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'.

The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.

I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.

Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.