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
How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Romance
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
It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Science
Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Strength
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Conscience
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
One is very crazy when in love.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Love
These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Reality
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
Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Flowers
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
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Love, Unhappiness, Feelings
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
Religion … the universal … neurosis of humanity.
—Sigmund Freud
One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Affection
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
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: America, Mistakes
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion, Childhood
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization
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: Humankind, Mankind, Man
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 conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mind, The Mind
Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as “right” in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as “brute force.”
—Sigmund Freud
The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Anger
When inspiration does not come to me, I go half way to meet it.
—Sigmund Freud
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
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
Where id was, there shall ego be.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Maturity
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
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
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