Quotes About Psychology

The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.

You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.

The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. -- A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....

Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.

Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love

And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

Nothing that is mentally our own can ever be lost.

The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

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

We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.

Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less perfect.

Places are often treated like persons.

Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.

In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.

I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.