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
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Liberty
I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Man, Humankind, Mankind
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Flowers
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 the manifestations of their aggression.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Society
One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Affection
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mental Illness
Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Men, Morals, Morality
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mental Illness
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
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: Psychiatry, Ego
These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.
—Sigmund Freud
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Secrets
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Solitude
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Self Respect, Feelings, Self-Esteem
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Babies, Family
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one’s dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Inspiration
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
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Pleasure
A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Anger
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization
Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
—Sigmund Freud
I could not point to any need in childhood as strong as that for a father’s protection.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Family, Father, Childhood, Fathers
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Psychiatry
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
When inspiration does not come to me, I go half way to meet it.
—Sigmund Freud
Thought is action in rehearsal.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Thinking, General
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them, for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Realization, Awareness, Aptness, Appropriateness, Instincts, Acceptance
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
The creation of the mental domain of phantasm has a complete counterpart in the establishment of “reservations” and “nature-parks.”… The “reservation” is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything make grow and spread as it pleases, including what is it useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasm is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroachment of the reality-principle.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Wilderness
I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Miracles
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Censorship
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: Belief, Beliefs
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Reality, Illusion
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.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: God
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
The mind is like an iceberg—it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mind, The Mind
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
The goal of all life is death.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Goal, Death
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Romance
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Intelligence, Inner-child
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