Sigmund Freud Quotes

"The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" (1924) (original text in German)

Die Anatomie ist das Schicksal

Whoever loves become humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Wer verliebt ist, ist demütig. Wer liebt, hat sozusagen ein Stück seines Narzißmus eingebüßt.

We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva.

Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

The common characteristic of all perversions, on the other hand, is that they have abandoned reproduction as their aim. We term sexual activity perverse when it has renounced the aim of reproduction and follows the pursuit of pleasure as an independent goal. And so you realize that the turning point in the development of sexual life lies in its subjugation to the purpose of reproduction. Everything this side of the turning point, everything that has given up this purpose and serves the pursuit of pleasure alone, must carry the term "perverse" and as such be regarded with contempt.

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.

Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years. ...They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis.

We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us.

Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones

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

Wenn man der unbestrittene Liebling der Mutter gewesen ist, so behält man fürs Leben jenes Eroberergefühl, jene Zuversicht des Erfolges, welche nicht selten wirklich den Erfolg nach sich zieht.

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

Psychoanalysis ... should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual.