
The Ego and the Id (1923)
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.
Moses and Monotheism (1938)
We must not forget, therefore, to include the influence of civilization among the determinants of neuroses. It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy: for a civilized man the task is a hard one.
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.
Civilization and its Discontents (1931)
And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say — the last and the most profound.
I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Studies on Hysteria (1895)
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."
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.
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933)
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
The Future of an Illusion (1927)
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.
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933)
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 — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.
It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe."
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933)
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.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)
A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
Misattributed
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
Attributed
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 in their object-relations.
Attributed Anna Freud in the preface to the (1981)
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
Attributed
This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
Misattributed