Sigmund Freud was a gifted writer.
In fact, he won the Goethe Prize in 1930 for literature. Both his published works and his private correspondence are eminently quotable.
Here are some of our favourite quotations from the founder of psychoanalysis.
He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Are there not very important things which can only reveal themselves, under certain conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble indications?
I, as is well known, do not like cats.
Today we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us.
Every night human beings lay aside the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin…We may add that when they go to sleep they carry out an entirely analogous undressing of their minds.
It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty too.
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It is popularly believed that a human being is either a man or a woman.
Philosophy sometimes seems to me like a person who keeps cleaning their glasses and they still stay dim.
In general people interpret slips of the tongue just as I do, even if they do not support my ideas.
Accustomed to paying attention to small signs, I must trust the wording in which you couch your enigmatic demand.
I see no advance or gain in the introduction of the term ‘Electra complex’, and do not advocate its use.
Nothing can be hidden from the superego. Not even thoughts.
Those dreams best fulfil their function about which one knows nothing after waking.
A certain degree of fetishism is habitually present in normal love.
Anyone who laughs at the bawdy talk they have heard is laughing like a spectator at an act of sexual aggression.
People do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.
It is inherent in human nature to consider a thing untrue if one does not like it.
The torments caused by the reproaches of conscience correspond precisely to a child’s fear of loss of love.
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A normal ego of this sort is, like normality in general, an ideal fiction.
Every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells has miscarried completely.
We understand very well how to interpret in other people the same acts which we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.
I must ask the reader to plunge with me into the tiniest details of my life.
Even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere.
Our unconscious will murder even for trifles; it knows no other punishment for crime than death.
The exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and not a self-evident fact.
It seems probable that the sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object.
The very same impressions that we have forgotten have nonetheless left the deepest traces on our minds.
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Please consider making a donation to help secure the future of the Museum.
Comments
Excellent article.!