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 essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it a distance from the conscious.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Lies
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
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: Communism
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
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
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 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
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
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
—Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion
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
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
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
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