Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Sigmund Freud (Austrian Psychiatrist)

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist. He is the founder of psychoanalysis—both as a theory of personality and as a psychotherapeutic practice.

Born of Jewish parents at Freiberg, in Moravia, present-day Czech Republic, Freud lived and worked in Vienna for most of his life. He fled to London in 1938 following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.

Freud developed important theories about the constitution and the functioning of the mind and the desires, conflicts, and motives that drive human behavior. He proposed the existence of an unconscious element in the mind, which influences consciousness. He was the first to highlight the conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious processes in normal and neurotic behavior.

Freud also formulated psychoanalytical techniques for analyzing normal and abnormal behavior. He posited that many illnesses with no evident organic cause could be treated by psychoanalysis.

Though many of Freud’s ideas have been rejected, revised, and modified since his death, they have been a significant influence on psychiatry. Many of Freud’s concepts—e.g., Oedipus complex, repression, the death instinct, penis envy, narcissism, Freudian slips—continue to be used in scholarly and in everyday discourse.

Critics question the predictive validity of psychotherapy’s hypotheses; they argue that Freud’s subjective discernments are merely retrospective. Irrespective of the persistent debates over the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, Freud himself is a writer of high distinction. His works include The Interpretation of Dreams (1899,) Totem and Taboo (1913,) and The Ego and the Id (1923.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Sigmund Freud

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Self-Discovery, Discovery

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Adventure

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Women

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Personality, Insanity

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Feelings, Family

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.
—Sigmund Freud

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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mental Illness

The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it a distance from the conscious.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Lies

I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises 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… but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Socialism, Property, Communism

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Ego, Psychiatry

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Inner-child, Intelligence

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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Illusion

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Medicine, Doctors

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mental Illness

One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Resilience

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
—Sigmund Freud

Religion … the universal … neurosis of humanity.
—Sigmund Freud

Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Sex

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come… you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Drugs

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Romance

One… gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization

The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Birth

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Life

Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Strength

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Honesty

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?”
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Women

Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Childhood, Religion

It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Psychiatry

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Beliefs, Belief

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