The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.
Anatomy is destiny.
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.