Dr. Freud Observed

 

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.


From error to error, one discovers the final truth.


Men are more moral than they think

and more immoral than they can imagine.


The first human who hurled an insult of stone

discovered civilization.


What a distressing contrast there is
between the radiant intelligence of the child

and the feeble mentality of the average adult.


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


I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong
as the need for a father's protection.


A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother
keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.


If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling
he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling,
the confidence in success,
which not seldom brings actual success along with it.


Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.


Neurotics complain of their illness,
but they make the most of it,
and when it comes to talking it away from them
they will defend it like a lioness her young.


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.


The ego is not master in its own house.


Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection
of a particular wish operating within us.


Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.


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.


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.


What progress we are making.
In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.
Now they are content with burning my books.


One feels inclined to say that the intention that
man should be ''happy'' is not included in the plan of ''Creation.''


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.


The time comes when each one of us
has to give up as illusions the expectations which,
in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men,
and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain
has been added to his life by their ill-will.


In the depths of my heart I can't help being convinced
that my dear fellow man, with few exceptions, are worthless.


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.

The tendency of aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man...
it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.


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.


Religion is an illusion that derives it's strength
from it's readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

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.


The doctor should be opaque to his patients and,
like a mirror,
should show them nothing but what is shown to him.


It might be said of psychoanalysis
that if you give it your little finger
it will soon have your whole hand.


Analysis does not set out
to make pathological reactions impossible,
but to give the patient's ego freedom
to decide one way or another.


No one who, like me,
conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons
that inhabit the human breast,
and seeks to wrestle with them,
can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.


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?''


Flowers are restful to look at.
They have neither emotions nor conflicts.


One is very crazy when in love.


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.


Love and work are the cornerstone of our humanness.

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.