The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.

I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.