Sigmund Freud
A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.Collection: Strong
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.Collection: Religious
The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.Collection: Atheist
A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.Collection: Hard
Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.Collection: Morality
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.Collection: Science
No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.".Collection: Men
The unconscious - that is to say, the 'repressed' - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.Collection: Real
But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.Collection: Insecure
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology.Collection: Girl
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.Collection: Work
The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice — that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law.Collection: Civilization
Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.Collection: People
Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.Collection: Psychosis
By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.Collection: Love
The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only person better you should be, this is who you are now.Collection: Past
Love and work, work and love... that’s all there is.Collection: Work
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.Collection: Fathers Day
The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.Collection: Strong
The unconscious – that is to say, the ‘repressed’ – offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.Collection: Real
I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.Collection: Firsts