773 Quotes by Sigmund Freud

Sexual morality – as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it – is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.

There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.

It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man’s life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day.

Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls” was urgently necessary or society was “doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.

A lady once expressed herself in society – the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: “Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!”

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.

If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into hap-hazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, thought they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental paitents are split and broken structures of this same kind... They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, physical reality...

The way in which these factors – displacement, condensation, and over-determination – interact in the process of dream-formation, and the question of which becomes dominant and which secondary, are things we shall set aside for later inquiries.