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
We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Feminism
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
Work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work, at least, he is securely attached to a part of reality, the human community.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Work
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
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be “happy” is not included in the plan of “Creation.”
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Happiness
One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Resilience
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Children
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
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
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
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
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 are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Suffering
The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl’s clitoris.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Man, Mankind, Body
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: Doctors, Medicine
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
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
I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Letters
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Romance
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Girls, Children
One is very crazy when in love.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Love
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: America, Experiment
The goal of all life is death.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Goal, Death
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: Awareness, Instincts, Acceptance, Appropriateness, Aptness, Realization
The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it a distance from the conscious.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Lies
Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Dissent, Opposition
It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Birth
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
I could not point to any need in childhood as strong as that for a father’s protection.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Family, Fathers, Father, Childhood
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
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion, Achievement
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