Sigmund Freud Quotes

Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.

[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.

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

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself.

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.

Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.

In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.