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| 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 | | Ideas; Religion | |
| Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it. | | Uncategorized | |
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| Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings;we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight. | | Psychology | |
| The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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. | | Uncategorized | |
| The derivation of a need for religion from the child’s feeling of helplessness and the longing it evokes for a father seems to me incontrovertible, especially since this feeling is not simply carried on from childhood days but is kept alive perpetually by the fear of what the superior power of fate will bring. | | Religion | |
| The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him. | | Uncategorized | |
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| 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. | | Uncategorized | |
| The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. | | Civilization | |
| The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. | | Civilization; Men | |
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| 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. | | Uncategorized | |
| 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?'' | | Uncategorized | |
| The history of the world which is still taught to our children is essentially a series of race murders | | History | |
| The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life. | | Uncategorized | |
| The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. | | Uncategorized | |
| The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization. | | Uncategorized | |
