The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud Quotes

“Cruelty is especially near the childish character, since the inhibition which restrains the impulse to mastery before it causes pain to others—that is, the capacity for sympathy—develops comparatively late. As we know, a thorough psychological analysis of this impulse has not as yet been successfully accomplished; we may assume that the cruel feelings emanate from the impulse to mastery and appear at a period in the sexual life before the genitals have taken on their later rôle. It then dominates a phase of the sexual life, which we shall later describe as the pregenital organization. Children who are distinguished for evincing especial cruelty to animals and playmates may be justly suspected of intensive and premature sexual activity in the erogenous zones; and in a simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses, the erogenous sexual activity surely seems to be primary. The absence of the barrier of sympathy carries with it the danger that the connections between cruelty and the erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be broken in later life.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“repression—which we must carefully note is not a suspension. The excitations in question are produced as usual but are prevented from attaining their aim by psychic hindrances, and are driven off into many other paths until they express themselves in a symptom.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“Constitution and Heredity.—In the first place, we must mention here the congenital variation of the sexual constitution, upon which the greatest weight probably falls, but the existence of which, as may be easily understood, can be established only through its later manifestations and even then not always with great certainty. We understand by it a preponderance of one or another of the manifold sources of the sexual excitement, and we believe that such a difference of disposition must always come to expression in the final result, even if it should remain within normal limits.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“The little child is above all shameless, and during its early years it evinces definite pleasure in displaying its body and especially its sexual organs. A counterpart to this desire which is to be considered as perverse, the curiosity to see other persons' genitals, probably appears first in the later years of childhood when the hindrance of the feeling of shame has already reached a certain development.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“The threat to the conditions of his existence through the actual or expected arrival of a new child, the fear of the loss in care and love which is connected with this event, cause the child to become thoughtful and sagacious. Corresponding with the history of this awakening, the first problem with which it occupies itself is not the question as to the difference between the sexes, but the riddle: from where do children come?”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“In so far as they have paid any attention to infantile sexuality the educators behave as if they shared our views concerning the formation of the moral forces of defence at the cost of sexuality, and as if they knew that sexual activity makes the child uneducable; for the educators consider all sexual manifestations of the child as an "evil" in the face of which little can be accomplished. We have, however, every reason for directing our attention to those phenomena so much feared by the educators, for we expect to find in them the solution of the primitive formation of the sexual impulse.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“It would seem more appropriate not to speak of degeneration: (1) Where there are not many marked deviations from the normal; (2) where the capacity for working and living do not in general appear markedly impaired”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost” (Scholz);”
― Sigmund Freud, Collected Works of Sigmund Freud

“If the reaction is suppressed the affect remains united with the memory.”
― Sigmund Freud, Collected Works of Sigmund Freud

“individual hysterical symptoms immediately disappeared without returning if we succeeded in thoroughly awakening the memories of the causal process with its accompanying affect, and if the patient circumstantially discussed the process giving free play to the affect.”
― Sigmund Freud, Collected Works of Sigmund Freud

“who make up for the loss of their power to control things in the present world by concentrating it on the future.”
― Sigmund Freud, Complete Works Of Sigmund Freud

“gloomy reflection that when, for once in a way, the rare conditions for a happy marriage had been fulfilled, this happiness should have come to such”
― Sigmund Freud, Complete Works Of Sigmund Freud

“First published in 1893 and written in collaboration with Josef Breuer (1842-1925),”
― Sigmund Freud, Collected Works of Sigmund Freud

“The conclusion which is now forced upon me is that the dream is a sort of substitution for those emotional and intellectual trains of thought which I attained after complete analysis. I do not yet know the process by which the dream arose from those thoughts, but I perceive that it is wrong to regard the dream as psychically unimportant, a purely physical process which has arisen from the activity of isolated cortical elements awakened out of sleep.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“Fourthly, Freud showed that sexual desires play an enormous part in our unconscious, a part which puritanical hypocrisy has always tried to minimize, if not to ignore entirely.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia

“Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds,”
― Sigmund Freud, The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud: PergamonMedia