Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.

Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.

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

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.

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.