Sigmund Freud

Psychologist

1856-05-06 – 1939-09-23

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. Born in 1856, he developed influential theories about the unconscious mind and psychosexual development that shaped 20th-century psychology and culture. He died in London on 1939-09-23.

Quotes by Sigmund Freud

Every man is a poet at heart.
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Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
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If 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.
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We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
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In 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.
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It 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.
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This 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.
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He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
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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.
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It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
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When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
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Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
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The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian--an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own .... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.
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I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
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Couldn't I for once have you and the work at the same time?
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Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.
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The story is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place, because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age unmarried
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As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
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The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.
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In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
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