This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

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

What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.

You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.

When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

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