12 Quotes by Karl Abraham

The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.

Psychoanalytic investigation has shown that in mental patients excessive affection often turns to violent hostility.

Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will easily yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstances.

Whereas the melancholic exhibits a state of general inhibition, in the manic patient even normal inhibitions of the instincts are partly or wholly abolished.

In neurotics, worm phobias are usually found as well as snake phobias.

The onset of mania occurs when repression is no longer able to resist the assaults of the repressed instincts.

When the depressive psychosis has become manifest, its cardinal feature seems to be a mental inhibition which renders a rapport between the patient and the external world more difficult.

Psychoanalysts have been occupied for a long time with the difficult question of what the psychological conditions are which determine the form of the neurotic disease to which the individual will succumb. It is as though he had a choice between different illnesses and led by unknown impulses selected one or other of them.

A person who suffers from severe locomotor anxiety finds himself in an almost permanent state of mental tension. He wakes in the morning with the anxious expectation of having to go out somewhere in the course of the day.