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

The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man… it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Anger

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

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

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 most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: The Mind, Mind

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Happiness, Wisdom, Business

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Liberty

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Children

I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day—until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Authority

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

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Love

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

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: Discovery, Self-Discovery

Religion … the universal … neurosis of humanity.
Sigmund Freud

Where id was, there shall ego be.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Maturity

The mind is like an iceberg—it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Mind, The Mind

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

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, Communism, Property

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

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

The ego is not master in its own house.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Thought, Ego

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

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Civilization

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

The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl’s clitoris.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Man, Body, Mankind

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Sigmund Freud
Topics: Religion, Illusion

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

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: Children, Girls

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: The Mind, Mind

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

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