Sigmund Freud

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Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant.

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) [ˈziːgmʊnt ˈfrɔʏ̯t] was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. He was the grandfather of Sir Clement Freud and Lucian Freud.

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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.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
The ego is not master in its own house.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
What does a woman want?
  • How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
    • Letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays (27 June 1882); published in Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939 (1961), 10-12
  • Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.
    • Letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays (2 June 1884)
  • Princess, my little Princess,
    Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today."
    • Letter to Martha Bernays, after receiving a travel grant he had been having dreams of receiving (20 June 1885)
  • A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.
    • Letter to William Fless (1895), as quoted in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol 3-4 (1967) p. 159
  • A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.
  • I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
  • Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
    • Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (15 October 1897), as quoted in Origins of Psychoanalysis
  • I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
  • The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
    • The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey.
    • At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in psychic life.
      • Alternate translation by Abraham Arden Brill, p. 483. Freud did use the Latin phrase via regia in the original as opposed to translating it into the German of the surrounding text.
    • "Royal road" or via regia is an allusion to a statement attributed to Euclid.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Dora : An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), his analysis of the case of Ida Bauer (also translated as Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria)
  • 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.
    • Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) Ch. 2 : The First Dream
  • Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
  • Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
    • The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in a footnote Freud added to the Second Edition in 1909 (see Psychoanalytic Pioneers, p. 46.)
  • At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
    • Totem and Taboo : Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913)
  • The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
    • Leonardo da Vinci (1916)
  • The ego is not master in its own house.
    • A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917)
  • 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.
    • Dream Psychology : Psychoanalysis For Beginners (1920) as translated by M. D. Eder
  • When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.
    • The Problem of Anxiety (1925)
  • The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
    • On his seventieth birthday (1926); as quoted in The Liberal Imagination (1950) by Lionel Trilling
  • In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
    • Letter to Dr. David Feuchtwang (1931), as quoted in Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home (1990) by Emanuel Rice, p. 25
  • What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
    • Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
  • Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
    • Letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality (1935)
  • A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
    • "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937)
  • 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.
  • Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.
    • Moses and Monotheism (1938)
  • 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.
    • From Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. I, ch. 1 (1953) edited by Ernest Jones
  • Was will das Weib?
    • What does a woman want?
    • More extensive variant: 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?"
      • Die grosse Frage, die nie beantwortet worden ist und die ich trotz dreißig Jahre langem Forschen in der weiblichen Seele nie habe beantworten können, ist die: Was will das Weib?
    • Letter to Marie Bonaparte, as quoted in Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (1955) by Ernest Jones, Vol. 2, Pt. 3, Ch. 16
  • America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
    • Remark to Ernest Jones as quoted in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud : Years of maturity, 1901-1919‎ (1957) by Ernest Jones, p. 60
  • I can recommend the Gestapo to anyone.
    • Postscript to a statement that he had been forced to write to leave Germany, about the fact that he had been treated properly by the Gestapo[1]

[edit] The Ego and the Id (1923)

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
  • It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.
  • The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
  • 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.
  • We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression … We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious — that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way.

[edit] The Future of an Illusion (1927)

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
  • If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?
  • The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.
  • It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
  • 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.
    • Ch. 3
  • A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
    • Ch. 6
  • Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
    • Ch. 6
  • Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.
    • Ch. 6
  • Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
    • Ch. 7
  • 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.
    • Ch. 8
  • The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neorosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
    • Ch. 8
  • "In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis."
    • Ch. 10

[edit] Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)

Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (literally, "The Uneasiness in Culture") - Full PDF online
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.
  • It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
  • Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. 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.
  • One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."
    • Ch. 2
  • I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest, but we have not altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother's relations to her male child).
  • It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.

[edit] New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932)

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse.
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
  • It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe."
  • Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.
  • 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.
    • The Anatomy of the Mental Personality (Lecture 31)
  • 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 Anatomy of the Mental Personality (Lecture 31)
  • Where id is, there shall ego be.
    • The Anatomy of the Mental Personality (Lecture 31)
  • Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.
    • Anxiety and Instinctual Life (Lecture 32)
  • If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
    • A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35)
  • 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.
    • A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35)
  • Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
    • A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35)


[edit] Misattributed

  • A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
    • This is not a statement that appears in any translation of any of Freud's works. It is a paraphrase of a statement from the essay "Guns, Murders, and the Constitution" (February 1990) by Don B. Kates, Jr. where Kates summarizes his views of passages in Dreams in Folklore (1958) by Freud and David E. Oppenheim, while disputing statements by Emmanuel Tanay in "Neurotic Attachment to Guns" in a 1976 edition of The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (1955) by Robert Mitchell Lindner:
Dr. Tanay is perhaps unaware of — in any event, he does not cite — other passages more relevant to his argument. In these other passages Freud associates retarded sexual and emotional development not with gun ownership, but with fear and loathing of weapons. The probative importance that ought to be attached to the views of Freud is, of course, a matter of opinion. The point here is only that those views provide no support for the penis theory of gun ownership.
Due to misreading of this essay and its citations, this paraphrase of an opinion about Freud's ideas has been wrongly attributed to Freud himself, and specifically to his 10th Lecture "Symbolism in Dreams" in General Introduction to Psychoanalysis on some internet forum pages: alt.quotations, uk.politics.guns, talk.politics.guns, can.talk.guns , etc.
  • This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

[edit] Quotes about Freud

I differ from Freud in that I think that most dreams are neither obscure nor bowdlerized, but rather are transparent and unedited ~ J. Allan Hobson
Freud … agreed in principle to the importance of sexual health. But he did not want what sexual health entailed, the attack on certain institutions which opposed it. ~ Wilhelm Reich
  • If often he was wrong and at times absurd
    To us he is no more a person
    Now but a climate of opinion.
  • A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.
  • He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas.
    • Albert Einstein, as quoted in Sigmund Freud (2006) by Kathleen Krull and Boris Kulikov, p. 132
  • Freud was one of the last representatives of Enlightenment philosophy. He genuinely believed in reason as the one strength man has and which alone could save him from confusion and decay.
    • Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1977)
  • I differ from Freud in that I think that most dreams are neither obscure nor bowdlerized, but rather that they are transparent and unedited. They reveal clearly meaningful undisguised and often highly conflictual themes worthy of note by the dreamer (and any interpretive assistant). My position echoes Jung's notion of dreams as transparently meaningful and does away with any distinction between manifest and latent content.
    • J. Allan Hobson, in The Dreaming Brain : How the brain creates both the sense and nonsense of dreams (1988)
  • Every time I see a photograph of Freud I wonder how a man who spent his whole life tête-à-tête with sex can look that gloomy.
  • For Freud the ultimate psychological reality is the system of attractions and tensions which attaches the child to parental images, and then through these to all other persons.
    • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as quoted in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty (1969) edited by A. L. Fisher
  • There is no longer any risk that Freudian research will shock us by recalling what there is of the "barbarian" in us; the risk is rather that the findings will be too easily accepted in an "idealist" form.
    • Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as quoted in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty (1969) edited by A. L. Fisher
  • Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Babies are … obviously narcissistic, but not in the way adults are, not even Spinoza's God, and I am a little afraid that Freud sometimes forgets that the narcissistic baby has no sense of self.
    • Jean Piaget, in The First Year of Life of the Child (1927), as quoted in The Essential Piaget (1977), edited by Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche
  • Yes, you hate me. But didn't I try to atone? If I'd been a real Nazi I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud's vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms.
  • Perhaps the last cultural fad one could still argue against was Karl Marx. But Freud — or Rawls? To argue against such persons is to grant them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories.
    • Ayn Rand as quoted in The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2 (November-December 1975)
  • Freud … agreed in principle to the importance of sexual health. But he did not want what sexual health entailed, the attack on certain institutions which opposed it.
    • Wilhelm Reich, as quoted in Reich Speaks of Freud (1967) edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael
  • The two most original and creative figures in modern psychiatry, Freud and Jung were both proscribed by the Nazis … for both, though holding widely divergent views, upheld the value of the individual personality.
  • Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation — something prior even to the formation of an hypothesis.
  • Wisdom is something I would never expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom.
    • Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Lectures and Conversations (1966) edited by Cyril Barnett
  • Freud … has not given an explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth.
    • Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Lectures and Conversations (1966) edited by Cyril Barnett
  • Sigmund Freud… Analize [sic] this! Analize this! Analize this-this-this!
    • Madonna, as written in Die Another Day

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