36 Sigmund Freud Quotes on Psychology

Sigmund Freud quotes on psychology

3. I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

4. 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.

5. No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

6. Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.

7. At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

8. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

9. The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.

10. The ego is not master in its own house.

11. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

12. When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.

13. The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

14. 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.

18. A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

19. 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.

21. Admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological.

23. A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.

24. Was will das Weib?

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. Where id is, there shall ego be.

32. 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 necessities.

33. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

36. 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.

41. It must be admitted that women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life.

43. Religion... comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.

44. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

46. Sex is the mathematical urge repressed.

47. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

49. The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

52. The only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.

54. The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.

55. The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is incomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.

58. A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.

59. He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas.

60. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

61. Doctor Freud not only used cocaine himself, but he also prescribed it to his patients. And then he drew his generalizations. Cocaine is a strong sexual arouser. That's why everything Freud invented - all those oedipuses, sphinxes and sphincters - is relevant only to a mental dimension of a patient, whose brain is turned to fried-eggs by cocaine. In such a state, one really has only one problem left - what to do first, to screw his mother or to do away with his father. Of course, until his cocaine runs out. And in those times, there were no problems with supplies. But so long as your daily dose is less than three grams, you don't have to fear either the Oedipus complex, nor other things discovered by Freud.