Sigmund Freud Quotes

The ego is not master in its own house.

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.

There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

[Freud's] sense of reality is less clouded by wishful thinking than is the case with other people and [he combines] the qualities of critical judgment, earnestness and responsibility.

In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.

It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.

The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

The ego wants to want more than it wants to have.

Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called the I and the ego

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

The aim of Zen training is to attain the state of consciousness which occurs when the individual ego is emptied of itself and becomes identified with the infinite reality of all things.

Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.

There is the mind itself. It is like a smooth lake which when struck, say by a stone, vibrates. The vibrations gather together and react on the stone, and all through the lake they will spread and be felt. The mind is like the lake; it is constantly being set in vibrations, which leave an impression on the mind; and the idea of the Ego, or personal self, the "I", is the result of these impressions. This "I" therefore is only the very rapid transmission of force and is in itself no reality.

Imagination consists in expelling from reality several incomplete persons, and then using the magic and subversive powers of desire to bring them back in the form of one entirely satisfying presence.

I have gone through a long apprenticeship. I have gone through enough of being a nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star! Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.

Fact is, the desperate desire to be cool has skewed our culture toward nihilism, carelessness, and ineptitude. It is now cool to be an idiot. A jackass. It's cool to be a failure, as long as your failure is the basis for a reality show.

How long do you remember that it is the Lord who is making you work? But then, by repeatedly analysing like that, you will come to a state when the ego will vanish and in its place the Lord will come in. Then you will be able to say with justice "Thou, Lord, art guarding all my actions from within." But, my friend, if the ego occupies all the space within your heart, where forsooth will there be room enough for the Lord to come in? The Lord is verily absent!

No amount of success - whatever that means, quote-unquote success - no amount of success replaces the reality of being separated from my family for this long.

For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.