01UndatedIn 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 / quote ↗
02UndatedIf we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they will do everything in their to power to rid themselves of their own surplus of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the suppression of another, perhaps the majority---and this is the case in all modern cultures,---it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
04UndatedThere 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.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
05UndatedIt is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
06UndatedWe are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
07UndatedThis time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other scientific field would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind's constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
09UndatedReligion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
12UndatedWith words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
13UndatedThe words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
14UndatedWords and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
15UndatedThe child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
16UndatedOur memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
18Undatedpublic self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
19UndatedEvery man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
20UndatedOur possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
21UndatedI have, as it were, constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstration which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as possible.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
22UndatedNo neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
23UndatedWhere such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot loveSigmund Freud / quote ↗
24UndatedMen are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?Sigmund Freud / quote ↗
