Great Throughts Treasury

"The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety."

"The aim of all life is death."

"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."

"The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life."

"The child takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real."

"The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty. Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature."

"The conceptions I have summarized here I first put forward only tentatively, but in the course of time they have won such a hold over me that I can no longer think in any other way."

"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."

"The deepest character of man consists of impulses of an elemental kind which are similar in all human beings, the aim of which is the gratification of certain primitive needs. These impulses are in themselves neither good or evil."

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

"The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse."

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

"The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."

"The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions."

"The EGO, or territorial-status circuit of the primate brain is a social creation for which one person at a time gets the blame."

"The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: 'Anatomy is destiny'."

"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."

"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction … One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly from his wishes for happiness—that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments."

"The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization."

"The first request of civilization ... is that of justice."

"The goal of all life is death."

"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."

"The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them."

"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."

"The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation."

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization."

"The madman is a dreamer awake"

"The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."

"The moment a man begins to question the meaning and value of life, he is sick."

"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief."

"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 most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness."

"The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris."

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

"The paranoid is never entirely mistaken."

"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."

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

"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."

"The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt."

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

"The psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be."

"The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious."

"The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father."

"The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition."

"The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an "unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young—-a human activity which developed late."

"The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology."

"The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex."

"The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture."

"The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will."