Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.

Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.

Obsessional prohibitions are extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women patients, 'impossible' - till at last the whole world lies under an embargo of 'impossibility'.

Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?

Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.